Blast from the Past

Back in the 1960's the Ma Bell telephone companies did not allow you to use your own telephone but made you rent one of theirs'. This was referred to as CPE (customer premise equipment) and you had to use their service with their CPE. That sounds pretty harsh but we are re-living the past with current wireless carriers.

Anyone with an iPhone has heard the term of "unlocked phone". This refers to a phone can be unlocked to run on carriers other than the one who sold us the phone. This practice is found in the old world of telecom, but how do we stop it today?

Wireless carriers need to figure out how to sell us one wireless plan and let devices share that one plan be it CDMA/3G/HSDPA just like we do on our home WiFi networks. We have one router and multiple "unlocked" devices can access it and share the bandwidth.

The carriers are just dump pipes, plumbing if you will. I personally do not find any value-add in ringtones and hosted picture albums. Just give me unlimited data without caps at a decent price that can be shared.

The Netbook Effect

Speaking of the technology of good enough the notebook industry is now shifting to the two-year netbook market.

Enjoy....

Web 3.0

The internet is the ultimate laboratory for cloud computing. Many of us use it every day without knowing or even caring where the data is stored or where the server lives. We just need it to be “on”. Availability being the name of the game.

The WWW is an active hive of thought, imagination, and even boredom. But what can it be from twenty years fro now. It has vastly evolved from the days of bulletin boards and text news groups. Now we have AJAX, Flash, and other web 2.0 technologies that is enabling interactive sessions with artificial intelligence with our marketing preferences so we can see ads that appeal to us only.

But a con to this movement is that isolation is growing exponentially between people and societies. Online communities are taking the place of reals ones that use to be created and maintained at churches, schools, and our workplaces.

What we need to do in this Facebook world that claims to make us more connected but we are replacing real relationships with virtual ones. We need to be making inroads to web 3.0 technologies to truly connect in unison.

Take me to your Leader

Android has landed and it is not about the non-sexy T-Mobile G1 of which I am a proud owner, but it has more than enough mojo to make up for its clunkiness. This operating system is more than just mobile phones and even netbooks with said OS. It is about a shift in computing and creating mobile thin clients that access the "cloud".

Here is an example of usage: imagine a government mobile PC that access classified information. When they are stolen and/or lost it usually makes the national news of how much sensitive data it held and is now on the lam. But with a mobile thin client all of the apps live on a remote server yet has Web 2.0 native feel without the storage woes. So when these units are lost you just get a laptop that has a browser.

Android is already second to Apple in mobile browsing with 8% of the market and it was just introduced last October. This out of a field with Nokia Sybian OS, Windows Mobile, and various flavors of Samsung's mobile OS. But the major difference in Android's development model is that it is the only open source option in the litter.

So all in all, a very good showing for the little OS that can and all very early no less. Stay tuned for more Android goodness....