moby hits the nail on the head …

this is exactly the way i think about how the different churches deal with homosexuality and abortion …
http://www.moby.com/node/7201
i couldn’t have said it better.

mobile carriers (part 1.5)

i wrote about last week’s news on cingular rebranding to at&t, well it sounds now like that is not the case, but instead cingular will stay cingular and local at&t’s can choose to keep their name. well, why not just have one brand?

but the main reason for this post is actually about the way mobile phones are introduced here in the US. and this is not about carrier branded phones that appear more and more in europe, but about phones from companies like motorola that are introduced with only one carrier. i guess this is supposed to be some sort of special deal, but in the end it is mostly a technical issue. the reason a phone is only available at one carrier has not so much to do with exclusivity, but with network technology. since the US mobile market is still a patchwork of different network technologies phone companies can’t introduce the same phone across all carriers. the most ridiculous part is what happens to the cingular and t-mobile customers since they should ultimately benefit from a large global gsm market and realize heavy savings since those phones can be produced in much greater quantities, but US carriers are keeping phone prices high to make more money.

in the end all this does is make the whole mobile experience less user friendly.

why round corners?

this post raises an interesting question: why do designers, and also i guess the users like round corners, not only on real things like ipods, but also on web sites … while interesting question, the article is a bit short on answers.

http://www.basement.org/archives/2005/11/why_do_we_love_rounded_corners.html

now it’s at&t, now it’s cingular, now it’s at&t

usually the mobile market is fun. there is still a lot of innovation going in the market, and while frustrating the mobile internet space is still interesting since it is pretty much still up for grab. but what the mobile phone carriers are doing is sometime just not understandable. while european carriers seem to have calmed down and actually learned from the bubble burst some years ago and become more humble, US carriers just don’t get, they think it is all about them. and to a certain degree cingular is the prime example for this. it is all about the brand and nothing about the service (even in a city like washington there are still spots where reception drops). but if you think one brand change in 12 months was not enough, now the company (or better its owners sbc) decide that actually at&t is a better name than cingular (http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=1806&source=HOME) and so a year after a quite costly rebranding campaign of at&t mobile into cingular the company is about to start a new rebranding campaign of cingular to at&t (and to make it all even more ridiculous, they will write at&t all lower case, rather than the all caps because marketers have told them it is cooler).

now i don’t know but there must be someone at sbc who owns stocks of some marketing company, otherwise i just don’t get it. usually it is all about shareholder value here, shareholder value there but this just makes no sense. this is just plain shareholder value destruction. and the strange thing, nobody seems to care.

what would really help is, if they start spending money on infrastructure and make sure that at least within cities calls don’t drop and you have actual 100% coverage, how about that for marketing? and even verizon with their stupid “can you hear me now” ads can’t even say their network has anywhere close the coverage of any of the secondary european carriers.

so here is my message to US mobile phone carriers, stop throwing money at marketing for a while and start investing in the infrastructure.

ajax (1)

i know that ajax is not necessarily something revolutionary since it uses a set of old/existing technologies, but i would say that like the ipod ajax creates something out of existing pieces that is actually revolutionary in that it creates a user experience which is unique and most importantly useful. one use that i really like, and which underscore the usefulness part can be found at the site of the International Herald Tribune (http://www.iht.com). if you take a look at one of their stories going to the “next page” will not result in a page load, but just changes the text to the new page text. in addition to this, the page view is great, not one long column, but three shorter column that fit in one page view, no scrolling required. plus, you don’t even have to click on the “next page” button but can just click on the last paragraph. i never thought much about the iht, but their site really amazed me.

security

one of the main areas i focus on in my job as an research analyst is IT security. and i have to admit that while i write about IT security i am a rogue apple user in a windows based company. i don’t really worry about it that much since using a mac is anything but a security risk, in a way i am actually reducing the risk by not bringing in viruses. plus, i have a much more rigid set of security apps on my powerbook than any of the corporate stuff.

why is this interesting? well, during the 80s and 90s there was this idea that if you make it easier for low income people to buy a house or apartment, something that they own, the neighborhood they live in will improve and crime will go down … i don’t know if this actually works, but it makes sense to me, you take better care of things that you own — just take a look how people treat cars they rent or lease vs. cars that they actually buy with their own money. so if this is the case, then why don’t companies give people a laptop as a gift when they start at the company?

let’s say on day one they give you a brand new laptop, and they say here is all the software that needs to be on it, let’s put it on (this way a user will know how to install software), then they walk though the security settings (this can all be done in group events, and most companies already have some sort of IT intro classes). after that the IT department says that there will be weekly security updates for download and also security bulletins on the intranet site that cover both personal and corporate use, and once a quarter there will be security user groups, which can be lead by users, not IT staff required for this.

with this in place, and people know more about what they do and what they consequences are, as well as the feeling of ownership i think that incidents would go down

rootkit, sony, and antivirus software

great piece by bruce schneier on the sony rootkit issue

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69601,00.html

music industry vs. apple

an interesting follow up on my earlier post on emi’s comments about itunes pricing … well and other things they are saying … as well as apple’s no response

http://techdirt.com/articles/20051117/1931236_F.shtml

the world in 2006

the economist special “the world in…” hit the news stands

http://www.economist.com/theworldin/

interview with jonathan ive

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/19/nive19.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/19/ixnewstop.html