JJHalans ‹› afterhours

Technology Review has a special report on 10 emerging technologies for 2008. One is Offline Web Applications, which I’m not going to talk about, it’s kind of obvious (Air, Gears, etc). Others are very “out there” (”Connectomics”, “NanoRadio”, “Probabilistic Chips” anyone…?). Another one though is pretty real: “Reality Mining“.

So what are they talking about? MIT Media Lab:

Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behaviour. Reality Mining measures information access and use in different contexts, recognizes social patterns in daily user activity, infers relationships, identifies socially significant locations, and models organizational rhythms.

It is emerging in a sense that it is only now that recent advances in mobile technology put the tools in people’s hands to actually aggregate large, realistic datasets of measurable information. In the last 6 to 12 months new mobile phone handsets are being combined with Wifi and GPS. The boundary between mobile phone (a phone to make, you know, phone calls and send text messages) and smart phone (a mobile phone with additional business related applications like email, office documents, multimedia) is blurring fast, and mobile data is getting faster and more affordable. But Reality Mining as an academic experiment at MIT has been happening for more than 5 years already (using Bluetooth) and they have collected over 350,000 hours (~40 years) of continuous data on human behaviour (100 subjects at MIT - Sensing complex social systems - pdf).

Only recently several other Reality Mining experiments came to light, like Cityware’s Digital Footprint in the UK and bluetoothtracking.org in the Netherlands. The goal of Cityware is “to develop theory, principles, tools and techniques for the design, implementation and evaluation of city-scale pervasive systems as integral facets of the urban landscape.” But in both projects participants are actually unaware that they are participating, in fact they are covertly being tracked without their consent in a technology experiment using Bluetooth scanners installed at secret locations in offices, campuses, streets and pubs to pinpoint people’s whereabouts. And they have been doing so for 3 years.

More than 1,000 scanners across the world at any time detect passing Bluetooth signals and send the data to Cityware’s central database. Those with access to the database admit they do not know precisely how many scanners have been created, but there are known to be scanners in San Diego, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Toronto and Berlin.

Although anonymous, most Bluetooth devices are given a personal name (Tom’s Blackberry), and the Bluetooth scanners can even pick up full names, email addresses, and address books from poorly configured devices.

Closer to our hearts (as it were), Yahoo! is experimenting with its MyBlogLog service:

MyBlogLog allows users to bind their Bluetooth address to their MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and find out if they have any shared interests. Meetspace [meat-space?] keeps track of time spent with others so they have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about.”

MyBlogLog uses a mobile Java applet to tie your Bluetooth device to your MyBlogLog account, then polls for new activity every two minutes. There are plenty of other services out there doing the same (Google Dodgeball).

But back to today’s future… and the iPhone. The iPhone for example offers assisted GPS which means you don’t even need a GPS signal for location aware services, cell-tower triangulation can be used, as well as Wifi AP triangulation (which by the way also works nicely on the iPod touch), as long as there are known access points around (known to Skyhook that is). And we happily use those services together with our social network apps. There are already countless social, location-aware apps available on the Apple App store like Exposure and Twinkle, and if our favourite social app doesn’t have a iPhone native app, we’ll happily connect to Brightkite or other Yahoo! Fire Eagle enable service and tell everyone (or only friends and family) where we are and what we do, and who we do it with…

Where previously thousands of Bluetooth enabled device where being scanned and tracked (unknowingly and unwillingly) by ten scanners spread around Bath, UK, now, at the same locations around Bath, or for that matter around the country, hundreds of thousands of users would be broadcasting their doings and location, and do so voluntarily. Though we might not know what is happening with that information. While we try to retain control of (and monetize) our Attention data on the web, will we be able to retain control (and monetize) our Lifestream data?

The mobile phone as a social artefact becomes more and more a personal black box, recording our every move (into the cloud), for later playback. Where we currently see governments worldwide implement retention policies for email, we might see, in a not so distant future, a retention policy on our lifestream. I do hope I’m wrong.

Have a look at this short video interview (4 min) on Reality Mining, with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT.

BTW, I love my iPhone, and I love location aware applications, but I always have Bluetooth disabled on my phone.

The iPhone 3G costs an arm and a leg…

The AP writes “Quirk in Belgian law drives iPhones near $1,000“. The article compares it to the AT&T locked in price of $299, which isn’t fair though. They should compare it to the unlocked price of about $550. Still a big difference, and 21% VAT doesn’t help either. The thing is, in Belgium it is not allowed to sell one service or device only linked to another service or device. Both services or devices need to be available separately. But the difference with other European countries, which offer similar consumer protection, is then that they can sell a device (at $1) linked to a service while also offering the device and service separately at full price. The full price of an unlocked 16GB iPhone in Australia would also be about $900 AUD.

I’ve updated my iPod Touch with the latest paid upgrade, and I’ve since been busy creating my own Webclip icons for my websites. It’s actually easier than a favicon, it just takes a 57×57 png.
When you add a Webclip to your iPhone/iTouch springboard, it will take a ’screenshot’ as an icon. But you might as well create your own Webclip icon and add it to your webserver.

By default, the new mobile Safari Webclip feature will look into the root of the website for a png named "apple-touch-icon.png". If you want a specific icon for specific sections or pages of yoru site, you can add a  <link> to  the <head> section op each page: 

<link rel="apple-touch-icon"   href="/xyz/images/whatever.jpg"/>

Yes, it can be a jpg too, and even bigger than a square 57px, but it will be scaled down. You don’t even need to add the glass effect as Webclip will take care of that too.

Smart and cool!

All info at the Apple iPhone dev site

I wanted to buy another ‘browse plus pack’ (A$10 for 20Mb), so logged into the Telstra site, and it’s no longer available for me to choose from a list of ‘plus packs’. I do notice some new plus packs, but no more browse pack? Are they really that annoying, or is it an oversight of a developer who removed the wrong thing?

I went to a Telstra store, and the guy didn’t even know what a browse plus pack was, until he opened the Telstra pre-pay brochure, which shows an overview. He asked me what phone it was (which I think is a totally irrelevant question), so I told him about the iPhone. He said that they were getting the iPhone, but couldn’t tell when. I also tried to order over SMS. You can send an SMS code (like BROWSEPLUS10) to topup your plus pack, and that did the job (although a confirmation back over SMS would have been nice, I had to check my online Telstra account). The brochure had $5/1MB, $8/3MB, $16/10MB, $29/70MB, $59/200MB, which is incredibly expensive. Although it might be out of date, as on the Telstra browse plus pack page it shows the prices I talked about (or is that page out of date?).

I had to have one. I was just waiting for the UK introduction to see if a new model (with 3G) was being introduced. But it was the same Edge-based model.

So I went looking on Ebay, and there’s lots of them. You can get them fully unlocked ready to go. But part of the fun is going through the ‘hacking’ process, so I went for an original one. I went for a Buy Now at 650 AUD + 50 AUD shipping. At the current 399 USD price though that would have been about 450 AUD, so the seller did make a decent profit from it. Some auctions went for 580 AUD, other up to 800. There were even some on offer for 1200 AUD (unlocked and locked ones). In the end it did take more than three weeks to end up in my hands though. In the mean time the iPod touch was released, and I got me a 16Gb one while waiting for the iPhone, just to play around with the navigation and Safari.

I only bought a new phone a couple of months ago, a Windows Mobile based Dopod D810. Lately I mainly used it as a mobile modem, while we were switching between two ISP’s, during which we didn’t have internet access. I have a 500 Mb plan on Three for 20 AUD, and that went just fine. I connect it to my Macbook Pro through bluetooth and share the internet connection. And also love it’s GPS functionality.

But on to some iPhone hacking. There’s a lot to read up on about ‘jailbraking’ and unlocking the iPhone. As you know, the iPhone is locked to an AT&T sim card, and you can’t add any 3rd party apps to the iPhone either. Fist you need to activate it, without going through the AT&T process. Next you need to jailbrake it, open it up to third party apps. Because this then allows you to add an unlocking application to the iPhone. I wont repeat the steps here, I’ll point you to the right sources. I don’t take any responsibility when thing go wrong!

One thing to look out for: your firmware version. Make sure you use the right procedure for your firmware. I’ll explain. I tried to unlock my phone with a 1.0.2 procedure while it was still on a 1.0 firmware. I spend 3 hours looking for a solution. It was only the next day that a bright light shone, and I upgraded the iPhone to the 1.0.2 firmware version, and from then on it was only 20 minutes to get it fully working. Well, up to the point to make calls and text. Remember, I’m in Australia. I am originally on the Three network.

Let me tell you right away, it doesn’t work on Three. I read about it on eBay, but didn’t want to believe that. But I got a No Service. So I first bought a Vodafone prepaid sim, 2 AUD for the sim card + 20 AUD calling value (-10%, so 20 AUD in total) because I thought that would be the cheapest. The Vodafone sim allowed me to make and receive calls and texts. So I was halfway.

A week later though I bought a Telstra sim, the main national operator. I knew they were the only ones with Edge here in Australie. The Dopod on Three would roam on it whenever outside of the Three network (quite often outside of Sydney). So while in Melbourne I went to a Telstra store. Tried to explain them that I wanted a prepaid sim card with a data plan. I already had gone through their brochure so I could point out what I wanted. I told them I wanted Edge access. Hmmm, unfortunately the sales people aren’t too well informed on the more technical aspects of their network. They only knew about ‘3G’. “Is it a 3G phone?” Well, it’s an iPhone. “Oh, that won’t work.” I just told him to give me a prepaid card with a 20 AUD calling value, that I would figure it out myself. But he looked to be intriged. It was his first iPhone he got in his hands, so he wanted me to try it right away. He even activated the data plan on it for me too. Unfortunatly he didn’t know what settings to change to get on Telstra’s Edge network (it was still set to Cingular/AT&T). Their phones are preset to connect to their network anyway. So, right there, in the shop, it didn’t work. In the evening, back at the hotel, using my Dopod D810 as mobile modem, I googled around a bit and I found the necessary settings for Telstra. Mind you, it is the 2G/WAP setting you need to use, the 3G settings don’t work. But in the end, yes, it all works, weather, browsing, email,… right here down under.

Keep on reading.

Mmmmmm, … iPhone, …. want one

Nuff said…

Edit: If only people could buy it immediately, if only Apple could deliver now (it’s available in June). People are starting to turn around already, it will get a fair bit harder for Apple to sell them come June.
iPhone no touchy feely
iPhone buttons
iPhone interface analysis

Cute kitten atop a MacBookPro while its owner is fooling around with FrontRow and the remote. Cute but could end up expensive if the kitten scratches the screen. Don’t try this at home…

As Apple introduces Spotlight in the next OS X release (towards summer 05), Google beta’s its own Desktop Search program (for Windows). It works as fast as the main google.com page, but it also looks the same. Not so cool as the spotlight feature in the next OS X. (I’ll keep an eye on ZoneAlarm to see if anything passes down to the mothership). But another desktop search program is grabbing the headlines: X1. It looks way cooler than the Google thing, check out the flash demo. You can also download a trial for you to try. If you use the search tool in windows once in a while, then you know it takes ages to find something on your system. These desktop search tools make it a breeze…
Update
You can add the Desktop Search also to the Google Deskbar, and a keyword for the search field in your Firefox bookmark. Do this (in Firefox): call the Desktop Search page, right click the search field, you get a ‘add a keyword for this search’, give it a name , and enter a ‘keyword’ which can be as short as a single letter (eg ‘d’). Now you can enter in the Firefox address bar ‘d cars’ and the Google Desktop window pops up with your search results.

Cleaning up three Star Wars movies in three months, with 600 G5 Macs (dual processor, 4Gb mem each). Take a 360 look in their server room at the Apple site.
An extensive overview of some of the changes in the DVD release (in relation to the original and the previous Special Edition vhs release).