Several gadgets and one SIM

NTT DoCoMo has created a prototype of what they call a modular phone. It has one inexpensive handset that you can dock into more advanced hardware, like a game device, a slider phone, a device with a QUERTY keyboard and more.

Read the short article.

This is a concrete example of an ide I have had for a possible future solution where you have a SIM that identify you and license you to access the network and other things. The SIM is package into some small gadget that you dock into whatever larger gadget you want to use but need to identify yourself to be autorized to e.g. use the network.

Maybe it is not hardware docking - like the DoCoMo solution - but some kind of "over the air" docking. This might also allow several devices to be autorized at the same time.

Amazone and Google race for books on phones

This is taken from this article in Rethink Wireless:

Amazon is also looking to port the software to general purpose smartphones, perhaps offering just a subset of the Kindle Store’s 230,000 books, targeting more casual readers. "We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones," spokesman Drew Herdener told the New York Times. "We are working on that now."

Google said on Friday that it is making titles from its PC-based Book Search service available for the Apple phone and the Android-based T-Mobile G1. This offers 1.5m public domain titles, which were previously scanned and released for free on the PC. The mobile version will be text-only, rather than scanned book pages.

Rethink Wireless also have these related stories:

Verizon plans rival to Amazon Kindle

The United States of Google?

An article in Business Week by Jeff Jarvis thinks about different ways of running the government in the U.S. He has been to Davos and heard Gore and the Google founders talk about solving the energy challenge and see their different ways of attacking it.

Link

He refers to the book "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky. And in view of this his last comment is:

Google & Co. aren't taking over Washington. They're helping us take over.

7 lessons from Mozilla

Link:
Article in The Open Road.

Two noteworthy lessons - more in the article:

1.
Superior products matter. Apache, Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc. What's the common theme? "All are known for being best-in-class for users." If the code is weak, the project will be weak. Period. Open source is an accelerant: it either makes poor code die faster or great code thrive faster.

6.
Communities are not markets: members are citizens. It's therefore important to treat them like active, valuable participants in open source, not consumers thereof because, as Lilly notes, such citizens "don't just make products better. They make them what they are."

Maybe an example of the first lesson is seen in another article in The Open Road:

Firefox, Google's Chrome speed past IE, Opera

where they tested the speed of the various browser as measured by the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript test.

Deutsche Telekom spawns of cloud company

Deutsche Telekom spawns cloud vendor Zimory

From the page:

Part distribution strategy, part software development strategy (Zimory uses an array of third-party open-source code to build its service), open source is fundamental to Zimory. However, the model's magic is in connecting disparate computing needs and resources, which is a "proprietary" service that only Zimory will be able to manage through its cloud infrastructure. It's a very smart idea.

Even Microsoft agrees. It named Zimory to its select German incubator program.

Google moving to meet enterprise customers

Gmail grows up with offline e-mail access

This is important for enterprise customer so that they can read their email e.g. on a plain. Google now has off-line email as a Beta.

Reading Google's tea leaves

I'm very interested in the things Google do, and I follow them closely. I've written a short piece about this process called "Reading Google's tea leaves." The post both describes some of the things I do to keep track of Google, but I also analyze some recent tea leves indicating that Google is pointing its guns at the telecommunications industry.