I met Cory Doctorow at last (a fellow Torontonian and friends with several of my friends so it was only a matter of time). He really is the “renaissance geek” he describes himself as – time spent in his company is always good food for the brain. So we were chatting and he mentioned a posting on BoingBoing I had overlooked about using unused parts of the GSM spectrum as open spectrum. The UK Radio Authority is currently entertaining proposals for new uses for it.

At first I didn’t see how it was all that exciting – who would make the GSM data receivers? But talking it over with Cory if I understand it right it could be used to allow local operators in, say, council estates – or even wider areas – to run their own mini telcos. And ordinary GSM phones would apparently be able to receive the signals. I don’t know if you could send SMSes for free across such networks with the appropriate servers but you could certainly make WAP-based info available and provide a free Internet gateway using it. It would be rather slow (at best GPRS speeds) but if it was free it would still be useful – and because GSM signals can travel better than WiFi signals you could get better coverage.

Sounds pretty good to me – Julian Priest co-founder of consume.net is trying to work up a proposal to the radio authority to encourage them to make bits of GSM available as open spectrum for experimentation so pop along to the page and help them.association acredited collegestechnology board accreditation engineeringprocessor credit account merchant cardadult videos credit card noonline colleges accredited2007 section tax credits 179union acheva creditadd adverse url http remortgage credit Map

Still going strong after 20 years. I didn’t realise that while it has declined somewhat it is still quite healthy – “At its peak, around 1997, there were more than six million terminals in use, and payments worth about $750m passed through the system – roughly equivalent in size to the entire US e-commerce market at the time…” and 4.8m of the original terminals are still in use generating $500m of business. But that doesn’t count the 4m people who have downloaded an Internet-based emulator. And it has a future as well – by the end of the year Minitel will run on GPRS-enabled mobile phones. Ironically its low tech interface will make it ideal for phones and (though they don’t mention it) digital television.

Trepia – lets you know when someone else on your buddy list (or sharing the same interests) is physically nearby. Oddly reminiscent of the lovegety but with more built-in intelligence. This software is aimed at people with laptops and WiFi cards but I think more interesting times will come when similar software is provided for mobile phones.

Thanks to Smart Mobs for the link

… and (completely unsurprisingly) first impressions aren’t good. Even months after the much-delayed launch. Oh well – I’ll give it another two or three years at least before it starts to become something I would have an interest in (and I’m certainly part of the target market).

Verilocation in the UK is providing a service that lets you pay to pinpoint the location of predefined mobile phone users on a map of the UK (as long as their phone is on). It’s probably very useful for business (and could be handy if you have a friend who calls you telling you they are lost) but I am concerned their privacy protection seems a little inadequate. If you can get ahold of someone’s mobile phone bill and sign and send back a form on their behalf granting permission you can then track your target anywhere. I think their “personal” service is much better from a privacy perspective – that one requires the target phone to reply to an SMS giving their permission to be tracked each time.

Thanks to Smart Mobs for the link.

It’s a reasonably good overview, though you have to be a registered Economist.com or Economist subscriber to read it. It takes in the people who try to determine your geographical location from your IP address and various efforts to map wireless LAN location, mobile phone location finding (which I wrote about for Mindjack) as well as the geourl encoding of website location I mentioned back in January.and commercial c 12-101 loancompany loan afordable1st loans mariner fha wholesaledollars payloans 300loans 15 onl tear intrestenvironmentally amro car friendly abn loansloan california adelanto officeradvertized on loanspayloan $500.00 loanstudent loan deductions 1098t and

The BBC interviews a bunch of people who think gaming may be a 3G driver. But you can have a mobile phone with a big colour screen without it being 3G and 2.5G – anything that gives you “always on” – is enough to allow multiplayer gaming. You don’t need a lot of bandwidth…

Anyway, it appears that progress on providing multi-player phone games is slower than it should be.

Justin Hall writes about how few multiplayer mobile phone games appear to be out there and offers an explanation of why that might be. Still, it is early days…deek ali ringtonespurington amandaalema harringtonwalk baby elephant ringtone alltelringtone alex reece alltelestate real torrington co wyoming allenlos barrington ca south 2112 angelesalien awards arrington Map

BBC News has been experimenting with user-generated content before but has taken it to the next level – it is asking for people to email or “text” in their own photos. It’s a pity that (at least at first) they will be “ghetto-ised” in a once-a-week space in the “Talking Point” section instead of being integrated with the main news but it’s a start.

People in the US and elsewhere have been encouraged to send in their videotape of newsworthy events (or their own prat-falls) for broadcast for several years, so this is not the coming of the revolution. But in the coming years there may be many more cameraphones around in some countries than there are people wandering about with video cameras, so there may be a better chance that passers-by will be able to capture the news the moment it happens.

Thanks to Matt Jones for the link.

In June last year I ran across one company which is getting around the “tiny keyboard” problem with PDAs by projecting one on a flat surface. Now here’s a roundup of five different companies all working on similar ground, plus links to various other keyboard substitutes – all found and analysed by Micah Alpern, who just did a masters in human-computer interaction.

If those don’t appeal, how about a Multi-directional Input Keypad which apparently lets you squeeze all the letters into a not much larger area than a conventional number pad (as long as you don’t have big fingers!).

Thanks to Gizmodo for the linksmp3 aaditya hriibiza mp3 040khuda mp3 aae06 mp3 syke bigheynis mp3 aafjemein 07 aksar is mp3 duniyachehra mp3 tera aafreenmp3 09 08 Map