RIAA and MPAA call a halt on digital progress: "In essence, the suggestion is that nothing should be invented in the sphere unless the RIAA and MPAA ok it first."

Like Mike Rowehl, I really don't get Oliver's excitement about BluePulse. Whilst the app seems to be nicely executed (on my Nokia N70 at least), I err can't really see what it does, other than be some sort of primitive browser-ish thing, paid for with a charge-up account (never a good sign in a new service from a low-profile company, since you're asking your customers to pay someone they don't know for something they've not received and can't use yet).

The RSS newsreader seems quite nice and capable. It's interesting having IM in there too, but the Bluepulse app itself seems to stick an extra layer of indirection between me and the things I want to do (talk to friends, read news) which wouldn't be there if I just used standalone apps. Oh, and just wandering around for a few minutes looking at menus used up 60k of data charges. It doesn't seem to cache much either - running through the app again seemed to run up a similar quantity again.

I'm not keen on the metaphors the UI uses: "show desktop" to return to the home screen of the app? "Control panel"? "Widgets"? All sounds a bit PC for me - *I* find it confusing and I have the misfortune to spend more time digging around phone UIs than most folks.

So tooks to me like an attempt at a land-grab (and a long shot at that): to control the UI for all online services and thereby own the mobile "desktop". I can't see anything about this which makes me think this'll work though - though I wonder what's patentable here, that might make a difference. Can someone pipe up if I'm missing something really obvious and great?

If it's really true that "the more deeply plugged-in to the mobile industry you are, the quicker you get the bluepulse value proposition", I'm starting to feel a bit insecure and disconnected. Still, "If you explain bluepulse to someone, and they don't get it ... whatever they're doing in the mobile space cannot be about broadening the mobile audience or increasing that audience's use of the mobile internet.". Ow! Maybe I'm not "really working in this industry at all" then! Seriously, guys: if your product takes some time to understand, it might be nice not to insult folks who don't get it yet.

But just a sec: "Blue pulse is built on something called OADP or the Open Application Delivery Platform. This platform provides access to mobile applications and content through virtually all mobile phones and various wireless devices. Unlike most of the applications available today that require extensive customization and porting to be used on the hundreds of different devices and dozens of different carriers, OADP allows developers to develop mobile applications without having to worry about porting, connectivity or billing."

A worthy goal, but even if from a technology standpoint Bluepulse does what it says on the tin, it'll suffer from the chicken-and-egg situation of needing an audience before content providers address it in large numbers - and not getting content providers without an audience. As a wise man once said: "Move units, then talk shit and we can do this"

I did like their committment to "we want to foster small developers with big ideas, and unfairly penalise huge corporations with way more money than sense" though ;)

Just found this via James Gosling:

"Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn't change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous"

NRC - Mobile Web Server: "For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites."

There seem to be a few folks out there now turning things on their head by embedding web servers everywhere (as opposed to thinking of wirelessly connected devices as just clients): Node and Ambiesense, amongst others...

The Mobile Opportunities event looked interesting: "The message of the day was there's a coming shift in the mobile space, the accepted hierarchy is going to change, innovation has been stifled and huge profits soaked up."