Dan’s Blog (2.0)

In about an hour, I will board the final flight of my round-the-world trip, from San Francisco back to London. I’ve mostly been in Beijing and San Francisco, and I’ve transited through Singapore and Hong Kong on the way. The most grueling part by far was Wednesday, where I boarded a flight at 9 AM in Beijing and after hitting Singapore and Hong Kong I finally ended up in San Francisco at 8 PM San Francisco time - that’s roughly a full day (24 hours) of traveling. The highlight from a travel perspective was flying on the new Singapore Airlines A380. This is an absolutely amazing aircraft. What struck me most was how quiet it was - others have commented on the quietness, but I haven’t seen any comments about how much bigger the lavatories were. This was a nice touch. It was the first time I’ve been able to wash my face in an airplane lavatory and not get water all over the floor - which I think is a significant quality-of-life improvement. The sweeping staircase at the front of the plane is a nice touch. I can’t wait until the A380 shows up on some of my more commonly traveled routes. This was my first flight on Singapore Airlines. They are certainly a very nice airline, but honestly I still prefer Virgin Atlantic.

Beijing was a basically what any pre-olympic city is: a mass of construction. On my one day of being a tourist, I was able to take in the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City - both of which are primarily outdoor, which is a shame as it was raining quite hard. I managed to snap some photos - I was particularly drawn to the architectural detail and intricate carving. Flight boarding now - more notes soon.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:39 under Travel
Tags: a380 www2008 web2expo

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I’ve just had confirmation that, for my flight out to Beijing for the upcoming WWW2008 conference in April, I will be flying the first leg on a Singapore Airlines Airbus A-380 “superjumbo.” The flight will be London to Singapore on the 18th of April and will kick off a round the world trip that I will be taking that week, first hitting Beijing for the W3C Advisory Committee meeting and the WWW2008 conference (where I will be co-chairing a workshop on advanced mobile Web applications) and then flying on to San Francisco where I will be speaking about the Mobile Web and Mobile Ajax at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo event. It’s going to be a very exciting week, tackling two very different Web conferences and helping to bring a mobile flavor to both, while simultaneously circumnavigating the globe and hopefully taking in some more sights than just hotel rooms and airport lounges along the way. But clearly, one highlight (for me) will be getting to fly part of the way on the A-380. I have to admit: I’m a bit of an air travel nerd, and I’ve been following the saga of the A-380 ever since it was announced by Airbus.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:06 under Mobile Web, Travel
Tags: A380, Airbus, mobea, MobileWeb, W3C, Web2Expo, WWW2008

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Why, in this day and age, when they can send a man to the Moon, is it so frickin’ difficult to tell what time it is? Specifically, what makes it so seemingly difficult for mobile devices, which are connected to a public network, to tell what time it is? Surely mobile connected devices should be our most trusted time sources. The network they’re connected to is constantly pumping out a time-sync. So what is the problem? Three examples:

I normally carry around a couple of devices. Most recently, these have been consistently unreliable sources of the time. The Blackberry has two time-sync options: network and “blackberry.” Neither of them ever yield a correct time (as measured by my Mac, whose time-sync works flawlessly when measured against the BBC).

The N73 also has a “network sync” option which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I have often found that the time is wildly off – by as much as a few hours. It also doesn’t help matters that a change of this setting requires a reboot.

I have to manually set the time zone on the Blackberry but the Nokia N73 somehow can figure that out for itself.

I just came out of the other end of the Channel Tunnel and my iPhone hasn’t picked up the fact that I’m now in Central European Time – so it’s still showing an hour behind.

In this fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever for your device to know the correct time. This becomes especially important when you’re sharing media (as, for example, a number of people are contributing camera-phone images into a photo pool which you then want to be able to view sequentially). I constantly find myself on conference calls with multiple people in different time zones and knowing the correct time can be extremely important in such situations (and don’t even get me started about how most software just does not know how to deal with meeting planning that happens across multiple time zones or meetings that are being scheduled in a time zone other than your own – the software on Blackberry is a rare exception – I often find myself using the Blackberry to schedule a meeting even when the PC is right in front of me). So what’s going on here and how do we fix it? I’m open to suggestions.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:02 under Mobility, Travel
Tags: blackberry, iPhone, Mobility, Nokia, rants, time

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I know I haven’t posted here in a while. Don’t worry — I’m not dead. I am taking a trip with my kids in the States and Candada. For daily-ish updates, check out my jaiku micro-blog.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 2:36 under Blogs, Travel

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On my recent trip to Greece with my wife to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, I made myself one promise: I would not use the Web for the whole week. By and large, I kept this promise, however I was not completely off the grid. While we were island hopping, I was snapping pictures with my N73 and using Zonetag to send them up to FlickR. The results are available here.

ZoneTag is a nifty downloadable application and service, developed by Yahoo! Research, which allows you to (among other things) upload images directly to FlickR from your camera phone. Of course, there are plenty of applications that allow you to do this, but the ZoneTag difference is that by using the CellID, and cross-referencing this against a database of CellIDs that they maintain, ZoneTag can accurately geotag your photos even if your device doesn’t have a a GPS built in. ZoneTag also learns CellID locations through users using the system and telling it their location. It’s “leveraging collective intelligence.”

Anyway, apart from being a bit of geeky fun, there was a method to this madness. Publishing these photos allowed our kids (being looked after by my saintly mother and sister) to keep track of our travels. It was like being able to send postcards instantaneously. And unlike MMS, sending an image with Zonetag does not compress / reduce the images to the Nth degree - the original images with their original detail are sent up. Now, granted this is the Greek islands and you can pretty much just wave a camera around snapping randomly and get great pictures, but I actually think these turned out pretty well. My only complaint (a Nokia complaint, not a Zonetag one) is the high level of compression (which I’ve complained about before) and some softness in the corners (which to a certain extent can’t be avoided with small lenses, but I would have expected more from a “Carl Zeiss” lens. (Carl must be spinning in his grave.)

I was also trying out a new product from Yahoo’s Berkeley labs - Zurfer. Zurfer is a Java application that allows you to browse FlickR images. The Yahoo! labs guys call it Zonetag’s “little brother.” It’s got a slick and responsive user interface that’s simple but also powerful in its task: enabling you to browse photos. You can browse your own photos, your contacts’ photos or (more interestingly) photos around you.

What would I like to see more of from these guys? For starters, I’d like to be able to upload pictures after the fact, and in batch, instead of having to go through the process for each and every photo I take when that photo is taken. I’d also like the ZoneTag UI to be built more into the camera/viewer functions (send to ZoneTag should be another option under “send” when I’m viewing images). As for Zurfer, I really like the concept, and it was fun to use, but I wonder if this couldn’t be built inside Nokia’s Series-60 browser as a Web App and thereby spare people the hassle of downloading yet another app to their phone. Then again, if it were inside the browser I wouldn’t have been able to keep my promise.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:50 under Travel, mobile 2.0
Tags: Greece, N73, Nokia, Yahoo!Labs, ZoneTag, Zurfer

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So here I am, sitting in a panel at South by Southwest on “designing for convergent devices.” As I walked in, I caught the tail end of something that seemed really cool - a service called Zannel that does user gen video content with a mobile and Web UI. Forget Youtube for mobile - these guys have already done it. They’ve designed for simplicity, and it’s great that the designers and app developers here at SXSW are getting that message. Also interesting to see that the SXSW.mobi site is getting a lot of discussion here - and people aren’t asking “what is dotMobi?” - there really seems to be a lot of recognition here of what dotMobi is and more generally what a mobile friendly Web site is (works on your phone). That’s pretty cool.

Just now listening to Denise Burton from Frog Design talking about the challenges of 4-way navigation based design (especially with regard to focus state). She stressed the importance of animations and transitions. YES. This is exactly the challenge that the WICD mobile profile seeks to address - being able to design consistent user experience that responds in a coherent way to user input, and be able to use SVG-based animations and transitions to respond to user feedback.
Other notes:

I had joked that they would probably put all the Interactive content off in a back room somewhere to keep the nerds away from the film and music people. Well, it’s no joke. These SXSW Interactive panels are off in what seems like an annex building only accessible by going up and escalator walking to the back of the building and then down an elevator. Still, a good 100 people here just in this panel (one of 9 running here at 10:00 am on a Sunday).

A quick travel note: There is a fine line between international air terminal and bus station. Delta Airlines have crossed that line in JFK. Unbelievably disorganized entry to the terminal. Staff who can’t tell you anything useful (like which line to stand in). It all felt like a cattle call, and I hadn’t even got to Austin yet. To be fair to Delta, airline travel in the States just generally stinks and seems to be all about being incoherently shouted at these days. Adding to the fun was that the flight from New York to Austin sat at the gate after we boarded for about an hour due to an incident on the previous flight where a passenger had apparently “vandalized” a seat. So we had to wait while New York’s finest came on to snap polarids of the “crime scene.” In the end, I got into Austin at 1 am instead of 10 pm as intended.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 15:50 under Mobile Web, Travel, mobile 2.0
Tags: Convergence, dotMobi, FrogDesign, mobile2.0, MobileWeb, SXSW, sxswi, WICD, Zannel

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I’m back in the UK after almost 10 days in Spain. We held the Mobile Web Initiative Best Practices meeting where much good work was done. I sampled the famous cider of the Asturias region. I drove to Bilbao and visited the Guggenheim (and met with our great Spanish R&D folks). I spoke at Fundamentos Web on the topic of the Mobile Web and as a bonus I got to meet lots of Internet notables, such as Ben Hammersley, Chris Wilson and Dave Shea (I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy). All in all, not a bad trip. Lots of photos on Flickr (uploaded using ShoZu, of course) and more thoughts later after I have a chance to recuperate.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:47 under Travel, Web

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This is the 2nd time this year I’ve traveled through Madrid’s beautiful new airport. It’s still wowing me. For my trip to Oviedo to go to W3C Mobile Web Initiative meetings this week and speak at Fundamentos Web next week, the sting of having to transit through Madrid as opposed to taking a direct flight was greatly alleviated by knowing that I would be going through the new airport. It’s beautifully designed. It’s efficient. It’s well signed. It’s spacious. It’s comfortable. It’s modern. It’s usable. It puts Heathrow’s dark, cramped, grimy corridors to shame. When I first came through here, after having traveled through Madrid’s old airport many times in the past, I wondered if I had been delivered to the right city. It’s a great start to what will hopefully be a great trip.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:15 under Travel

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Here’s snapshot of my day:

1. Present some of the work we’ve been doing in Mobile Web Initiative and dotMobi to some important internal stakeholders
2. Go to Heathrow
3. Get my iris scanned
4. Fly to Düsseldorf
5. On the plane, write a use case for my friend Phil’s Web Content Labels working group
6. When I get off the plane, immediately jump into chairing the Mobile Web Best Practices weekly conference calls where we have to finally resolve to publish a “2nd last call” despite numerous contentious issues being raised from all quarters
7. Convene and host a conference call about innovation in Vodafone
8. Have a beer

At this writing, I’ve done steps 1-3, and in the mean time a company “restructuring” has been announced. Suffice to say: it’s one of those days. I can’t wait until #8.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:05 under Mobility, Travel

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So here I am stuck in Germany while the terrible events in London unfolded today. The family is fine. Thanks to everyone who has contacted me today to check up on us. Now I only hope I can get home tomorrow morning.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:32 under London, Terrorism, Travel

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