Technological Darwinism

Today I've read and article on the recent achievement of a teenager with the iPhone. It seems that this guys have connected the iPhone to the forbidden networks of Orange, Movistar and Vodafone. This is not a great novelty because each day thousands of cellular phones are unlocked in order to work with any network provider and in fact, it is a feature, the unlocking mechanism, guaranteed by the GSM standards in order to boost competition. The news, for me, comes from the fact that the unlocking procedure has engaged a token I did not now yet. It is the TurboSIM. What is the TurboSIM? Well, I would say it is something like a parasite in the biologic scale. It presumably filters the Cellular Phone - SIM Interface communication in order to take profit of it and send the suitable commands to get some functionality. It would be nice to see how it works (it is announced as Open Source) and which is the very change for the market dynamics the providing of such a "revolutionary" token but it looks like by now it is impossible to get one!!

At last... BicinGadget!!

This weekend I gave a bit momentum to this project and I finished it late Sunday. It is available at http://www.domocat.com/bicingadget/bruc45.xml. If you want to see it just go to your iGoogle page, click at "Add Stuff"-> "Add from URL" and put this address in the box. Once accepted the warning of "You're adding stuff not created by Google" it will appear in your iGoogle page. In this screenshot you can see how it looks. I must say that it was easier than I thought and looks great for the effort invested!
However, the license of the publishing of the gadget is the usual Creative Commons on what I post in the blog.



Now I'm preparing the RenfeGadget!

Knowledge Society in Catalonia

This weekend I've been working in the bincingadget, a first approach to the idea I introduced in my previous post on having standard gadgets for my everymorning worries (bicing, renfe, weather...). At present I'm able to catch the information that I need and put it in an ftp server. The google gadget simply accesses to this information in the web server and shows it. Now I'm planning the step to put it in a dedicated server because I now have to keep the laptop on to execute the updating script.

Today I read this article on the knowledge society in Catalonia. It started setting up the fact that Catalonia, a former engine in software and IT services in Spain, has receded in its leading role. One of the targeted causes are lack of institutional strategy, or even diverging strategy, in the topic. I may agree with the idea but I would add also the high prices in the broadband access and the strong and rigid telecommunications regulation as factors that make a huge impact on it. At present, for a home to have broadband access to the Internet costs around 60 ? per month in Spain. This cost, affordable for middle and middle-high class homes contracting a double and triple play offer, lays quite aside for the 30-40 % of homes with incomes below the mean. Additionally, the ban for public institutions to offer free universal wireless access to the Internet is a hard barrier in order to give local administrations, like the city government and NPO's, the possibility to impulse and give momentum to local initiatives. These two factors may have been taken into account in the analysis of the KIS of any territory or country because the infrastructures are, like is mentioned in the article, the basement where the whole knowledge is build on.

Bicingadget

Today when I was having a shower (I know, it's an strange place to have an idea, or maybe not?) I started to think in an status screen where useful information at this time in the morning may be showed. The kind of issues I was thinking where the number of available bikes in the nearest bicing station, weather, trains schedule, traffic information... the kind of information news program give in the morning but more personalized. Once in the office, I opened firefox and my iGoogle page appeared and I thought... why not? I've just found a place where I kind find some of this information, in fact the one on the bicing station, and I expect this weeked to start working on the gadget development... Lets see if it works!

Mobile Communication and Society

Today I've received the book I was looking from some months ago. It's a research essay on, as the title of this post says, Mobiles and Society. Linked with this topic there is an article I've been suggested to read in La Vanguardia and that is on Web 2.0, the recurrent topic of the last 4 or 5 years in the ICT industry. In a former post I babbled on the possibility for the Mobile Technology to converge (another buzz word) in a Mobile 2.0 paradigm. In that post I put the SMS technology as an incipient one seeming the possibilities of social participation and content generation of the users. A recent news talked about that the SMS technology was 8000% (1500? per MB!) more expensive that its correspondent over UMTS... and it continues to be used. Some factors influence this use. Of course, the fact that ALL the mobile terminals in the world that use the GSM technology implement this feature and the easy use in any terminal have promoted this. But even in the communication between people that know each other and have cheaper alternatives like IM, email and others, continue to use this 7bit alphabet, text based mean of communication. But what I see even more amazing is that mobile provider still see the SMS service as a value added one... strange humans, I say.