Link to article

The new wireless service - which has been undergoing trials in Seattle for about the past two months with a group of about 300 users - lets T-Mobile’s subscribers make free phone calls using their at-home WiFi network or from any number of public WiFi hot spots which have been set up throughout the city. For now, only subscribers using theNokia ( News - Alert) 6136 and the Samsung (News - Alert) T709 dual mode phones can place free calls over WiFi.

A response to Alex’s question on Google’s YouTube acquisition over on my blog: Four reasons why Google-YouTube is the best strategic deal of Web 2.0.

The New York Times ran a fascinating piece today on the small group of PayPal alumni who have gone on to build several successful Web 2.0 startups, including YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Slide. (Not mentioned in the article is that PayPal co-founder Elon Musk has been a tremendous supporter of electric car company Tesla Motors, another startup worth watching.)

Schaumburg, Illinois

The MIT Innovation Club continues its work with Motorola Technology, which started with the Emerging Technology Conference last month. The vlogs here are from visitors to Motorola’s Technology Innovation Showcase, held October 17th and 18th at their Schaumburg, Illinois, headquarters. The showcase is a celebration of the innovative technologies that are being developed through the tech-giant’s resurgent R&D efforts. Motorola considers these technologies “ building blocks” to their vision of Seamless Mobility, a world in which people are mobile, connected, informed, entertained, secured and empowered.

…and it operates on the same principle as an ink-jet printer! Check out these videos - talk about an innovation, albeit quite scary, in the evolution of weaponry…

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061011-7963.html

Interesting article suggesting that Nokia plans to have WiMAX in phones by 2008. I think it’s interesting for two reasons

a) Any hardware technology is first integrated in the PC market first and the phone/mobile market adopts it after the chip cost comes down, the technology has proven itself in the market place and IP-licensing agreements are sorted out.
BTW, this was also true for Bluetooth

It doesn’t look like PC/Laptops will adopt WiMAX in next 1-2 years atleast. Perhaps this is an indication of things to come - with Cell phones moving towards being the center of the computing ecosystem.. .

b) Battery life: With Wi Fi on all the time, the battery life of the phone is reduced in half. Early incarnations of WiMAX will consume even more power, so you can expect even worse battery life. The only application i can think of initially is short-burst data transfers. I don’t think this is intended to compete with Cell phone networks atleast in the short term which i feel is more ‘disruptive’.

For all you Web 2.0 enthusiasts, there is “Office 2.0″ conference being held in San Francisco this week.

http://www.office20con.com/

There definitely is a lot of euphoria and hype around web-hosted office applications, i am personally a bit skeptical when it come to adoption of these in enterprise sector anytime soon because

a) Functionality - Can web-based app match the functionality available on the desktop application?

b) Connectivity - We are still atleast 3-5 years away from Ubiquitious Wireless broadband becoming a reality in major business cities.

c) Security/Mindset - Regardless of what the Office 2.0 startups quote about data theft (they claim that majority of data/information theft is done by insiders), how comfortable will an enterprise be in storing their financial, planning and various other documents on a remote server?

BTW, if you are looking for rationale for why you should use Office 2.0, look here:

http://itredux.com/blog/2006/01/16/rationale-for-office-20/

May be in my next post, i will cover why i am still not convinced

…and so, it’s finally happened, despite Mark Cuban quipping that only a ‘moron’ would buy YouTube and then later, that “Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime.” Google just acquired YouTube for $1.65b in an all-stock acquisition - quite a pretty penny for Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

What do you think? Smart move giving Google a corner on the Internet video market or stupid move, given the innumerable amount of piracy and copyright violations throughout YouTube’s video library? Post your comment here or discuss here.

According to this post NTT Docomo is developing a phone to deliver surround sound ring tones.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/51-surround-cellphone-as-awesome-as-it-sounds-205436.php

The trend here is not an isolated surround sound ring tone innovation. The important innovation is the integration of surround sound/high quality audio integration in the to the mobile platform natively.

Couple this with
a) Rapid improvements in battery life on phones
b) Presence of multiple wireless buses ( Wi Fi/ Bluetooth) which offer ad-hoc connectivity on cell phones
c) Increases in the storage capacity on phones
d) Soon to be launched Wireless speakers

you get the picture?

If this ins’t the definition of innovative ideas coming out of MIT, I’m not sure what is. This would have been very cool to have had in my pocket when learning newtonian physics!