Songbird

An interesting application and platform, Songbird:

Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.

Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.

Thanks to Jilles for pointing Songbird to me.

New TomTom Gizmo Tracks Traffic via Cells

It is an idea that has been around for a while, but now we have the product. From TomTom, the Dutch navigation company, a device that uses mobile phone density to deduce car traffic.

A network operator knows where its users are at each moment. Of course, clever algorithms must be used to manage the vast amount of data and to establish the car flow distinguishing moving cars from pedestrians. Multiple mobile phone operators should also be used, etc.

It is also important to notice the paradign shift in the industry: In the past, the company only sold devices. But now that dozens of competitors have entered the market, prices have plunged. As a result, the company is expanding its business to include services.

From Businessweek, New TomTom Gizmo Tracks Traffic via Cells

Challenges on creating a mobile software platform

Creating a mobile software platform is a challenging task. Below some reviews of Android, the Google mobile platform.

Dow Jones reports (shorter Wall Street Journal version here) that some software developers are experiencing considerable frustration writing for Google’s much-touted Android mobile platform.
Link found thanks to search engine land.

I know some of these problems. Nokia has three main software platforms (S30,S40,S60) and creating and evolving them is not an easy job.
I have worked on evaluating Nokia software platforms, focusing mainly on software platform evolution. Some of the challenges in mobile software platforms are described on my research papers.

Goodfellas

“For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers.
They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again”, quote from Goodfellas, the movie by Scorsese.

And the other famous scene from the movie, “you are funny