Author: atrasatti

Born and raised in Italy, US resident. Innovator with a soft spot for developers. Currently director of developer advocacy @kin_foundation, previously @Samsung_IoT, @Nokia, an advocate of the open Web

Telefonica launches Opera browser

It must be clear to everyone that today I have more spare time. Meetings are done for today, all I need to do is go to eat and then I have a few hours free.

I took a chance to clear a bit of my backlog of things I wanted to post on the blog, then.

Via Marco Casario I found out the Telefónica Móviles has partenered with Opera to provide to their users a custom version of Opera and Opera Mini.
They are not the first ones and to me is another demonstration of the quality of the Opera browser and that a better user experience will lead more users on internet using their phone.

There’s a full Press release, of course: Telefónica selects Opera Mini and Opera Mobile to deliver the mobile Web.

Blogger pains

Mike Rowehl has commented negatively about Blogger (and my blog being here) more than once. Anyway he’s not the only one, of course.

I have noticed myself more than once, lately, that the site is very often slow and sometimes returns an internal error. Reloading solves the thing most of the times. It seems like some server clusters might have some problems.

The commenting system is not so very well designed. I found myself more than once not being able to publish a comment because there was an error in my message, but the alert was so tiny that I hadn’t even noticed it.

I had to hack some widgets and take inspiration from other programmers that built their own widgets such as the tag-blob and the comments widget.

I have considered moving to WordPress, but when the tags were added to the Blogger, I did not feel the need so much. I think the skins are too limited in their variety (they are mostly color variations), but I can leave with that.

Playing around with RSS has sometimes generated some problems to RSS readers and yesterday has been the latest demonstration of these problems. I added some tags here and there on old posts. Their date has remained 2005 or 2006, but they appear in the RSS as very recent posts (while they are not).

I’m sorry about this, and if you have any formal complaints, please, direct them to the blogger dev-team. 🙂

iPhone “unique” motion sensor

There have been many posts about the iPhone announced by Apple. Some are saying that it’s the beginning of a revolution, some are saying that it is very stylish, but will not resist falling on the floor or getting hit. Some others are saying that Jobs is a great entertainer and made the iPhone look like something new while it is not.

My own opinion, being one of the few millions that saw the presentation, but never had a chance to hold the phone and use it for real, is that it will actually be a device for a niche market. It will most likely fall in the same space as PDA‘s and smartphones and not be really a mass-market device.
That’s also how the iPod was born. A device for music enthusiasts. The mass-market was reached with a lot of good commercial, good design and a bit of luck. It became mass-market when everyone thought it was cool to have it no matter how big and heavy it was compared to the tiny flash-based devices.
The iPhone will be the same in the beginning, with the exception that Apple is in a very good position right now. The future will tell us if it can be a real revolution.

It is obvious that the 2 year contract with Cingular, the delayed distribution for Europe and the high price will actually keep it away from the hands of many of us.

But going back to what is nearer to my experience (which is not marketing or sales), while cleaning up my inbox I noticed a newsletter from Nokia promoting the newly released SDK to access the motion sensor API’s of the 5500 Sport.
It doesn’t look so much different from Apple’s system with the advantage of being on the market today and with an SDK ready to use. Visit the Forum Nokia to know more, there’s a page for it, of course: Nokia 5500 Sport.

More WURFL jobs

I have written in the past about a job posting in which WURFL was a reason of preference (you can read about it in WURFL means real money).

Now James Pearce, the new CTO of mTLD, has posted a message on the developers’ site blog. .mobi is seeking developers that know WURFL, that have experience with adaptation, mobile sites and have done something outstanding.

If you think you fit or are interested in working with .mobi, you should check out this post, Technical genius sought.

Getting ready for Boston

Today is a busy day, I am getting ready for my trip to Boston. I’ll be there for a full week and I need to prepare my computer, all my gadgets I can’t live without, backup data and most of all, get ready for the super-cold temperatures of Massachusetts.

Italy and mostly Europe in general has been quite warmn this year, considering that we are in January, but it seems like Boston will not be warmer than last year, when the day we arrived there was a snowstorm! Luckily just a few hours after we had landed, but the day after the airport was closed and remained so for 2 or 3 days.

Download Music and More At The Pump

Thanks to Dmitry I have found this great press release about a company, Dresser Inc, that has presented a new gas pump with ringtones included.

According to the Dressr this is the Future of Fueling.

Luckily they have partnered with a solid company, Microsoft.

Read more about the Ovation² iX directly on their site.

Here’s also a picture of the “revolutionary” gas pump.

Ovation² iX

Mr. Dan Harrell, vice president of Global Product Architecture for Dresser Wayne, said:

Working with Microsoft has enabled us to bring unrivaled innovations to consumers the gas pump. With our latest fuel dispenser and Windows CE-based applications, consumers can now be more productive and enjoy some of the same online luxuries right at the pump that used to be confined to their PC. What was recently a mere concept is now becoming a reality in which consumers can experience a new world of interactive fueling, whether it’s downloading media, getting printed directions, or reading the latest news headlines while filling their tanks.

I had thought Apple was innovative, but this certainly demonstrates how Microsoft can reach places where no one else has goes, yet. I wish I had thought about this before!
Thank you Microsoft for opening all these new doors to me and thank you Dresser Wayne for making this a reality.

Building next block on fire!

While I was having lunch today I noticed some firemen stopping out of the cafeteria. Some of the other guests said there might be a fire in the building in the higher floors.

I went out as soon as I was done with food and noticed some smoke.

Later my friend Julien sent me this picture (and some more) that show the fire had grown A LOT!

At this time I don’t know if anyone got hurt. It turned out that it was the office of some of the other people in the cafeteria.

See exactly where it happened on this map.

UPDATE: more picture here.

Traveling around the world

Lately I haven’t been traveling a lot, my last trip has been in September to the beautiful Gijon in Spain (I just realized I never posted anything about it, strange!) and then a 1-day trip to London to meet my colleagues of the European offices of M:Metrics.

The next months, instead, includes 2 trips, one to Boston for the W3C Multi-Group Meeting and one to Barcelona for the 3GSM World Congress.

I am really excited about these trips. If you are in the W3C and would like to meet, please let me know.

While during the trip to Boston I will mostly be in some W3C meeting, during the 3GSM World Congress I will have much more time to meet people. Last time I went was still in Cannes, I think it was 2002, I have never joined again. I am really looking forward for the new location, bigger space and maybe some new projects.

If you are going to any of these meetings, please let me know and we’ll try to arrange something.