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Very quick post to get something off my chest. Mind the rant.

Michael Arrington’s comments on the now very commented Forbes article bothered me - but initially I decided to ignore it. It was Silicon Valley myopia. It was Eternal September 2.0. It was all these things we’ve been discussing here - the rise of mobility creating all these opportunities for cognitive dissonance. And I was a little tired of yakking about it (not for long, as you see). However, when I read today about this tablet experiment and the gutted laptop it just spawned, I was a little shocked - how is the man who goes about homebrewing his gadgets via internet “crowdsourcing” now deciding which companies are “relevant” in a market he know next to nothing about?

There, I said it. And just to make this post more than just a rant, when it comes to the no-bullshit future of Symbian, please stop listening to Michael Arrington and go to David Woods blog. David is EVP of Research for Symbian and one of the greatest minds in mobility. Nice to hear someone who knows what he’s talking about.

So there you have it. When you want to hear which idiotic startup conned which VC into giving them money, or maybe what was Twitter’s uptime last week, go to Michael Arrington. When you want to hear about the future of the mobile industry, go after the likes of David Woods, Michael Mace or Carlo Longino & Russell Buckley.

Or condemned to being a follower platform forever?

It’s been 6 years since the last major MIDP release (2.0) and 4 years since the expert group for MIDP 3.0 started working. And they’re still not finished. In the same timeframe, we had Android, iPhone, multiple versions of S60, the rise of RIM’s JDE, Flash Lite, Python, most of them built from scratch.

Is the Java Community Process killing Java ME?

I just read a post on Venture Beat where a Fatwa for the death of SMS was issued. I kid you not - go there and read it yourselves. I will even provide a link with the post title - here it is: Twitter kills SMS service in some countries over costs. Will someone kill SMS already?.

Yes friends, will someone kill SMS already? Haven’t you heard? SMS deserves to die. Why? Because Twitter can’t make money and pay its operator bills. SMS deserves to die because it is preventing my fuckbuddies in the UK from following my every move on Twitter, where I diligently post every 15 minutes or less.

Will someone kill SMS already?

Now, serious.

Would someone who poses as a serious commentator on issues of, say, the transportation industry write a blog post saying “will someone kill the internal combustion engine already”? The global SMS network, that (with painful well documented exceptions) virtually connects all operators in all countries will serve 2 trillion messages this year. I don’t know how many messages Twitter is (barely) handling these days, but I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark. Now why exactly do we want SMS to be killed? Oh yes, because it’s not free, like good old reliable Twitter is - oh wait, maybe if Twitter weren’t free, the reliability problems would go away? Just an idea.

Old readers of this blog (yes, the two of you) know that one of my favorite pastimes is to observe the reaction of “new media” commentators to the rise of the mobile internet, and how they normally get everything backwards when looking at mobile (a set of standardized applications enabled by mostly proprietary non-neutral networks) through web (small pieces loosely joined yada yada) glasses. Most cases of this syndrome, which I like to call Eternal September 2.0 are just amusing. Some cross the line into annoying and beyond. Like watching an old man curse and scream at the weather, watching webheads complain about the idiosyncrasies of mobile as if they were only that - mere irrelevant idiosyncrasies - can be a test of patience.

But you know, at least I have my blog where I can curse back and scream and have some fun while doing it.

Update: Tom Hume quoted this post in his blog. It was then picked up by Mobhappy’s Carlo Longino, who wrote a very interesting piece there - go read it.

Image from The San Francisco Sentinel

If you’ve read The New York Times in the past, you probably caught yourself thinking at one time or another if maybe you were reading The Onion by mistake. This happened to me this morning while reading the Metro section, but this time it was different - it was a voluntary emulation of The Onion style (the sincerest form of flattery etc.) on an article about the Starbucks store about to be closed in Staten Island. It is worth a read:

One Last Grande Peppermint Mocha Whatever, With a Shot of Nostalgia

Cynthia Salas and Stephen Modica mourned the closing of the Starbucks at the Forest Promenade shopping center.

After everything, it was over — or would be, on Sunday. The handwriting was on the wall (actually the door) at the Forest Promenade strip mall on Staten Island where a sign announced the grim news: “Our Sincerest Apologies, This Starbucks Will Be Closing on July 27.”

It had been a good run, patrons reminisced last week, going back to the store’s early days, when George W. Bush was president of the United States and Michael R. Bloomberg was mayor of New York. A gallon of gas was $2.60. “Rent” and “Mamma Mia!” were on Broadway.

But history’s die was cast. It was the end of an era for the disrespected little mocha mecca under the sign of the mermaid, Starbucks location No. 11280, that opened on Sept. 15, 2006.

“Kind of sad,” was how Victoria Guzman, 25, a visiting nurse, summed up her emotions as she handed a Grande Caramel Frappuccino® to her friend Christina Cortes, and sipped one of her own.

Kara Schodowski remembered the early days. She was a girl of 18 then, working at the nearby Mandee clothing store. She discovered that she liked the hot coffee from Starbucks and cold coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts across the parking lot. Why? “I have no idea,” said Ms. Schodowski, still a clerk at Mandee and now 20 years old.

Talking about closing Starbucks stores, last week I was at The Last Hope conference here in New York. I’ll probably talk more about it later, but here’s a video you might find interesting - Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 fame doing one of his famous social engineering demonstrations on a closing Starbucks store (probably the same one mentioned on the above article?). Roll the tape:

The great photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson once said:

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis.

In that sense, one might argue that these pictures from Reuters may actually go down in history as the greatest in the history of business. From left to right: Larry Page, Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin.

Saw it here, original link here.

Please vote for me is a documentary where a camera crew follows a class of Chinese children from Wahun through the process of electing their class monitor for the first time. I caught it by accident on TV and was very impressed by it. Not only it is curious to see how children react to the basic concepts of democracy (to which they have never been exposed before), but it is also an interesting and rare look at the life of the new Chinese middle class.

In a recent letter to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, this is what Warren Buffett had to say about the airline business:

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by growth when they should have been repelled by it.

And I, to my shame, participated in this foolishness when I had Berkshire buy U.S. Air preferred stock in 1989. As the ink was drying on our check, the company went into a tailspin, and before long our referred dividend was no longer being paid. But we then got very lucky. In one of the recurrent, but always misguided, bursts of optimism for airlines, we were actually able to sell our shares in 1998 for a hefty gain. In the decade following our sale, the company went bankrupt. Twice.

Yesterday I got an email from United Airlines, containing a letter signed by CEOs of all U.S. airlines, basically saying that oil speculation in the commodities markets is killing the airline business. The e-mail points to the “Stop Oil Speculation Now” website and urges us cattle self-loading freight passengers to do something and get involved.

Oh dear. As the passage above shows, I believe Warren Buffett is with me on this one - be it with $14 or $140 oil, the major airlines have never been able to run a successful business. And now that push came to shove, who’s to blame? The invisible hand, of course. Oh spare me.

Some days ago Paul Krugman wrote a great column on the New York Times addressing exactly that, and giving the counter example that addresses the claims of those that want to blame the market for the high price of oil: iron ore.

You see, iron ore isn’t traded on a global exchange; its price is set in direct deals between producers and consumers. So there’s no easy way to speculate on ore prices. Yet the price of iron ore, like that of oil, has surged over the past year. In particular, the price Chinese steel makers pay to Australian mines has just jumped 96 percent. This suggests that growing demand from emerging economies, not speculation, is the real story behind rising prices of raw materials, oil included.

Having said that, it is true that there probably are people out there are making more money you can ever dream of on the high oil prices. Now removing these people from the equation will not bring cheap oil back. And it certainly won’t save the airlines.

Long out of print and never released on DVD, the documentary Code Rush was uploaded to Viddler and annotated by Andy Baio. It follows the life of Netscape during a key period - the release of Mozilla as open source and the AOL merger. It’s worth a watch, if only for the nostalgia value.

Via waxy.org.

Remember the days when TinyURL was the only player on the “URL-shortening segment”? It was an useful little site, you used it to avoid email line breaks from screwing up your URLs when posting them to discussion groups. Yeah, those days are gone. Now we have SnURL, LittURL, Is.gd and the new kid on the block Bit.ly. It’s a “segment” now. Were there any significant revenue being made, some would be calling it an “industry”.

Now for the question: are all those services popping up because of Twitter? And if yes, why won’t Twitter just simply add that functionality to its posting form?

After years of patronage, Amazon still manages to amaze me with their incredible CRM. A couple of weeks ago I put a Nokia USB charger on my shopping cart (yeah, we don’t get everything for free, you know). I didn’t complete the order because I knew there were more stuff I would buy, so I waited to make a single larger order.

And voilá, today I went back to add something else to the cart, and when I did I was greeted with the message below:

It’s a silly thing, but the kind of thing that brings total customer delight - think of the two alternate scenarios: 1) the price of the item on my shopping cart gets lowered and they don’t tell me about it, getting no karma points from me and 2) the price of the item on my shopping cart stays unchanged and I get unknowingly screwed in a couple of dollars. They not only did the right thing and made a point of telling me about it - considering the volume of transactions Amazon deals with, it’s obvious that some hard work and very impressive technology went into adding that kind of flexibility into their system.

Anyway, congrats Amazon for knowing that God is in the details.

Update: Silly me who thought of only my particular use case when I saw that message. As I was walking around this afternoon I caught myself thinking about this post and said “silly you, Bernardo! Prices go UP at least as frequently as the go DOWN”! So clearly AMZN wasn’t thinking about making people feel good about saving a couple of dollars, but rather about preventing people from purchasing products at higher prices than they expected and the enraged customer support calls that would most likely ensue. Still, it shows good thinking and nice implementation, even if the purpose wasn’t as “noble” as I initially thought.

It took me two hours to develop this minimal music player with sensor support for changing tracks, using Python for S60. I will polish a little bit more and make it available for download. Shaking the phone to left advances one track in the playlist; shaking it to the right goes back one track, and putting it face down shuts down the application.

I was fortunate enough to have seen a Zapcar Xebra Sedan at Nokia’s campus in Mountain View, CA. Checking their website, I could see that for only $11,700 you can get the ugliest car on Earth, plus a staggering range of up to 40 miles per day with opportunity charging. Without it, you can drive for 25 miles.

If that’s what you get for being green:

i’ll probably stick with this for a little longer:

Python is a refreshing look at the world of programming. Being so easy to learn and use, it has gained lots of attention from the developer community and it’s used for several different purposes such as: web development, desktop apps, utilities, scientific computing, scripting language for games and special effects software, flying and of course mobile development. In fact, I am very surprised that it took so long before any mobile platform offered Python as a viable software creation vehicle.

Developing mobile applications - Round 3: Python, from my Forum Nokia Blog

This is a touch screen engine written for Nokia N95, which doesn’t have a touch screen. Clever, huh?

The Holy Grail, according to Monty Python

So let us talk now about the Holy Grail of mobile development in Nokia platforms: Symbian/S60 C++. It is the language in which the operating system is developed (about 95%), it is the language that allows developing all sorts of applications, from simple expense trackers to VoIP and geotagging and video-sharing applications. It is the language about which odes are written, flowers strewn at is feet, and virgins sacrificed to its altar.

Round 2 of mobile development technologies comparison, via
my Forum Nokia Blog

If I had just made a dollar each time I heard this question… *sigh*.

With the availability of so many different development technologies in Nokia’s platforms today, sometimes is hard to decide which of them we should use to build our application, isn’t it? There’s Java, Symbian C++, Open C, Flash Lite, WidSets, WRT Widgets, Python, and the list is still growing.

More in my Forum Nokia Blog.

Stay tuned, as I will do a roundup of all available technologies, at least on Nokia platforms. If you can convince me, I may analyze other platforms as well, though. :)

From Strange Maps (one of the coolest blogs out there, soon to become a book):

“With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self portrait on our planet,” writes Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar on his website for the project, appropriately named http://biggestdrawingintheworld.com. “My pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around the world. The paths the briefcase took around the globe became the strokes of the drawing.” The resulting drawing’s dimensions are 40,076,592 by 40,009,153 meters – which are about the dimensions of the Earth’s surface, if it could be rolled out as a canvas.

The website contains some videos and documentation like the exact instructions given to DHL.

I have a small list of posts that I wanted to write but when never get around to it because those things I get paid for doing (as opposed to this blog) keep getting in the way. I got rid of the list, but there are two things that are too significant not to leave at least a little note here. So here it goes:

1) Mowser.

Mowser went under. Then the mobile web was over and done with, yesterday’s news. Then .mobi bought Mowser. Then the mobile web was happy and doing very well thanks for asking.

2) Jan Chipchase in NYT Mag.

Great article in The NYT magazine about cellphones, specifically about one of the greatest minds in this industry - Nokia’s own Jan Chipchase. My favorite part: Sara Corbett from the NY Times, probably a flaming “progressist” who read too much Rousseau in college, muses (kind of trying to answer the question herself):

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices.

And immediately gets schooled by Mr. Chipchase:

“People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

I swear to God I had a huge post written in my head about this article, centered basically around this paragraph. But it’s too late now - momentum is gone.

And that concludes the blog backlog.

I have covered the new Java ME user interface toolkit, LWTUI in this post at my Forum Nokia blog. LTWUI (Lightweight UI Toolkit) is an open source project of cross-device UI toolkit for J2ME created so developers can develop compelling user interfaces without writing painful low-level Canvas code.

Here’s a video I made with it running on my Nokia N95. Pretty good, though it’s a bit slow. It works nicely also on Series 40 devices.

If you are like me and spent countless hours playing snake on your old Nokia monochrome phone, this will probably bring a smile to your face:

SNAKE Game in the Student House - video powered by Metacafe
From haha.nu

Miss it? Feel like playing a bit? There you go.

Interesting side note: In 2005, as the mobile gaming industry was starting to take itself seriously, a Finnish engineer named Taneli Armanto was honoured at the Mobile Entertainment Market awards for his achievements as the creator of Snake for Nokia phones. Nokia’s press release at the time states that there were an estimated 350 million phones in the market with snake installed (that figure has at least doubled since), making it one of the most popular video games in history.

Cheers and have a great weekend!
Bernardo