BillDay.com

No doubt about it, Neven Vision is on a media roll lately.

Wired featured their facial recognition software for cellcams in its December 2004 issue, and now TheFeature interviews namesake Dr. Harmut Neven about his plans for “Hyperlinking the World”, visual Google style.

If Dr. Neven and his company have their way, we’ll all soon be sending cellcam pics to Neven Vision powered visual search servers. Example: Snap a photo of a painting and MMS it to his server. The server responds with information about the painting, maybe an audio-visual narration. TheFeature delves into some of the difficulties with constructing and searching a world size visual database, while the Wired piece focuses more on the biometric and security applications of the technology.

Whatever comes of this, I can’t help but think that the issue of whether or not we non-celebrities own our “public image” is about to be forced. I’m a big cellcam fan, but I don’t know if I’ll appreciate it when any cop or TSA employee (or city worker, or man on the street?) can snap my picture and within a few seconds know everything public there is to know about me. Privacy is about to take on an entirely different meaning.

Am I paranoid? Or concerned for good reason? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

As Wired News notes in “A Century of Einstein”, special relativity and other discoveries from Albert Einstein’s immortal 1905 papers celebrate their one hundredth anniversary this year.

I’ve been intrigued by relativity for as long as I can remember, but the thing that really hooked me on Einstein was seeing one of the first printings of his original special relativity paper in German in the University of Oklahoma’s History of Science Collections in the early 1990s. (It was situated near a 17th century printing of Principia Mathematica, not the sort of thing a geeky engineering type such as myself soon forgets!) The power of Einstein’s work from 1905 to effect us in our daily lives one hundred years later still amazes and inspires me.

If you aren’t already a fan, buy a copy of Einstein’s “Relativity : The Special and the General Theory” or click here to access the free Project Gutenberg text. If you’re interested at all in how things work, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Thanks for everything, Professor!

My recent iPod Shuffle post received a tip o’ the hat from broadband blogger and Business 2.0 senior writer Om Malik. Thanks, Om!

I particularly enjoyed the comment from barky81 that “People who want shuffles want apples”, especially since I’ve never owned a Mac or Apple gear of any kind.

It’s always nice to see people do their homework.

It’s a bit late to the game given that Nokia 6230 has been reviewed various places since the first half of 2004, but PC Magazine’s posted their own short review.

The review is in their typical US- and PC-centric fashion. Worth a read however if you’re looking for a cellpod or a first rate EDGE modem at a discount price.

According to LinuxDevices.com, Motorola will launch 8-10 Linux based handsets in 2005. This would constitute roughly one quarter of Moto’s new handsets in 2005.

That’s cool. Not so cool, however, is this dorky quote from Jim Ready, the CEO of MontaVista (makers of Moto’s Linux distro):

[Motorola's] ability to pop out three phones based on the same OS is making people in the industry say ‘Oh sh*t, how’d they do that?

Three phones, or even eight or ten, based on one OS, Jim? Have you seen how many Nokia cranks out based upon Series 60/Symbian?

Investor’s Business daily reports on 2004 performance and 2005 predictions.

IBM developerWorks has published a look inside the standard wars for ultrawideband (UWB) wireless technology.

History repeats itself again and again, doesn’t it?

CNN is celebrating twenty five years on the air with “Top 25 of the last twenty five years” lists. This month’s list: Top 25 Innovations.

Most of the things on this list seem so common place in our everyday lives today that it’s amazing to think that none of them existed (or at least they weren’t in widespread use) 25 years ago. Kids growing up now won’t believe us when we tell them we can remember life before this stuff.

For extra credit, go through the entire list (it’s in the right gutter of the article) and count the number of items related to wireless and mobility.

The massive Indian Ocean tsunamis hit one month ago today.

The effects will be felt for years, perhaps decades, to come.

Please continue to give generously.

Widespread (mis)use of 802.11 is making life easier for any air sniffer equipped black hat.

Most people plug in their new wireless router, turn it on, leave everything at the defaults, and go. Bad, bad network users! Turning on SSID broadcasting, non-MAC locked, unencrypted WiFi is akin to hanging an ethernet port off your network outside in a dark alley and inviting all the bad guys to stop by for a look at your net comms.

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know some of the basic things to do when you’re setting up a WiFi network. Click here for a refresher on SSID broadcast (bad), MAC address ACLs (good), and using the highest level of encryption supported by all of your devices (absolutely).

What you may not know, however, is that WEP’s been cracked in significantly faster time in recent months and is approaching the point of uselessness. At least, it’s useless if you want to keep out anybody that’s spent even the smallest amount of time online reading about WEP weaknesses and attack tools. If at all possible, use at least Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to secure your setup.

WPA is available in a large and increasing number of WiFi products. I recently bought a Toshiba M35X-S161 laptop with built-in 802.11g/b and a Linksys WPC54G wireless adapter for a different laptop. Both support WPA out of the box. Make sure any new WiFi equipment you buy does too, and use it.

BTW, securing your WiFi network also requires securing everything connected to it. Make certain you change the password on your router’s administrative account, and that the router uses stateful packet inspection (SPI). You also need to secure all of the systems that will be connected to your network (wirelessly or wired). Verify they are running up to date antivirus and firewall software. With software such as AntiVir Personal Edition and Zone Alarm available for free download, you have absolutely no excuse not to secure even your oldest and fuddiest print server or email station.

Building on last week’s site changes, I am working this week to clean out dead links and update the J2ME Archive. Check out the first part of the cleanup by clicking here.

I also added a Bloglines button to make it easy for B-lines users to subscribe to my feed, and I added my blogroll in the right gutter to share my “must reads” with everyone.

Finally, I’ve added an Amazon donation button to both the BillDay.com homepage/blog and the J2ME Archive (see gutter at right). Small donations towards hosting costs, etc., are greatly appreciated.

On the news from Midem front:

Reuters reports that the music industry finally seems to get it.

Rather than continue the long slow self flagellating fight against the inevitable, music execs are embracing online sales and hope to see an expansion of them from 1% of 2004 revenues to 25% by 2009. Cellpods for everyone!

Biz Week’s Olag Kharif has definitely drunk the mobile Kool-Aid.

Power to him and of course I agree with a lot of the things he mentions, including the importance of the ever quickening rise of the cellcam and cellpod. I think he’s a bit overly optimistic in his implied timelines for some of the higher data rate futures (imagine loading movies for home theater consumption via your cell phone on today’s GPRS or even EDGE!) and that HD video will stress wireless systems and give cable and satellite companies plenty of business for the foreseeable future.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting thought piece on the possibilities.

Snapfish recently reported on the results from a cellcam user survey they conducted with individuals from across the US. Click here to read their press release including the results.

I wasn’t surprised that most people find camera phones easy to use, use them around the home, and take more pictures of their kids than anyone else (I’m guilty of all three counts). I was a bit surprised that interest in video was so low, but then many cellcams capture relatively poor video at this point, so perhaps interest will rise with higher resolutions, better sound, and bigger in-device storage via SD and MMC slots?

The most heartening stat for me:

56% of people think camera phones will replace digital & film
cameras in the next 10-20 years

56% is a pretty big number of people who already see the writing on the wall.

When I first heard about the Apple iPod Shuffle, I thought to myself “An MP3 player with no way to select a particular song, how dumb!”. I was shocked that Apple had made such a blunder. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that Apple’s done a brilliant bit of engineering.

The Shuffle epitomizes Freeman Dyson’s comment that “A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible”. The Shuffle is a flash based MP3 player, sans bells and whistles of any sort, with a clean and simple design. It is very small and light and has pretty good battery life too. It derives much of its simplicity (and no doubt quite a bit of its battery performance) from the extraordinarily streamlined interface. Namely, the lack of an interface, or rather more precisely the lack of a graphical interface.

Everybody else in the MP3 player business is poo pooing Shuffle’s screenlessness. But no screen = no LCD battery drain + a very simple control pad. Without a screen the Shuffle is smaller and can undercut the price of other leading similarly sized flash based players.

Apple’s realized that many people who use their iPod (mega?) or some other hard drive based player right up to and including a laptop or desktop may want another device, very cheap and very simple, for times when a bigger more capable solution isn’t required or appropriate. Price and weight+size, for a given memory capacity, become key.

How would I use Shuffle? I have several gigs of my favorite music on my laptop. I normally listen when I’m working, so that’s a solution that fits me just fine. But when I’m out for a jog or I’m skiing, I can’t lug the laptop, I know my own tunes so I don’t need to see titles, and I’m not going to be looking at a player’s screen anyway. Simplicity, size, and weight are all at a premium. The fact that I can use it as another USB drive too is icing on the cake. Shuffle fits my second player needs perfectly.

Shuffle is even leading me to rethink my prognostication that cell phones might kill iPod. I would have been more correct to say cell phones will incorporate iPod. But even in a world of cellpods, there’ll be room for really small and simple players like Shuffle because mobile phones require ever bigger and brighter screens, a constraint Shuffle has escaped.

Think different(ly) indeed.

For more on Shuffle:

• Access the specs from Apple
• Read in depth reviews: iPodlounge | Macworld | PC Magazine
• Then satiate your device lust at Amazon

BusinessWeek reports on Motorola’s plans to produce a line of handsets based upon the Razr V3.

In case you somehow missed it (I’m not sure how you could have if you’re in the US and watch television, because Cingular carpet bombed the airwaves with Razr ads over the holidays), the V3 is a new top end Moto phone targeted at gadget afficionados and fashionistas. Click here for the Razr homepage including the specs, the “Transformer” TV spot, the user manual, and more.

Now it may just be me, but although it’s relatively thin through most of the body, isn’t it awfully wide and long? What’s the benefit of thin if it’s big in the other two dimensions? I tried one out when I was last shopping for a handset and decided on a LG L1400 fold cellcam instead. The L1400 may be somewhat thicker, but it feels smaller in my hand and fits nicely in my pocket (the Razr was a bit “pokey” because of its width and height). Even worse than the width-height thing, for a top end handset the V3 seems to be lacking a lot features I’d expect: It supports GPRS but not EDGE, it has only a VGA resolution camera at a time when more and more megapixel handsets are available, and it lacks a SD or MMC slot, fixing memory at the anemic 5MB built-in.

The final nail in the coffin: Price. Amazon currently sells the Moto Razr V3 for $259.99 after a $150 rebate offer and with Cingular service activation. Amazon has the LG L1400 for -$50.01 after the rebate and activation (they pay you $50 to take the phone from them). If I were purchasing again today I’d buy the L1400 again and pocket the $50 I got back as a down payment for a Razr with better specs somewhere down the road.

What am I missing? Please enlighten me. In the meantime, I think I’ll enjoy the VGA pics from my L1400 and hold out for a 2MPix Razr with WiFi and FRS. Hint, hint Moto.

[Via MobileTracker]

Thank you, thank you, thank you to whomever came up with this idea at Google! Can’t wait to get the updated Wordpress bits that implement this…I’m dying under a regular onslaught of drug ads and other crap and at the least I don’t want to see any that slip by get any cred from me.

I’ve been approached to do some writing on wireless development. I have my own preconceived notions about topics that I should cover, but thinking about the details made me wonder: What topics are you interested in? What wireless development issues haven’t been covered in sufficient depth? In short, what do you think I should write about?

Please post your comments and let me know what your hot buttons are. I hope to write about as many of them as possible in the coming weeks and months. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

No sooner had I added Google ads than I came across this “Google CFO: Fraud a big threat” CNN Money article from last month. The unspoken question in this article: If click through ad fraud endangers Google’s business model, how many more other, smaller entities in their ad program (sites like mine) will suffer too?

The trickle down economics of the net, writ large.

As promised way back in September, I’ve finally found the time for additional cleanup to my blog and the J2ME Archive.

In addition to removing the previous Participate section (my site doesn’t use the login account information for anyone besides me anyway) and renaming Formats and Info to more clearly reflect what it contains, I’ve turned on Google ads in the right gutter in my blog. I’ve done this for three reasons:

• To help defray site hosting costs now that I’m sans employer and every little bit counts
• To provide additional (hopefully) relevant information for visitors using my site
• To learn more about what is, and isn’t, useful for site visitors

I’ve also added rotating Amazon links to top J2ME books in the J2ME Archive (see example below). Same rationale as above.

I’m very interested to hear your opinions on this. And if you find this site useful and want to help keep it going, please consider clicking through and buying a book or two. Thanks in advance for your support.