Wireless Wonders

No news, just comment about mobile phones and services, from a veteran practitioner...3G, GPRS, WAP, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc...

Friday, April 07, 2006

Calendar in my picture frame (idea #87)

I've already raved on this blog about the photo widget in the Google desktop sidebar. Every 5 seconds it displays a thumbnail image of one of the digital pictures on my PC. I find that at least every 1/2 hour I will click on one and enjoy it full-screen. My wife asked why can't we have that in our kitchen (the most frequently used room in the house)?

This started me thinking about how good it would be to have one of those WiFi-enabled digital picture frames that will do the same thing as the widget, but at a decent size and on display for all to share. What my wife asked today was an interesting question, which was why can't we put a calendar (i.e. from Outlook) into the frame too? That's actually a good idea. It's easy to convert text into an image of course, which could then be added to the queue of images being sent to the frame. A good way to post reminders and make sure they get seen. More bump-into-effect!

Not that we're busy socialites - we're not - but a family calendar is useful, especially for kids events, appointments and so on. The problem is that it's currently on the kitchen wall, which means I can't see it if I'm out and need to make an appointment and check there isn't a clash. This is why I tried using Airset with my wife, which is a web-based group calendar app that can also be accessed via the phone. Problem is that it doesn't have that bump-into-effect. It might be good at reminders (via text message or email), but there's a difference between glancing at the whole calendar on the kitchen wall (dangling post-it notes included) and seeing things in advance than only knowing about it at some fixed reminder interval prior to the appointment. Perhaps the picture frame idea might work. Reminds me of the Zingo portal I designed for Lucent way back in 1997, which has a virtual post-it board on the fridge! In fact, with the right software on my PC, I could send messages from my phone and have them come up as images in the frame! Sounds like a killer app :)

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Thursday, April 06, 2006

Spending money doing nothing...(idea #86)

Recently I used a 3G mobile to gain data access for my laptop (running XP). To my horror, just sitting there doing nothing - no surfing, no emails, no RSS .... absolutely nothing whatsoever - the data meter is whizzing away clocking up lots of bytes on the uplink and downlink. Clearly, something is happening in the background and costing a lot of money doing it.

I guess that I could have poked around with the service applet to see what's going on, but that's not very user friendly, is it?

It seems perfectly obvious to me that XP should detect that I'm using a mobile link (or even just a slow one perhaps) and do something smart about it, like stop any IP traffic that isn't necessary. It could work a bit like a firewall notifier - "app X is attempting to access the net and use lots of your money to do so, would you like to temporarily block it?"

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Monday, April 03, 2006

Name that tune in 1 note...(and idea #85)

I was watching a DVD the other night (Without a Trace) and heard a song that I liked on the sound track. Unfortunately, it wasn't credited at the end. Then I remembered Shazam, the music identification service, so I dialled 2580 (which I remembered, as it's the middle keys going downward) and held it out to the TV speaker. Seconds later, it sent me a text note with the artist and track. It was Mazzy Star ("Fade into You"), who's probably very famous, which shows how little I pay attention to popular music.

Combined with a music download service, the service would really rock (forgive the pun). Now if there was an API into iTunes (accessible from Shazam), I could have gone clicked on the link and downloaded the tune. Better still, my desktop could have gone downloaded the track for me and - "Shazam" - there it is, next time I charge my iPod.

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