A Dutch firm called RealMapping has already mapped 4.3 billion IP addresses, and is selling software to allow sites to map user's locality. They are publicly claiming the largest database of mapped IPs. It's now marketing even more localised versions - cities and academic institutions.
The firm is privately funded (including cash from NewEconomy, a Dutch VC firm,) and the company's management have told me they don't necessarily intend to take the firm public, since the cost of creating the database was so low.
On the one hand, it could be a very handy thing for companies wanting to provide localised content - very relevant to those of us living outside North America, as we usually don't qualify for freebies or special offers - and on the other hand, I really don't want companies knowing where I am surfing from and what my viewing habits are. The same argument goes for cookie, but this is a lot more intrusive.
I'm covering this from a European angle, so please bear in mind my thoughts are specific to this market.
iMode cannot really get anywhere in Europe until an always-on service of some kind is launched. GPRS is being touted at the moment, but EDGE networks are also popular with some of the financial guys like WestLB Panmure because they're cheap and you don't need a hugely expensive license (or ubiquitous infrastructure) to set up and run them. EDGE networks in big population centres will do.
WAP has been held back in Europe by two things; circuit switched communications at agonisingly slow rates and mismarketing. Circuit switched versus always on has already been debated elsewhere in this discussion, so I'll leave that for now.
The marketing angle is interesting. Almost every company selling WAP has touted it as the Internet on a phone. users, rather understandably, have become disillusioned with this. In fact, one academic I talked to said that the telcos would be better off ditching WAP very publicly, even if they continue to use the technology, because the brand is now covered in mud.
By the time GPRS comes out, version 2.x of WAP will probably be out, and iMode will have a fair amount of competition. This is not least because of the amount of time, energy and brains that developers have invested in WAP. A big switch between technologies halfway through a development effort does not a successful project make.
The WAP forum and NTT DoCoMo are talking to each other. Scott Goldman, chairman of the WAP Forum, has said the forum is in talks with NTT engineers. The next version of WAP (WAP-NG) is likely to be a tighter subset of XML incorporating a lot of the bits and bobs that iMode has taught DoCoMo.
One other point; at present there is no for mobile phone data. Location and timeliness will be the two big apps.
Just my thoughts.
Ben
Um, I disagree about handset usage.
BT Cellnet in the UK predicted at the start of the year that it would sell 500,000 handsets by the end of August. It claims to have sold 250,000 at present. I've also heard reports of users returning the handsets (in this case Nokia 7110) because they don't like using them - basically because access is slow (9600 baud) and negotiating connections is incredibly time consuming, _before_ you get to the content.
On top of that, of the seven mobile phone users in my office at the moment (and yes, we are gadget fiends) there are three WAP handsets. One was a freebie. None of them are actually set up for WAP. The handsets _could_ be out there, but the usage isn't.
The advent of GPRS and, to a lesser extent, EDGE networks will remove this barrier, but the damage has already been done. WAP was marketied in the UK as the Internet on a phone. It's not, and people now think it's tosh. That is one very big marketing hurdle to overcome.
Where did you get the 50% figure? Not even Forrester quoted that to me...
Ben
I might be mistaken here, but Vivek Mehra, Cobalt's CTO, was the lead engineer on Pippin, Apple's attempt at the set-top box market which failed so disastrously back before anyone had heard of the set top box concept....
Um, so exactly how much does a PIII laptop with a modem, 10/100, 14.1" TFT, Firewire, USB and DVD cost these days? My guess is more than the 2,000 ukp a 400Mhz G3 cost. And even if it did, does a PC laptop have enough PCMCIA slots for all the add-on cards? ;) Frankly, Powerbooks have always looked pretty expensive. But when my company wanted me to get a laptop, their bog-standard Toshiba PC solution cost about 3,500 ukp, whereas a G3 setup was about 2000 ukp. And it ran Quark. And it can run for 5 hours straight on a battery. Or longer if I wrench the software and use a RAM disk. <sigh>
The other option, of course, is to use one and appreciate how <damn> nice they are.;) Ben
MacOS at the moment is bobbins. I won't run OS9 on any of my machines. MacOS is not multitasking, it;s just that someone wrote the appswitcher to make it look like it is
Despite all this, i love my Macintoshes (powerbook 100, duo 280, 3400c and Lombard) and I won't run anything else.
Why? Well, the hardware is thoughtfully designed, the OS is simple to use (Very handy for slow witted technology journalists such as myself) and I know where I am. If there is a problem, I can generally wrench it.
I can and do run ten applications in the finder at once. Sure only the front one works, but I still get my email, and I can rmmage in quark or BBEdit whilst a page is loading in Exploder. The point I'm trying to make here is that most of the time I don't need the power of a Linux box. Sure, it's nice, but it's complicated, and I've only scratched the surface when it comes to learning it. MacOS is simple enough for me to be able to swap advice with the techies we employ at my workplace, who, by the way, really dig X DP3 because they develop apps for Macs.
I think Apple is going the right way by junking legacy code and starting from scratch with a proven core OS. I will be first in line to buy OSX, because it will make many of my boxes run better. I get the advantages of Unix with the userfriendlyness of the MacOS. i can't wait. And, no, I don't find a one button mouse a problem. I've used five button mice in the past when I was forced to use Win95 with Quark, and I'm not missing much, to be honest.
. I must say I can't think of any killer apps that the Mac can run that those two OS's cant (even Photoshop is nicer on Windows now than the Mac, and the GIMP rules Linux)
Well, there are a few killer apps, actually... I use a Lombard 333mhx for Quark Xpress. Whatever you say about the PC version of Quark, the Mac version is a hell of a lot stabler. Believe me. I've also got a 2gig partition runnning Linux.
Oh, and if I *really* want to, I can run Windows using any number of Windows emulators. But there's not need to, really. I use my Powerbook as a desktop machine in the office, and whilst the graphics performance is not nearly as good as a loaded blue and white, it's good enough. Other benefits: Synthetic dolphin skin cover. _ooooh!_ Light up Apple logo on the cover. _Style!_ Curvy design. Not boxy! I like the Vaio, but there's nothing to beat the Lombards and Pismos at the moment IMHO. It's a personal thing.
Apple advertised its G4 range a while back as being too powerful to export to unstable countries because the US government classified it as a munition. Off the record, however, Apple staff here in the UK told me that the USG didn't specifically restrict the G4, as there were other, more powerful systems that were already available on the general market that were more suited to tinkering with things beyond man's ken and other dictatorish type things. I'm assuming they were referring to things like Beowulf and various other Unix machines. IMHO the restrictions applied to older machines, back when men wore plaid and a gigaflop meant not having to say you were sorry...
Um, I'd have to disagree, even though it's an interesting point (and I seem to remember having read that JK was over 50, hich makes him old anyway.;) ) What HST does, if I remember rightly, is get involved in the stories - which is a central tenet of the New Journalism. However, he never drags his own baggage into a story. He appears as a character, affects those around him, but does not use a situation to push his own hangups at the reader. His attitude is always; this is what I saw. Katz does not do this. He is: This is what I believe, here is some comment and other empirical evidence to support it. It's mostly opinion, with a little reportage. Not the other way round. I think there are elements of new journalism in Katz' work, IMHO, but I wouldn't sit down and say he approached HST or Wolfe or any of the others. Compare the Rolling Stone article to one of Katz' posts. There is a difference between edited and uneditted work.
Nice, site, BTW. I especially like the purple and orange! B
Jon, I read a lot of your postings. You don't like the way journalism is practiced in the US. What about elsewhere? I work on several computer trade mags in the UK as a staff writer, and some of the things you say about journalism, whilst possibly relevant to US TV journalism, is pretty irrelevant to the practice of quite a lot of my colleagues in the UK. We know our markets intimately, spend hours and days researching our stories, and are directly answerable to our readers, who, after all, tend to know a lot more than we do about any given subject. We're not like TV journalists who never have to meet the subject of a story again. We have to be fair because people we write about will rubbish us, and, if we just write sugary, flattering stories, our readers will and do ignore us. We're directly answerable to our constituents. Unfortunately you're tarring all of us with the same brush.
Would you agree that your constant sniping at other journalists is yellow journalism at it's very worst? Ben
staff writer, Network Reseller magazine The VAR magazine
There's a webcast of the announcement (if you can bear the tedium!) at www.borland.com at 16.30 GMT. Probably (IMPO) the usual 'we're really jazzed we could get together.' stuff as opposed to analysis, but there you go.
________________ 'There are no black cats, only black cat - shaped holes in the universe.' -Arundhati Roy
And of course, You're not posting nonsense, even though you are posting anonymously.;) My, you do have big balls! Have a look at the Object Desktop. Compare it to MacOS 8.x / 9.x / X. look a little similar? Ah, whadever. Time for you to go home. ya mom wants you to clear up your room.;) Ben
What completely freaked me out about the whole Look and Feel case was that Apple was so clearly in the wrong - it had licensed it's technology to Microsoft - and that it had *did not plan* for the possibility that it wouldn't win the case. I love and use Apple products, but there's no excuse for arrogance and NIH. It also looks like Stardock saw the Aqua interface before it was announced at Macworld - the press release announcing and debuting the new skin was released only a few hours after the keynote. Either someone was working *really* fast or they had prior knowedge. At this stage it's difficult to tell because the details are not clear. Another thing; Stardock originally called the skin Object desktop. Check the Stardock press release. Oh, and check out As The Apple Turns for a lighter view of the situations. If you don't get it the first time, trawl through their tape library. If you still don't get it, i give up.;) Ben ***** 'If it ain't got an animal or a piece of fruit on it, it's worthless."
Slashdot Mirror
The firm is privately funded (including cash from NewEconomy, a Dutch VC firm,) and the company's management have told me they don't necessarily intend to take the firm public, since the cost of creating the database was so low.
On the one hand, it could be a very handy thing for companies wanting to provide localised content - very relevant to those of us living outside North America, as we usually don't qualify for freebies or special offers - and on the other hand, I really don't want companies knowing where I am surfing from and what my viewing habits are. The same argument goes for cookie, but this is a lot more intrusive.
Try http://www.realmapping.com
Of course, one way of getting round this would be to use Anonymizer or Freedom.
I'm covering this from a European angle, so please bear in mind my thoughts are specific to this market.
iMode cannot really get anywhere in Europe until an always-on service of some kind is launched. GPRS is being touted at the moment, but EDGE networks are also popular with some of the financial guys like WestLB Panmure because they're cheap and you don't need a hugely expensive license (or ubiquitous infrastructure) to set up and run them. EDGE networks in big population centres will do.
WAP has been held back in Europe by two things; circuit switched communications at agonisingly slow rates and mismarketing. Circuit switched versus always on has already been debated elsewhere in this discussion, so I'll leave that for now.
The marketing angle is interesting. Almost every company selling WAP has touted it as the Internet on a phone. users, rather understandably, have become disillusioned with this. In fact, one academic I talked to said that the telcos would be better off ditching WAP very publicly, even if they continue to use the technology, because the brand is now covered in mud.
By the time GPRS comes out, version 2.x of WAP will probably be out, and iMode will have a fair amount of competition. This is not least because of the amount of time, energy and brains that developers have invested in WAP. A big switch between technologies halfway through a development effort does not a successful project make.
The WAP forum and NTT DoCoMo are talking to each other. Scott Goldman, chairman of the WAP Forum, has said the forum is in talks with NTT engineers. The next version of WAP (WAP-NG) is likely to be a tighter subset of XML incorporating a lot of the bits and bobs that iMode has taught DoCoMo.
One other point; at present there is no for mobile phone data. Location and timeliness will be the two big apps.
Just my thoughts.
Ben
Um, I disagree about handset usage.
BT Cellnet in the UK predicted at the start of the year that it would sell 500,000 handsets by the end of August. It claims to have sold 250,000 at present. I've also heard reports of users returning the handsets (in this case Nokia 7110) because they don't like using them - basically because access is slow (9600 baud) and negotiating connections is incredibly time consuming, _before_ you get to the content.
On top of that, of the seven mobile phone users in my office at the moment (and yes, we are gadget fiends) there are three WAP handsets. One was a freebie. None of them are actually set up for WAP. The handsets _could_ be out there, but the usage isn't.
The advent of GPRS and, to a lesser extent, EDGE networks will remove this barrier, but the damage has already been done. WAP was marketied in the UK as the Internet on a phone. It's not, and people now think it's tosh. That is one very big marketing hurdle to overcome.
Where did you get the 50% figure? Not even Forrester quoted that to me...
Ben
I might be mistaken here, but Vivek Mehra, Cobalt's CTO, was the lead engineer on Pippin, Apple's attempt at the set-top box market which failed so disastrously back before anyone had heard of the set top box concept....
Um, so exactly how much does a PIII laptop with a modem, 10/100, 14.1" TFT, Firewire, USB and DVD cost these days? My guess is more than the 2,000 ukp a 400Mhz G3 cost. And even if it did, does a PC laptop have enough PCMCIA slots for all the add-on cards?
;)
;)
Frankly, Powerbooks have always looked pretty expensive. But when my company wanted me to get a laptop, their bog-standard Toshiba PC solution cost about 3,500 ukp, whereas a G3 setup was about 2000 ukp. And it ran Quark. And it can run for 5 hours straight on a battery. Or longer if I wrench the software and use a RAM disk.
<sigh>
The other option, of course, is to use one and appreciate how <damn> nice they are.
Ben
MacOS at the moment is bobbins. I won't run OS9 on any of my machines. MacOS is not multitasking, it;s just that someone wrote the appswitcher to make it look like it is
Despite all this, i love my Macintoshes (powerbook 100, duo 280, 3400c and Lombard) and I won't run anything else.
Why? Well, the hardware is thoughtfully designed, the OS is simple to use (Very handy for slow witted technology journalists such as myself) and I know where I am. If there is a problem, I can generally wrench it.
I can and do run ten applications in the finder at once. Sure only the front one works, but I still get my email, and I can rmmage in quark or BBEdit whilst a page is loading in Exploder. The point I'm trying to make here is that most of the time I don't need the power of a Linux box. Sure, it's nice, but it's complicated, and I've only scratched the surface when it comes to learning it. MacOS is simple enough for me to be able to swap advice with the techies we employ at my workplace, who, by the way, really dig X DP3 because they develop apps for Macs.
I think Apple is going the right way by junking legacy code and starting from scratch with a proven core OS. I will be first in line to buy OSX, because it will make many of my boxes run better. I get the advantages of Unix with the userfriendlyness of the MacOS. i can't wait. And, no, I don't find a one button mouse a problem. I've used five button mice in the past when I was forced to use Win95 with Quark, and I'm not missing much, to be honest.
Enough! Next!
Well, there are a few killer apps, actually... I use a Lombard 333mhx for Quark Xpress. Whatever you say about the PC version of Quark, the Mac version is a hell of a lot stabler. Believe me. I've also got a 2gig partition runnning Linux.
Oh, and if I *really* want to, I can run Windows using any number of Windows emulators. But there's not need to, really. I use my Powerbook as a desktop machine in the office, and whilst the graphics performance is not nearly as good as a loaded blue and white, it's good enough. Other benefits: Synthetic dolphin skin cover. _ooooh!_ Light up Apple logo on the cover. _Style!_ Curvy design. Not boxy! I like the Vaio, but there's nothing to beat the Lombards and Pismos at the moment IMHO. It's a personal thing.
Apple advertised its G4 range a while back as being too powerful to export to unstable countries because the US government classified it as a munition.
Off the record, however, Apple staff here in the UK told me that the USG didn't specifically restrict the G4, as there were other, more powerful systems that were already available on the general market that were more suited to tinkering with things beyond man's ken and other dictatorish type things.
I'm assuming they were referring to things like Beowulf and various other Unix machines.
IMHO the restrictions applied to older machines, back when men wore plaid and a gigaflop meant not having to say you were sorry...
Um, I'd have to disagree, even though it's an interesting point (and I seem to remember having read that JK was over 50, hich makes him old anyway. ;) )
What HST does, if I remember rightly, is get involved in the stories - which is a central tenet of the New Journalism.
However, he never drags his own baggage into a story. He appears as a character, affects those around him, but does not use a situation to push his own hangups at the reader. His attitude is always; this is what I saw. Katz does not do this. He is: This is what I believe, here is some comment and other empirical evidence to support it. It's mostly opinion, with a little reportage. Not the other way round.
I think there are elements of new journalism in Katz' work, IMHO, but I wouldn't sit down and say he approached HST or Wolfe or any of the others. Compare the Rolling Stone article to one of Katz' posts. There is a difference between edited and uneditted work.
Nice, site, BTW. I especially like the purple and orange!
B
Jon,
I read a lot of your postings. You don't like the way journalism is practiced in the US. What about elsewhere? I work on several computer trade mags in the UK as a staff writer, and some of the things you say about journalism, whilst possibly relevant to US TV journalism, is pretty irrelevant to the practice of quite a lot of my colleagues in the UK. We know our markets intimately, spend hours and days researching our stories, and are directly answerable to our readers, who, after all, tend to know a lot more than we do about any given subject.
We're not like TV journalists who never have to meet the subject of a story again. We have to be fair because people we write about will rubbish us, and, if we just write sugary, flattering stories, our readers will and do ignore us. We're directly answerable to our constituents.
Unfortunately you're tarring all of us with the same brush.
Would you agree that your constant sniping at other journalists is yellow journalism at it's very worst?
Ben
staff writer,
Network Reseller magazine
The VAR magazine
There's a webcast of the announcement (if you can bear the tedium!) at www.borland.com at 16.30 GMT.
Probably (IMPO) the usual 'we're really jazzed we could get together.' stuff as opposed to analysis, but there you go.
________________
'There are no black cats, only black cat - shaped holes in the universe.'
-Arundhati Roy
Nice work. Yes, it is a bit of showmanship, but it's for Charidee, folks.
How about donating it to K.I.D.S?
Check it out on http://www.itrelief.org
And of course, You're not posting nonsense, even though you are posting anonymously. ;) My, you do have big balls! Have a look at the Object Desktop. Compare it to MacOS 8.x / 9.x / X. look a little similar? Ah, whadever. Time for you to go home. ya mom wants you to clear up your room. ;) Ben
What completely freaked me out about the whole Look and Feel case was that Apple was so clearly in the wrong - it had licensed it's technology to Microsoft - and that it had *did not plan* for the possibility that it wouldn't win the case. I love and use Apple products, but there's no excuse for arrogance and NIH. It also looks like Stardock saw the Aqua interface before it was announced at Macworld - the press release announcing and debuting the new skin was released only a few hours after the keynote. Either someone was working *really* fast or they had prior knowedge. At this stage it's difficult to tell because the details are not clear. Another thing; Stardock originally called the skin Object desktop. Check the Stardock press release. Oh, and check out As The Apple Turns for a lighter view of the situations. If you don't get it the first time, trawl through their tape library. If you still don't get it, i give up. ;) Ben ***** 'If it ain't got an animal or a piece of fruit on it, it's worthless."