All 13 Telefonica Movistar American networks SIM cards. Uups… I’m missing VIVO Brazil!

Don’t worry i’m not a fan of the dark side yet!

Barthi Airtel knows also how to do generic commercials for the brand without focusing on any product. This commercial is stunning, really inspiring and revelating. It will make any Indian proud of being Indian.

In youtube there are more commercials of Barthi Airtel, all of them really good. I don’t know what agency created those amazing ads but If I would have an Indian company I’m sure I will try to hire them!

Apart of all the interesting work being done in our booth, I also explored the trade show and played with the new toys. I really loved Samsung’s projectors integrated on the cell phones. I can’t wait to develop something using Nokia’s QT libraries and publish it using the new Nokia store.

I attended the Mobile Awards, where lots of start ups introduced interesting projects and crazy ideas on elevator pitches (3 minutes maximum). Seems like not enough time, right? In fact 3 minutes is enough time to decide if the project and the guy introducing the startup will success or not. Some of them even started their careers as showmans. I love to attend this kind of start up events because you can feel a lot of creative energy.

You can feel the vibe and see where the industry is headed for the next years.

Only a handful of us are able to speak with regular people being respected as equals. Some are media whores, you can recognize them because they have thousands of followers on Twitter. There are some real scientists and engineers that enjoy explaining technical concepts but most of us suffer when we are speaking about technical stuff to people that lacks basic technical background.

Dilbert

Why do we need to speak with them?

You may need to explain your sales drones the magic that make your product different. It’s amazing that sales people know all the trendy buzzwords but they don’t have a clue of what they meant at a technical level.

You may need to explain your C-level people why your coders have been the last 3 months rewriting the entire architecture of the product without any visible improvement.

It’s clear that eventually you will need to speak with them.

The problems

There are three problems when discussing technology with regular people. The first one is that we can’t use our acronym based jargon but just plain language. The second problem is that we need to picture complex abstract concepts with something easy to understand. The third problem is the short attention span regular people have when listening technology.

There is no point in using acronyms the people doesn’t know about. There are lots of new ones created every day. For similar reasons you can’t use buzzwords, even the ones that have been forever on the web.

As everything is interconnected you may feel tempted to explain how something works explaining the related technology it’s based on. This is a double edge sword, people may understand you better but you will may need to explain the big bang theory and progress from there. By the time you reach your main topic everybody will be dreaming of donuts and you will be preaching in the desert.

The solution: Imagination land.

What you need to do is create a magic world where there aren’t acronyms and the technology is simple and accessible.

In this world, Internet works like the road system. Cars are Internet packets. Each car has a driver that knows their destination. There are two car brands, TCP and UDP. Both cars can go elsewhere on the Internet. They can even go off road to reach obscure destinations like this blog.

TCP cars are women’s favourites. Women always plan in advance their routes. They often get lost on the road but when they finally arrive at the destination the rest of the family is still waiting for them because they are only ones that know how to cook.

UDP cars are normally driven by males. Men don’t like planning. They get into the car and reach their destinations following traffic signals. Lots of drivers get lost but it doesn’t matter because nobody is really waiting for them at home.

On the other hand VPNs are intercity trains. There are already fixed established paths and you are not expected to go off road. Trains are streams of information. Train cars contain data, and on the locomotive is the driver, who knows where the train is headed and has the special key to open each train car.

A web server is a bakery where customers wait in line. Some years ago the bakeries had only a few cakes to choose but now all of the bakeries accept personalized orders. Behind the bakery there are big factories where lots of machines are cooking those cakes following personalized recipes. The factories are often interconnected so the product of one factory can be an ingredient on the next one. There are also giant storage places managed by third companies where all the ingredients (information) of the world is logically stored.

A firewall is the muscular guy at the entrance of popular spots. People in line are the network packets. If a network packet look suspicious the big guy will not let him in because he is not wearing today’s correct shoes. Once the disco is full the big guy act as traffic container and don’t let anybody to pass unless it’s a VoIP packet.

Spread the fun

Using this imaginary world make our world accessible to anybody. It’s easier and fun to explain, the people don’t lose their attention span, they don’t get lost under thousands of mysterious acronyms and they leave the room with an smile and a general picture of how things work.

If they are interested in the topic they will ask questions. That’s the moment in which you can switch to technical jargon language. You will saturate their attention span in minutes, they will get lost and they will not ask again. You ego will be intact.

When Apple introduced the IPhone it was clear where the market was headed. The future of the mobile computing was in simpler, better engineered devices with usability in mind, not features. The IPhone was what the people really wanted. Today, the Iphone, one single device has a big piece of the market and the most interesting thing is that it has never been marketed as a business tool but a cool personal device.

My prediction was totally on it’s way. Nokia was sleeping and dying slowly. Until now. The most interesting pitch I attended on the last GSMA was given by a Nokia VP in which he was introducing the Nokia Store, explaining why they bought symbian just to offer it to public domain, why they also bought Trolltech for the QT technology and their vision of the future mobile computing.

All of that means a 180 degrees turn on Nokia’s strategy. They have a new paradigm and they now embraces a more open way of develop software for their devices. Nokia is full of bright people and they will probably be heading again the innovation in our industry in a couple of years.

This change has tough me that even big corporations are flexible enough to be able to adapt to changes on time. Something similar is happening on Microsoft. They have been a lot of years ignoring and looking down on Open Source initiatives. Now we are in the middle of an economic storm and they are losing market share and the corporation is changing fast to a friendlier approach to Linux and open source.

The world changes, and the companies that are not willing to adapt dissapear.

The Spanish SMS language makes use of compressed words taking off vowels and shortening expressions. In consequence it is faster to write a message in SMS language and you can pack more information in each SMS.

This SMS language is seen as an aberration for Academics, which are seriously concerned about those simplifications finding their way onto regular Spanish. One of the most widespread problems is that nobody writes SMS messages with accents.

What not everybody knows is that if you want to write proper Spanish on your SMS messages, you will need to pay more for each message.

The technical reason

All the cells in Spain are configured to send messages of 160 characters. However, the real payload limit for an SMS message is 140 bytes. We can encode 160 characters on only 140 bytes using a 7 bit character set.

A bit after the dinosaurs ruled the world, the computers spoke to each other on complete 8 bit words. American people were not entirely happy with this solution. You have plenty of space to encode all English characters on 7 bits so using 8 bits per word was seen as a waste of space. One bit does not seem a lot, but it was actually a big deal when computers could just manage a few kilobytes of memory.

So they took off the first bit and the 7 bit characters sets were born. The most widespread is named ASCII. On 7 bit you can refer to 127 characters but instead of including foreign symbols, American people decided to use the free space for drawing symbols and to control printers. This was a decision what made easier to develop software but it also made sharing information encoded in different character sets a big headache.

On the other hand GSM was an European effort, a lot more concerned about interoperability on the entire region. Instead of using standard ASCII they decided to create a new 7 bit character set removing the useless symbols and control characters and including the special symbols of the European languages. They included German, French, Danish and Finish symbols, but they just included the Spanish symbol “ñ“, essential to write wonderful words as coño,maricastaña,ñoño, guiñapo or moño.

The GSM character set is spoken by all the GSM cellphones on earth. This is how it looks:

On the GSM character set there are all the lowercased French accents but only the lowercased Spanish é. Why they included only one Spanish accent is a mystery to me. It’s useless.

You have probably noticed that this character set has 255 spaces but I said that GSM is a 7-bit character set. It actually was at the beginning, but eventually they decided to extend the character set with a beautiful hack on the system. They allow referring the upper 127 symbols using 14 bits (one control symbol plus the upper symbol). That’s why when you write a ‘[',']‘ or € symbol on your cell it counts as 2 characters instead of one. As you see there is still lot of empty space. Why they didn’t seize the opportunity to include more symbols? No idea.

GSM is also used out of Europe. Can Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic people send messages in their languages? Yes, but they don’t use standard GSM character set. They use UTF-16/UCS2 (Unicode) to encode their symbols. Unicode solve all the problems because it includes on one character set all the symbols of all the present and future real languages  you can think of. Unicode is the character set equivalent to a nuclear power plant.

Unicode requires 2 bytes per character. As we have a maximum payload of 140 bytes, all those countries using Unicode have a limitation of 70 characters per message. This is not a big deal for Korean, Chinese and Japanese people because they can transmit very dense information with their symbols. I guess Russian people have the same problem as we have with Spanish.

What is the problem? Spanish is not a dense language. Using Unicode to write Spanish means we can only use 70 character messages. 70 characters is simply too short. Remember that we already have a very compressed SMS language to deal with the 160 character limitation.

You can set up your phone to send messages in proper Spanish in Unicode. It’s very easy. Why the Spanish cells are not configured by default in Unicode? I guess it would be a nightmare for PR Operator’s department because thousands of people would start complaining about extra cost. Spanish operators charge concatenated messages as independent messages.

There was a nice alternative which was also the ethically correct solution. The operators could have changed their billing processes to allow sending sequences of two or three Unicode-written concatenated messages at the cost of one message. That would have meant that sending 160 character messages of proper Spanish in Unicode would have cost the same as one message. That nice solution would have forced the Operators to assume extra transmission  costs. Let’s say they could lose 0,00001% less. I got that number out of thin air but I don’t think it’s far from reality.

The operators chose between giving the possibility of write proper Spanish in concatenated short messages or ignore the problem and force the people to write bad Spanish.

Everybody knew what happened. In fact using SMS language was used by the operators on their marketing campaigns to attract young people. It was just cool and modern to use it. The operators forced the people to write bad cool Spanish.

So if Spaniards start using SMS-based language while singing flamenco,  remember that part of the problem was that one executive working on a Spanish operator thought that it was a good idea to sacrifice our language in exchange of a bit of extra revenue.

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