Chumby is on its way

Rumours in the blogosphere about an open,hackable wifi enabled portable device for accessing that interwebby thing ? (no not the Nokia 770 :)...


More details here :
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/announcing_the_birth_of_chumby.html

Web mashups - no programming required

A colleague of mine pointed me in the direction of Dapper.com , just launched, where it 's super easy to create your own web mashups, using point and click! Simple but powerful ...(also noted it was also on the homepage of Programmable Web)... Services that expose their platform API's (including mobile network enabler platforms) offer the chance for some really interesting new mobile/web mashups and tools like Dapper may make it easier than ever..

Storing your media and personal details online

I've been thinking about whether mobile consumers would be willing to store their personal details online with a "trusted provider" (what defines a trusted party is a whole other debate). From a mobile innovation perspective though all sorts of propositions and services could then be built that could be of real advantage to the user.

However I remember the total failure that was Microsoft's .net passport scheme a while back on the web... but maybe now times have moved on and the new c-generation are more willing to store personal details online across multiple "trusted" 3rd parties.

Today, Amazon has my credit card details hopefully safely locked away. Google has access to a vast amount of my e-mail and eBay is storing my reputation. All of these things are of value to me. Do I trust these companies ? I'm not 100% sure. However the benefits currently outweigh the costs of transacting through these companies to do what I want to do or get what I want to get.

If you can accept that maybe the c-gen ** will ** start storing more of their personal details online , it may not be so difficult to suggest that they also store a lot of media online (music / photots / videos) rather than in folders and filesystems on their PC. A lot of my media is now held either on my phone, desktop PC, laptop, but I'm moving more and more of it online (Google GDrive anyone?). My bookmarks are now held in del.ici.ous not my desktop browser application, my photos in flickr / picasa online and my mobile contacts with Shozu. It's only a matter of time until I'm sure I will end up storing most of music somewhere online as well.

There is an advantage of storing stuff online, in that you can have easy access to it pretty much anywhere / anytime without being tied to your PC... and that inlcudes access then via the mobile phone. Companies like Orb and Phling allow remote access to your PC via your mobile today ... whilst Yahoo with their mobile client (and I'm sure Google are working on one too) want you to store your media with them so it can easily be accessed from the mobile...also we are seeing phones with dedicated "MySpace" links or keys, where again the c-gen populate their profiles and web pages with lots of their personalised media.

I wonder if the c-gen will store ALL their media and personal details online...

Nokia N73

I've been using the Nokia N73 for a few months now and gotta say I think it's a great phone. It goes on release today alongside the N93.I've been playing with the imaging and camera functions for some work related stuff and they are generally stable and an improvement over S60 v2.0 equivalent apps.eg. the N70.

Plus there's dedicated hard keys for quick access to the image gallery and camera (as well as opening the slider)...

Whilst the screen resolution is not as high as the Nokia N80 (released a few months ago) if you can live without the W-Lan client, and like candybar phones with big screens then get down to your local mobile shop and take a look or check out various reviews on the web ...