RESTful Services - Dana Gardner, Adrian Trenaman, Roland Tritsch - wrapping it up

The Webinar went very well. I think we had over 50 poeple that showed up. The archived webinar and the source code will be available on open.iona.com.

Check it out.

Effective Mac - call me slow

You can call me slow, but it took me only a year to find the RSS reader that everybody else is using. David Greco finally pointed me to NetNewsWire. This seems to be it :).

Link of the month - Google Twitter (GTwit)

Micro-blogging (Twitter, Pounce, Facebook, ...) just go a little bit easier. Check out GTwit. It is a light-weight Google App, that allows you to access your Twitter account from any browser you might have access to. It is based on the Twitter API. It stores all tweets that you send/receive in a private "Google-Cloud" and allows you to search on them by whatever you like (word, person, tag).

Check it out.

The iPhone - and what you can learn from thinking about it

On Sunday I went to the driving range and while Alexandros was working on my early retirement plan (aka. he making lots of money with golf and I am managing his career), I was reading an article on Businessweek about the new iPhone 3G contracts. The article made me think again.

It made me think about two presentations that I saw recently: One by Michael Crossey from Aepona at the Mobile Monday in Belfast and the other one by Peter Moeckel from T-Labs (the R&D think-tank of Deutsche Telekom) at the OSGi community event in Berlin. Both are saying the same thing: Mobile Phone Operators are struggling to maintain their value proposition in the food/value chain. More and more applications are totally provider-independent and just use the network as a bit-pipe. Even worse, customers actually have either no or a bad perception of the underlying network operator.

Lets take a look at the current situation. I have a mobile phone and I am willing to spend EUR 100,-/month for that luxury (e.g. like I am willing to pay a certain amount of money for the luxury to have a dish washer). Right now and in general, there are three parties I am spending this money with:

• the device/platform provider
• the network operator
• (and to a much lesser extend) 3rd party application/service/content providers

Going to a Vodafone, O2 or T-Mobile shop is actually the wrong way around and is just a desperate attempt by the mobile phone operators to make sure that existing customers stay with them. People do not buy a "contract". They buy a and/or feel loyalty for a device (e.g. the iPhone) or a platform (e.g. Palm OS, Windows Mobile). Means normally you should go to an Apple-, Nokia- or HTC-Store. Most customers have an emotional relationship with the hardware and/or the operating system that runs on it, but not with the network operator (or at least not a positive one).

When the network operators realized that people do not buy contracts, but hardware, they approached the device manufactures and said "Hey Mr. Device-Manufacturer, give me 1M of your phones, make me a good price and I sell it for you". They then give away the device for a fraction of the prize to make people sign up for their contracts. The result is, that people buy devices and pay for these devices through contracts. Means today most of the money flows through the network operator, but a certain fraction of this money (my EUR 100,-/month) ends up in the pockets of the device manufacturer. Interesting enough, right now I am spending close to nothing on 3rd party (value-add) applications/services.

In the next 5 years all of this is going to change. The Mobile Phone Operators will get a lot of pressure from customers, politicians and competing technologies (e.g. WiMax) to drop their prices for voice and data services. At the same time the Mobile Phone Operators have created an acceptance in the market to spend a certain amount of money on/with the mobile phone (e.g. in my case EUR 100,-/month). In the end some customers will just to be happy to save money, but others will be willing to spend the saved money on something else.

The companies who have a good answer for the question, what this something else is, will win. Means the future of the mobile market is not in the network and/or the device. Instead the future is in mobile applications, services, solutions and content. And to enable such a market you need to provide a platform to connect the customers/consumers/users with the application/solution/content-providers. And this is what Apple is doing right now. They (and a lot of other poeple) realized that the future is in applications and content. Means they will create some applications themselves and will also provide a platform (aka. AppStore) to allow others to sell applications and content (against a fee).

Today I am spending a 100% of my monthly budget, buy paying my mobile phone bill. My prediction is that in 5 years from now this will drop to below 50% and that I will spend the remaining +50% on monthly subscriptions for applications, services and content. Becoming a platform- and/or application/content-provider in such a world will make you a winner.

Mobile Payment - what is needed

in the last 4 weeks, i was talking to sailesh panchal (Enterprise Architect - Payments at Lloyds TSB) and hermann sauer (EDS - Integration Engineering Lead EMEA North/Central) about the future of mobile payment.

there is clearly a need and a benefit to find a solution, but implementations are not available yet (leaving aside lots of POCs that are out there).

one obvious driver is the need to find a replacement for cheque payments. cheque payments are expensive and slow, means neither banks nor customers/retailers like them, but they are still a popular means of settling bills in the UK, Ireland and other countries. in the UK the national payments council has just released the national payments plan, which states that one the ambitions is to find a suitable replacement for cheque payments by 2013. a first step into that direction is the Faster Payment Service that got launched in May 2008.

today (in Ireland) i am using cheques to pay my utility bills and my dentist. in germany i haven't used cheques in a long time. in general i am getting an invoice (e.g. from my doctor) and just pay by electronic funds transfer (EFT). in some cases (e.g. utility bills) i allow direct debit on my account and last but not least for some i have a standing order (e.g. rent). for everything else i am using cash and/or a credit card. i know that this is maybe a simplistic way to look at it, but it allows us to focus on the real nature of a cheque. what can a cheque do, that i cannot do otherwise?

• a cheque allows me to give money to somebody with no bank account, means i can write a cheque and the person can go the next bank and can get cash for it
• the payment can be anonymous, means even if the person has a bank account the decision might be not to use any means of EFT

a good summary what a cheque is all about can be found here. the question for me is, what problem mobile payment solutions will solve. currently i cannot see, how they can possibly address the two capabilities that i described above and everything else makes them just another way to transfer money besides EFT and plastic cards.

where is the value in mobile payment? what problems will mobile payments solutions solve? replacing cheques (probably no)? competing with ETF and plastic (probably yes, but then the question is what makes mobile payment solutions superior to EFT and plastic)?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Effective Mac - the beginning of a journey

yesterday i finally finished my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

overall it went well. i did an erase and install (as a 20 year windows user i feel much more comfortable with clean installs. maybe next time if will try it the mac-way :)) and also used the exercise to clean up my disk and the way i work. the biggest problem was that leopard does not come with iLife, means you need to find your old tiger CDs and reinstall iLife from there (or buy (!?!?) iLife 08, no comment).

using a mac is like using any other tool. just using it is not going to give you the maximum ROI. using it effectively is going to make the difference.

therefore i decided to start a little series of blogs and i am going to call it "Effective Mac".

this is the first one and i just want to give a summary of tools that i am using on my mac. please feel free to comment and add to this list.

• mail - looked at a couple of options, but for the time being will stick with mail.app. using YAI to deal with exchange invitations and will probably checkout MailTags.
  
• calendar and contacts - have not looked around and will stick with iCal and AdressBook.
• todos - did look at the functionality in iCal and did not really like it. did a little bit of research and finally settled for iGTD (get things done).
• browser - currently using safari and occasionally firefox (especially, if i am in london heathrow airport. the safari browser cannot get me onto the bingo wifi network there). also looked at Flock to get a grip on my social networking (xing, linked-in, pulse, facebook - it is madness).
• RSS reader - looked at safari (and a couple of other browsers) and the wonderful TimesReader (looks very good. almost like a newspaper), but settled for the new RSS reader in mail.app.
• communication - using iChat (AIM), Skype, Aqua X-Chat (IRC) and Twitterific (James also pointed me to GTwit, but i still need to makeup mind, if and how i am going to use it). tried to find a universal "chat" client. stumbled over Fire, but it does not support SSL enabled IRC server (and keeps on crashing on me).
• programming - still like my emacs :). using Aqua-Emacs, but have also started to use Dashcode for my web developement.
• brainstorming - using Freemind for my mindmaps and OmniOutliner for structured bullet list type brainstorming.

let me know, what you think about the toolset. anything missing? anything that could/should be replaced by a better tool?