Year: 2004

The Washington Post:

Frisbee-throwers and lawmakers alike could soon be able to access free wireless Internet on Washington’s National Mall under a plan announced by a nonprofit group on Wednesday.

Members of the Open Park Project already have set up a wireless access point covering the Supreme Court and the Capitol and say they hope to extend wireless broadband coverage across the capital’s monument-filled core within a year.

Hey, that totally rocks.  I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on The Open Park Project.  The FCC already provides free Wi-Fi at their headquarters.  Many local coffee houses also provide free Wi-Fi for their patrons.  For-pay Wi-Fi is also abundant.  There are 38 Starbucks locations, three Borders stores, and seven FedEx Kinko’s Office and Print Centers in the district.  These are all T-Mobile hotspots that can be accessed for as little as $6 an hour.

Converge Digest has some stats on Verizon and Verizon Wireless’ Q1 2004 stats.  Here are some of the highlights from last quarter:

• 1.4 million new customers.  They’re definitely one of the benefactors of number portability.
• Customer loyalty is big.  Fewer customers jumped ship last quarter.
• The average customer (voice, DSL, or wireless) paid Verizon $48 monthly.
• They’re ramping up on EV-DO

Now here’s the biggie: Verizon customers sent 2.1 billion text messages in Q1 2004.  They downloaded 19 million apps to their phones (directly through Verizon).  They sent 21 million picture messages.

Those numbers are for one carrier (now the number 2 carrier in the US) over one quarter.  The stats mentioned by the BBC yesterday were for all UK carriers in the month of March.  We’re obviously not sending as many SMSes over here as they do in the UK, but we’re catching up fast.

SMS pricing structures also tend to be different over here.  Most carriers offer SMS bundles.  I’ve got an add-on for my T-Mobile plan that gets me 500 SMS messages for $2.99.  Other carriers have similar plans, or you can just pay $0.10 a pop.

Dave Winer might not have a use for SMS (other than as an illustration for an RSS vs. Atom argument), but Americans are indeed sending text messages.  Quite a few of them.

BBC News:

According to the Mobile Data Association (MDA), 2.1 billion text messages were sent in March 2004, a 25% rise on the total from the same month last year.

That is a lot of text messages.  I mean more than a metric tonne of text messages.  We’re talking more than a humpback whale of text messages.

If I were a Stupid American, I might not be able to fathom such a large number of text messages.  Luckily I’m a mobile tech geek and that number excites me.  In a big way.

If only we could figure out that your phone is capable of doing more than just talking.  Stupid Americans…

Update:

<Moof> Netminder: you forgot the “at 5 cents a text, that’s $LOTS, or at 160 bytes a message, that’s $MUCHO per megabyte” at the end of your post

So true.

I reported on the purchase of Kinko’s by FedEx when it happened late December.  Now FedEx is rebranding the stores:

Memphis-based FedEx said Monday the stores will be renamed FedEx Kinko’s Office and Print Center.

This is similar to what UPS did when it picked up Mail Boxes Etc.  Good move again, FedEx, although the new name is a bit much to swallow.  Something like FedEx Office Center or Kinko’s by FedEx would probably roll off the tongue a little better, but I understand the need to keep both FedEx and Kinko’s in the longer name.  If they are smart, FedEx will keep the T-Mobile hotspots active.

John C. Dvorak:

I hate the IMs (instant messages), the paging, the PMs (personal messages), the private chats, the open chats, the IRC, AIM, ICQ, and MSN Messenger. I particularly despise the small talk that is an important part of chat, and I loathe all the phone SMS chatting and its entire infrastructure.

Dvorak has a rather clueless (but I’m sure valid in some situations) rant about chatting online.  It’s not about the “hi. hi. how are you? fine.” conversations.  It’s about communication.

Let’s take #mobitopia as an example.  We’re a loose knit bunch of mobile tech enthusiasts sprinkled throughout the globe.  During the day I can expect to chat with Jim.  He routinely IRCs from his mobile phone during his morning and evening commute.  I can check in with Matthew and Frank in Germany.  I wonder if Martin in Scotland has managed to fix his Garmin Forerunner?  When I’m starting to get hungry for lunch, Russ and other left-coasters start popping online.  There are a few people that say “good morning” when I’m getting ready for bed.  Erik doesn’t sleep much, so he’s always throwing my mental clock off.

On any given day we will communicate constructively.  We trade links, ideas, opinions, thoughts.  If Nokia is holding a press conference, chances are that Ewan, Rafe or Jim will have play by play coverage from a taco.

Of course we discuss other things (holy crap, did you see episode 18 of 24?  What an ending!).  We don’t talk tech 100% of the time.  That would be too geeky!  But the mobile shop talk and the sense of community that the channel and site have given us keep us coming back.

Via j2k in #mobitopia, Expansys lists a Nokia 6600i as a pre-release phone.  What is the 6600i?  My guess is that the 6600i is similar to the 6620 but for European markets.  It will probably be the 6600 + 6620 enhancements/bugfixes + EDGE + more? + European frequencies.

I haven’t heard about this, but once it is officially announced, if it is for real, this page at Nokia should work.  That is, of course, if the phone is for real.

So far I’ve only seen rumors (like the one at 6600.info), but nothing solid.  Is this a case of Expansys hoping that the rumors are true, or do they know something that we do not?

Lots of releases are due out in the next few weeks:

• OpenBSD 3.5 is scheduled to be released May 1.  Roll out the CARP!  Listen to the release song too if you get a chance.
• Tribes and Tribes 2 will be released for free at fileplanet on May 4.  According to the Vivendi Universal press release it will also hit newsstands on a DVD attached to Computer Gaming Word on that same day.  I played the crap out of Tribes, but never got around to picking up Tribes 2.  I’m looking forward to playing Tribes 2 for free, and I’m also psyched about Tribes: Vengeance due out Q4 2004.
• SUSE Linux 9.1 Professional and Personal should be available for purchase May 6.

I’m reading though the dead tree version of the May issue of Business 2.0.  There is a great article on Creative Commons licensing starting on page 112.  It leads off by highlighting the experience of Allan Vilhan, aka Cargo Cult.  Allan has put his music online at Magnatune under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  He has since been contacted by a game developer and a design firm and licensed his work for over $1000.  He’s really good.  I’m listening to Alchemy right now and it rocks.

Magnatune has something going here.  Any artists music can be downloaded for free, but they make purchasing high quality copies of the music (WAV, Ogg, FLAC, MP3 etc) inexpensive and easy.  Listeners can elect to pay anywhere from $5 to $18 for an album, with half of that money going directly to the artist.  The website also makes it extremely easy to inquire about licensing music for commercial use.

Back to the article, there is also a good interview with Lessig about Creative Commons, copyrights, and court decisions that went “the other way.”  It’s definitely read worthy.

Wow.  I thought this was never going to happen.  T-Mobile US is stocking the 6600 for $399.  I might have to look in to extending my contract if that price drops any time in the near future.  I love my 3650 to death, but the poor thing just doesn’t have enough memory to deal with the abuse I give it.

Thanks to Russ for mentioning it on #mobitopia.

Russ just pointed out that a new marketing firm, Mobilopia has set up shop at Mobilopia.com.  As far as names go, Mobitopia wins hands down.

What does Mobilopia mean?  Are the markets near sighted about mobile technology?  Or was that far sighted?  I can never remember.

I wasn’t able to FTP updates for a few days, but I think that’s sorted now.

In searching for information on JSR-179, the Location API for J2ME, I stumbled across a great article at Sun that shows just how easy geolocating yourself in J2ME can be:

...

/* Set criteria for selecting a location provider:
   accurate to 500 meters horizontally */
Criteria cr= new Criteria();
cr.setHorizontalAccuracy(500);

/* Get an instance of the provider */
LocationProvider lp= LocationProvider.getInstance(cr);

/* Request the location, setting a one-minute timeout */
Location l = lp.getLocation(60);
Coordinates c = l.getQualifiedCoordinates();

if(c != null ) {
  /* Use coordinate information */
  double lat = c.getLatitude();
  double lon = c.getLongitude();
}
...

Does it get any better than that?  It’s simple, easy to use, and now in just a few lines of code you’ve got your latitude and longitude.  Of course if you were grabbing your location in a real-world app, you’d put non-blocking code in a new thread and run it in the background.