Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The other day Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch wrote a rave review of Bluepulse, a new mobile application platform. In a quick read through their website, it looks like they’re trying to offer a carrier-independent path for 3rd party mobile application developers to reach mobile users.

Bluepulse is planning to develop applications for customers, as well as rev share with 3rd party developers, and offers a free SDK. Getting applications onto wireless carriers network is a pain, and getting paid for them is also painful, so there are some good opportunities here, and I thought I would give it a try on my Nokia 6820.

The application downloaded and installed, but nothing happened, so after a few tries I sent off a message on the Bluepulse web site, and got a quick response from Stuart Hely, their general manager.

This project seems like it could be a good fit for developing but urban settings where there is fairly high population density, a budget for deploying infrastructure, and enough community support to limit problems with vandalism or theft of the equipment.

Starsight (Starsightproject.com) is a project designed to supercharge street lighting and power in developing counties. Essentially it is a network of pylons, each with a solar panel, linked not by cables but by antennae which use wireless internet protocol.

The Starsight idea came out of the involvement of London-based sustainable development specialist the Kolam Partnership in an urban street lighting initiative in Cameroon.

Reliable street lighting can help a country to develop – a study by the Kenyan government recently found that street lighting reduced crime by 65 per cent. The benefits are even more widespread – aid workers and foreign businesses are more likely to stay on in a country if they feel secure.

At last month’s Mobile Monday, Jack Denenberg from Cingular Wireless commented that 411 calls accounted for a huge chunk of revenue to the US cellular carriers, with Cingular servicing around 1 million 411 calls per day at an average billing cost of between $1.25 to $1.40. All US carriers combined do around 3 million 411 calls per day, which works out to more than $1 billion per year in 411 fees!

They’re going to be really unhappy if these guys get some traction:

A few weeks ago I met Andre Vanier, CEO of 1-800-411-SAVE (my friend Ajay, the guy with the cool geek car, introduced us). I was intrigued by his new business and he’s on the phone with me announcing his new service that turns on tonight at midnight.
…
We are considerably cheaper, he says. 1-800-411-SAVE is a free call.

This topic for this month’s Mobile Monday was “Funding and Investment”, held at the AOL offices in Mountain View.

Speakers included:

• Colin Wiel (Keiretsu Forum)
• Ken Matusow (Keiretsu Forum)
• Vineet Buch (BlueRun Ventures)
• Martin Frid-Nielsen (SoonR)
• David Fradin (MauiGames)

Quick scribbled notes:
Keiritsu Forum is an angel investing group, making investments of $250K to $1MM in early stage companies, at premoney valuations of $1.5MM to $10MM. They gather 50-80 applications per month via their website, which invite some teams in for screening by member committees to select which ones will make presentations at their monthly meetings.

They are not strictly focused on mobile or technology, and their disclosed investments are eclectic. One company they mentioned makes a self-cleaning kitty litter box.

Vineet from BlueRun Ventures outlined some mobile and communications topics they’re following :

• Convergence of wireline/wireless (Cellular + VOIP / VoWLAN)
• Innovative Mobile Services
• User interface and usability innovations
• Emerging wide area technology (WiMax, not 802.20)
• 3G rollout creating new opportunities

Today, mobile search in the US = $1 billion per year in 411 calls.

Well, that’s a gross oversimplification, but it gets to one of the main points from this evening’s sold-out, standing-room-only joint Search SIG and Mobile Monday session on Mobile Search, held at Google this evening.

The panel discussion was moderated by David Weiden from Morgan Stanley, with panelists

• Elad Gil (Google)
• Mihir Shah (Yahoo)
• Mark Grandcolas (Caboodle)
• Ted Burns (4info)
• Jack Denenberg (Cingular)

Jack Denenberg from Cingular was the lone representative from the carrier world. During the panel, he made the observation that 411 “voice search” was at least 2-3x the volume of SMS and WAP-based search, and that Cingular (US) is doing around 1 million 411 calls per day at an average billing cost of between $1.25 to $1.40. All US carriers combined do around 3 million 411 calls per day.

This works out to more than $1 billion per year in 411 fees!

via Om Malik:

Google seems to have developed a secure WiFi VPN software tool - Google Secure Access Client. The information can be found here. Google Rumors has all the details. To sum it up, what they are doing is giving away a VPN tool that takes some of the security risks out of open WiFi. Companies like JiWire and Boingo also have these type of secure WiFi software solutions. While on paper this sounds like a perfectly good deal, Inside Google says not so fast, and writes, “Google Secure Access has the same benefits for Google as Web Accelerator did, with fewer of the things that scared away people the first time.” They dig deep into the GSA privacy policy …

Another take at Inside Google:

From SANS: Multiple Linksys WRT54G Vunerabilities, published: 2005-09-14

iDefense has released five vulnerabilities against the Linksys WRT54G wireless access point/switch/router. Some of these vulnerabilities are very serious. Users of these products are highly recommended to patch their devices. Patches for the latest versions are available at http://www.linksys.com.

This is one of the most popular and widely modified wireless routers out there. If you have one that’s exposed to the public, time to patch it.

Here’s the capsule descriptions, these look like fun:

Stopped by the Mobile Monday meeting at Yahoo this evening. This evening’s session looked like fun, as the theme was “Mobile Photos”, combining a couple of my current interests. Quick notes:

Some the general trends targeted by mobile photo services:

• Mainstream arrival of digital photography
• Impending arrival of megapixel+ phone cameras
• Increasing availability of network connectivity
• Rise of social software applications
• Changes in online attitudes and habits of society - it’s not considered weird to meet people online
• Change from photos mostly documenting events to photos of incidental, serendipitous memories

The slate of speakers / demos:

Erik Weitzman, Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com)
Heather Champ, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)
Rich Gossweiller, HP Labs/Plog (http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/Plog/PLOGPage.htm )
Chris Dury, ScanR (http://www.scanr.com)
Mike Prynce, Mobido (http://www.mobido.com)

Now that the 2.4GHz spectrum is approved for unlicensed outdoor use in India, a number of projects based on WiFi, 802.11, and related commodity wireless data networking technologies are emerging.

The Kuppam i-Community program in Andhra Pradesh, which I was involved with, also has a network based on 2.4GHz wireless radios. At the time we had to get experimental licenses, after many meetings and much paperwork, because the 2.4GHz band wasn’t approved for outdoor use in 2002 when the project was started.

From Times Of India (via ContentSutra):

Rural India has now some serious chances to go Wi-Fi, and that can be for as cheap as Rs 50 per person a year. United Villages Inc (UV), a US-based low-cost internet service provider, has asked the government for permission (foreign direct investment or FDI) to set up base in India. It will provide rural WiFi broadband, which has the potential to reach out to about 30 crore people living in the villages.

A couple of days ago I wrote about the unsolicited SMS message I received on my Cingular Wireless cell phone, inviting me to download some antivirus software from McAfee. Unfortunately, the source of the message was unidentifyable, meaning that anyone willing to downloaded the binary package would be just as likely to have picked up malicious code as an antivirus package from Cingular.

Apparently it really is from Cingular. I’m happy that they’re trying to provide a useful service, but this is a case where they’re educating the customers to behave in a counterproductive way. There’s no mention on the Cingular site, because this is a beta program.

Darla Mack writes:

On August 25th a small number of Cingular subscribers(including some Pre-Merger subscribers) received text messages alerting them of a new service provided by McAfee. Apparently, some of these subscribers had been infected by the Commwarrior virus. As you know, the Commwarrior virus can be spread via Bluetooth and/or MMS ad only affects devices running the Symbian OS.

This turned up on my cell phone a few minutes ago.

I have no idea whether this is really from Cingular or not, but I’m sure some trusting people will go ahead and click the link.

It’s unauthenticated, sent to my phone via WAP push, with no way to verify that the originator is Cingular, McAfee, or an affiliate. They want me to download a binary and run it on my phone. Just lovely.

I hate the fact that its just as likely to be from an attempted security exploit as it is from Cingular. There’s no obvious mention of this on the Cingular public site, customer service site, or a quick Google search on Cingular and McAfee. Unfortunately, Cingular, like the other wireless service providers, tends to be poor at communicating with subscribers, other than attempting to upsell and cross sell services, so your guess is as good as mine whether this is authentic.

If you have a Yahoo account, you can send a free SMS text message to any US cell phone. The message is sent with your Yahoo e-mail address in the “From” information field, making it possible to reply directly to the message using MMS.

The service is provided using an HTTP GET interface, making it easy to construct links and forms that will send SMS messages from a web page.

A working example of a web form and more info is at Russell Beattie’s Notebook.

The neat thing is that because the form uses GET, you can actually create a link on your page that uses the same tech: Send “This is a test” to 415-555-1234. [Update: Tim Bray says: “Don’t do this, you moron!” Doh! Duly noted.]

Here’s a wireless hotspot based on the Voltaic solar backpack: article link (Popular Science), blog link (Mike Outmesguine)

What if you could marry the short-range power of Wi-Fi with the huge coverage areas of high-speed cellular services such as EV-DO to create a portable hotspot?

Parts List
• Junxion Box wireless gateway $700; junxionbox.com
• Verizon Wireless EV-DO PCMCIA card $100; verizonwireless.com
• Voltaic Systems solar-charging backpack $230; voltaicsystems.com

Proxim has been struggling financially for a while, and today announced the sale of all assets to Moseley Associates.

Proxim is the current home of the former Lucent / Agere / Orinoco 802.11 product line, which were ubiquitous a few years ago as wireless LANs became popular and before “WiFi” was a marketing buzzword for a notebook computer feature. They also own the former Western Multiplex Tsunami point-to-point wireless product line, after merging with them a few years ago.

I’ve always liked their gear, but the WLAN market is totally commoditized now (Linksys, D-Link, and assorted white label manufacturers), the enterprise solutions seem to be moving toward solutions such as Aruba and Trango, and the longer haul point-to-point market hasn’t really taken off, partially due to all the noise about WiMax (which has yet to become a deployable solution).

Here’s what Proxim had to say to their customers about Moseley on their web site:

Continuing on the topic of converged GPS/camera/phone devices, here’s a post from Wade Roush (writer for Technology Review) calling for the cellular operators to open up location information for 3rd party applications, and detailing some of the business and cultural reasons why this is taking a while.

There are a lot of interesting technical hacks being strung together to cobble together location-aware and geotagged services, but the wireless phone carriers already have a lot of the infrastructure for this, and a near-total absence of applications.

This is the first camera phone I’ve seen so far that looks plausible for general photography. The Samsung SPH-V7800 has a 5 megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom and a built-in flash, along with other standard point-and-shoot features. (via Engadget)

This phone is probably too large for me personally to carry around. But it would also be nice to see a built in flash with the more common fixed focus camera phones, to turn them into digital equivalents of the disposable film cameras. A 1 megapixel camera is perfectly adequate for snapshots, but without a flash they’re nearly useless indoors and in the evening.

An interesting thread on Google Answers, regarding what services are available to track the current location of a cell phone. (via del.icio.us).

For about $200.00 ICU, Inc. offers to locate a cellular telephone by
pinging the phone – a kind of triangulation process similar to the one
I mentioned earlier. Ms. Landers explained that the cell phone appears
as a ‘blip” on a screen. They provide the service 24 hours a day, 7
days a week in order to help locate missing persons, fugitives,
cheating spouses, etc. They regularly serve bondsmen, authorities,
investigators and many others. You will receive the results within 7
to 10 minutes of a successfully completed ping that will indicate
within approximately 50 feet, where the phone was located at the time
of the ping.

I.C.U. Inc.
http://www.tracerservices.com/cpl.htm
http://www.tracerservices.com/cplfaqs.htm

Some notes from day one at KINCON 2005 at the Palo Alto Crowne Plaza. Today’s sessions were technology-focused. Although this has traditionally been a Korean IT-related conference, and mostly chips and displays at that, the biotech presentations were the most interesting.

The first session was on wireless technology, mostly aimed at services for mobile phones, such as ringtones and games. Korea is a good place to try launching these services, with 76% wireless penetration rate, and 90% of the handsets capable of running games and multimedia. My observation — it’s hard to do much in this space with the mobile operators trying to extract fees from the customers and 3rd party service providers (in order to pay back their spectrum license fees). At least two of the speakers commented that most of the fee paid by the customer is to cover the billing costs.

This past week the Kuppam team has successfully deployed wireless connectivity to several new sites (in this case, village police stations) using cantennas. This design is based on the approach described here and also here, using locally available metal cans.

Although the cost of external antennas has fallen substantially in the past couple of years here in the US, the Indian domestic prices for wireless equipment is still quite high, partly because much of the equipment is imported from the US and other sources, which makes the effective price there around 2x the US prices after adding in shipping and import tariffs.

I’m always a little jealous of the internet and wireless services available outside the US. I’m at the SATS Premier Lounge in Terminal 1, which has free internet access via wireless. There are also free internet access PC kiosks placed regularly throughout the airport. None of this “sign up for T-Mobile” business like we have at the San Francisco airport.

The local television ads for the “25000kbps” i.e. 25mbit internet service and the Nokia “widescreen” TV phones also make me wish for more progress on the broadband front back in the US. Most people in the US have no idea how miserable our wireless and internet services are compared with places like Singapore, Korea, or Hong Kong.