(prompted by many things)
CONSUMER SERVICES
Payment: Starhub (mobile operator in Singapore), will offer the payment service in conjunction with EZ-Link (government-owned company that operates a contactless payment service based on cards with near-field communication) technology. EZ-Link cards (or phones with embedded NFC chips, and a Java applet) can be used to pay for public transport in Singapore as well as purchases in some stores by waving them over a reader. A similar initiative was announced in September by SingTel and NETS (Network for Electronic Transfers) which operates a card-based payment system set up by local banks.
Social networks: MySpace will open its platform broadly to outside developers. Since opening its platform to external developers in May, Facebook has built up a catalog of about 6,000 applications, which it credits with increasing its members' engagement on the site and their enjoyment of it (Facebook's has grown to 47m active users today from 12 million in December). Last month MySpace had 114m unique visitors worldwide (up 72%), Facebook had 52m unique visitors (up 270%).
VoIP: Hutchison is offering free calls between Skype users through 3G mobile phones (2-megapixel camera, MPEG3 player, Bluetooth, 16MB expandable to 1GB with a Micro SD memory card). in UK, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau, and Sweden. Their new phone has a large button with Skype's logo that's used to launch calls and IMs. In the UK the handset is free with a a contract (starting at $25 a month).
BUSINESS SERVICES
Capgemini (France) has introduced Customer Care and Intelligence service (CC&I), that focuses on aligning clients' customer care operations with their overall business objectives, rather than merely improving the efficiency of customer care. It will become a stand-alone offering within the company’s BPO portfolio. The service will initially be offered to clients in the energy, utilities, and telecommunications services sectors. CC&I typically starts with specialty customer queues, and then extends the business and process insights to the volume, commodity part of an organization’s customer care.
UI
Mobile UI: Mozilla's mobile Firefox should run on Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux.
Mobile UI: Adobe wants to see 1 billion phones shipped with Flash Lite (a cut-down version of Flash Player that runs small apps). Flash Lite has been shipped on 300m
devices, and this year Adobe expects 250m Flash Lite phones to ship, giving it 27% of the global phone market. The most popular mobile application platform JME will come preinstalled on about 500 m devices this year. There are 3 billion mobile phones in use today far more than the 1 billion PCs currently in operation.
Mobile UI: Symbian is adding a new graphics architecture (ScreenPlay) as well as enhanced networking capabilities (Freeway) to its mobile OS. ScreenPlay allows for a layered effect (where different applications can deliver information and graphics on one screen) and is designed for the delivery of high-definition video, gaming, and animated interface (implemented in SW on low-end devices, and in HW on high end devices). Freeway is an IP networking architecture that will allow for seamless switching between high-speed networks such as 3G and WiMax.
Web UI: WebEx Connect desktop technology will host Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand.
This will also give users the ability to integrate WebEx meetings with CRM prospecting activity reports.
Web UI: Google Web Tookit (GWT) is a popular way to develop Ajax applications (Java developers can create Ajax without needing to know JavaScript). This four-part seriesdemonstrates how to use the GWT and XForms to create a dynamic Web applications - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xformsgwt3.html
Web UI: XForms seven presentations on XForms (design experience, end-to-end solution development, case studies and driving business value through integration) are scheduled for 03 December at the XML 2007 Conference (Boston). Sessions include:
"Seeing is Believing: Intuitive Visual XForms Design" -
demonstrating that XForms can offer an order of magnitude simplification to the design and development of business applications.
"The Pure Declarative Approach: XForms in Real Estate Forms Case Study" - using almost no Java/JavaScript, mostly XML Schemas (to capture requirements), XML transforms (to create XForms), native XML databases (to store data),
Schematron (to store business rule checks), XQuery (to manipulate and report on XML datasets)
"Creating a Custom Editor for Everything" - how to use XForms to create a custom editor for an XML vocabulary
"XForms and the eXist XML database: a Perfect Couple" - how the XForms 1.1
submission module (which supports REST) can be used to perform CRUD
operations in eXist and how XForms can directly submit
XML database queries using XQuery 1.0 language implemented by eXist.
"XForms, XHTML, and RDFa for Internet-Facing Applications" - The applications include desktop widgets and gadgets, pure Ajax browser applications, web applications that use browser plug-ins such as formsPlayer, and complete standalone desktop applications, running independently of a browser.
"Composition and Choreography of Web Components in XForms" - a programming model for composing and controlling Web 2.0 documents based on the Model-View-Controller design of XForms.
RULES
BP/BR - SAP AG is buying Yasu small Indian software company that makes business rules management software to help beef up the BPM capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.
LANGUAGES
F#: MS plans to integrate F# into its Visual Studio. F# is based on the concepts of functional programming. Functional languages treat computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions.
SOA: SCA (Service Component Architecture) stands a good chance of being adopted. MS won't adopt it willingly as enable portability, but open systems vendors will. It is likely that it can avoid the probably CORBA had (partially the demand now for inter-operability is so much greater). Languages that will be supported in SCA cover most popular (non-Microsoft languages) e.g. COBOL, Ruby, Java, C, C++, BPEL, PHP etc.
DEVICES
Laptop: Asustek's Eee PC a low-cost ($340) laptop designed for children and emerging markets sells well. It is less than 1 kg, 7-inch LCD screen, Xandros/Linux, 900MHz Celeron M, 512MB of DDR2 DRAM, 4GB flash drive, built-in camera, speakers and a mic, and has 40 applications (Skype, Firefox, etc.).
Laptop: Intel's new Diamondville chips (extremely low voltage, Core 2 Duo processor, 10 watts) are aimed at low cost laptops ($150-200).
Tablet: Nokia N810 ($479) is a Linux-based WiFi tablet with, Mozilla browse, a camera, Skype, music player, GPS, touch screen and a slide-out full keyboard. It can be connected to cellular data networks via a Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone.
PC: Last quarter there were 67m PCs shipped worldwide (up 16% increase, attributed to a strong demand for laptops). Market shares: HP has 20%, Dell 17%, Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba (the next 3 biggest)
Phones driving SaaS: MS's software-plus-services (i.e. attempting to extending its hegemony on PC, to the on-lines services market). CEO says: "There's no better way then the cell networks of the world to make this model happen," "The PC is the most powerful device, but the phone is the most popular,"
Phones: Microsoft built a custom Windows Mobile UI for a T-Mobile USA phone built by HTC. The Shadow has a home screen very different from other Windows Mobile phones with a slide a wheel to navigate through icons that take people directly to e-mail, music player and photos. This really seems to be a way to recognise that people want to distance themselves from the MS's usual offerings - awful UIs (not mention unreliable, slow, resource hungry and insecure) Cf. Apple's offerings.
Displays: Sharp LCD measures 55mm across the diagonal and is just 0.68 mm thick (currently the thinnest cell phone screen). AUO's screen is 47mm and 0.69mm thick. Most phones today have screens 1.5-2.5mm thick.
e-Paper: NTT are working on a keypad that changes icons depending on which application is being use. More work must be done to improve the technology e.g. response time, and a move to active matrix
STORAGE
Drives: Hitachi will provide 4Tb desktop and 1Tb laptop drives by around 2010
Solid-state: Alienware introduce a 64GB solid-state storage option for its desktop computers.
Solid-state: FlashMate combines HW, firmware and SW in a system application subsystem that manages a notebook computer's hard drive and enables notebook users to access content on the hard disk drive, without having to power on the notebook e.g. MP3 files, digital pictures, access email (avoiding Windows lengthy boot process).
MODELLING
DSL: Borland is adding domain-specific language capabilities to Together package for application modeling. The DSL Toolkit in Together 2007 is intended to overcome the complexity of UML models by enabling project teams to build model notations aligned with a business domain.
MANAGEMENT
Mobile: MS System Center Mobile Device Manager IT administrators manage and secure Windows Mobile phones (focusing on its closed stack approach). Nokia supports the OMA DM (Open Mobile Alliance Device Management) standard in its devices so that any standards-compliant management console can communicate with the devices. Windows Mobile does not. Intellisync (Nokia) had to build a separate client to install on Windows Mobile devices in order to support Windows Mobile phones in the management software.
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