‘Cross The Breeze

Sometimes I think I live on mobile. If there’s a device I really couldn’t miss it’s my mobile phone. Ask my wife, if on occasion I don’t take my mobile phone with me, she’ll wonder how it’s possible I forgot it. It’s just too odd for me to be without. According to my mom, it’ll grow on my ears one day. Whatever ;)

Anyway, it’s true that mobile is important for me, ever since I got my first mobile phone some 10 years ago. Every year I hope that mobile will really breakthrough, but unfortunately also this year won’t be the year of mobile, just like 2007, 2006 nor 2005 were the year of mobile. It’s that one prediction that I wish it were through, but you know it won’t be.

It’s not even in our hands. I think the devices are there, thinking of the N95, the iPhone and some Windows Mobile devices that are all capable of doing amazing things for such a small device. The iPhone has the interface to love, my HTC is less slick but comes with 3G, built in GPS and all the power of Office and Exchange on mobile. Or the N95 with it’s superb camera. And now I’m not mentioning a ton of other great features these phones have.

Apart from all that greatness, I’ve been a very active user of the mobile web for the last 6 years or so as well. First on WAP on my old Nokia 6310i for instance, later on Vodafone Live with a Sharp GX30. Back then I was still working on Kinepolis‘ new media strategy and we invested in this back then already. Today Kinepolis is still one of the very few Belgian companies with a decent mobile site, for which you got to give them credit. But even outside Belgium, there aren’t many mobile specific sites, which already resulted in a shout-out more than a year ago.

The mobile sites I currently use are: BBC, Bloglines, Gmail, Hotmail, Messenger, Dopplr, Facebook, Google Reader, Live Search, Kinepolis, MSN, Twitter, Technorati, Wapedia, Flickr, Yahoo and WordPress. I don’t really know many more that are of use to me, or that aren’t in a walled garden like Vodafone Live.

I also use client versions like Live Messenger (which you can download for all kinds of devices), the Live Search client as well as the Google Maps client, Yahoo!Go, … as well as apps that run in the Java environment on mobile like Gmail and Opera Mini. On the N95 I also tried the Widsets, but whatever the phone, the browse services still top them all.

Today, with the iPhone’s browsing capabilities, or other mobile browsers that enable better viewing of ‘normal websites’ on mobile we will probably skip the further development of mobile specific sites. With Skyfire for instance (see announcement) or Deepfish I expect to see more ‘regular’ browsing in the future.

Still, the problem remains, now even more than ever I guess. We will have access to every site we want, with great browsers but at what cost? There’s a good explanation why I use so much mobile: I can use it obviously but more important is that I don’t have to pay for it. The day I have to pay for it, I’ll cut back for sure, need or no need. How much I love the Wifi on these phones, that’s not truly mobile for me. It’s when in a taxi, or before checking in a plane, while waiting on someone, … that I love to use all my catching up. Not only in my sofa at home for instance.

So unless operators change their models on data costs, mobile will never really breakthrough and that’s sad. And yes you can discuss devices etc aren’t ready yet either, allow me to say they’re well ahead of the game when you compare them to operator attitudes. And I’m afraid they won’t change that soon either. There’s too much money to be made with TXT messages to allow you to use IM on mobile instead for instance. What’s your take?

PS: Also check out the upcoming FF for Mobile now we’re at it ;)

PPS: And Twitter, for god’s sake, at least add a replies tab to m.twitter.com will ya!

You got to admire it when a man can make a bit of fun of himself, don’t you think? You might have seen it already as it has been all around the web, but here’s a little video of Bill Gates’ last day as showed during his CES keynote this weekend in Vegas. Especially the work-out scenes were hilarious (at least that’s what I found).

Both Engadget and Gizmodo also have interviews up with the man that are good to watch/read. They talk about the historic sit-down with Steve Jobs (remember?), the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, differences between Apple and MSFT as well as Gates’ changing public image. Whether you like Microsoft or not, you got to admire what the man has accomplished.

(disclaimer: I work for Microsoft)

Last week I spent a couple of hours at Microsoft’s European Innovation Day. Apart from the presentations, there was a whole ‘trade show’ of companies from all over Europe showing innovative technology, all somehow based on Microsoft technology. Some if we already knew like Microsoft HD view with their ‘gigapixel panoramas’, Skinkers with LiveStation (new version coming soon), etc.

There were also some cool things that I had never seen before like the 3D flatscreen for instance. I have no imagery here unfortunately, but I just kept staring. Another very cool thing, distributed by the same company was this ‘virtual lego’ thingy. It had nothing to do with Lego, they just used it to show the capability of their software.

It’s quite tough to explain, maybe Luc who I joined at the event can do better then me, or Miel who filmed this. Look at the empty Lego box and how they add a 3D object to this on screen. Cooler even is it detects which Lego object is on the box which defines the 3D object they show (note: the 3D objects where created in advance). Anyway, too hard to explain, just give it this a look and let me know what you think.

Think about what this technology can do for the traditional ’shop window’ ;)

Just about a year ago I wrote a post about the Samsung Blackjack. I saw it first up on Crunchgear and it looked “like the perfect answer to what I want” as I mentioned back then. A couple of months later I received one at MIX07 in Vegas and I’ve been using the Blackjack until about a month ago. I think it’s the best phone I ever had, but there were a few good reasons for switching to something else again. The Blackjack was an unlocked Cingular mobile, and although it was a 3G phone it didn’t work on the European 3G networks. It also didn’t have WIFI and it’s a Windows Mobile 5 phone whereas I need WM6 for some of the demos I do on mobile. That said, I miss the darn phone.

Today I run around with a HTC TyTNII, which is a pretty powerful mobile phone… but it’s a brick. And battery life is pathetic. Especially that last point is a bit of a dilemma. The phone has great capabilities to get work done while on the road (and I’m on the road quite a lot) so doing email, reading RSS feeds, surfing the web, checking word and powerpoint docs, … the TyTNII is quite good at it…. for a few hours. If you use your phone actively for all this it doesn’t survive the day. And that’s bad. During the weekends I mostly use my Nokia N95. I got lucky to get one from Nokia so I could use it to demo the Windows Live for Nokia and I’m especially astonished by the photo/video quality of the phone. I’m having way too much fun filming the kids having fun during the weekend. I could use it for work as well as I can use it with Exchange but I don’t like the whole emailing feature on the Nokia.

And then I saw this, the Samsung i780 or the next generation Blackjack. And I want it. It’s like my original Blackjack with all the functions I had to miss and adding even some more. So Samsung, you can send one my way right now ;)

One thing you can learn from the latest HTC models though, they do a very good job on the home screen (quite a bit better than what is shown here).

Technorati Tags: samsung, blackjack, mobile, nokia, htc, n95

Found this one at Right-Half Chow and had to post that up here as well. You’re never too young for some ‘branded entertainment’ I guess ;)

From Atypyk.

… or “it’s for my boss”. These were some of the great quotes out of a little video made by Karl Long, a very good marketing blogger that works at Nokia. I know I’m a little bit behind due to my holidays, but I had to post this one. It think it’s a really smart video (and cheap) that shows everything there is to say to it especially since the video is made with the Nokia N95. Great job Karl!

Read on about the how and why at Karl’s blog. There’s a very good post on the buzz around the iPhone on the Pronet Advertising blog by the way in ‘the importance of marketing and covering in moderation‘.

(disclaimer: I work for Microsoft)

Technorati Tags: nokia, iphone, iline, video, youtube, n95, marketing

For the record: I love WordPress ever since I started using it which was not long after WordPress.com went public. WordPress.com has evolved quite a lot over time and added many new features which were always nice to discover. That has changed a little the last few weeks if you ask me.

I wrote earlier about Akismet losing its edge but that seemed to have been just a hickup like Matt confirmed in the comments. For the blogs on WordPress.com at least, all went back to normal which is good.

At the time that WordPress.com started with the system of upgrades I thought they had found the ideal road between the ‘old’ WordPress.com and the self hosted version. They added things such as domain support, custom CSS or extra GB space upgrades. And all of this for a few credits (or dollars) only. This is an interesting concept and offers users such as myself the ability to tune this blog a bit more without having to go ‘all the way’ by hosting it all myself. I don’t want to host myself as it offers an extra set of questions and issues that I don’t even want to think about.

Now instead of continuing that way, I get the feeling they changed strategy and I don’t really understand why. Two weeks ago they added WordPress Video which would allow you to host Videos on WordPress and use their native player. Now why would I use that? Why didn’t they just add support for existing video services (next to YouTube, Google Video and Dailymotion that they support right now). Think of Soapbox, Revver, …

Today WordPress.com stopped their feed stats feature (or at least put it on hold) because they didn’t feel it was totally right (it was beta so I’m ok with that) and it wasn’t used enough apparently. And although I’ll miss that I can somehow relate to this decision, I like it when people don’t just launch stuff, when they want it to be good. But my question would be: why not offer another solution then? Looking at the ‘upgrade strategy’ you could easily implement an upgrade by which people could replace the default WordPress RSS feed by a Feedburner feed for instance… and yes I would buy 15 credits for that.

I think WordPress.com made a very good decision with these upgrades and they should get back to that strategy if you ask me. I’ll pay to integrate another RSS feed, I’ll pay to be able to add a Javascript widget to the sidebar that allows me to integrate some more advanced widgets. Why? Because I want to do more with my blog than I do today, because I want to keep on testing new stuff out there but I don’t want to host this all myself. Think about this for a second. If they would allow advertising on WordPress.com in a revenue sharing model they could actually make some good money off it and it would make us all even more addicted to WordPress than we are today.

My 2 cents. Matt?

When I saw Blaise Aguera y Arcas do the Photosynth demo at an internal event last year in July I was really impressed and I must say that feeling has never gone away. Today I found this video from the demo Blaise gave at TED about Seadragon and Photosynth and again, there’s only one word: great! Here it is:

“Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year,” wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

I think it won’t only change the way we manipulate and experience digital images, I think it might completely change the way we browse through the web. In the video you can hear how Blaise explains how you will be able to browse between images, using the meta data on them. Very interesting idea if you ask me. And looking at the example of BMW in the The Guardian, just imagine what you could actually do with very small non-intrusive ad placements!

In collaboration with the BBC, Microsoft also created some new collections in Photosynth that are part of the ‘How we built Britain‘ series.

Another cool technology that was announced during the last few days is Surface. Let’s just call it a very advanced coffee table, there’s only one way to understand really good what it is and that’s what you can see in this exclusive preview from Popular Mechanics:

And also with Surface, think of the advertising opportunities this will have to offer. And what would you think about combining both… wouldn’t that be neat? ;)
(I work for Microsoft)

Technorati Tags: surface, photosynth, seadragon, video, demo, bbc, bmw, theguardian, technology, microsoft, innovation

Take a look at these stunning images. Stunning, you ask? Yes, knowing that only one image is from a real life situation and the other one is a computer generated one from Gran Turismo HD for PS3, I think you can call that stunning. Do you see the difference?

[Via fosfor gadgets]

LiveSide made a nice post today about the ‘10 Windows Live features you don’t yet use and should‘. Even if you don’t use the Windows Live services these features belong to, they still make ‘em worth a look.

I remember Chris from LiveSide asking me on IM a couple of weeks ago which litlle - not well known features - I like most and I think these must be it:

• Windows Live for Mobile (aka G2) and Live Search for Mobile which offer you very nice apps to have your Messenger, Mail and Maps Search on your mobile. The Live Search for mobile is even available for Java-running phones
• Live Search activity in Messenger: You’re in a conversation and looking for something on the web, no need to open up a browser, just launch the activity in the conversation window and search the web/images. With one-click link to share specific results in the conversation
• Add a nickname in Windows Live Messenger which will allow you to change any name in your buddylist to something less cryptic than these names usually are and avoids having 8 Tom’s, 4 An’s, … in your list
• Windows Live Writer, now that is a great tool for any blogger out there. And hopefully more people will develop plugins for it like the Flickr4Writer that make things really easier

… and Bird Eye view for Antwerp of course :). Expect more soon.