Hi there, long time no see

History:
Actually I have been doing lot of things lately but not blogging. Soon 2010 is here and I have to write something that concludes this decade. I don’t know what this decade has meant to you? I entered this decade/century/millenium as an 18 years old student on high school. For me, 2000 was the entrance to the new world outside of school. I got a part time job at Europolitan, one of the 3 biggest Mobile Operators in Sweden, located in my hometown Karlskrona. Since I did not need to do any military service i started to work there full time when I had graduated from School.

Europolitan:
I worked with phone services at Europolitan. I was working as a phone operator (phone directory assitance and switchboard services) for 1 year. That was interesting itself but the intranet and all mobile devices and services that was all around me was even more inspiring. I got in charge of a phone pool service for our department and started to help my collegues to try the new phones such as: Nokia Communicator and Ericsson T68. I got some comments like: Why do you need a color screen? and What’s the point with MMS and mobile internet? We know that now right?

My Phones:
All my phones the last decade has been collected in the image on top of this post. I have been studied each and every feature in all of my phones. Buying a new phone is all about finding new functionality, hidden treasures and customizing the phone so it’s taylor made for your everyday needs. My T68 is by far my most tailored phone. I had special ringtones for almost every close friend and family member. It was the first phone with color screen and that ment that I could have fun pictures for each and every person in my phonebook. Customizing small gifs and jpegs took much time. Was the time worth spending? Actually .. .no. . .but it was fun! I have also been writing a lot of custom made ringtones for all my ericsson phones. It is cool to see all these phones side by side.

University:
When I started studying Mathematics Engineering a new world opened up. Now I could understand each and every feature i was amazed over as a user. Speech recognition/Voice compression technology/Jpeg/MP3/MMS/GSM/UMTS was even more inspiring from a technical perspective.

Did you know that the person you hear through your mobile earphone is not the true voice? It’s just a synthetic simluation of the true voice.

Scalado:
I’m glad I have the opportunity to work at Scalado in the mobile area. Every workday counts and it is important to be open minded and think outside of the box. With Scalado, I reached my goal to work and be a part of this mobile revolution. This industry is changing how people communicate and it helps people to make their everyday life better.

Industry:
The mobile industry is the most dynamic industry in the world right now. Think about other areas and the transition during the last decade. They are not even close… Now the mobile industry have started the new era.. I find my phone more modern than my computer. . It has an app store, it is fun to use and it’s always with me!

Once the quick-and-simple design is deployed,
it can then evolve as needed,
driven by user requirements

I think good enough market segments are kind of new but they are easy to find if you look for them. When it comes to technology during the 90′s, the market was mainly focused on 2 segments: good or cheap.

For every “good enough” product there will always be a small group that wants a high fidelity version. All the big volumes will be in the good enough segments and the high fidelity versions will be expensive and targeted for small groups. In the same time it will be a big market for “a bit better than good enough” targeted for people that wants a little extra. This means that you will create 3 markets from just one! This fragmentation will go on and on and on. Then you have a market that is more fragmented than ever with: cheap, cheap but a bit better, good enough, good enough but a bit better, cheap almost high fidelity and high fidelity. At some point you will have too many “small segments” between good and high end and finally some markets segments will disappear.

What if the high fidelity buyers will find benefits in the lower price segments?
When reading the wired-article “The good enough revolution, when cheap and simple is just fine” I noticed that sometimes you can create other values in the good enough segments that you cannot in the high fidelity range. A couple of examples:

Mobile cameras – always with you.
TheFlip video camcorder – cheap and easy to use.
Youtube – Free with lots of content.
Netbooks – Cheap and small.
IKEA – Why pay more?
Skype – Free and border-less.

When it comes to music you can store more compressed music in one device. Compressed formats also allow streaming and infinite music for a monthly fee. That kind of services and possibilities is not available for lossless formats for the moment..

Music, one market where good enough probably will out compete high end.
Let’s compare the music industry from the 90′s with today’s “good enough” music market. On the 90′s we had CDs. The industry was focusing on quality and Digital Remastered versions of the old LP-versions. Quality and convenience was the sales arguments for the CD.

When the mp3-format arrived during the mid 90-s it was a revolution. It had a good quality compared to the other digital formats and was possible to download even with a 56k modem. With services like Kazaa and Napster people started to download music (mp3 files with 128kbit). People got used to and accepted the quality decrease since they got the music for free and it was more convenient than buying a cd. The noticable quality decrease that you got with 128kbit mp3 was ok, since it was… yeah… good enough…

With Itunes Music Store the digital music went legal, but the sound quality was only 128kbit/s AAC. That was quite far from CD quality. Even if people where paying money for the music, they still recieved quite bad sound quality. Why did we accept to pay for bad sound quality? Probably because it was good enough for some. Around 2 years ago Apple increased the quality to 256kbit/s AAC VBR that sounds alot better. For the most of us, it is good enough.

The Spotify music streaming service uses OGG 160kbit/s compression in their music archive. Their OGG settings has some really disturbing differences compared to uncompressed music when it comes to cymbals and intensive parts that starts suddenly directly after a silent part, but for many people it is good enough. For premium users Spotify gives the possibility to listen to the music with a 320kbit/s compression mode that sounds very good. It is hard to tell the difference compared to the uncompressed original, it is good enough to even more people.

I think it is a big difference between compressed and lossless audio. A cd or FLAC (lossless audio) file sounds a bit more natural and not so “tense” as compressed music. For me the difference is worth paying for. I think I’m heading closer to the high fidelity group when it comes to music.

According to Wikipeida, good enough is an adapting process.. . It will be improved when it needs to (when it’s not good enough any more)… For every improvement it will be a bigger threat to high fidelity (or better quality). It will attract more and more customers. At some point the number of high fidelity customers will be too low. What will happen? It will become a very expensive niche or the product will disappear. I am wondering what will happen with the CD in a couple of years?

First of all I must point out that i am not organized when it comes to personal appointments and such but I’m really working on it. I think it is more interesting to find out solutions that make it impossible for me to not organize. These posts are the result from my investigation in some tech that will make it easier for you to organize your life…

Today we have lots of devices around us. Mobile phone and at least one computer. It should be able to control your calendar items in all of them. I think that the web-page-calender-solution is not good enough and want to use calendar applications and sync them all together.

This is possible by using one mother calendar that all your devices sync from. My choice is Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar because of their syncing abilities. There is a standard called CalDav that is supported right out of the box in many calendar software and mobile phones . Both Yahoo and Google calendar supports CalDav.

Mac OsX: iCal sync out of the box with CalDav. guide

Windows and Linux: Mozilla thunderbird or Sunbird (calendar only). They support CalDav.

Mobile device: I use goosync and it works great with my SonyEricsson G900! Another solution to use googles own google sync that should work with many different mobile phones.  Iphone supports CalDav right out of the box.

Widgets: Many widgets are available for google calendar or yahoo calendar. I use an Opera Widget at work to check the upcoming activities.

All the calendars will be in sync. If you change in one device, all will change the next time you sync them with your online calendar. Hope this was helpful for you.

By the way .. this solution does not require any cables.

I have been reading a lot of comparisons between the new web-browsers but most of them have forgotten one player, Opera.

Tested: Chrome vs IE8 vs Firefox 3.1 vs Safari 4

Which Is The Best Browser: IE8, Chrome, Safari Or Firefox 3.1

Opera released its alpha for the upcoming version 10 a while ago and it had a few interesting features. Higher speed of course but also 100% score of the ACID3 test. Recently Opera also announced another interesting feature, the Turbo mode:

Demo of Opera 10 with Turbo mode

Basically opera turbo is a kind of compressed tunnel between your browser and an opera-server that makes the browsing much quicker, especially on a netbook with 3g modem or connections with lower bandwidth. Opera themselves recommend users below 100kbit/s to use turbo mode, but I can clearly feel the performance enhancement on my 3g connection that is around 200-400kbit/s. When I tested, my speed benefits with turbo are usually around 2-4x. Opera is one step ahead again.

As always with opera, all features you need are just there without installing a lot of memory consuming plugins: Ad blocking, mouse gestures, Bittorent, Full screen mode, Notes, Bookmark, Multiple browser synchronization and so on. All comes with a fast engine, low memory usage and some Opera-unique features such as Turbo and “Fit to width”.

So before you choose your favorite, try Opera.

/David

They need to make the application powerful but also easy to use. It should fit all needs and different types of users. My favourite example of this is Microsoft Office. Computer professionals, old people, students, children.. . Everyone uses it differently and few are happy with it… On the other hand are there few alternatives to the application and the alternatives (openoffice, staroffice) has almost copied the application design from MS Office. They simply want it to be easy for the user to switch.

The Web 2.0-trend (basically HTML and Javascript combined) has enabled web “applications” and now there are several “office suites” online. They are free, comes with online storage and . .. they are very simple to use! On web applications, siplicity comes with a lot less functionality.

If application developers have web-apps in mind when they develop the next generation of applications i think they would be easy to use and advanced. .. It can probably be the best of two worlds combined. Easy and powerful.

Instead of combining, do several apps…

/David