By Posted on Posted in Misc No Comments

Great article on BBC on interplanetary communications: "Mars to Earth: How to send HD video between planets" http://bbc.in/StPewZ Brought back to mind a lunch-time table discussion we held at W3C  #tpac  last week in Lyon (with +Hadley Beeman +Douglas Schepers and others..)  The discussion was about the interplanetary Web. Can we imagine a Web that could extend across multiple planets, and if so how would this Web be different than the "World Wide Web" we currently know…and what (if any) changes would be required to underlying Web technologies? Looks like there is plenty of work on the Interplanetary Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet) and potentially some work at the Web level going on at ESA (http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMFQJHWP0H_index_0.html)… Anything else going on out there? Any +NASA projects? Paging +Ariel Waldman… #blog   Mars Rover Curiosity is sending us HD photos – but will we one day be able to receive HD video from the Red Planet?

By Posted on Posted in Misc No Comments

As an experiment, I'm reposting my posts from Google+ over to my blog in order to keep an independent record and to share with people who either aren't on or don't want to use Google+. Brought to you through the magic of the Google+ API – thanks +Ade Oshineye.  Google Plus Plus Plus. By Daniel Appelquist on November 4th, 2012. Ok – I realized recently that I hadn’t posted on this blog since January of this year. However, I have been very active in putting my…

By Posted on Posted in Politics, Technology No Comments

I was greatly moved  yesterday after listening to the This American Life episode on conditions at Foxconn, the plant in China than makes (among other things) iPhones, iPads, and most other Apple products. I just made a post on Facebook relating to this and a related Forbes article and I encourage you to chime in there or here. Is this just “business as usual,” or is there something wrong happening here that needs to be fixed?

By Posted on Posted in BlueVia, mobile 2.0 2 Comments

Today, I start my new job as Head of Product Management for BlueVia, a unit of the newly forming Telefónica Digital. Why, after 10 years at Vodafone, have I chosen to pull up stakes and move to BlueVia? The answer is simple: BlueVia are actually doing something that I’ve been talking about doing since 2006 and even earlier – they are taking operator network capabilities and exposing them (via APIs) to Web and app developers. And they are bringing these APIs to real grass-roots developers. Read what I wrote in 2006 about exposing enablers. Most of the other predictions in that post have been borne out (mobile Web, connected apps, social media, etc…) but mobile operators have so far not been able to expose the capabilities of their networks to developers in a simple, straight-forward way (a-la market-leading Amazon Web Services). Well – BlueVia are actually doing that: taking the capabilities of the network and making them available to developers through an accessible developer program. If you combine that capability with the emerging idea that applications will exist in the cloud and be accessed by users through a range of connected devices, the important role such a provider can play becomes clear. I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. Vodafone is a great company and working there has been a fantastic experience. I’ve worked with some great people on some amazing projects. I’m immensely proud of the work I’ve done there. The work I’ve been engaged in at Vodafone has often focused on bringing the Web …

So-Long Big Red; Hello Cool Blue Read more »

By Posted on Posted in W3C, Web 2 Comments

It’s time to have a serious talk about #!. If you’re a sharp-eyed Web user, it will not have escaped your attention that, for many Web sites (Twitter among them), the characters #! have started to appear in the address bar when visiting certain pages. Try it now. Go to my page on Twitter but check the URL I’m sending you to first – it should be “http://twitter.com/torgo”. Now – when you visit that link, check the address bar at the top of the page. Abracadabra, a mysterious #! (pronounced “hash bang” in geek-parlance, and we are firmly in geek territory here) has interposed itself between the twitter.com and the torgo bits of the URL. The appearance of #! is an artefact of a certain approach to Web application architecture. Many in the Web community have decried this approach (see more detail in Jeni Tennison’s blog entry), but to cut a long story short, the argument against using #! has been painted as largely academic by many Web application developers. This morning, I woke up and found my (very) local paper, the Archer, had been slipped through my mail slot. Something drew my eye to a box at the bottom of the page. “The Archer is now on twitter,” it pronounces. “Follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/TheArcherN2.” Ok, #!. Now, it’s personal. I’m not pointing fingers at the good folks at the Archer, by the way. They just did what Twitter told them to do. In good faith, they copied and pasted the URL that appeared at the top …

#!: This Time It’s Personal Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 No Comments

[This is a re-posting of a two-part blog post originally published on the Mobile 2.0 blog. For a discount code for mobile 2.0, please DM me on Twitter or leave a comment here and I’ll send you one.] If you’ve ever seen one of those NASA simulations of galaxies colliding, you’ll know it’s a messy business. Symmetric spirals, serenely evolving and progressing through the universe on their own, suddenly encounter each other. The result is a violent conflagration. Plumes of previously well-ordered stars go shooting off into space, only to be drawn back in and shot out again in another directions; seeming child galaxies form, only to be absorbed again in more churning cataclysms. The time-scales over which this occurs are, of course, astronomical. At human-scale time, all we can ever perceive is a moment, frozen in time. We are in the middle of such an event right now in both the Web and mobile industries. Our galaxies are colliding; they have been colliding for a number of years; and they will continue to collide for years to come. The result will be a new landscape, a new ecosystem, a new industry. What that industry will look like is not clear, but we can guess at its shape. At this year’s mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, we are once again going to take a stab at doing just this. In 2006, before our first Mobile 2.0 event, when I first sensed the colliding of these two galaxies, I wrote a post about what I thought …

When Galaxies Collide Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Web 2 Comments

I’m fed up with the state of online (and offline) “sharing.” I’m talking about the experience of seeing something you like and sharing that sentiment (and a suitable URI*) with a community you care about (your Twitter followers, for example). I had three sharing experiences over the long weekend, none of which were very satisfying. Example 1: The TechCrunch Europe article on start-up frustrations with BT’s Fibre roll-out. I was trying out an App, Pulse, and ended up reading the original article through this. Pulse is essentially a smart feed reader that downloads and caches articles – one advantage being that you can read them while off-line. (NB: when will someone write an HTML5 “app” that uses local storage to do the same thing?) Anyway, I wanted to share the article using the app’s built in Twitter button. That brought up a pop-up int he app which gave me a link shortened with Pule’s own link shortener (pulsene.ws). I wasn’t too comfortable with this because while I’m happy for the company behind Pulse to know that I’m using their app to send the tweet, I’m not so happy for them to be able to collect information on who’s reading my tweet. Plus I don’t know what that user experience will be when any other random person pulls up that URI. And I have no other option to use a third party shortener. Example 2: The David Mitchell column in the Observer. This was the most dysfunctional. First of all, I had been reading the article itself in …

Can I Share Something With You? Read more »