Yusiang's Log

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.