Connectivity Technology

KPN bashing iPhone (je wordt niet groot door anderen te kleineren)

Ik begrijp KPN niet. Ze maken de mooiste reclame campagnes van Nederland, melken het precies ver genoeg uit. Neem bijvoorbeeld de goedemoggel campagne; een hit over heel Nederland!

En toen deze net niet meer kon, werd hij van de buis gehaald. Maar na een paar maanden -precies op tijd- gewoon versie twee:

Ook andere uitingen van KPN zijn altijd goed. Zo rijden er duizenden autos rond van KPN met campagne teksten, hebben ze mooie namen voor diensten ("flexibel") en weet men gewoon al jaren hoe men B2B en B2C marketing moet bedrijven: echte marketeers met verstand!

Wat ik dan niet begrijp is dat er schijnbaar sub afdelingkjes zijn die zelf autonoom wat mogen aankloten in de marge. En dan krijg je dus dit soort advertenties online:


(adwords op Google)

en


(reclame op Amazon)

en op duizenden andere plekken vond je en week of twee geleden anti reclames tegen KPN, want zo zal de gemiddelde cosument het zien. Negatieve reclames worden geassocieerd met de aanbieder, niet met de concurrent.

De iPhone is een fantastisch apparaat, dat kan je niet afzeiken. Als je dat wel doet, dan plas je tegen de wind in terwijl je probeert te mikken op de digital bohemian. Twee keer dom, toppers moet je niet afzeiken, ze bepalen de maat en opmaat. En tegen de wind in plassen, dat maakt dat je raar gaat ruiken (heb ik me laten vertellen :-) )

Dus KPN, niet huilebalken dat je de geweldige iPhone deal niet hebt gekregen, maar gewoon goede dingen doen.

"You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube" solved

Somehwo I always manage to screw stuff up. The other day I connected my iPhone to my Mac and it fired up -as it should- iTunes. However, iTunes told me that I should "activate my iPhone or that the SIM was damaged". I have a jailbroken iPhone and a fine SIM card, rebooting the iPhone "solved" the problem. However, it triggered something else that I only found out days later; the Youtube application still was not activated and tol me when I started it

You must first connect to iTunes with an Internet connection to enable Youtube

And then the application stopped. It seems that this is "normal" behaviour when you unlock your phone with ziPhone. However, I jailbroke my iPhone with iNdependence and it has been working fine for month.

The solution for ZiPhone users worked for me as well however. Some say that installing a "YouTube fix" program via the installer application will work, it did not for me. But all you have to do is copy three files to your iPhone, even if you do not know anything about UNIX an easy task.

Just download these threefiles. Start a SFTP client on your machine, copy the files in /var/root/Library/Lockdown to your desktop for backup reasons and copy the three files you downloaded to the same location. The userid to do this with is "root", the password "alpine".

Worked for me, I can use the Youtube application again, thanks to macriot!

OpenSource and clouds

There are two big trends in ICT; Service a a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). And I do think those two go hand in hand and are reflecting changes that are coming towards the ICT landscape. When I say "hand in hand", I do mean that they are complementary (like people are in a relationship) but also that the are in contrast of each other (like in many relationships). It is my opinion that you either outsource
(parts of your) IT activities, or build the solution yourself. You will either use a cloud to deliver your needs, or make your own cloud. It will either be service from the Microsoft's or you will have to build and manage the solution by yourself. You either well use a cheap commodity service with limited customisation to have the complete freedom to fit the software to your business objectives. Let me try to make clear why this is my opinion and how this influences your role as a user or provider of ICT services.

Recent trends have shown that release cycles of software have become shorter and shorter; to keep ahead of our competitors you have to be able to release early and often.

Release early and release often as a way to be able to quickly add new features for the future, fix problems for the current software and to prevent that software becomes obsolete ("end of life"). The perpetual beta as the new adagium. Where flickr was able to deploy during it's booming period a new codebase every 15 minutes, Microsoft was able to make a new operating 7 years. One is using the "service" (cloud) way of offering it's software, the other is using the "fat client" approach. So on one hand proprietary fat client software s facing competition from cloud based services. Sure Google Docs is not as feature rich or reliable as the Office suite of Microsoft but most agree that this is just a question of time and network reliability; in due time Google Apps will be good enough for the masses. Mind you, most if not all cloud services are proprietary and are doing well; salesforce as the most prominent example.

On the other hand, proprietary software faces problems from the Open Source alternatives. OpenOffice.org is a real competitor for MS-Office, the Ubuntu distribution beats Microsoft in many areas and MySQL is giving the absurd licence fees of Oracle a hard time. If proprietary closed source software wants to stay in business, they have to move. Not to a "long tail" niche but in the other direction, to the left side of the tail where you can offer a highly standardised yet customisable version of their product. That way they are able to release early and often and go for a low margin per product sold but sell a lot. So I do think that closed source software has to move towards a service model, away from the client into the data centre.

This means that the other trend (Open Source Software) -that has written "release early and often" written all over it- will dominate the Do It Yourself area. OSS will be used by people and companies that have time and resources to fulfill their needs via highly customisable software. You will see this first with applications that are by nature webbased; the can move to the cloud with less legacy baggage. Software with much interaction with local legacy products will follow later, much later in some case So Office Automation for existing companies will take some serious time to migrate to the cloud since hybrid solutions (some data local, some in the cloud) will be rather expensive and complex to many from security, identity and manageability point of view.

One of the webbased applications that will dominte the "DIY" will be Drupal. It i already the best Content Mangement System ("looking outside") on the market and it is moving more in the direction of the core of business processes ("looking inside"). Drupal will more and more be used as both a frontend system and a backend system; a system where you can aggregate and enrich data for internal use that can be pushed towards for example an external Drupal site.


If you follow this logic (proprietary moving towards commodity cloud service, Open Source solutions towards customisable client service) you might conclude with me that Open Surce CMS-es have nothing to fear from closed source CMS-es like sharepoint. Sharepoint will be the shell around your office data if you want to use that from a cloud perspective, Drupal will be used by enthusiast and enterprises that need more power and have more resources to kickstart and operate that power.

So some people will use an iPhone and the cloud service "Mobile me", others will build Android. Some will use digital TV solutons from their cable providers, others will build MythTV. Some will run an OpenID service themselves, others will use it from a Google/Yahoo! And some will use voicemail (the most used cloud service in the world) and others prefer a local answering machine. I, I use all kind of differtent services, cloud and local, like most people will do.

PS: This posting as very late for last years' Drupal prediction posting or very early for next year, whatever makes more sense to you

PPS: Sure, you can have Open Source "SaaS" solutions as well, for example hosted and managed Drupal instalations but it will be a niche crossover, if that makes sense to you. Also, when I say "build", it can also mean "let other build", aka buy.


PPPS: I do think that SaaS is a complete wrong term; it is a technological acronym. First, people do not want "Software" as a service, but they want a service (as a service). As long as the ICT things about acronyms like SaaS, true adoption of using a "Service as A Service" will only stall. It is time to stop the technology lingo where it should stop; at the door of the customer and think of services instead of software. Second, Software as a Service is a very limited view on what truly can be accomplished with services; it might be disk capacity from the cloud (like S3, Storage as a Service), it might be CPU capacity (like EC2, CPU as a Service), it might be housing (Rackspace as a Service), hosting (Linux box as a Service) or to give an everyday example we are used to, voicemail (Answeringmachines as a Service). Therefor I plea to stop using the term SaaS and use XaaS ("Anything as a Service") or use SaaS for the acronym "Service as a Service", whatever makes more sense to you.

Drupal Barcode module

One of the most interesting modules I have seen in a while to come out for Drupal is the mobile codes one. The ability to combine mobile power, location based services and Drupal will open up a complete new field.

Implementations can be to add the barcode in a print.css so people can just point and click to visit the article if they have a printed copy instead of typing in URL's.

But you can also combine the real world with the online (like that is not real) world, with many mobile phones being able to process the image (like my iPhone) you can make "Location Based Services" like shotcode does.

It is available for Drupal 6 only, and to be honest that is a good thing. We always have a "break with yesterday, build tomorrow" attitude and while there are a lot of people still deploying 5 in production right now, in one or two month 5 will be yesterday. And 7 tomorrow...

Boy, the future waits for no-one, this sure goes fast.

Who will be the first to come up with a new way of using this module?"

Teletekst applicatie van e-office voor iPhone

Hulde voor e-office! Hun teletekst applicatie voor de iPhone is echt geweldig! Snel, mooie userinterface en natuurlijk, teletekst is 100 jaar oud maar met deze applicatie voelt het alsof je op een "mobiele website" zit, hetgeen wellicht meer zegt over de userinterface van de meeste mobiele websites. Smiling

Als je een jailbroken iPhone hebt, een must om te instaleren! Voeg http://teletekst.e-office.com/iphone/repo/ toe als repo aan je installer en je bent er. Een nadel, waarom zulke lange URL's als je weet dat je ze moet inkloppen op een iPhone e-office? iphone.e-office.com/repo/ was beter geweest. Maar okay, los van nederlansche gezeik, een geweldigge applicatie!

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