The first Gphone is out

Google “Gphone”, the mobile software platform Android, is out.

In the press:

A black swan

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” is the second successful book of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, after “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life”.

A black swan is an event with three main characteristics:

  1. It is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility
  2. it carries an extreme impact
  3. In spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact
examples are the rise of Hitler, the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc, and more recently the market crash, the latest news of the fall of Lehman Brother and  Merrill Lynch.
A book worth to read.

Crowded Internet music services

Nokia has announced the launch of Comes With Music service in which people who buy Nokia mobiles will be able to download and keep as many tracks as they wish from participating music companies over a one-year period. Nokia has already the OVI music service on-line.

This makes Nokia a direct competitor of Apple iTunes that at the moment is the market leader and uses the pay-per-track model. However, it seems that Apple is considering the same busines model of  “all you can eat” music service.

And now, Sony Ericsson is going to unveil an unlimited music downloading service for its mobile phones.

We are seeing a convergence where mobile phone companies, mobile operators, Internet companies, media companies and software companies are going after the same business. It appears that the Internet music service market is going to be particularly crowded.

Nokia uses Microsoft DRM, Apple uses its own DRM but has recently made available DRM-free songs called iTunes plus. Amazon makes available the songs in mp3 format and are DRM-free. Sony Ericsoon, we do not know yet.

Nokia OVI, Sync

Nokia Ovi is the new door (Ovi is the Finnish word for door) to the Nokia Internet services.

Among these services I have tried the sync, the service that allows you to save your phone contacts and calendar events. And it worked smoothly and fine. Now I have my data backup in the Internet and I can access them whenever I want. It is an idea that has gone around for years, and now we can see it in practice.

There are many things that can be improved. For example, it is possible to search my contacts by name. Why not also by phone number, address or email, etc.? And why do not make the service accessible for all kinds of phones including non Nokia´s ones?

Of course, the sync service went online recently, many improvements are possible and the OVI services are tagged “beta” which includes continuous updates and upgrades. Good start overall.