Category: Misc

Cloud computing is crap but not for Washington DC

ReadWriteWeb: Google Apps Unseats Incumbent Microsoft Office in Washington, DC (via mfavez on twitter)

[…] Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District’s 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite […]

This news comes only a few weeks after Richard Stallman (GNU founder) warned about Cloud Computing… Guardian: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman:

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control, it’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

Well an US government agency is using US company infrastructure… so far so good.

Should “cloud computing” becomes trendy, and it will, I wonder how non-gov companies are going to address that privacy issue and I wonder if Washington state would have done the same choice if Google was not an US company ?

1.5 Million G1-Android Pre-Sold

1.5 Million G1 Mobile Phones Pre-Sold:

The G1 won’t officially be available until October 22. […] Reports are in that up to 1.5 million G1 devices have been pre-sold and you can bet that more will be coming in.

With that, Motorola is building a 350-persons Android team and Nokia is also around (though they have to take care of Symbian as well)…

It is going to be interesting… an open-source OS with an appealing development environment,… time to investigate further this Android thing!

Read also: 11 ways Android will kick the iPhone’s ass

Mobile web app vs native app, an example

Mobile web app vs. native app

Twitterific is one of the well known application in the app store for Twitter on iPhone. I installed it and used it for a while until I recently found out about Hahlo, a web based mobile client for Twitter. Awesome!! When using both you do not see which one is web based!
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2nd Mobile Monday Switzerland: Mobile payment

I attended last night the 2nd Mobile Monday Switzerland hosted at EPFL. Topic was about Mobile Payment. More than fifty persons (out of 70 “subscribers” to Momo Swiss) were attending this session which is less than in other part of the world but not so bad for a 2nd edition in Switzerland. Mainly business oriented crowd, not much students (I saw only one) despite the fact that it was at EPFL.
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Mobile web app vs. native app

From Wapreview: Mobile Browser Based Applications

Two requirements need to be met before browser based technologies are capable being a general replacement for applications:
1. They need to be functional offline. The ability to edit a document can’t depend on the availability of a network signal.
2. There needs to be access to core phone features like the phone book, calendar, camera and location.

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Picking a SSID and Network Magic

I bought a new wireless router at home. working for Cisco I bought a Linksys one of course. At some point I had to choose a SSID name for my wireless network. I used my cell phone number as the SSID, thinking that if someone wants to connect he can call me and I will give out the password…
At the same time I installed Network Magic a networking tool provided by Pure Network (bought by Cisco a few months back)

Apple app store sucks (bis)

Russell Beattie: The iPhone Crapp Store?

From the descriptions of most of them [read: applications], I’d say there’s a ton of unmitigated crud flowing into the App Store right now. You don’t read about it because the iPhone is all shiny and new, but with all those apps arriving daily the quality has to be really varied. Really, really varied. And with a few of the App developers making BANK to the tun of a quarter million in like two months, it’s just going to get worse. The sort of press those successes generate may not be good for Apple at all in the long run, as it appears the land-rush is on, and the scammers, spammers and other dregs of online society are closing in fast and I have serious doubts if the iTunes Store is really made to keep up.

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Indoor positioning

Nokia creates Indoor Positioning:

Nokia’s keeping mum about exactly how the technology works, for now, but has said it’s based on wireless networks. The firm’s also said that the technology still needs a scalable solution to make it work and admitted that mapping the guts of each building “is quite a challenge”.

Based on wireless networks ? so you mean something like the Cisco Location Appliance but integrated on the device ? I would be curious to see how it works but it probably makes intensive used of the wireless network infrastructure…

Wikio sur iPhone

Pierre Chappaz demande sur Twitter ce qu’on pense d’une version beta de Wikio sur iPhone: http://wikio.alterclickr.com/m/

L’interface de Wikio sur iPhone est plutôt sympa, mais le problème rencontré par Wikio est le même que celui rencontré par tous les agrégateurs de contenu lorsqu’il s’agit de développer pour les mobiles (iPhone y compris), à savoir qu’ils ne peuvent contrôler que la source vers laquelle ils renvoient est adaptée à la navigation mobile. Ceci peut avoir un effet désagréable pour l’utilisateur (sur son portemonnaie et/ou son expérience utilisateur).
Une solution consisterait peut-être à insérer une page intermédiaire qui permettrait d’avertir l’utilisateur qu’il se dirige vers un site potentiellement non adapté à la navigation mobile et/ou proposer l’utilisation d’un transcodeur pour mobile (comme Mowser, Skweezer,…).