Cisco to buy Skype?

TechCrunch rumors that Cisco might acquire Skype right before their IPO.

If they really do, that'd make for quite interesting Linksys boxes with Skype built in... Just add your Skype Phone, or TV, ...
Skype by Cisco on Linksys by Cisco ...

Then you'd no longer need to have your PC running to place or receive Skype calls - or video calls.
Bad for the Telcos...

I like it :-)

Fantastic error message

You just have to love digg for this error message:

Facebook vs Identity - again

Well, it should read "Facebook vs Privacy - again"... but the point I want to make is, that Facebook could have been an Identity platform.
In a way they are... not only in a way, if you go and count the sites that allow you to login with your facebook account. But that only makes them an Identity provider.

An Identity platform needs more than just a secure single sign-on.
For example authorization: you should be able to finely tune who has access to what. That's why the social graph (or your address book, if you will) is so valuable. Facebook does have most of the data and means to enable proper authorization: who can see my wall-posts, who is allowed to contact me, ...

It would have been easy to extend from there.

But with Places they once again proved that they rather go the pure marketing platform way, instead.

1. Places is mostly opt out. It is somewhat (but not fully, it seems) enabled by default, until you disable it.
   Not a good default - privacy-wise.
2. Other people (your friends) can check you in at any place they want.
3. You can't control your places. Anyone can check in at your home...[1]

This is all good and fine for a geo platform (like foursquare)... but not for an identity platform

To Facebook (the company) it seems more important to publish stuff about you (and make money from the ads) than to have you properly manage your identity. That's fine, too, but that makes them a marketing platform only...

Sorry.

--
[1] different issue, I know, but it still troubles me.

How to get Thunderbird attachments as read/write...

This has been bugging me for years now... ( I guess ).
When I double click e.g. an OpenOffice attachment in Thunderbird, the document is then opened as read-only in OpenOffice.

There's 1000+1 reasons on the web why this is a) intended and b) good... but I still did not like it.

Some (short) analysis revealed, that Thunderbird is actually setting the read-only attribute of the attachment, so OpenOffice was not to blame.
Easy to google from that and find a really good tip here:

One has to set the configuration value browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit to false [1]

E voila... Works fine now.
No unintended side effects so far.
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[1] you might have to create it...

ProfiMail for the E71

Thanks to the hint of a colleague, I installed ProfiMail for the E71. Well, I needed the hint, because I never intended to install yet another 3rd party app on my E71...first of all, because this never increases the stability of the phone, and secondly, I thought it would only be cumbersome...

I couldn't have been more wrong.

ProfiMail (v3, 3.28 to be more specific) has everything you want from a professional mobile email client.

• full imap/imaps support.
• "push" email... well, it's "only" IMAP IDLE but thats good enough for me[1]
• multiple accounts
• full folder support on IMAP, and it allows you to move an email message from folder to folder.
• user interface is very OK
• proper attachment support
• proper address book support

Seems like the creators actually use it themselves or have a good feedback process... it's the little things like the feature to check mail on startup and immediately go to the inbox when you start the email client...

Access to it is quite easy, if you map the application to the long-press of the Messaging one-touch-key, then it's just one (long) press on the envelope button, and there you go.

I seem to prefer it over the built-in iPod/iPhone mail client... but that's probably only because of the physical keyboard... which I stll prefer over the virtual touch keyboard.

--
[1] and it's enabled on my mail server...

Surprise

Today I finally managed to get my eCard to work as a citizen card ("Bürgerkarte") with more than just the federal tax online aplication ("Finanz Online").
I could - for the first time ever - access the federal pension plan application (PVA) as well.

It was not easy, and I really don't know what I did differently with the (I guess) 3rd approach, but it finally worked.
And now it seems to work stable, i.e. I could access the site and authenticate with my eCard a second time...

After only more than half a year of struggling.
Amazing.

Now that this is done, and now that I know my future pension ... it's time to retire :-)

Tab Candy for Firefox

There is a new Firefox add-on in the works called Tab Candy, that will help you to organize your tabs into quite powerful and dynamic tab groups:

• Lightweight Grouping... simply drag & drop
• Only the Tabs You Want... once you open a tab group, you only see the tabs from this particular group, all others will be hidden

See the demo/concept video here.

An Introduction to Firefox's Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

(I'm not sure I follow Aza on all the future steps and developments in the second half of the video.)

To me, the need to organize your tabs, group them, prioritize them, hide "inactive" tabs is just another way of saying how important and dominant web-applications  and the browser has become... It is no longer a tiny window into the world of the internet, that does a little HTML rendering... it's become the universal client.

One more quote, though, from Aza's post:

Tab Candy is made entirely with HTML, Javascript, and CSS. There is no native code—just the open Web. That is how powerful the web has become.

Looking forward to it.

iPad Available in 9 More Countries This Friday

Can't hardly wait... I guess I'm gonna get one...

iPad Available in 9 More Countries This Friday: "Apple’s iPad will go on sale in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore on July 23."

via mashable

Digg4 alpha is out

I just got invited to the new alpha of Digg4 ... which finally introduces a friend-based news feed, i.e. I can see the storied that were digged by my social network.

So I know have two dimensions of filtering my digg/news feed.
a) by category (as before) like "Business", "Sports", ...
b) by my social network...

Probably the most usefuly type of curation in this century.

Who needs sorting anyway...

Well apparently mobilkom austria[1] does not... at least not in their online shop:

8 - 3 - 5 - 2 - 1.3 - 12

maybe this is a code to a secret message ...
--
[1] sorry, A1 Telekom Austria as of today

Microsoft's Kin is dead

The Kin will be discontinued and never make it to Europe.

So what?
Is anyone really surprised by this?

First of all, Microsoft never had a good track record with or mobile phones (and their operating systems) nor generally with hardware...

Secondly, a pure social network phone that's cluttered with status updates, tweets and stuff does not make any sense. A phone is still a phone, and not a social network beeper or pager.

If I consider my social graph - any of them, be it Facebook or on Flickr or on Xing or on Twitter - I'd panic if I'd get all their updates directly on my phone.

So lets grieve for the Kin...
Then again.... No, let's continue to ignore it.

Backslash ...

via xkcd

Odd limits on the E71

In the last couple of months the limitations on my Nokia E71 started to really annoy me.
Today's incident:

When I added my new corporate email account[1] (and did not delete the old one) I wanted to enable Automatic email retrieval[2] - of course.
To my great surprise, I could not...

Turns out, you can only have 2 email accounts with automatic retrieval enabled.
A limitation I don't understand at all.


Totally time for a new handset... preferably one with proper reception... :-)
--
[1] new because Oracle bought Sun and as of today I am 100% Oracle
[2] you know, the one that cannot be set to 1 hour...

When recommandation engines start to bug...

Amazon for instance keeps recommending Freedom TM to me[1], although I marked it as "I own it" ("Gehört mir" on amazon.de) and also rated it... the very edition, they keep recommending to me... for weeks now...

And as if this was not annoying enough, Facebook today started recommending that I like Black Books (the hilarious UK TV series), although I liked it on Facebook months ago...[2]

So could you guys please all go back to your desks and fix your recommendation engines... they bug me.
Thank you.
--
[1] OK, I sort of keep recommending it to you guys as well, but that's beside the point.
[2] I just noticed that the verb "[facebook] like" works a bit different than "[real-world] like"

Spooky

It's really spooky to listen to the E3[1] review on this weeks TWiT podcast, while at about the same time reading Freedom TM by Daniel Suarez...

What is being rendered as sort of a nightmare in the latter, has just been presented an demoed as the latest and greatest at the former.

Kinda gives you the creeps.
--
[1] the Electronic Entertainment Expo 

AppTabs Extension for Firefox

Today I finally tried out an extension add-on [1] for Firefox called App Tabs, which has been on my radar for quite a while now.

Not only does it reduce the tab of your favorite apps and sites to an icon (the favicon of your application/site) - thus saving tab space, which leads to a more well arranged tab bar.

It also allows to keep this app permanent, i.e. it keeps you from inadvertently closing those apps, and also opens them automatically when you start Firefox.

All you have to do (after installing the add-on from here) is to go to your favorite sites, and then ctrl-click[2] on the tab... et voilà... it's become an app tab with a fixed app.

Pretty neat.
Love it.

According to the tab bar preview video I posted yesterday, this will become a Firefox 4 feature.
--
[1] sorry, I'm still in old Mozilla-speak
[2] see options of the add-on

Why Tabs are on Top in Firefox 4

Nice overview of the new UI concept / ideas of FF4... and the reasoning behind it.

Facebook email replies still odd

It still bugs me that I can reply to a facebook comment-notification per email, but not to the notification of a facebook message...
If I get the notification (along with the full facebook message body) in my email client, I want to reply by email... is that so hard to understand? Or implement?

Vuvuzelas and the platformness of the iPhone

I guess by now everyone knows the Vuvuzelas, those fan instruments / noise creation devices of the soccer worldcup finals 2010 in South Africa. I will not rant about them here... just report a nice observation.

There is a Vuvuzela app[1] for the iPhone/iPod which creates the sound of a Vuvuzela.

Granted, not the most useful app - but fun to annoy friends an colleagues.

But the mere existence of said app, which went viral within a couple of days only, proves to me that the iPhone with its app store is a serious platform for SW developers - as well as a serious marketing vehicle.

To me, the Vuvuzela app has proven the "platformness" of the iPhone & appstore


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[1] actually there are several of those

No more Technorati for me

I've been using Technorati for my blogs for years now. First for statistics, then for search, but then...

Their service and availability/uptime started to really suck, and Google did better for both (search and statistics).
Their ranking is really irrelevant to me, because I don't even try or pretend to have top authority.

So, today I removed technorati from all of my blogs.
Weird thing though is, it's really hard to delete your technorati account.
There is no menu / action in the account settings panel for this, and according to their support fora[1] you should write an email with your account details to some suspicious non-technoarti email address..
Also, feeback on the success of such emails is not too positive either.

Totally odd... especially for company that centered around bloggers you'd expect a more modern and open approach to account deletion.

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[1] too much Latin in my past, can't say or write "forums"... sorry