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Parallel Kingdom is a new (and far from being released) GPS game based on Android platform. Since a long time locaion based games have been explored, but up to now none really succed to capture enough attraction, mostly because they required poeple to move to play the game which requires a lot of commitment to play the game in a cold winter day!
But this one, Parallel World, seems to contains some interesting concept. You can build virtual elements on top of the real world, and then influence other players. The exact mechanism of the game is not yet explained, but I like the concept, presented by this video.
February 24th, 2008
From Techrunch:
January 9th, 2008
A great piece of reading (discovered through AboutMobility weblog): CTO Handbook — How to care for and feed your CTO
He defined three types of CTO:
- The Technical Founder - the person that wrote the code that got the
company off the ground. Has sweated to give the alpha/beta/product life
and as a result any criticisms are effectively received/interpreted as
“Your baby is ugly! Now where’s your Corn Flakes so I can piss in them
too!” Is never far from code.
- The Visionary - sometimes seen as the flake without any “real”
deliverables. Is never far from a whiteboard. Can write code but
shouldn’t.
- The Figure Head - parachuted in, probably did or was associated with
something impressive in a semi-related industry. Doesn’t know most of
the company but is on a first name basis with most flight crew. Is
never far from PowerPoint.
The next game, just like CEO is doing, is then to think which part of these description fit in your profile!
January 9th, 2008
Yes, I’ve got two of them. Less than one month old, fully unlocked, 1.1.1 software…
See it on eBay: iPhone 8GB unlocked
December 3rd, 2007
Mobibase seems to be ahead of everybody in the mobile industry: they already attended or participated to future events…Impressive
December 2nd, 2007
Just discovered a VERY interesting post about Facebook and privacy:
Facebook Isn’t Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know.
The most interesting part, is this one, the number four topic:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
So Facebook can do what they want with content posted on Facebook! Including picture, your profile (your CV?), etc…. A perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable license….
Think of this before creating your own private group to discuss the next big thing, or before posting your perfect pictures… Seems to be the reason why a group named “the Grasshoppers” moved from Facebook to Ning…
Through Widgify
Identificateurs Technorati : faceook, ning, privacy
September 9th, 2007
For those who still don’t know it, there is a new great blog which already a star: it’s Marc Andreessen one, blog.pmarca.com . A lot of great post about startup creation, VC, and a lot of other things. Read the “Moby dick theory of big companies” , and the series on “Truth about venture capitalist“
Interesting also is the Ouriel Ayon point of view on Marc’s blog. As him, I always wondered how Marc could create so quickly such incredible content, while being involved in many other things.
July 9th, 2007
I’ve wrote by the past several entries about touchscreen ( The future of board games ) and how interesting this technology is, especially for mass market.
Of course, Microsoft know this too, and just announced “Microsoft Surface“, which provide new way to interact with a computer.
The video is really interesting and demonstrate good use cases:
May 30th, 2007
After Mobease last year, it’s now the time for Webwag to showcase at Innovate07, the 8 of May in Zaragoza, Spain. Nice list of ocmpanies, including some competitors (Pageflakes) but also some intriguing projects (like the Todeka project)
The 8 of May? Might be a good day to do some cool demos and announcements, no?
Technorati Tags: webwag, mobease
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April 22nd, 2007
Another cool and incredible demo of multi touc screen, thanks to Perceptive Pixel:
Through Louis Van Proosdiij Duport blog…
Technorati Tags: multitouch
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March 20th, 2007
“I used to say that the web browser was the most hostile programming environment ever devised, but that was before I found out about Mobile.”
Douglas CrockFord…
What about mobile web development? 
January 12th, 2007
Well, seems that I’ve also been tagged for “5 things you don’t know about me”, but twice! The objective of the game is to give five “unknown” facts about you, and spread this virally to five other people…
So this came from Seb and Wendong!
- I started to work as a game developer for UbiSoft during my student period. Ported a crap game, and had to get a serious job in the telecommunications later on.
- I was in Africa (Zaïre that came later Republic Democratic of Congo) and enjoyed some civil war
- I’ve made a lot of pirate TV decoders during my engineering school! (for
Canal+)
- I am now a definitive Ruby On Rails addict! The best productivity boost since I’ve discovered Java, 11 years ago.
- I own a collection of “museum computers and console”, like Vectrex, ZX81, Colecovision, Atari Lynx, Gizmodo, etc….
So, let’s follow the link with a few suggestions for the next providers of these five facts:
- Pascal Darre
- tmenguy (everything and the software universe)
- Philiipe Kerignard (truc de ouf in French)
- Fred Brunel
- Alexander Cassovici ( Mobitrends)
Technorati Tags: 5 thins you don’t know about me, 5things
January 9th, 2007
Earlier this year, I had a post about potential interest of augmented reality on mobile. It seems that Total Immersion, the leader of this sector - well now with a famous demo 2004 presentation haves also plans for mobile.
Here is a video which shows some potential usage of AR on mobile for advertising for instance. Sorry, the video is in french. Examples includes “augmented reality advertising”, and the manipulation of a small character. I am sure that there are much more interesting scenarios than these one, so let’s see….
On negative things is that the demo still running on a PC, and very little to do with mobile now. One of the great things with AR on mobile, is that the concept of a camera phone allows you to use the mobile as a “window” or a “lens” that transform what you see. This feeling does not happen with the current demo where you have to look in a different direction to see the results. Hope that before 3GSM this will be solved (Total Immertion plans to demonstrate it on 3Gsm next year).
Through Codors Blogs
Technorati Tags: augmentedreality, 3gsm, mobile
December 15th, 2006
Surfkitchen, a provider of ODP (On Device Portal) is on the way to have a UK patent that - if I understand it well - might generate a lot of troubles if granted. This patent cover the download of dynamically generated data that is trigerred by an SMS.
First, let’s look at the abstract:
Abstract of EP1536613
A method of server initiated download of information is described. When a server (5) determines that content (26,28) is stored which is to be made available to a remote device (1;2) the server (5) dispatches a signal to the appropriate remote device (1,2) in the form of a non HTTP message such as an SMS message which has a predefined format. When such a signal is received, this indicates to the remote device (1;2) that content to download exists. A browser program (14) on the remote device (1;2) then responds to the received message by forming a conventional HTTP link to the server (5) and requests location data identifying the location of content (26,28) to download from the server (5). When the browser program (14) receives the requested location data the browser program (14) utilises the location data to generate instructions to cause copies of the content (26;28) to be downloaded via the HTTP link.
So the patent seems to cover the fact that you notify a mobile through SMS that a content is available on the server. Then, the mobile answer by forming an HTTP request to download this content from the server.
This seems quite broad, and might cover many existing services/technologies:
- MMS ( See Wikipedia definition ) . A notification is send to the client, using SMS or Wap Push and then the phone generate an HTTP request to download the contents.
- Wap Push, more generally speaking, is just sending a link (an URL) to a mobile phone, so it trigger by definition an HTTP request.
If you dig one step further, it appears that the patent highlight the fact that it’s not really an URL to the exact location which is sent. It only trigger the fact that some informations are available, and then, the server identify the user and only send the relevant information….
- [0019] Having the server 5 send an initial content update signal which indicates the existence of content to be downloaded from the server 5 but which does not indicate the location of that content gives rise to many advantages.
- [0020] Firstly as the signal does not identify the location of any particular item of content, a single signal can be sent to a remote device to enable the remote device 1, 2 to download multiple items of content. The fact that a single signal can be sent reduces the amount of data which is transmitted to the remote device via the non http link.
- [0021] Additionally, since data identifying the locations of content to be downloaded only needs to be generated after the browser program 14 has initiated a communications link between the remote device 1; 2 and the server 5, this data will identify current locations for content to be downloaded even when there is a delay between the sending of the initial content update signal and the initiating of a communications link by the browser program 14. The possibility that content from within the content store 24 is deleted in the interim between notification of the existence of content and the dispatch of a request to download content from a location and hence a requested item of content is no longer available is therefore reduced.
Translation: the data to be downloaded is created dynamically. In other words, the link might be http://myservice.com/get/tomsoft ( or just http://myservices.com/get if the user is automatically identified) and then the answer content depend of the user: it’s a dynamic content/page creation….
So if the result of the SMS sent is a dynamic page, then you might be concerned by this patent.
It might be the case of SyncML, where HTTP synchronisation can be triggered by an SMS for instance.
In fact, many services trigerred by SMS might be covered by this patent. MobileScope have plenty of these, but we are not the only one in the industry. Of course, as a competitor to SurfKitchen, we are more concerned by such patent.
But many deployement of applications are done through SMS/WapPush, and it’s not always a link a static ressource, but to a ressource that might depend of your handset for instance.
Note: the patent is not yet awarded, but in a final phase.
So I would be curious to get your feedback/views on this? Does anybody in the industry feel concerned by this?
Technorati Tags: surfkitchen, patent, mobilescope, sms
December 7th, 2006
Just added a few services on this blog: MyBlogLog on the right sidebar, and also 
Snap preview…This service add nice automatic preview when you move the mouse on top of a link. Really net, and was just a line of JavaScript to add in the template….
Technorati Tags: snap, mybloglog
November 21st, 2006
For those who have missed it, Getting Real, the book written by basecamp creators ( 37 signals), is now available for free on the Web, here: Getting Real
November 3rd, 2006
Small note to highlight this nice service: xFruits
This allows you to do different things with existing RSS feeds:
- Aggregator RSS : umtiple RSS feeds transformed into one feed
- RSS to Web: display in a plain web page an RSS feed
- RSS to mobile: same for mobile
- Post to RSS: publish through email
- RSS to PDF: display a feed as a PDF document
Some grayed features, so probably comming in the next monthes are:
- RSS to mail
- File to RSS
- Composer?
The RSS aggregator and RSS to PDF are in my view the most interesting and innovative usage.
As an example, here is the xFruit result of this RSS feed as a PDF: 
The result is clean and could be used as a document in some meetings for instance. This open some interesting idea of usage, especially in the enterprise…
Technorati Tags: rss, xfruits, pdf
October 17th, 2006
Carnival of the mobilist is this week hosted by Communities Dominate Brands…As usual, a very interesting compilation from various perspective on mobile world….
October 2nd, 2006
Microsoft MAX is a photo album creation tool from Microsoft…It includes an RSS reader tools. The result is really awesome, as you can see here…Unfortunatly, after the first waoow effect, it appears that the feature is not really useable and less usefull than a good feed reader, for two main reasons:
- Lack of feedback about what have been read or not.
- Reading the full article exit from the application and open the web browser…..
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September 12th, 2006
Following the announce about the founding of “Mashery“, an interesting start-up that will create “resources” for developers, API providers and Mashup users, I was wondering if such company was targeting Widget developer or Mashup developer?
So, came the question of what is the difference between a Mashup and a widget, after all, they seems both some technology that could be used to create a new web page/service?
The actual situation:
-
a mashup, is a new web service, usually a web site, created by aggregating existing Web services. Typically, a service tot display renting house on Google map is a mashup, taking information both from a renting site, and from Google Map, aggregate them, and displays them
- a widget, is a “micro application”, that do a small individual task and that can be put as a component in a desktop or a web page. But some widgets can be a mashup…
So what are the real differences between the two? Today, a mashup is more a programmer affair, while widget is more an end user technology. The other actual difference is that most of the time, the newly creating service imply that there is glue between all data sources (for instance, some code to put house locations on Google map) while widget does not speak each other: the clock widget does not talk with your flickr badge widget, etc…
But the limitation starts to fade down, and I think that this will slowly disappear, and I am quite sure that there is probably tons of widget that act as “mashup”.
- It will be easier and easier to create new composites application, based on third party app for everybody, and not only technical people.
- The question will be again business model? One trend in Widget industry is to provide money to developer according to widget usage, based on revenue like advertising. But the value come also from the data itself, the initial provided one. If the mashup/widget creator get some revenue from his creation based on external data source, these external data source could ask for money too….
This latest part will be an interesting challenge in the future, and I think that the value of company like Mashery will be also to be able to manage the value chain and provide fair revenue to the entire participant….
Update: waow, what a sync, I was ready to post the article when Techcrunch pointed out this new start-up, dappit. Seems to be very close to what I describe as the ability to create Mashup for end user. But I’ve tried to use it and was not able to extract easily simple information for an HTML table, so I do not share Techrucnh enthusiasm. But this just means that there is still a lot to do, but direction is here
Technorati Tags: mashup, widgets
August 18th, 2006
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