Jaiku is Twitter on steroids March 4, 2007
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile , 7 comments
For the last day or so I’ve been kicking the tires of the new Jaiku, and I must say it’s pretty impressive.
You have the status message you know from Twitter, but that’s not even half of it. You can comment directly on other peoples “jaikus” (that’s what they call your status updates), and the coolest thing is that you can add other feeds to be displayed in your Jaiku stream. So, if you have a blog, it will appear amidst your Jaiku messages when you update it with a new post. I’ve added my moblog to the feeds list. (I also tried to add this blog, but Jaiku told me it couldn’t find a feed :-/ I’ve contacted Jaiku about the bug). In addition, you can add your Last.fm feed, so that others can see what your listening to at the moment, your Flickr feed, your del.icio.us feed — even your Twitter feed! So when you update Twitter, Jaiku will automatically also be updated.
Both services has it’s pros and cons. The beautiful thing about Twitter is its simplicity and that it is text message based. Everybody can participate — no need to download anything to your phone. Also, Twitter is easily grokked. Send a text message to Twitter with what you’re doing, and you’re done. Other people subscribing to your updates will instantly get a text message with what you’re doing.
But not everyone wants their phone to beep every single time someone on your friends list updates their status. Of course, you could turn off updates, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the service. Jaiku, on the other hand, is more like a presence service for mobile phones, and this makes Jaiku more discrete than Twitter. The Jaiku program on your phone mirrors your phone book and displays your Jaiku contacts appear on top of your contact list with their latest update is shown. This way, you’ll have a chance of knowing whether your friend is available before you call them. If your friends latest status message says “Visiting grandma in the hospital”, and his update was less than an hour ago, it would probably be a good idea to postpone your call for a while. The subtle thing about this is you don’t get beeps every other minute if you have many friends on Jaiku like you would on Twitter. You’ll have to check their status yourself, which is a key difference between Twitter and Jaiku. One thing that would rock, though, would be the ability to make the Jaiku software notify you if any of your contacts status messages changed. This way, users could have it both ways: Beeping updates like Twitter, or subtle presence updates when you need them.
Other things that propels Jaiku ahead of Twitter are the ability to:
- display your location (based on cell tower info)
- see how many people (or rather, bluetooth devices) are nearby
- display your current phone profile and if you’re currently using the phone
- integrate your calendar with Jaiku, so that your contacts can see if you’re currently in a meeting etc.
The barrier of entry is a bit higher with Jaiku than Twitter. I could never get my mom or dad to install Jaiku on their phones and learn how to use it. Twitter, on the other hand, would be easy for them, as all they’d have to do to update the service is send a text message, which comes right after voice call on the easiest-things-to-do-on-your-mobile list.
Anyway, to understand the power of Jaiku you’ll have to try it out for yourself. I’m madsb on Jaiku, if you want to add me.
Cell phone karma: It’s real February 20, 2007
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile, Humour , add a commentFound this on mopocket:
=)
10 Ways the Nokia N800 Is Better Than Apple’s iPhone January 18, 2007
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile, Gadgets, Nokia, iphone, N800 , add a commentJim Mendenhall of Starry Hope has a post about why he thinks the N800 is better than Apple’s iPhone. Not a totally fair comparison, given that the N800 is an internet tablet, not a phone, but I still think he has some valid points:
2. Open Source
The Nokia N800 is a Linux device based on a modified version of Debian GNU/Linux that they call “Internet Tablet OS 2007 edition”. Nokia created the open source Maemo development platform for the 770 and N800. They’ve worked hard to encourage developers to port applications to this platform. You can find more info at maemo.org.
The iPhone is far from open. We’re still not sure what Steve Jobs meant when he said that the iPhone runs “OS X”, but it’s most certainly not the full-blown “Mac OS X” that comes on a new Macbook. While the core of the phone’s OS may someday be open sourced (like Darwin), it’s highly unlikely that Apple will ever open source the entire OS or even share the iPhone APIs that would allow developers to make new iPhone apps.
I could definately swap my PSP for the N800.
Just for the fun of it, a little size comparison:
Not a word about the iPhone from me January 9, 2007
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile, Gadgets, iphone , add a comment
Read Carlo Longinos post instead. Couldn’t agree with him more.
Yet even more video of the N95 January 4, 2007
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile, Gadgets, Nokia, N95 , add a commentA little shaky but nonetheless exciting video of the N95 in action:
I realize that this blog is turning out to be a Nokia N95 fanboy blog, but to be honest I’ve never been more excited about a mobile phone ever. Can’t wait till it hits the shelves. I might have to trade in some of my other gadgets, though, but as they say in the video: “You might as well throw away your digital camera, your phone, your GPS, your computer, your MP3 player, whatever else you have, cuz… it’s a killer!”
Nokia N95 and N80 comparison December 30, 2006
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile, Gadgets , 1 comment so farWow, the N95 looks fast! My N73 was a huge step upwards in quickness from my old 6680, but it’s still a bit slow when starting the camera app and such. The N95 really looks like a huge improvement speedwise.
How to take better photos with your cameraphone December 20, 2006
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile , add a commentAll About Symbian has four great tips for taking better photos with your autofocus-equipped smartphone:
Firstly and most importantly of all, […] light is everything. It’s photons of light that trigger charge in the camera’s sensor, and the more of them the more accurate the reading from each sensor pixel. In good light, there’s more than enough information being gathered and your Nseries camera will produce results comparable to those from standalone cameras. In poor light, either in the evening or under flash conditions or in a dimly lit room, there simply aren’t enough photons hitting each pixel for the sensor to be absolutely sure what value to report, which is why you get ‘noise’, flecks of random colours in your photo.
AAS Feature: How to: Take better photos on your Nokia Nseries smartphone
WTF show previews the Nokia N95 December 18, 2006
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile, Gadgets , add a commentMore YouTube videos of the Nokia N95:
From Darla Mack.
Understanding Mobile 2.0 December 12, 2006
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile , add a comment
Rudy De Waele of m-trends.org has written a great post on Read/WriteWeb about the emerging mobile web. His enthusiasm correlates with mine:
What we mean by ‘mobile 2.0′ is another (r)evolution, already started, that will dramatically change the web and the mobility landscape that we currently know. The idea is that the mobile web will become the dominant access method in many countries of the world, with devices that become more hybrid and networks that become more powerful - everywhere in the next decade to come.
There are some great quotes in the post by Eric Schmidt of Google and C. Enrique Ortiz (among others). A must read.
Missing a web cam? Use your mobile! December 6, 2006
Posted by Mads Foli Bjerre in : Mobile , 2 commentsThis is eerie. David posed a question earlier today: Why not use the camera in your mobile as a webcam? Connect it over Bluetooth and there you go. I responded that I didn’t think the bandwith was high enough.
Well… turns out I was wrong.
When I got home I checked my news feeds, and guess what pops up: a post about Mobiola, a program that turns your mobile into a web cam. I’ll be darned! So of course I had to immediately download and check it out on my Nokia N73.
Turns out it works like a charm:
The image quality is not the best (neither are the looks of the model on the above picture, but hey — I got a two month old son which at least explains the bags under my eyes), but it works! High Quality setting results in some very low fps, so if you’re going for that 1999 56K modem web cam look, this setting is for you.
It’s probably also a good idea to have your phone charger handy. A constant Bluetooth connection and the camera on (my N73 even turned on the photo light the entire time) will drain the phone battery pretty fast.
The trial version of Mobiola allows you to run the program for 7 days and drops the Bluetooth connection after 5 minutes. The full version is USD $19.95. If you want to try it out, you can download it from Handango here.
