Category: Wireless
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Survey: Only 40% of Canadians Password-Protect Their Cell Phones
Continue Reading: Survey: Only 40% of Canadians Password-Protect Their Cell PhonesOnly 40% of Canadian cell phone users password-protect their phones or use other privacy options, a survey by Canada’s privacy commissioner found. The results of the 2000-person survey were released in August and written up in a Globe And Mail piece entitled “How private is that text message?“.
When I saw the headline, I honestly thought it was going to be something about the security of SMS messages… but in fact it was about the security of the cell phones themselves. If the phones aren’t secured then someone can go in and look at your text messages. Ergo… the link-bait title of the article. (And yes, it got me to look.)
Still, it had some interesting data points such as the fact that the users from age 18 to 34 were the ones most likely to use privacy tools, which is good to see, since they are probably the ones pumping the most information out online.
Nice to see, too, that 82 percent did not think police should have access to your online usage info without a warrant.
I was surprised, in all honestly, about the 40% number… I actually might have thought of it being lower as I…
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Did Amazon Just Fork The Android Operating System?
Continue Reading: Did Amazon Just Fork The Android Operating System?Did Amazon just fork the Android operating system with their Kindle Fire? That’s the question asked at Mashable today in a post “Amazon Kindle Fire Just Hijacked Android where it was noted that all the promotion around the Kindle Fire did not mention Android. The key piece to me is this:Amazon is not the first company to use Android for its devices, only to customize the UI and add its own App Store…
Still, Amazon’s customization of Android goes above and beyond re-theming the interface. Amazon has created its own apps for email, video playback (using Amazon Instant Video), music and books…
Amazon is using Android 2.3 as its base, not the tablet-specific Honeycomb, and we expect that the company has taken the opportunity to optimize 2.3 specifically for the Kindle Fire’s hardware.
Likewise, instead of applying tweaks to the basic Android web browser, Amazon chose to build its own: Amazon Silk…
The tragedy here is that the Amazon Kindle Fire will undoubtedly be a very popular device. At $199, I can see many people picking these devices up.
And it could be a great opportunity to bolster the Android ecosystem.
To encourage and nurture a further competitive…
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Congrats, I think, to Alec Saunders as RIM’s New VP of Developer Relations
Continue Reading: Congrats, I think, to Alec Saunders as RIM’s New VP of Developer RelationsCongratulations (I think) to my friend Alec Saunders for taking a new role as “VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development” for Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry line of mobile devices.Or perhaps condolences are in order… somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.
Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:
Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.
“Lack of support” probably doesn’t go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry’s rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to…
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Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPad
Continue Reading: Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPadGood to see that Mitel is joining the iOS application space with Unified Communications apps for the iPhone and iPad. These apps will work with Mitel’s “Freedom” architecture to allow people to use their own iPhone or iPad device with the Mitel corporate phone system.Per Mitel’s news release, the app allows users to:
- Search the corporate directory and click-to-dial from corporate contact list to place calls through the corporate network.
- View missed, dialed, and received calls.
- Access visual voicemail from your office extension and manage messages by preference rather than sequence.
- Automatically update presence status and call routing preferences based on your location, or time of day.
Given enterprise users’ desire to use their own devices, it is not surprising to see these type of apps coming out from a vendor like Mitel. It will be interesting to see how this helps Mitel in the marketplace.
Kudos to the Mitel team for creating the apps.
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Video: How to Communicate at Burning Man using OpenBTS and Tropo
Continue Reading: Video: How to Communicate at Burning Man using OpenBTS and TropoHeading to Burning Man this coming week? Would you like to use your mobile phone to connect up with others on the playa in Black Rock City?If so, check out this video from Chris Pirillo about the work being done by a team of folks to supply local cell phone coverage… the vans with satellite and cell hookups are already enroute… it uses software from OpenBTS and Tropo.com to let burners leave each other voice messages, exchange SMS messages and more. Here’s the video:
And here are some blog posts that provide more information:
- The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
- Tropo + OpenBTS + Burning man = Awesome
- Voice Board and Group SMS for Burning Man
- Papa Legba FAQ (about the deployment at Burning Man and what you need to do to participate)
I’m not personally going to be at Burning Man, but this does sound very cool!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
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Fascinating to Watch AT&T and Sprint Duke It Out Over T-Mobile Acquisition
Continue Reading: Fascinating to Watch AT&T and Sprint Duke It Out Over T-Mobile AcquisitionInteresting piece on the “This Is My Next” site last night about Sprint and AT&T taking to print ads to ratchet up their fight over AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile:
Sprint and AT&T take merger battle to print: ‘Competition is American, Competition plays fair’
The issue is, of course, that there is a U.S. Congressional hearing on the proposed acquisition this coming Wednesday in D.C. Sprint obviously is opposed to the merger and is pulling no punches in saying exactly what it feels about the proposed merger. I do admit to enjoying one line in their ad:
Competition keeps us all from returning to a Ma Bell-like, sorry-but-you-have-no-choice past.
This definitely IS a concern for all of us as the companies in the mobile space continue to consolidate.
AT&T of course counters with how this will be the best for the country, how it will foster innovation, bring about a stronger network, etc.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. For me personally, the proposed merger offers very little. AT&T has poor coverage where I live (Keene, NH) and T-Mobile has even worse coverage of the area… so I don’t expect that we’d see any…
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Where Was I in the Summer of 2010? My iPhone Tells Me! (Courtesy of iPhoneTracker)
Continue Reading: Where Was I in the Summer of 2010? My iPhone Tells Me! (Courtesy of iPhoneTracker)Where did I travel with my iPhone? Given all the recent kerfuffle over the logging of location data on an iPhone, I naturally had to try it out. First stop was getting the Mac OS X app at:http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
The app itself is super simple… simply launch the app and it goes off and finds your iPhone backups, extracts the location data and shows you a map.
In my case, the Mac I ran the app on only had data from my iPhone 3G and only for the period of time from when I updated it to iOS 4 in July 2010 through when I stopped using it in September 2010 (because I replaced it with an iPhone 4). Still, the data is kind of fun to see. Here’s what it looked like overall:
During that time period, I traveled down to Voxeo’s corporate office in Orlando, went to a SIPit test event over on the New Hampshire seacoast, and spent a chunk of time in New York City attending SpeechTEK 2010.
Diving into the data a bit more, here’s a close-up of the northeast. It’s amusing to see the train trip I took down to NYC (for SpeechTEK) as…
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Microsoft Infographic on Mobile Market Shows Compelling Numbers
Continue Reading: Microsoft Infographic on Mobile Market Shows Compelling NumbersEverybody loves an infographic, right? Earlier today Mashable ran a Microsoft infographic about the state of the mobile market. The numbers are quite powerful (click the image to see the full version):I had a huge personal disconnect with one of the stats showing that so many people use their mobile phones for games, simply because I almost never use my phone that way…
Yet I know that many people do and I see that when I’m out and about.
All in all some interesting stats, even if they do have the inevitable promotion of Microsoft Tags, since that was the sponsor of the infographic. (Microsoft Tags being their proprietary mobile tag solution versus the QR codes you see in many places.) Not a bad technique for Microsoft really… create a great infographic with lots of compelling data… and then insert a few little tidbits and links that promote your story.. and then…
… people like me will write about it. 🙂
Regardless, there are some good stats there… kudos to the MS team who put it together.
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Combined Coverage Map: AT&T and T-Mobile – Montana is Still A Blank Spot
Continue Reading: Combined Coverage Map: AT&T and T-Mobile – Montana is Still A Blank SpotWant to know what the combined coverage of AT&T and T-Mobile would look like on a map? By way of a tweet from Todd Carothers I learned of a post at Fierce Mobile Content that uses maps from AmericanRoamer.com to show what the combined coverage map of the United States would look like. Click on the link or image to see all the various comparison maps:Interesting to see the spectrum holdings of the two companies as well.
Alas, my little pocket of southwestern New Hampshire doesn’t stand to gain much out the merger… we’re still stuck with the limited AT&T coverage we have. At least, though, we’re not up in Montana, where it would appear coverage is close to nonexistent… (and yes, I know that population is minimal up there, too).
Interesting charts…
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The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?
Continue Reading: The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?Multiple people have pinged me asking if I was going to weigh in on the news last night that AT&T is acquiring T-Mobile USA.Seriously?
It’s been ages since I’ve seen this kind of online and offline media feeding frenzy[1] … I mean, look at Techmeme this morning:
Pretty much everybody and anybody who writes online with anything remotely to do with communications has generated posts on the topic.
I think at this point all we can really do is watch what the regulators say… and realize that this will take a year or more to actually happen. I’ll perhaps have more to say at some future time, but right now I’m just reading Om and all the many other comments out there…
[1] Well, okay, maybe we haven’t seen this kind of media feeding frency since, oh, the iPad2 launch 😉
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