General

The southern California fire has touched many lives. This terrible event has even touched the life of Debi Jones (a.k.a. Mobile Jones), a dear friend and fellow Mobilist, who I contacted today and told me the news. Hang in there Debi, let us know how we can be of help… Erin from the Austin Wireless … Read more

The other day in response to a question in the KVMLIST I spent some looking into JSON, as I haven’t used it before for data exchange. I’ll say that I actually like JSON quite a bit, due to its simplicity, and its structure — structured name/value pairs. For example from the JSON.org page: An object … Read more

I will be speaking or presenting at the following events during October 2007: Emerging Technologies panel at Mobile 2.0 event, October 15th. NFC in Mobile Commerce at Texas Wireless Summit, October 18th. Hope to see you there… ceo

My website was down for two days… supposedly a general network outage in the Downtown Chicago area where a number of servers for the hosting company that I use are located. That was painful! My apologies. If you sent me email in the last two days, please resend — or call, there is no replacement … Read more

I like this definitions for ROI, by John Maeda, associate director of research and Allen Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab: From iThinking About iPods: Designers can tackle the time challenge in two different ways: by making the wait shorter or by making the wait more enjoyable. In either case, … Read more

A very interesting application of the Web collective intelligence applied to the patent process. Peer-to-Patent is a pilot program that opens the patent examination process to public participation: “Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications.” This is great and worth a try! ceo

Today I finished my arrangements for my trip to San Francisco for the Mobile 2 event where I will be speaking. Finding the best airfare deal is always a pain in the neck. My buddy Gary pointed me to kayak.com — and I’m sold! The website searches a bunch of different airlines and travel sites … Read more

Last night was episode #1 (of seven) of The War, a film by Ken Burns. It is the real story, as real as it gets, as told by the U.S. soldiers who fought at those theaters: in the Pacific, North Africa, and Europe, as well as the stories from the families in four towns in … Read more

With the new Microsoft Office 2007 release, comes new file formats. And with new file formats come the questions “but what the hell happened with the concept of backward compatibility?”, and “is this Microsoft’s strategy to force everyone to move up to Office 2007?”. Whatever the case is, Microsoft has not done a good job … Read more

Image: The Gaping Void Too busy, too many things going on… meaning that blogging (and emails, and so on) will be very light for a while; I’ll play it by ear… ceo