In my case its improving the way I work. Before having it, I used to carry my thinkpad everywhere with me. I really love this rock solid, super stable laptop, but has two problems. First, even being an ultraportable, it weights 1,4 kg which is too heavy if you are going to carry it always with you. The other problem is that I was using the x40 as my main laptop and I didn’t want to have the risk of losing it or (even worse) losing the data.

With the inexpensive laptop everything changes. It’s almost always with me in my bag because it’s a lot lighter and I use it wherever I have free time. Subways? No problem. As I don’t trust the laptop, I don’t carry sensible information there anymore (all my data is stored online anyway) so I’m less worried.

What kind of use does these small underpowered laptop have? I use mine mainly as a typewriter. I like to go to public areas like parks or crowded streets. Lots of ideas come to my mind while looking the people walking and running around me. These ideas are captured by my fingers and stored in the laptop.

It’s not perfect though. This laptop is cheap and unfortunately the keyboard is one of the places they Asus save money. The keyboard is bad if compared with Thinkpad’s family keyboards which personaly are the best laptop keyboards ever. It’s necessary to hit with energy each one of the keys to be sure that the keyboard is going to detect the letters correctly. Furthermore the keys are tiny, even for my small fingers. I frecuently hit keys I dont want.

That’s the price of convenience. Cheap underpowered laptop for online use and typewriting. Light. Almost disposable and without critical data stored.

Online use? Yes, another feature of the mini laptops is the webcam. These laptops are the perfect videoconferencing tool. The webcam and internal microphone allows you to have a pretty good video quality and decent audio quality without need of external microphones or headphones. And it’s light meaning you can easily move it around.

Three months ago was impossible to find small laptops in Korea but last week I went to Yongsan (Seoul electronic market, the biggest in Asia) and they had small laptops everywhere. Furthermore there have several options, including the new MSI wind which is by far a better deal than the Asus family, not only because the hardware (I don’t care about that anymore) but because the screen and the keyboard look a lot better.

The host gave us stickers, food and drinks. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation was here and we spoke about the important role Firefox has from now on, providing a safe and clean browser for the masses.

In the Q&A, I asked a question about the huge problem Firefox faces in Korea. Here the Firefox penetration is very low and there is a good reason: Lots of Korean websites make heavy use of proprietary extensions in the form of Active X controls that can’t be used on Firefox.

I asked Mitchell if the Mozilla foundation has any plans to address this issue and Michelle told us that Firefox will never execute Active X controls because of the huge security hole they create. What they are doing to fix the problem is going through the political way, educating the people who take decisions .  I think is the correct way.

For example, Michelle was in Seoul this week because the next day she was going to attend a meeting with Korean ministers to request them to eliminate the need of the Active X controls in the government websites.

It was a fantastic technological party and hope to soon enjoy firefox 3.1 release party too!

UPDATE: I’ve just added a group picture I founded on flickr

Computex on Taipei 101

I didn’t have a lot of time to explore the trade show but in the few minutes I was there I didn’t see anything that caught my eye. Furthermore I think we visited the worst pavilion because none of the big Taiwanese companies where there. Indeed it was the pavilion where the Microsoft booth was. Of course I took a picture with one cute Taiwanese Microsoft hostess. You can see in the picture the interesting slogan Microsoft had in the Computex: “Better with windows!” encouraging people to use Windows on the sub 300 USD laptops.

Microsoft’s Taiwanese Hostess

Microsoft knows that they have a problem. As more of our time in front of computers is using web applications instead of desktop ones, more and more people will start using small cheap laptops. A huge chunk of the market is going to be on this small form laptops and they will probably replace all the normal laptops in the future. Microsoft is in a position where Linux is going to be eroding their user base. The problem is that vista will never run properly on these laptops (plus nobody likes vista) and must rely on Windows XP to compete with modern Linux distributions.

As LCDs are not anymore the stars in the trade shows, the manufacturers try
to attract attention showing ballistic missiles from the neighbor North Korea.
Next year they will try porn.

It will take time though because most of the cheap laptops in Computex were running Windows. I assume Microsoft marketing has something to be here, probably giving away for free or close to nothing the windows licences to the Taiwanese manufacturers. An intelligent positioning or a desperate move depending on your point of view but a sign that they are worried anyway.

This is a QR code

Once I understand the limitations of the Java mobile platform, developing the application was pretty easy and interesting. These are the main topics I learned while working on this project:

• Bidimensional codes are really interesting, especially when the tags have also visual information. For an example, look this website with pictures inside the QR tag.
• An emulator allow easier and faster development of applications but you need to test the prototype in the real hardware as soon as possible. The reason is that you really want to verify that the application runs at correct speed and that you are not using too much memory. In the case of Java mobile, you can download the Sun wireless toolkit which comes with a handy emulator, but in my experience this emulator is not the best.
  Sony Ericsson Wireless toolkit comes with a emulator closer to the real behaviour of the real devices. Problem is that Sony Ericsson WTK is only available on Windows platforms, and although there are ways to install and run the emulator under Linux, at the end I decided to install a Windows Virtual Machine only for testing with the SE emulator.

• Java is very complete but Java mobile is not. Java core libraries come with all the basic functionality you need to forget about most of the boring subroutines of the the underlaying layers and focus on the logic and the user interface of your application. On the other hand, Java mobile libraries are a subset of the regular Java libraries and it’s common to need common functions that are in Java but not in Java mobile. That means that you need to design your own workarounds or rely on the phone manufacturer’s special libraries condemning your app to run only in selected devices (Something that can be fine in case of developing special designed business applications because it can save lot of time)

• There is not any XML engine on Java mobile, and I couldn’t find any LGPL/BSD SQL compliant database. Does anyone know any engine I could have used?

• The signing of the Java mobile applications. I understand the reason Sun decided to force the applications to be signed with certificates issued by big authorities but I think it was an error not to define clearly the set of certificates all the phones needed to have. Sun should have defined a standard procedure to overcome the signing problem.
  Anyway, the non-signed applications are too restricted, and maybe is the reason we only use our cells for gaming instead of business applications. I think it was an error not to automatically allow the Java applications basic functionality like access to the local filesystem, access to the PIM database or taking pictures. I think that only real critical functionality like connection to the network should be confirmed by the user, who either way is annoyed by constant confirmations. After all, you can have malware in your cell that is stealing data, but if it can’t connect to the network the data is not going anywhere. It’s only a matter of educate the user.
  This is something that Sony Ericsson has resolved giving the user the opportunity of relaxing a lot the security rules for each ones of the applications installed. It’s not as good as sign your application but at least you can run business applications of the cell phone.

• Mobile computing is really exciting. Cell phone applications are not only games anymore. Java business applications and web based applications on normal cellphones are interesting and easy to develop. Google had foreseen very well this market, developing Android (An operative system for smartphones and a complete Java library, SDK and open license). Mobile applications will be an important market by the time the first Android based phones appear in the market later this year. Android based devices will be the firsts serious competitors to the already established blackberries and smartphones and they will probably eclipse all of them and will start fighting hand by hand with the Iphone.

I really want to continue developing mobile appications, and in the following weeks I will start playing with the Android library. Stay in touch!

The maximum technical-related aspiration of the people is living in an apartment fully stock of all kind of gadgets like automatic doors, automatic lights, voice controled washing machines, internet conected fridges and huge flat televisions.

Korean Internet Connection

Korean Internet penetration is probably the largest of all countries. 60% of families enjoy internet conection in their homes and 87% of them (compare that with US 19%) is using broadband.

Broadband is some form of high speed internet, for example a high speed and high quality fibre line, ADSL line, cable or mobile internet. In my case we are paying around 30K wons (20 EUR) for an ADSL line but in general, DSL lines are falling steadily and FFT (fiber to the home) is growing

Cell technology

Korea had made a huge investment in CDMA technology, which was great at that time but a real problem now that all providers are switching to GSM. Korean cells are a bit old-fashioned to my eyes because I’m used to see the last mobile gadgets in Spain. In Korea there are not Iphones (Iphones are GSM) but there are also cells with huge touch screens althouth nobody seems to have one (Maybe they are too high end, maybe having a huge touch screen is not atractive to Koreans)

All modern cells support Digital TV, and Koreans use it as entertainment while conmutting to work or school in bus and subway where by the way there is perfect voice and data service.

Mobile internet

Korea is leader regarding mobile internet. They made their own cool technology (Wibro) to prevent korean companies from paying royalties to american/european ones. Wibro has been a huge success and now it’s part of the Wimax specification: Mobile Wimax = Wibro.

Wibro is based on CDMA designs and for that reason I think Koreans are going to jump over the 3G cell technology and use 4G directly. Actually they are now already using 4G with Wibro, which must be popular because it’s so cheap. Wibro cost around 20K wons per month (13,5 EUR) for a reliable ubiquitous wireless internet connectivity. I’m pretty sure Wibro works way better than our UMTS-based HSPDA wireless connection back in Spain.

Operative systems

Korea is Microsoft’s best client. I’ve seen Ipods but almost no Apple computers. Furthermore there is no Linux presence.

Korean websites usually only work with Explorer and frecuently they need to install plugins in the form of special ActiveX controls so if you are living in Korea you need to use Windows or a least have a Windows computer close to you.

¿What are the reasons for this love? Having a uniform environment helped the country to reach a incredible technological level faster. Nowadays it seems they have a huge problem because it’s a very bad experience to use a korean computer: korean Windows computers tend to have lots and lots of crappy extra software installed that makes computers slow to a crawl.

There are also other problems, for example I would like to use a USB Wibro dongle so I can have internet conection everywhere, but It doesn’t work on linux so I’m not going to apply for the service.

Simyo also treat us for lunch and we had the opportunity to discuss about Simyo and the future of our applications. Simyo was cool before knowing who was working under the scenes because they are such a close and innovative company, but now I ‘ve realized the team is very powerful and enthusiastic, they enjoy a lot their work and they have the goal of change how the Spanish cell companies work.

Simyo is so cool!

Furthermore the old video was really boring. It was a mistake to produce a 16 minutes long video and pretend to get your attention in this time of if-it’s-longer-than-a-minute-I’m-not-going-to-see-it (Youtube mantra?).

So I produced a new video showing the new UI and I cut the important sections of old video. Now I have 4 independent videos in the form of small pills of 5 minutes each. Shorter. Easier to see. Faster to get to the point. Better.

I lost the introduction of the old video though, so if you are new and you don’t know what I’m speaking of, please look the first part of the original video.

These are the videos (Still in spanish):

1. The improved user interface (4:50 minutes) New video
2. Explanation of how the system works (1 minute)
   
3. Demo with softphones,landline and cell phone (4:18 minutes)
   
4. Potential commercial and virality (5 minutes)

What happened with AOL, Compuserve and Infovia in middle 90′ is that they created a lot of content in a proprietary and inoperable way. High quality (by that time) message, chat and web publishing applications. In US that kind of systems were the first contact with internet for millions of people. In Spain Infovia was the closed network that provide the infrastructure for the first providers and Internet companies.

But when the magic of the open protocols like http gain a critical mass, everybody wanted to surf on the primitive wild internet instead of surf on a controlled closed bubble. Some years were necessary before the quality of the new and open internet was on par with the previous proprietary versions but it didn’t mattered. At the end, AOL, Compuserve and Infovia accepted the new situation, took to pieces the closed networks, and mutated as normal providers or disappeared.

Now we are in a similar situation. We have a lot of different social networks but all of them are inoperable between them. For example, you can’t write a profile on Facebook and make it automatically appear on Bebo. You update an event on Tuenti and it don’t magically update also Facebook. You tell twitter what are you doing but Facebook didn’t realize that unless you install glue in the middle.

In my opinion there are two big problems here. On one hand the local social networks with local content are always going to be stronger if they are big enough to be interesting for their users. That means that it’s impossible for a single company to have all the social network users in the world, because the people will always prefer a localized version. Facebook don’t have anything to do in Korea and Japan if they don’t place cute hello kitties all over the website. In the case of my country, I think that if there is a well designed Spanish social network (Tuenti anyone?) is going to be very difficult for Facebook to gain a important market share because the people is lazy to update more than one service. And the more popular service will be always used because it just works.

On the other hand, the social networks believe that all their value is on the information of their user’s profiles. The bigger the network the bigger the business. In my opinion that is completely flawed because is not entirely true. The more people, the more interesting content the site has so it attract more visits, which means more advertisement so you get more money. But only *having* that information on itself *has not value*, you need to offer something interesting before.

Two things can happen. The companies can buy each others in a movement resemblance of the internet bubble or simply glue their databases and create bigger networks. That means interconnect their networks. It won’t matter because the history tell us that it’s inevitable for an open protocol to appear.

So what will happen if a well designed open social network protocol appear in the next months? New companies will start to work together to make reality a decentralized global social network. And new business models will appear, with the objective of creating applications for a common global social network. And new buzzwords. Web 4.0 at least. Who knows!.

And meanwhile, Facebook, bebo and the bigger social networks will need to adopt the common global network, the global resource or die. Like AOL did.

The virtual worlds are another interesting case. The biggest contender is Second Life, but it may appear another competitors using open protocols in the future. If you have the option of creating an island with your own content hosted in your computer or creating it on the closed servers of Second Life using and paying for the official content what will you choose? Did this sound similar to creating a website for AOL/Compuserve/Infovia or creating it on the web?

Social networks like we know now are doomed.

Now we only need to decide what open protocol we’ll use.

What had the application improved this last week?

1. Better architecture. I split the web frontend (the web application you can see on facebook) completely of the VoIP backend (the call manager) on two different servers running on different locations. Now the application is ready to scale.
2. Way better sound quality. AMG (a local network service provider) lent me a provisional SIP account, more than enough to improve 1000% call’s reliability and sound quality. I need more accounts for reliability reasons, though, is someone interested?
3. Completely new user interface. Polished, a lot more integrated on facebook, making use of facebook widgets. A long way to go, though, but a lot better than the pre-release version you could saw on video last week. Now it’s time for user usability reporting and web2.0 effects
4. Multilingual. The application works, so what is the reason to reduce their commercial potential focusing only on the Spanish market? No reason. As facebook didn’t provide yet the multilingual capabilities I designed the application to understand Spanish and English, and Vasque, French and German translations are coming soon. Catalian anyone?
5. Developer corner. I’m the only one developer but I like to work on a complete environment. Nowadays the application had a subversion repository, a wiki with my last thoughts and documentation and a bug reporting software for me and betatesters (some techie friends)
6. Bugfixing. Lots and lots of bugs had been resolved, and lots of new ones are being fixed every single day.

I continue to have ideas to improve the functionality or reliability of the application. I’m thinking in several cool improvements. I don’t know if the application will be ready to enter an open beta state on time (maybe by the middle of next week?) but for sure at the beginning it will have less functionality than other VoIP applications.

Don’t complain! It’s working, it’s a complex system with lots of components and has been programmed on a garage

I’ve made a video showing how it works, what you can do with it and the commercial possibilities and monetization of the application. The video speaks Spanish but I’ll dub the video if there is demand.

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I expect the judges to like my application!

The software is based in the VoIP java prototype I programmed for my final research project but only in the experience I adquired because I ended hating java as much that I developed this new one entirely in PHP. I’m in love with scripted languages.

At the end the big problem has not been the software but the hardware. Right now I’m still configuring the machine that runs the VoIP backend. I expect to finish as soon as possible so I can polish the web interface of the application.

Programming the application has been a lot of fun because programming for facebook is easy as cake and mixing web developing and VoIP technologies is super atractive for me (And I think is going to be a huge bussiness in the next years). Plus the motivation of the conquest it’s pretty interesting indeed