(Originally Published on infoSync) Woohooo… buzz word attack! In the red corner, Instant Messaging (IM) with the likes of ICQ, AIM and MSN Messenger; all having turned into amazing success stories on the Desktop. Mirabilis, the Israeli company that brought us the first of them all, ICQ, ended up being bought by AOL in 1998, only 12 months after founding, for over 280 million USD – in cash, not counting the additional performance incentives!
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Monthly Archives: April 2002
Will IM kill MMS
Wireless DECT Headset
Wonderful. I just got this thing set up:
http://www.audioline.de/telefone/schnurlo/sl08.htm
It’s a portable DECT phone with a headset and costs only 50 EUR, which is far cheaper than anything else on the market. It’s nice and small and seems to work like a charm.
On a related note I was at the Germany – USA ice hockey game here in Cologne yesterday. Over 18000 fans and 99% germans of course. It’s interesting that when the US team came in you saw them scating around on the ice and they recited the names. Then the german team came in, spotlights, music, pictures of each player on the overhead display, the crowd roaring 
I presume it’s the same when germany plays in the US though. The cool thing is, germany won 5 to 3 and you can imagine how the crowd went wild. Intense. I think I have to go to a few more hockey games.
The thing I have to think about now is if I should go to the US WWF show on the first of may. Not that I like wrestling but with this being the only show in germany … it might be fun to watch the show.
Testing i-mode
For the US people among you, AT&T recently launched mMode which is similar to i-mode, which again, came from NTT DoCoMo, who have invested in AT&T Wireless. They have also invested in KPN. KPN own e-plus. Now e-plus launched i-mode. Now I am getting the phone for a month to test it. Wopiiiii Sadly I can only spend 50 EUR and anything above that I have to pay for myself. Would have liked it unlimited. Ah well, I can only keep it a month anyway
Tapping into Wireless
It’s published. I recently wrote a review of the book Tapping into Wireless which Dave Mock co-wrote for infoSync. This was followed up with a long talk with Dave about the wireless technology. I am also happy that I am explicitly thanked in the book for the help I gave for a European perspective. Now that my name is in a book already I need it on a book next
Tapping Into Wireless
(Originally published on infoSync) The sub title of this book by Tom Taulli and Dave Mock reads: “The savvy investor’s guide to profiting from the wireless wave”, which might seemingly put it out of the reading list of those of our readers who are not investing their money in the stock market. While this is true about many aspects of the book, the knowledge that can be extracted from the book can help anyone who wants to understand the twisted interactions of the wireless market.
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Israel – Palestinia
I just read this on the TMF discussion boards:
“Negotiations In Israel”
The Prime Minister of Israel sits down with Arafat
at the beginning of negotiations regarding the
resolution of the conflict. The Prime Minister
requests that he be allowed to begin with a story.
Arafat replies, “Of course.”
The Prime Minister begins his story: “Years before
the Israelites came to the Promised Land and settled
here, Moses led them for 40 years through the desert.
The Israelites began complaining that they were thirsty
and, lo and behold, a miracle occurred and a stream
appeared before them. They drank their fill and then
decided to take advantage of the stream to do some
bathing — including Moses. When Moses came out
of the water, he found that all his clothing was missing.
“Who took my clothes?” Moses asked those around him.
“It was the Palestinians,” replied the Israelites–”
“Wait a minute,” objected Arafat immediately, “there were
no Palestinians during the time of Moses!”
“All right,” replies the Prime Minister, “Now that we’ve got
that settled, let’s begin our negotiations.”
Nice walk in the sunshine
It’s beautiful weather here and we just went for a walk in a park nearby after setting out on the balcony with our feet on the table and reading. The walk was wonderful and refreshing and it’s nice to see the park slowly getting full again. There is even a swan breeding with the mail watching that nobody was getting too close.
The most unusual thing, for that park, was a big group of sheep though and there was one of them where we were just not sure if it was the result from an out of the ordinary mating ritual between a sheep and the watch dog. 
Meet Eric the Sheeg.
While I am at it, more photos, from my holiday in Egypt and some more pics that I just think are good can be found here (password: friends).
Tricking Carnivore
There has been a lot of outcry about Carnivore, the FBI system used to tab internet traffic. Now a student has presented his idea of an armored data vault at a privacy enhancing technologies workshop. The idea is as follows. A computer in a network is setup to log all traffic on that network and store it, encrypted, with the only key able to unlock the information kept by the vault. If the FBI wants the information they submit a digitally signed court order which the vault recognized and gives out the information in that order and only that information. The processor involved is an IBM 4758 cryptographic coprocessor, designed to destroy itself if it detects an intrusion attempt. Now how cool is that?
MS going mobile
If you want to know a bit more on how Microsoft is trying to wrestle it’s way into the mobile world then this article is a highly suggested reading. It clearly shows the two ways that MS can go. Either from the server side or from the user side.
The current mobile future
I finally exported the PowerPoint presentation from my talk about mobility at Möbius to a HTML file for all those that care read it. It’s only the PP file so some things might be harder to understand. I thought about writing a word document about it but am not sure yet. Lots to write there. We will see. Here it is.
