Yusiang's Log

Haha, finally took some time to come here for a look. Still rushing to finish my FYP(a J2ME+J2EE-based wireless auction), really need to pray hard for it. I f***ed up an interview with a mobile-related company which I really like actually, especially when they asked about my math subjects, I really wish that I am not a dyscalculia. When am I going to have some free time to complete my pet projects?? BTW, if anyone interested in them, just email me yusiang at yahoo dotcom. 1:a memory utility for symbian(to kill specified background threads so that you can play ngage/big GB rom games), 2:asp.net-based MMS image manipulation(you need a mm7-supported mmsc, i myself use cracked nowmms), 3:voice-blogging tool for .net cf-compatible smartphones.

Going to help my uncle move house to kota kemuning. According to him, that residential area is covered with Wi-Fi. Still no news from AtlasONE regarding their nationwide 3G-like wireless broadband while Wi-Fi technology has been progressing so rapidly and now we have 802.11a,b,g(popular currently), and i,n coming soon. There will be also Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone soon(in Japan). Interestingly, many recent IPOs in US are WLAN-related companies like those providing hotspots, chips/hardware, billing, locator, roaming, management/security, voip over wlan, mesh, wgttd, wimax blah blah... While in Malaysia, if you wanna try out Wi-Fi, the (only) good choices are TMnet Streamyx Hotspot(more locations covered) and Airzed(cheap).

Survey found that 45% buy online after researching gifts in stores and catalogs. One of the idea I have for shopping is MMS-based shopping service using image recognition. Although the first barcode advertisement service, CueCat was a big failure due to privacy issues, there are several companies coming out with similar service to assist shoppers such as Paperclick which help book shoppers by recognizing ISBN from the book cover, semacode which is a 2-dimensional barcode and can be implemented for several purposes, and invisible electronic watermark. Of course the ultimate technology in assisting shoppers will be RFID.

Telephony Magazine: 10 hottest wireless applications for 2004
1. Multimedia messaging   6. Remote networking
2. Voice over WLAN          7. Wireless printing
3. Localized content          8. Mobile blogging
4. Multicasting                  9. Mobile community services
5. Group press-to-talk     10. Industrial productivity
Besides these ten in the list, some of the application that I think will be popular next year are multiplayer gaming, friend-of-friend networking, peer-to-peer and video conferencing(finally it is realistic to be predicted).

Bluejacking seems to be the highlight in the media recently. For you who just came back to earth, it is basically using your mobile phone to send surprise message to the 'victims' around you through bluetooth. There are also some interesting issues on bluetooth security and related tools such as btscanner ,redfang and bluesniff(though they only work in linux). It seems that bluespamming is possible after referring to SMan(great app but for SE p800 only) source code and reading some symbian sdk doc sh*t. It probably drain battery but worth it if you bluespammed some pretty girls around you. ;p

Japan's NEC is coming out with their analog TV cellphone now. Japan has been leading the world with their mobile phone technologies, even European is comparatively lagging 1-2 years compared to Japanese. First Mobile Internet? Japanese(i-mode). First Cameraphone? Japanese. First 3G? Japanese.... There are a lot of kewl gadget/app available in Japan, such as dog translator, nokia imagewear and kid cameraphone. Maybe I should attend some Japanese technology exhibition when i can afford it in future...most of them have many japanese AV-like babes demonstrating the gadgets ;p

Played around with Tomtom Citymaps, great software but there is no map for any Malaysian cities yet. Mobile positioning would give lot of interesting applications besides those common one like shortest route, tracking children and nearest ATM. Botfighter is a location-based game that let player shoot missiles on enemies when they are within certain proximity. Another interesting service, Activematch scan if there is 'matched' persons which suit your bf/gf seeking condition in your nearby location. I think it would be great if there is any local company providing service like "where can i rent a house in this area" and the landlord can post picture of their houses.

From buying Coke and paying parking, now somebody is coming out with implantable RFID-based payment chip. Mobile phone seems to be a suitable choice as an alternative wallet for lazy people like me. There are several attempts to establish the mobile payment, such as Japan's Sony Felica, US's Mastercard Paypass, Europe's Nokia & Visa's Virtual Wallet and Korea's SKT Moneta. More interesting mobile payment will probably appear with the improvement of Bluetooth/GPRS/RFID/Smartcard/Biometric technology. Hopefully we can see some "advanced" TouchNGo in near future. :p

It is undoubted that ringtone is one of the biggest business in mobile phone industry currently. BBC has a review on the WiderThan.com's COLORing, a ring-back tone service in South Korea which allows the callers to hear subscriber selected music. When reading it, I thought of something that might be interesting. Basically it would be a service provided by telcos so that the subscribers can set their personalized name/photo/ringtone/video which they want the receivers to see/hear when they call them and the receiver can add the predefined info in their contact list easily.

Sendo released some details about their coming-soon Sendo X. It looks like a competitor to nokia 6600 though I think both of them have something each of them have(or don't have). My wishlist for ultimate smartphone would be the below:-

processor/memory as good as IPAQ pda, self-upgrade firmware

hot-swappable SD with at least >1GB and SD I/O

built-in camera with >1.3 megapixel/flash/auto-focus/optical zoom

EDGE(or class 8 GPRS), Wi-Fi, >50m Bluetooth, GPS

stereo audio, analog/digital FM/TV tuner

dedicated graphics processor, 65K TFT with touch screen

// posted by Steve @ 4:11 AM

Just spent hours watching some videos downloaded from MSDN TV, this particular video about .NET Compact Framework really spark my mind. Never thought it is so much easier than J2ME app development though i heard about it before. Anyway, Microsoft Smartphone is still 'minority' compared to other platform like J2ME and Symbian in term of current market. Symbian app is powerful but its learning curve is too high(at least for me). J2ME availability is high but it is too sandboxed and there is no IDE which is as (nearly) good as Visual Studio .NET.

Yeah, finally exam is over. We had a post-exam 'luxury' dinner in Teluk Gong, Klang. The food is actually not bad(quite good business), though the place is quite difficult to be located. That's the question that we always ask, like "where can i find the best wan tan mee in this area". Fortunately, there are some generous malaysians and singaporeans who have been doing GPS mapping with such information. Garmin GPS unit is still too expensive to most of us, why not telcos like Maxis provides their nodes GPS position so that we can make use of such GPS resources with our phones. The positioning might not be so accurate but I think it is quite useful.

Digi today said no extra charge for EDGE when it is available next year. Theorectically EDGE can give up to 384kbps compared to GPRS 144kbps. The bad news is, they will stop providing free MMS when EDGE is launched. Perhaps I should get beyond prepaid while waiting for hotlink.

Meanwhile, KL Police has started SMS Patrol Notification so that you can ask them to patrol your house when you balik kampung during hari raya. Just type: "POLISKL Balik Kampung", followed by name, address & away duration, and send it to "39988"(Each SMS 50 sen).

Bill Gates didn't say anything about their coming soon(though it has been coming soon since 2002) SPOT watches in the COMDEX 2003, his speech on Tablet PC(is this still considered new?) and security(sigh..windows..iis..) looks dull except the matrix spoof. BTW, SPOT technology is to feed information(weather,message,traffic..) to your wristwatches, you can see the cool demo here.

Today is the last day for me to upgrade my MyKad via MMU, looks convenient for me to do it in campus(can't wake up before 3pm in hometown) but final exam on wednesday. Wouldn't it wonderful if they implement some scheduling like fluidtime (sample pic on the left) which synchonize service timing with groups of people through J2ME app(back end based on web services and agent...AI..sigh..going to fail) so that everybody get their perfect schedule and no more queueing. They currently doing trial for public bus service and washing machine for hostel residents.