Licence to Roam

I guess Apple never got round to signing those licensing agreements with Cisco for use of their trademark term iPhone. And now they are suing.

“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name,” said Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel, Cisco. “There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission.

Update 18/1: Google likes this site for Iphone lawsuit and as I don’t actually have a lot of content here’s some links that look good:

• the orginal Cisco Blog post is linked above.
• Apple Insider has statements from both parties
• Pretty similar news articles can be found at iPodObserver, ItWire, the Wireless Weblog, TMCNet, etc, etc - there’s a fair few posts about Apple callignthe suit silly.
• ignore the sites with iplawsuit in the domain - they look and feel (at least today) like spam sites that are just reprinting content with a lot of ads attached.
• I go to the BBC for mainstream news. But there’s not too much new in that over the other online news sites.

But, after poring through a few of these, after you have read a few of the news articles, they are all pretty much saying the same. I guess we have to wait for news.

To be honest, I’m not really into phones. I have a pretty good one for the UK, all 3g and live tv and browsing etc but the data plan sucked and it’s no use where I am. And my US phone is just about manages to phone and text, there nothing else really to it. So looking at the iPhone coverage I can drool over the design but as for the functionality, if I bought it it’s just end up being a big phone and ipod I can’t put in my pocket, so would sit in the bottom of my bag getting scratched.

And once you get past the design, what is really new about the phone. As Robert says, there’s always a reality distortion field when it comes to Apple announcements. The range of functionality is not too hot as far I can read; Tom has a good piece looking at what it can do compared to his current phone. So again, design good, features not so good. There’s back and forth on a mobile marketing mailing list about design vs functionality, especially about what appears to be the closed nature of the system, without the ability to add functions, tools and widgets. Then again, lack of functionality never stopped the iPod. Would I buy it - probably not. Cool gadget, too expensive for what I would actually use it for.

If you are determined to get one and you want to find out how long you have to wait - iphonecountdown.com has the numbers for you. From Mike via Dan.

With Firefox now allowing you to open the browser with the same tabs it closed down with by default, I’ve been looking for a way to synchronise open tabs across 2 or more PCs. So that where ever I am, i can have the same set of open tabs. There’s a number of ways to share bookmarks across instances of the browser but not your current tab set, as opposed to the tabs you set as home. I want to be able to set it up once and that is it. No having to remember to click things, it just does the saving for me when I close.

One of the posts I did find in trawling the new Technorati was Devanshu’s 95 Theses of Geek Activism. A great list og things that you should be concerned about, tying in well with many of the talks I attended over the weekend.

Jello Biafra gave a a superb 2 hour keynote, focusing on the theme fromthe day before of Provacy is Dead and covering his former bandmembers, his feelings towards the FBI, US foreign and home policy, Oprah, the Media Marketing Accountability Act, the COPE act and net neutrality. This, combined with the talk previously from Robert Steele makes me think (despite not knowing many of the political and national references) that I’m not paranoid enough.

My domain is being used in a spam email, so I’m currently sitting on about 3000 returned/out of office mails. Not the best problem to have. Now I have to go through and delete everything

I see that Warner Brothers are going to be providing downloads of movies and TV for about the same price as the DVDs at about the same time. They plan to use BitTorrent as vehicle.

No need to manufacture a disk and packaging, no need to distribute, no need to provide the retailer with a cut, maybe no extras, can only play on one computer so no backup when it goes wrong. And they are charging the SAME PRICE!!!! This is called taking the piss.

I spent some of the morning watching the WeMedia on video stream and via the online chat and IRC, then got to see a couple of sessions at the conference. There is a lot of blogging coverage about the event, some from participants, others from the virtual attendees.

The blurb says “The We Media Global Forum brings together the trailblazers of the connected society - the thinkers, innovators, investors, executives and activists seeking to tap the potential of digital networks connecting people everywhere”. From the bits I saw and the people I talked to, not too sure that really happened. Digital networks change things, move and share power, giving the potential to take control out of the hands of the few and spread it around. This can happen with or without the current set of gatekeepers. I would have thought the conference was about providing a chance for the traditional media centres to take stock and assess how they are going to support the devleoping communities across the world.

Instead I got the impression that what was being said on stage only supported the existing worldviews. There was little challenge, the same old questions were being asked and little movement made. Rebecca McKinnon puts it well: “The question we really ought to be focusing on is: how can citizens and professional journalists work together to create a better and more well-informed public discourse?”. Instead, it was the same debates about them and us, bloggers are scary and don’t we (media) know best?

I’m not sure if today’s was any different - I was travelling all day so missed it.

On Tuesday, I went off to the Swedish Beers night, a mobile networking event. Douglas from Sponge ws talking about mobile groups and marketing. The group Jane’s Addiction were given mobiles on a tour; fans were encouraged to sign up for a text group and the band sent updates tot he group whilst on the tour. As well as general updates, they also used it for a form of flash-mobbing. After playing at Brixton Academy, the band announced a back of the theartre, post-gig acoustic set, and also announced a Covent Garden busking concert, which lasted til the police moved them on. This is a geat example of engagement with fans.

On Monday, I went along to a London 2.0 meeting. As usual with many of these meetups, the first time go along you’re never quite sure who you are looking for. But this time it was slightly easier. The venue chosen was near to the law courts so was full of suits; the meetup group, being primarily in the technical area, weren’t, making them slightly ewasier to spor than usual.

I spent some time with Ben discussing reevoo, a UK consumer product review site. It has both formal reviews and customer reviews, collected via feedback emails/interviews and from blogs. The customers of the company are the retailers, who pay for feedback, but the reviews are not sanitised.

There were a number of demos presented. The photo below shows everyone watching the demo from Python Hosting from Remi, who demo’d a very cool install control panel with one-click installations of web app frameworks. From the ooohh, arhhs and offers to pay moeny there and then, it was a popular demo. The other demo was from Phil, who showed off Protest, a test application that streamlines the process.

The BBC ia running an article about the spread of wifi in the wild, with hotspots extending to form zones and more and more people getting wifi in their homes. What it doesn’t mention is the conflict between paid services and free wifi. Companies ever increasing their coverage is one thing, but without a single type of sign-on, having to run multiple accounts toget wifi can be a problem. There are small efforts to go down a municipal route, but these are not yet widespread. One move i see is similar to the way we use telephone wires. Almost all users are connected to the same physical network, but they can choose who provides the actual service and takes their money. I don’t see wifi becoming free and ubiquitous anytime soon in the UK, but the service model may be a way forward - I pay for my connection and I get the service whether from home or whist roaming.

Last night I attended a networking event run by Women In Technology, with the topic of Flexibility in the workplace. There were 2 very different keynote speakers, a panel debate and then a chance to eat and drink and chat.

Eileen Brown was up first, talking about how technology helps her be flexibile in the workplace. With a 130 mile each way commute, she relies on being always connected - the phone is her friend. She’s helped by a culture at Microsoft that has set up all the tech required to be able to work anywhere. She did more in a 15 minute speach to explain the benefits of the anytime/anyplace MS office than any of the poor dinosaur ads. Some great numbers in explaining the reach of devices - MS apparently have just over 5 PCs for each employee.

Second speach was from Ray Testa of Lehman brothers. A lot, lot drier, looking at the policies and procedures the company has. Not too much that I could take from that. The following panel answered pre-submitted questions from the audience (no interaction, no chance to reflect and challenge the speakers in the public forum). The general theme was about strategies to convince the companies to do flexible working, about the change management required to adopt to a culture where there is less command and control and more trust.

One very annoying thing, picked up in later conversations was a few of the assumptions of the panel. On being asked about balancing career and child care, the answers were along the lines of get a nanny or get your partner to stay at home. One of the women from Accenture mentioned a survey of successful female Partners in the firm - the one thing they all had in common was a stay at home husband. But very few people have the salary to support a family on one income or to employ a nanny, or have a partner that would be prepared to stay at home.

This event was a completely different event from the Girl Geek Dinners. Both women-focused, both opportunities to network. But the WiT is the corporate, seminar style, controlled panel, looking at bigger business, looking at supporting in a formal way; organised through a paid team Girl Geek Dinner is your small web start up, flexible, changing organisers, locations, M.O’s. There’s very little cross over between the 2 events in terms of attendees. I definitely prefer the later way.

I;ve read two great posts this week on Women in Technology.http://giagia.blogspot.com/2006/02/modelling-or-whoring-atoms-one-thing.html

The first, from Gia, addresses her feelings after watching Anina at Lift06. She was not impressed, feeling that Anina was there because of being a model:

I’m genuinely glad that Anina is excited about “technology”, but can’t we as people who are involved with moulding the future perhaps concentrate on women who are doing really cool stuff for geeks- not just because they are women, but cos they are simply doing cool stuff?

Tara rephrases the question “So, why aren’t there more women in technology? Or…to rephrase it…why aren’t there more prominent women in technology?” The question is not answered, but good challenges made about perceptions of women in geek space.

Last night I wandered along to Wiki Wednesday, where Ross dropped in on his way back from Helsinki. This was a focused gathering, so I think most people had a chance to to talk to everyone there. There’s definitely a group of people I keep bumping into at these type of sessions, like Sarah and Ian. Some new people to me were Tom and Julian . One of the topics was the stabilisation and productionisation of wiki software - making the installation a lot easier and making the use of them far more WYSIWYG. I’ve shown wikis to people at work who just ‘use’ computers, use Word etc and there is always a reluctance to edit, to attempt to use the required syntax to do formatting. If that can be made a lot simpler, then some of the behavioural change will be easier. Another set of conversations were about geting people to use systems like wikis internally, what sort of information could you seed the idea with. A favourite was definitely the lunchtime menus - one story was about the use of a webcam so that people could see the queue to get food. Another favourite would be information about benefit policies. These strategies are targeted at company wide initiatives, where the whole intranet would change, not at providing information solutions for smaller teams. However, whatever the trigger, the technology is often the easy part - finding ways to provide a solution that people will believe will make their lives better enough to get them to use it is always the hard part.

I wonder what the business reason is for not allowing extra subscribers to Sky Broadband. But I’d more than likely sign up to a subscriber system to download movies. I rent them at the moment from Amazon; it’d be so much easier just to download instread of having to post DVDs all the time. But instead I have to sign up for a package over £30…but I can’t where I live so this is out of the question for me.

This is DRMed to death, in that you only have a limited number of days (30) to watch the movies. But that’s not much different from the rental system I use - i have to return the discs. So in this case, letting me subscribe as a rental system (instead of locking me into a subscription that makes me sign up for things I don’t want) is a way Sky could get money from me when currently they make nothing.

I’ve bought me a new phone. Apart from a short lived pay-as-you-go phone in Amsterdam back in 2000, this is the first phone I have actually gone and chosen. Up until now, work has provided a phone and paying the bills. As I’m not going to have that in the future, it was time to go and get my own.

But it’s a shock to the system. I’ve being using a Nokia 6310i; as a phone it works great. But that’s all I ever really used it for, a triband phone plus texts. I stretched the use of it to include alarm clock and stopwatch but the WAP/GPRS etc were never enabled on it.

Now I have an 6680 Smartphone. It’s got colour! ( a small thing I know, but having had grey tone for so many years, the initial impact is the colour screen). But I have web, email, calendar, camera, video phoning, and lots more stuff I’ve not touched yet. I’ve even got TV. Buying through Vodaphone gives me their Live service and this month they have free Sky Mobile TV. Despite having entertainment channels, the programming is not the same as their satellite equivalents (I guess this is a rights issue) but you can get the news live. It is missing the one essential thing a TV needs though - a little tiny remote control ;o) The phone uses RealPlayer to manages the video stream and so far performance has been great.

A survey conducted by Women in Technology of around 1200 current and former members of the WiT group found that they like buying technology and gadgets for Christmas presents. The top 10 were:

(1) Digital Camera,
(2) iPod,
(3) iPod Accessories,
(4) Laptop Computer,
(5) HDTV,
(6) Videogame Console,
(7) Camera Phone,
(8) Desktop Computer,
(9) Smartphone
(10) Handheld Videogame Player.

The survey is picked up by the BBC here. They pick up the point about women being the silent influencer behind many joint purchases.

Women are the silent majority when it comes to influencing and making consumer electronics purchases.

They influence around 80% of consumer electronics purchases, according to figures from manufacturers and trade groups such as the Consumer Electronics Association.

But until recently the industry did not pay attention to this.

And we can see the changes from the consumer electronics industry - a colleague at work has a pink phone which appears to make a feature of having a biorythm tracker. But the women’s market does not just mean colouring everything pink; designing smaller and lighter goods can be important (just look at Maryam’s experience with a new laptop) but also lowering the entry barriers - reduce the fiddleliness in setting things up. That’s a complaint I’ve heard from friends - too many things needed to get things working, it’s not just turn on and go. Although I have to admit given I’ve seen many men just turn on the stuff and never even attempt to read manuals I’m surprised that it is being bought up as a need for designing for women ;o)

Anyway, back to list. I’d go with the HDTV as first choice for me - and I’ll definitely have to be buying it myself. But why was anyone surprised that women who work with technology buy technology?

At Waterloo this morning there was a scrummage around the small team that were handing out free gifts. Joining in, I found that BT were giving away headsets, promoting their VOIP system, BT Communicator. Useful in that you can easily make calls to phones far cheaper than using the ‘landline’ and then it all comes in on one bill. They’re pushing it pretty heavily this Christmas, with a Christmas offer of free calls to 30 countries No mention of other products though ;o)

One set of people who did not seem pleased about the free offer were the station cleaners. The headsets came in largish boxes, which were left scattered around the elevators and were being rapidly cleaned up by a squad of 3.

Somewhere out there, there has to be a website that offers exactly what I am after. Let me put in a list of requirements and it’ll give me a list of phones that have those features. I’m pretty sure that Nokia once had something like this, but now you can only compare phones for a couple of features at once. I don’t have time to trawl through lots of pages full of lists of features, not do I particularly want to go into a shop and face the sales guys without having a little understanding first. Too, too frustrating. Well, back to the review sites.

The Times does end of year ‘awards’ about technology-related things that it believes has bought in changes this year, including:

• timeshifting music - podcasting
• Artic Monkeys - the band that got to No 1 through downloads and word of mouth
• timeshifting TV, making TV schedulers redundant
• ‘citizen jounalism’ though ubiquitous cameraphones
• Mark Russinovich, for ‘idling through his computer’s nether regions’ and finding Sony’s rootkit
• RSS for improvong web delivery

  Blogs don’t get an award, not for a lack of revolution but because they are as core to a number of other things, such as providing a tool to support free speech in many countries