MarcAThing.com » English

England soccer-kit comes with a QR Code

Marc Fonteijn — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:04:13 +0000

QR Codes are making their way to the general public. Umbro has equipted the away kit of the english national soccer-team with an QR Code!

Via picturephoning.com, source metro

The new Nokia E71, codename LIAM, the E61i successor

Marc Fonteijn — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:14:23 +0000

We’ve seen new Nokia models released faster than the downfall of the dollar. But it has been quite on successors of the E61i, the full QWERTY wonder. Well here’s some news. It looks like the Nokia E71, codename LIAM is right around the corner. See the first photo’s below. The E61i is great but not flawless so I can’t wait to get my hands on this baby.

Open letter to Nokia: get the PIM up to todays standard

Marc Fonteijn — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:20:41 +0000

This is my open letter to Nokia
Please, just spend 1% of your hardware R&D budget and give us a decent PIM.
Although you give us fantastic hardware and keep innovating in the features of new devices, we’ve had to put up with a PIM that just doesn’t cut it if you want to do something more than a basic calendar entry for several years now. The PIM is probably the most used application on my phone. I use it way more that making phone calls for instance. It’s just

You keep giving us firmware updates (which is nice), but please just give the guys at the PIM development department some budget (and a tray of Jolt) to get the stuff up to the level we expect from Nokia. The active users are contributing their ideas on how you can improve our Nokia experience so you just need to grab the list and off you go.

My no. 1 feature request would be the ability to have multiple calendars. I know everything is miscellaneous but that doesn’t mean I don’t wont to have a “work” and “personal” calendar. Imagine syncing iCal/Thunderbird/Outlook, Goolge Calendar and the Nokia Calendar, wouldn’t that just be great? The main thing lacking in order to get this setup working is … the support for multiple calendars in the Nokia Calendar. Just start out by adding an extra field called “calendar” which I can select when entering a meeting , thats all I ask from you.

Do you have any question concerning this open letter, please feel free to contact me anytime.

Sincere,
Marc Fonteijn

08/03/2008

Augmented reality screens are so 2005

Marc Fonteijn — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:12:10 +0000

There’s been a buzz lately about some images of how future internet search will look (see below).

Well guess what, its no future. Johnny Lee, you know the guy who amazed the world with his wii hacks, showed off the “Moveable Interactive Projected Displays Using Projector Based Tracking” technique that basicly does what the image above show in 2005 (!). Check out the video, it’s truly amazing!

His new project called “Foldable Interactive Displays” completely blows you away. Apple, Nokia, Microsoft (surface) … eat your heart out or even better, hire this guy!

Thats a Mount Everest of rice you have there

Marc Fonteijn — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:32:33 +0000

If you want to impress your date over diner a candle just won’t do. So check out the Topoware tableware serie by Alexandra. There’s nothing IKEA about this! Topoware is available on Etsy but you’ll need to be quick because the’re jsut 47 left…

It comes with a price tag, but hey whats the price of a first impression! It helps to mention to your date that it was featured in the NY Times magazine ;)

GraphSync next step in reclaiming your data!

Marc Fonteijn — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:35:53 +0000

Data portability is revolutionizing the internet. It’s going to have a huge impact on everyone and everything on the net. Users, organizations and business-models will all be affected by this movement. Values are shifting!

GraphSync is one of the steps in this process. It challenges developers to build data extractors for proprietary services and translate the data in open standards. Free your data that’s trapped inside proprietary silo’s!

Everyone is giving their predictions for 2008. Well, mine is still the same as last year with the addition of data portability.

My list of Mobile Apps

Marc Fonteijn — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:24:35 +0000

Raimo pinged me to post a list of the applications I’m using om my phone. This one is easy. I’ve made such a list (dutch!) some time ago but things have changed over time. To make a complete list I’m going to include all the app’s I use, including the ones that come shipped with the phone.

Daily use:

Gmail
Nokia Messaging application
Nokia S60 browser
Nokia PIM (although I wish something better came along)

Regular use:

Rare use:

WidSets
Jaiku
FON WiFI
MGMaps (Google Maps Mobile … with extra features)
Nokia Podcasting
SmartMovie
Adobe PDF
Tasky
X-plore
Pathe (dutch movie guide)

I don’t know why I stll have them on my phone:

How about that for an overview ;)

Howto: Easy text input on your mobile phone using QR Codes

Marc Fonteijn — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 11:34:15 +0000

Here’s the problem:
You have a fancy new phone that supports WiFi. How Cool! Now you want to connect to your uber-secure WPA2 WiFi network. For maximum safety you generated a random 63 characters WPA key. Now to connect your shiny phone to your network you have to input something like this on keypad: q,NPTD\yukR+$47#E+GhcMV7+,fItelYb-x\Cqt&QA$HD-8R&N-XkUehS9zAmaj
Of course if time and patience isn’t an issue for you, you’ll eventually succeed.

But there’s an easier way. For this you need a phone that supports:

copy/paste function (eg. the Nokia E61i)
a QR Code reader

Here are the 4 steps that will save you a lot of shore fingers:

http://qrcode.kawya.com

Fire up the QR Code reader on your phone

Copy the decode text from the QR Code reader

Paste the text in the destination field

Now I hope you understand that this isn’t only usefully for random WPA2 keys ;)

And than there was Mailku

Marc Fonteijn — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:16:01 +0000

Just 2 days after I managed to send email message to Jaiku using Twittermail, Jaiku has already catched up. Mailku has seen the light. Mailku lets you send direct messages to Jaiku using email. It’s plain and simple (as it should be).

Register with JaikuFans.com, enter a Mailku password and you’re done! You can start sending emails to .@post.jaikufans.com and see them published instantly in your Jaiku stream!

Mailku works great, thanks for such a quick implementation!

By the way you don’t have to throw your TwitterMail account out the door just yet, you can just CC the messages to Twitter :)

Extending your central online identity with addons

Marc Fonteijn — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 20:52:37 +0000

I’ve been fascinated with they way people use the internet more and more to extract their identity, to show the world who they are. The thing I see happening is that 13/14 year old teenagers build up online identities that, compared to most business users and their linkedin account, are so much more connected, complex and complete that I cannot imagine what this generation will be doing in 10 year.

With this topic keeping me busy I’ve been thinking how the eco-system around our online identity could evolve in near future.

Email address on steroids
Everyone will have a central online identity. You could look at this central identity as an email address on steroids. I’ll try to explain. Everyone that is online has at least one email address. This email address is very personal. People you know recognize you when they see your email address passing by. But not only people recognize you, machines do too. Every time you sign in to a website with your email address you are recognized.

Using an email address as online identity works pretty good on small scale. If you have dozen accounts on various websites it becomes a drag. Each website contains duplicate data of you and each website adds its own information to your online identity. Duplicate data is bad because having to change your hometown when you moved becomes a annoying task with a dozen accounts.
In itself It’s great that specialized websites add information to your online identity. The bad part is that most website take your data “hostage”. You provide them with your personal information but they don’t give you the option to share that information. They treat the data as their property when in fact it’s yours. This is a business model for many website by the way. Their value is defined by that amount of data they have extracted from their users. But more on that later

We need to turn this around. Only our trustworthy email address wasn’t really designed for this so we need something else. Something that gives you the same identity “feeling” as an email address but is extensible, flexible and provides more options for control. Looking at this we could end up the diagram below:

Central profile
Your central profile represents your online identity. This is a website that gives you the ability to manage basic identity data such as name, age, hometown, occupation, email address, etc. It’s also the place to manage what data you want to share and with who. It also might be an nice overall representation for the outside world of your identity. The central profile is they key to eliminating duplicate data, putting you in control and having a portable identity.

Identity Addons
Imaging one big interface to manage all the aspects of your identity. As your identity expands you’ll be looking at a screen that doesn’t make sense -even to you- in a very short time. Not only will this be a usibility nightmare but also who is going to implement all those cool features for managing specific aspects of your identity?
I’d say lets keep all those fancy third party websites that are designed for one specific goal. Flickr for instance is great to manage the “photo” aspect of your identity, Last.FM is great for keeping your taste of music up to date and managing that booklist on Amazon just works fine.
We can look at those third party sites as Identity Addons. They provide a friendly interface for managing specific aspects of your identity. These Addons will need to add the specific data to your central identity in an standardized way, sort of like plugins do for software.
I can even imaging that we won’t be choosing a site to share our photos but a “photo identity provider” that is an Addon to your identity in the near future.

Identity Readers
Having a extensible central identity that tells a lot more about you than an email address is great, but the first next thing you’ll want to do is to share (parts) of that identity. In the same way that Identity Addons add specific data to your identity they could also take advantage of the data you share with them. I call websites that make use of your shared identity data Identity Readers. The most basic use of an Identity Reader is to fetch data such as name, age, hometown, occupation, email address, etc. But using basic data is just the start. Having just one contact list that is used by different Identity Readers so that you won’t have to add all your friends on every new social site you sign up with is a more advanced -but very desirable- use.

Requirments
Ok, sounds cool until now right? So what are we waiting for? Why hasn’t anyone implemented this yet? First of all there are a few requirements in order to do this the right way:

A central identity; an online place that represents your online identity. You fully trust and control this place.
Identity standards; these standards define how is your identity data stored. They don’t (!) define an identity, just the way properties are stored.
Data exchange standards; portability of your identity is crucial. Data must be able to flow from Identity addons to the central profile and from the central profile to Identity readers.

As we know defining standards takes time but my gust feeling tells me we’re almost there. We are a long way on the technology end that will enable this. I’m sure OpenId, hCard and microformats are things you’ll be hearing a lot more from in the near future.

But there is something else that was holding this development back. This setup is very much aimed at portability, having control over your data and having the choice to manage your data using the website you like. You can imagine that moving your data from Identity Addon provider #1 to provider #2 isn’t a very secure base to build a business. You could lose 50% of your users as Identity Addon provider when the next day a new startup pops out of the silicon valley sand with a better service then you. Of course we -as users- cheer this on as it pushes providers to compete on giving us the best service so that we don’t make the switch.

And now?
What is going to make this happen? Basically the vision, resources and endurance of a few brave. This development has been taking place for some time now but it’s getting more attention and picking on speed lately. Smart computer people (those with big glasses ;)), have been talking about this for some time now. We can thank Facebook that it put this development in the face of the mass crowd. What Facebook did was like saying “screw all those business models, we’ll open up everything and see what happens”.

It’s good to see more people thinking and writing about this development. I’ll be keeping an close eye on these developments as I’m sure they will dominate the web the next few years.