Rui CarmoAttended the annual corporate meeting, which had the usual mish-mash of interesting tidbits, genuinely fun moments, and statistics. Battled the continuous onslaught of budgeting related e-mail with valiant thrusts of my Blackberry without much success, need to revisit my GTD tactics in face of wildly shifting rules of engagement.
Came home to ponder the upcoming year and what I intend to do with my time (what I write about here is fun, but there is the other 99% of my life I have to give some serious thought to).
In the meantime, I set down to browse the news and came up with these:
- Yahoo, in an odd bout of coincidence also published a mapping API. Google's API key has the odd limitation that you're locked to the directory you want to display your map in (which means I can't use it in my Wiki, at least not without major gymnastics), but Yahoo's seem to cover only North America, which makes them useless for now - and besides, Google's API lets you do Star Wars parodies...
- The VoIP onslaught continues (looks like everyone is doing VoIP these days) - there's a new SIP client for the Mac called Gizmo, which I'll be fiddling with soon (my home Asterisk is turning out to be an interesting thing to fiddle with, so I'll be testing it against that).
- Sadly, TheFeature (one of the best and least hype-prone mobile-related web sites out there) seems to be shutting down. These people wrote some of the best essays on the business (largely because they tended to point out the inconsistencies in the industry hype we are deluged in every day), and will be sorely missed. I can't replace them (and Carlo Longino is joining MobHappy, which might compensate somewhat), but maybe you'll see more opinion pieces here from now on (someone has to cut down on the hype).
- Siemens, however, isn't dead yet (despite the BenQ deal), and has announced the S75 and the SL75. Strangely, they don't look like tennis shoes, although there is still a hint of German industrial design about them.
- I've pretty much given up on running Hula in its present form (I don't need its features and don't care much for the admin interface, although I've recommended it to a few people with good results), but now that there's a planet for it, I'll be keeping an eye out.
- Following up on yesterday's news of T-Mobile adopting Google as their phone's home page, here's a BBC piece that mentions that along with the new Vodafone/MSN announcement.
- Incidentally, Freeserve is now called Orange. Hmmm. A single brand for mobile and broadband? What an original concept.