Apple iPhone's Achilles Ankel: the EDGE Data Network

In Greek mythology, Thetis dipped infant Achilles in the river Styx in an attempt to make him immortal. The area in which she was holding, the heel, did not make it into the water, therefore leaving him with a vulnerable spot and eventually lead to his ultimate demise.

The iPhone, is a gorgeous looking device, it has a near perfect design, marketing, and user interface for browsing the web. Unfortunately, when I tested it at the SOHO store in NYC this afternoon, the EDGE network was just too slow for the page to load. Once the page loaded, the operation is flawless, you can scroll the pages, zoom in and out in such a smooth action. But what can a flawless operation do without having the page to operate with?

The near immortal iPhone will suffer from this short coming. Especially when it will always attempt to load a full webpage instead of detecting a lighter WAP site by default like most smartphone browsers. When asked, Steve Jobs say that the choice for the slower EDGE network is to save battery as opposed to go with the more power-hungry HSDPA/UMTS chips. I am wondering how much of this has to do with cost-cutting as there are lots of known hacks to set existing 3G phones to default to a lower network like EDGE to save power.

T-Mobile Dash Smartphone for 1 Penny (Another iPhone Impact)

This week has been wild. Not only the iPhone launched, it has drastically impacted the price of PDA/Smartphone lineups across all carriers. T-Mobile Dash, aka HTC S620, is going for $0.01 at Amazon.com with a new contract. These deals are the kind of stuff dreams are made of. I remember 3 years ago, any smartphone would easily set you back three Benjamins. Let the good times begin!

AT&T Cingular 8525 for $139 Shipped Free

I noticed that this past week, all the smartphones on the market dropped in price (possibly in reaction to the launch of iPhone today). The hottest 3G WM5 smartphone by Cingular (8525), a $599 phone, is now $139.98 from Amazon.com. Yours truly ordered one and have received it today. In short, I am pleased with this purchased. Using the UMTS 3G data network is the real deal. Its also nice to have WiFi that most smartphones are missing. I will provide my final verdict shortly. For those of you interested in a powerful smartphone, this is it! Unless you want to pay $599 for a new iPhone. [AT&T Cingular 8525 is an HTC Hermes)

Update: 6/29 Price was $159.98
Update: 6/30 Price dropped to $139.98
Update: 7/2 Price dropped to $124.98
Update: 7/10 Price dropped to $79.98

Thanks to Amazon.com's 30-Day Price Guarantee, I've gotten reimbursed for the difference all three times. Gotta love Amazon.com!

Amazon.com Sells "Unlocked" Cellphones

Amazon.com has long been a great site offering excellent prices to buy cell phones. What I didn't realize until tonight, was that they have a section called "unlocked" phones.

For those who are not familiar, the phone you purchased from a carrier is always locked to that carrier. I would guess majority of users do not bother to unlock the phone even though you have the rights to (so long as you have the patience to call your carrier and request that unlock pin and instruction). If you are halfway through a 24 month contract but you are growing tired of your current phone, you really don't have a lot of choices but to go to your carrier and buy another phone at full retail. Occasionally, you can find a decent "unlocked" phone from another carrier floating around eBay. An unlocked phone allows you to use it on another network; for example, my unlocked Blackberry 8700c from Cingular can be used with a T-Mobile SIM card.

Back to my point, Amazon.com has a section selling some interesting unlocked phones. Some of which looks like they are imported directly from the manufacturers (where the design, color and name is vastly differently than the lineup you see at your local Cingular or Verizon store). I for one, am very pleased to find this as it has been an ongoing challenge for me to find a unlocked phone vendor in the U.S. Kudos to Amazon!

Report: InSITE Conference 2007

Yesterday was the last day of the Informing Science + Information Technology Education (InSITE) conference, organized by the Informing Science Institute and hosted by the Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana, Slovenia (yep, the city I live in - there's nothing better than having a good international conference at your doorstep ;) ). In the last 3 days I listen to around 25 presentations at the conference, and also presented my paper (yes, that is why I wasn't online as much as usually). How was it? Well, read below :)

I'd like to start by mentioning some of the presentations that I found most interesting and/or valuable (listed in order of appearance at the conference):
  • The Search for the Adaptable ICT Student (Glen Van Der Vyver): This was a presentation of the results of a study among a group of undergraduate ICT students about their adaptability (which is one of the characteristics ICT students should have). The results showed that the students have a high degree of adaptability when personal choices are involved, but not much adaptability related to job change - students like change, but expect their jobs to adapt to their lifestyles, not the other way round. I find these findings really interesting, and I would certainly like to see how adaptable our students are.
  • Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources (Alex Koohang): I found this presentation interesting because it opened some interesting questions and issues related to Open Educational Resources and the sustainability of OER. These are all important topics in education, and I especially liked the fact that Alex stressed the importance of including users' perspectives in further research and development of OER.
  • Of Disobedience, Divinations, Monsters and Fumbling: Adopting a Self-Service System (Bob Travica): During this presentation we learned about some of the issues that emerged during the adoption of a self-service management system in a Canadian company. The presentation got me thinking that we don't really pay enough attention to how our students adopt different e-learning systems, and that perhaps more detailed studies than just the usual multiple choice question "How would you grade the usability of the LMS?" should be performed. Mostly, we just have the quantitative data on how much our students like our e-learning systems, but I don't think we know enough about how they really interact with them, and about what could be done to improve their interactions with the system. Certainly a topic to keep in mind for further research.
  • What Exactly Do You Want Me To Do? Analysis of a Criterion Referenced Assessment Project (Tony Jewels and Marilyn Ford): This presentation provided a critical view on criterion referenced assessment. They pointed out that the practice of using CRA shows different results than the theory of CRA predicts. In their paper, the authors presented some interesting negative feedback they got from their students when using CRA, which in neither surprising nor new. The authors concluded their study with a valuable suggestion: educational institutions should focus more on educating students at an early stage on skills that apply to all subjects and assignments.
  • A ‘Hands on’ Strategy for Teaching Genetic Algorithms to Undergraduates (Anne Venables): I found this presentation inspiring because Anne presented an interesting approach to teaching what at first sight appears to be a complex and unattractive topic of genetic algorithms to undergraduate students in an engaging and easy to understand way using poppet beads. Sounds interesting? It sure is, so I really suggest reading Anne's paper that explains the approach in more detail. We definitely need more teachers like this in all our schools!
  • To TxT or Not to TxT: That's the Puzzle (Val Hooper): During this presentation we heard about an interesting use of SMSes to engage large groups of first year students during lectures. I like the general idea of the presented SMS X-word puzzle activity (see the paper for a detailed description), and although it is at this moment still costly and technical demanding, I liked the fact that they've tried to engage their students in a new way that is closer to what the students use in their everyday life.
  • The Educational Potential of Modified Video Games (Andrew Moshirnia): This presentation was a virtual one (meaning: we watched a PowerPoint presentation with a voice-over explanation of the author), so we weren't able to have a discussion with the author (which would certainly make the presentation even more interesting). Nevertheless, the presentation showed us an interesting example of using a Civilization IV mod to teach American Revolution. I still believe that we're at the very early stages of developing serious educational games, but I think it was good to have this topic presented at the conference.
  • Using Video to Record Summary Lectures to Aid Students’ Revision (Janice Whatley): In this presentation we got an interesting example of using video lectures summaries with text notes to help students with course revisions. Although I like the general idea of these video summaries, I think it'd be better to give the students the ability to create their own video summaries and share them with their colleagues, or at least give the students the chance of posting and sharing their own notes for the video summaries. Still, the presentation did open some interesting questions about the usefulness and the right format of summary lectures, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this project will develop in the future.

I also co-presented the paper Can Online Tutors Improve the Quality of E-learning?. You can check out the slides for the presentation on SlideShare, but I know there aren't of much use without the narration, so if you've missed the presentation and are interested about hearing more about the topic of the paper and the e-learning at my faculty, I can provide an on demand voice-over through Skype (my Skype ID: alja-skype) :)

Speaking of presentations: why is it so popular to share presenter notes with the audience through PowerPoint slides? I had the pleasure to listen to many great speakers at the conference, but unfortunately many of the interesting speeches were disturbed by great chunks of text behind their backs. I personally can't resist the temptation to read all the text on the slides. Unfortunately that turns my attention away from the speaker and the presentation becomes difficult to follow and to remember. A few minutes after such presentations I always wonder what the main point the presenter was trying to get across? And there is no way I can remember any of the slides. I really think these presentations would be better if the presenters turned off the projector and kept the slides full of text for themselves. If you don't have time to practice your presentation and prepare an interesting slideshow don't bother with using your notes on the overhead projector. And also getting all your notes on paper in advance really spoils a lot of the fun; I don't want to know how the story will end! Please, dear presenters: surprise me, engage me!

Apart from some bad uses of PowerPoint slides, the conference was full of interesting topics and presentations. I only wish I could have attended more, and talked to more people. Thanks to everyone that I met at the conference for all the interesting conversations we had, and I hope we can keep in touch. The next InSITE conference will take place at the nearly same date next year in Varna, Bulgaria, so we might meet again there.

Mobile video: Is there a there there?

[Reposted due to a correction. Sorry if you get this twice on your feed.]

I recently I spent a couple of days at the Global Mobility Roundtable, an annual conference that brings together mobile-related academics and a selection of people from the mobile industry. This year's conference was in Los Angeles, so it also drew a number of attendees and speakers from the major entertainment firms. It turned into a kind of a mobile meets entertainment event, and the results were interesting. Mostly, they underlined how far we still need to go in bridging the gaps between the tech industry, mobile, and entertainment.

There's a lot of information to cover, so I'm breaking this post into two parts: mobile video in this part, and in part two the status of mobile data in general and the relationship between Hollywood and the operators.


Is there a pony in the stable? If so, it's a very small pony.*

There was a lot of disagreement about whether mobile video will take off, which may be just as well because the economics of it are seriously dodgy. It's not certain that users really want it, no one knows whether the revenue will come from sponsors or from user fees, and even if video does take off, it's not at all clear that the mobile operators can deliver it without bankrupting themselves.

Other than that, the prospects look great.

One panelist compared the situation in mobile video to a company running a health club: they want to sell a lot of memberships, but they don't want anyone to actually use the facility.

The information below is drawn from a series of different sessions I attended. I've mashed them together so I could organize the information by topic. All quotes are as accurate as I could make them. They are definitely correct as to message, but I probably missed a few words here and there.


Who wants mobile video? A segment of the market.

There are plenty of people in the industry who are enthusiastic about mobile video. One presenter quoted Rob Hyatt, executive director of mobile content at Cingular, as saying, "Watching video on cell phones could eventually easily surpass [demand for games, ringtones, and wallpapers], to reach 100% of the population." That's pretty remarkable, since even SMS doesn't reach 100% of the mobile population yet. (You can find the original quote from BusinessWeek here).

Telephia, a mobile industry research firm, reported that revenue from mobile video is growing rapidly, from $35m in Q3 2006 to $146m in Q1 2007. In that same period, the number of mobile subscribers in the US using video services grew from 5.7 million to 8.4 million (for comparison, there are 77 million MMS users and 148 million SMS users). The Telephia numbers imply that revenue per video user has grown from $2 per month to $5.80. Unfortunately, they didn't give any details on which particular services are growing.

The base is still very small, so it's dangerous to extrapolate from those numbers. But they're definitely hopeful. A number of other speakers were much less optimistic, though.

At the conference, USC presented the results of the sixth annual Worldwide Mobile Data Services study. It showed that about 30% of 18-24 year olds and 20% of 25-34 year olds in the US felt that video downloads to mobiles were an important feature, about the same percentage as wanted games on their mobiles. That's nice, but not the universal usage that Cingular talked about.

Sanjay Pothen, CEO of Pliq (a mobile video production company), claimed that 44% of mobile users are interested in mobile video -- but only 4% are willing to pay for it. That's the typical pattern for mobile data features -- most people don't want them if they have to pay anything for them.

Frank Chindamo, CEO of Fun Little Movies, which produces short video for Sprint, asked the audience how many people in the audience had Sprint phones. About five people raised their hands. "If you all subscribe, that will double our revenue for next month," he joked. [For the record, Frank asked me to make clear that he was only joking; he says he's actually quite happy with the Sprint relationship.]

Is the glass half full or half empty? As I've said before, I think there's abundant evidence that the market for all mobile data products is highly segmented, and we need to learn to make money from products that appeal to ten or fifteen percent of the users. I heard nothing at the conference to change that view.

But overall demand for mobile video is just the beginning of the story...


What sort of video will people watch on mobiles?

This one is still very much undecided. The usual assumption is that because short video is popular on the Web, it'll also be popular on mobiles. For example, Funny Little Movies is creating original short animated films for mobiles. (The place is run by a USC film professor who has his students create a lot of the content.)

Pothen of Pliq said the ideal sort of video for mobile is neither short individual clips (like YouTube) or long-form video (like a TV show), but chunked content -- an engaging story told in two-minute segments. He said excerpts from reality shows can work well -- highlights from America Idol, for instance. But original content seems to be his main target: soap operas, telenovelas, and cooking for young women, comedies and dramas for young men. The goal is to get people hooked by an ongoing story so they'll keep coming back to watch every segment.

Derek Brose, SVP of business development for Paramount Digital, was also excited about short video. He said the company is cutting all its movies into clips of different lengths, for various mobile usages. Two second clips -- something like Harrison Ford saying, "trust me" -- are for embedding in an MMS message. Twenty second clips are for use in ringtones. Two minute clips are for streaming your favorite scene from a movie. Paramount's goal is to teach consumers a variety of different things that they can do with mobile video.

But some people were skeptical about the prospects for short video on mobiles. Bill Sanders, VP of mobile programming at Sony Pictures, said that in Japan people are watching broadcast TV shows on their mobiles rather than short video streamed over 3G. He said 3G in Japan is great for certain kinds of applications, such as e-wallet. But he said data is priced so high that streaming video barely exists on 3G at all.

"The only thing you find in 3G is porn, because it's the only form of video where people will pay $10 for three minutes of content." --Bill Sanders, Sony

USC's mobile survey also strongly implied that the biggest demand is for broadcast TV. More than 40% of users said they thought that was the most interesting type of video for a mobile, compared to about 20% for short video.

David Tilson of Case Western University supported that view. He said that in a UK test of DVB-H (a broadcast video standard for mobiles), users watched three hours a week of television on their mobiles, with viewing concentrated in the lunch break and commute hours. That's very intriguing, because it implies that mobile video might add new television viewers at times when people don't usually watch TV. Unfortunately, the users were not charged anything in the test, so it's very hard to tell how much usage mobile TV would get if operators started charging for it.

I have no clue what the answer is on this question. People may say they prefer broadcast television just because that's what they're used to. Their actual purchase behavior might be very different. I think price will make a huge difference in adoption, which brings us to the next subject...


Who will pay for mobile video?

You've got two choices -- users pay, or advertisers pay. There are good arguments on both sides.

Sanjay Pothen of Pliq made an interesting case for having the advertisers pay. Since his company is involved in that business, his argument was not a surprise, but it was still interesting.

Pothen claims that neither paid nor ad-supported video are taking off today in the mobile world. As I noted above, he said few users are willing to pay for video, which stops the user-funded scenario right there. But ad-supported video is also problematic on both PCs and mobiles because users are not very tolerant of watching even a short commercial in order to see a two minute video. So what Pliq does is build the sponsor into the video itself, through placement and other promotion within the video.

Pothen said advertisers are willing to pay significant sponsorship fees for these videos. He wouldn't go into details on his financials, but someone I talked to privately said the revenue can be dollars per viewer for a three-minute video. That's impressive, and far more than you could charge a viewer for a few minutes of video.

Unfortunately, Pothen said, the operators want to take 50% of the revenue from these videos. He said that's not acceptable, that the revenue split should be more like 20% of revenue to the operator. "If we work in collaboration and the walled garden is down, we're willing to create original content (for mobiles)....We can drive mass adoption." But he said that won't happen in the current revenue situation.

My take: I don't think it has to be one or the other. Apple's selling a lot of video downloads to iPods, and that won't just dry up. But I think it's going to be very hard to make paid downloads the leading mobile video product, because they'll be competing with free video from places like YouTube, and because ad-supported TV teaches people to expect their television for free. Besides, if advertisers really are willing to pay dollars per viewer, there's no need to make people pay.

The revenue split is an ongoing problem in every mobile data category. There's no immediate solution, at least in the US. I think we're stuck in a chicken and egg situation in which the revenue split discourages the kind of programming investment that might drive a lot of usage, thereby justifying a more generous split.

That may be just as well, though, because video might break the mobile networks if it did take off.


Can mobile video be delivered?

This was the most disturbing topic of all. Even if we can find the right users, the right product, and the right pricing scheme, most of today's 3G networks are not well suited to delivering video.

Tilson of Case Western quoted some very sobering statistics on the economics of mobile video. He said one megabyte of data delivered as SMS messages yields £268 of revenue to an operator in the UK. That same megabyte delivered as video yields 20 pence of revenue, roughly 1/1000 the revenue. Of course, a single user of video is much more likely to consume a meg of data than is an SMS user, so the billing per user might still be fairly good. But video quickly exceeds the capacity of a typical 3G data network. He said no more than six viewers per cell can watch video at one time, and if 40% of users on a typical 3G system watched six minutes of video a day, they would saturate the entire network.

Hardly the basis for achieving Cingular's dream of 100% viewership.

Some of the operators at the conference confirmed this perspective. Francois Thenoz, Director of Strategic Marketing at Orange, said it takes seven minutes to download a 60-90 second video clip on a standard 3G network. 3G "evolved" takes 90 seconds (so you can just about stream in real time). The CDMA 1X network I use to connect my notebook PC is a lot faster, but GSM is the standard for most of the world, so his point was that in most places the wireless network simply isn't ready for video.

Higher-capacity networks are in development, of course. But Tilson said that in the UK, spectrum for a DVB-H wireless video system won't be available until 2102 at the earliest. That implies that for the next five years, mobile video in the UK is more of a science experiment than a serious commercial project.

In the US, the functional equivalent of DVB-H is MediaFlo, which is already deployed in Verizon's VCast system. MediaFlo transmits video one way, using a separate wireless signal, so it gets around the network saturation problems you get in 3G. Similar systems are already being used in Japan and Korea, and reportedly account for most of the mobile video usage there.

A drawback of the broadcast technologies is that they're not streamed on demand. You watch whatever's been programmed at that time. It's like a cable television system, but with far fewer channels. Tilson said one driver of mobile video usage is the availability of a lot of different programming, so limits on the number of channels might eventually restrict usage.

The other challenge for broadcast systems like MediaFlo is that they compete with people using SlingBox or similar products to retransmit their home cable television signals to their mobile devices. "Why get HBO Mobile when you can already get HBO home slinged to your phone?" asked Sanders of Sony. He pointed out that the Three network in the UK is bundling Sling services with its flat-rate 3G service offering.

"Three is like an airline that just bought a bunch of 777s and now they're flying with a bunch of empty seats," replied Brose of Paramount. He claimed that Three has to be betting that video usage will grow slowly enough that faster data networks will be available before the usage of video saturates the network.


The "encoding nightmare"

Then there's the question of standards. Unlike the PC, there aren't one or two video standards for mobiles. Because of the huge array of different screen sizes and software environments, a company that wants to stream video to mobiles supposedly needs to encode it in up to 150 different formats (seriously, that's the figure I was given by a couple of people). An executive I talked to called this the "encoding nightmare." Some companies are starting to offer server appliances that encode the video in real-time from one or a few base formats. But this adds expense to the business model, and real-time encoding is not as high-quality as pre-encoded video, especially if you're trying to compress the video heavily -- which is exactly what operators need to do in order to conserve bandwidth.


What does it all mean?

I think there's a role for mobile video, but considering the limits on user interest, and the huge technical and business challenges, it's not going to be the great horizontal application that drives the mobile data market. At best, it'll be a nice add-on for entertainment-focused users who want video in addition to their MP3s and games.

_______________
*This is a reference to an old joke about a boy who desperately wanted a pony. One day he saw a stable stall full of manure, and began furiously shoveling it out. "What are you doing?" his parents asked. "Well," the boy replied, "with all this manure, I figure there has to be a pony in here somewhere."

How could we make Second Life more teacher friendly?

A few days ago I was watching Daniel Livingstone's presentation Immersive and Web-Based Virtual Learning Environments, and although most of the things he talked about were not new to me, it did strike me that teaching in Second Life at the moment is no piece of cake if you don't have certain technical skills. Sloodle is an interesting project that tries to make Second Life more teacher friendly, but can you imagine an average teacher (who has already struggled to learn how to use Moodle) installing Sloodle and setting it up with his or her own Moodle site? Or setting up a quiz for students within Second Life by finding and modifying a quiz script? I honestly can't, and I think that until we can make teaching in Second Life as easy as using a web-based learning system like Moodle, I don't think we can expect a lot of existing teachers to do any serious teaching in Second Life (for the sake of the argument let's just say that Second Life (or a similar virtual world) is an environment we want to use in education, and that we want to have our teachers to teach in it). You all probably know that it's difficult enough to explain what Second Life is all about, not to mention convincing teachers to get an account and get seriously involved in it!
Teaching in Second Life can be confusing
So, what would we need to make Second Life more teacher friendly and consequently more student friendly? I think the best way to achieve that would be to integrate some teaching and learning tools right into the Second Life (or any other virtual world) client. Let me give you an example of how that could look like.

First, a quick look back in time. The things we have to do right now in Second Life to set up a quiz or a similar activity remind me of the internet in the middle of the nineties. Back then, internet was a cool thing tool that most people were still unaware or even afraid of. It was really cool to have your own website, but it was not easy. You had to get some server space, learn HTML (remember how proud we were when we managed to use frames? ;) ), and then you had to know how to upload files. Argh. Only the real enthusiasts bothered to learn all that. Compare that with the ease with which you can nowadays create (and publish) a website in iWeb or the wonderful one click web publishing - everything is so easy that even my grandfather was able to learn how to blog in a few hours! And that's just how Second Life should become if we want more people to adopt it. We need better interfaces, more interactivity, and the ability to create content without the need to edit the scripts directly. Everything should be as easy as blogging with the Sloodle Toolbar currently is (well, once you manage to set it up :) ).

What we'd need is a user-friendly tool with which we could manage our courses. The best would be if learning management tools were available right in Second Life - in a similar way that group administration works right now. Can you image how great it would be if we had an extra "Learning" button somewhere in the SL interface? This button could open a list of all courses an avatar is currently attending or teaching. With a few clicks, you could get more info on each of our courses, search for new courses, start your own course etc.. Right now there are already many interesting courses that are being taught in Second Life (not just by educational institutions, but also by individual residents), but no easy way to find them and keep track of them.
Learning and Teaching in Second Life
I think every Second Life resident should be able to set up a course - pretty much like you can create your own group. Linden Labs could charge a small fee to open a course (as it does with groups), and have special discounts for large educational institutions that provide more courses. As a teacher of a course you should be able to change some basic settings, manage the list of participants (students and teachers/tutors) in each course, make course materials and notes available to students, have a list of assignments with deadlines and grades, have the ability to view attendance stats in your virtual classroom (a certain space on a land you or your institution owns), have the ability to set up and rez objects that contain a certain script with a few clicks without having to manually edit the script (a quiz chair for example or and info point for students) etc. Of course, it'd be great if you could connect this teacher tool to other learning environments (Moodle or others) with just a few clicks, and even able to view and edit the content of SL courses on the web. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so let's try to imagine how such a tool could look like:

Course management in Second Life
And then of course, students should in my opinion also get some help to keep track of their courses in the 3D virtual environment. They should be able to view basic course materials, send messages to the teacher and other students (either using the virtual world's IM channels or maybe even send IMs to other chat clients outside the virtual world - Skype, Google Talk, ICQ etc.), get reminded of upcoming lessons (wouldn't it be great if you were automatically offered a teleport to the class location 5 minutes before the start of the lesson?), receive notices of changes, have the ability to upload reports, write posts, answer quizzes, rate courses etc. Of course, the content of all their courses should also be accessible through a web browser and on any mobile device.

These are just a few ideas of how I think future teacher/students tools in 3D online virtual worlds should look like. I don't think it'd be a good idea to build an education-only virtual world (some sort of 3D Moodle) that focuses just on education - at least not until our avatars are able to travel between different worlds with all their luggage. In my opinion we need to provide better support for education in existing virtual worlds - education is after all one of the very important aspects of our lives, so why shouldn't it be more visible and better supported in the so called real-life simulations? I hope we will start seeing more tools like this soon, and that providing such tools will make second life easier for both "virtual" teachers and students. As virtual worlds are slowly making their way into mainstream and evolving in more open and connected spaces we now have the opportunity (and perhaps even a moral obligation) to bring out our own ideas about the future of education in virtual worlds and also demand better support for teachers and students in these new environments. That is why I would like to end this post by asking you, dear reader, this question:

What do you personally think should the killer app or tool for teaching in virtual worlds be like if it were to bring 3D immersive environments a step closer to the average teacher and make studying in these environments easier to follow for learners?

China Mobile Telephones

China Mobile Telephone Exports It wasn't difficult to guess that with China's industrial revolution into manufacturing everything and its growth markets in mobile telephones that China would aim to compete with the world's best known handset brandnames, such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson, Alcatel, Sagem etc. I thought it might be helpful for mobile telephone examiners to be aware of

Gotta Get Goals Meme

I admit: I've been a bad blogger lately. I've been tagged for my first blog meme over 3 weeks ago, and I still haven't done my homework :blushes: I'm glad that I can now finally take some time to add my post to the Gotta Get Goals Meme, for which I was tagged by Eduardo Peirano (also, check out his College 2.0 network on Ning), who also wanted to learn about my goals.

I admit it took me some time to write this post. I'm in a way at a turning point of my life - just got my bachelor degree, and now I'm trying to get a full time job and continue with my formal education. And although I'll probably continue in the field I'm already so involved in, it certainly is a good time for me to think about goals, and all the things I'd like to do in the future.
Gotta Get Goals
So, after much thought, I have decided that these are the most interesting goals for me right now:
  • I'd like stay on track with recent developments and best practices in the the field of e-learning, and also in other fields that can help me with my work or are just interesting for me (for example informatics, psychology, communication science, marketing, graphic design,...). My goal is to keep my eyes open for new discoveries, to keep reading, keep asking questions, meeting new people, learning something new every single day, and trying to apply new knowledge both to my professional and personal life.
  • I'd also like to continue with my formal education. My goal is to find a good online master and later a doctoral program connected with e-learning, during which I'll be able to improve myself as an online learner, and of course continue to reflect on my work as an online tutor.
  • I'd like to continuously improve my tutoring and teaching skills, and try to share my passion for my work with my students, colleagues, and anybody else that is willing to listen ;) With that I'd like to inspire people to discover new things that are not necessarily related to a single course subject, and to start viewing the process of learning as a daily activity and not just as part of a formal educational setting.
  • I'm my lifetime I'd also like to learn another foreign language - currently I know English and Italian (although I need to improve my speaking and writing skills in Italian!), and I would once like to learn a language that is completely different from the languages that I already know. Currently, Japanese looks the most tempting for me. Why? Because it is something entirely new, because it'd also give me the opportunity to get to know a different culture, and because it would enable me to watch Japanese anime in the original language :)
  • I'd also to continue blogging and make my blog an interesting place to visit at least once a week :) Although blogging takes a lot of time and effort, it gives back so many wonderful rewards that I certainly hope I'll be able to actively use my blog as my starting point for learning for as long as possible.
  • And at last but certainly not least, I'd also like to continue making the lives of people closest to me (my family and closest friends - you know who you are) brighter with tiny thoughtful displays of affection that show them that I care about them and that they are special for me. By doing this I'd also like to thank them day by day for all their love and support - because that in the end is what fuels all my passions and makes me go on.
Eduardo already tagged some people I'd have wanted to tag, but one person he didn't tag, and I would like to learn more about, is Joan Vinall-Cox.

Good deal: Palm's new ownership

Several people have asked what I thought of the recent change in ownership at Palm. I don't have any inside information, so all I can do is speculate like everyone else, and try to apply the lessons I've learned from working at other companies.

Overall, I'm very happy for the folks at Palm, and cautiously hopeful about what this might mean for the company's prospects. I think this outcome is a lot more encouraging than any of the buyout rumors that were floated in the last few months. Palm's new part-owners clearly understand the value of systems design, which is Palm's biggest potential advantage in the market. I think we really need another great systems company to challenge Apple, and I would love to see Palm step up to that task.

Although a purchase by a Motorola or Nokia would have been very entertaining from a soap opera perspective, they don't really understand systems design, and it's very likely that they would have digested Palm without a trace. I'm reminded of a joke we used to tell at Apple in the 1990s when there were rumors that IBM would buy the company:

Q: "What do you get when you combine Apple and IBM?"
A: "IBM."

The other buyout option what was circulating, a full purchase by private capital, would have left the company independent, but with a load of debt that might have been crippling. Hardware companies must have a big reserve of cash to fund inventory and tide them over if they launch an unsuccessful product. I don't pretend to understand all the terms of the Elevation deal (they're wickedly complex), but from my perspective it looks like the financials aren't crippling. I am a little worried about Palm's cash levels, though; a lot of their current cash is going into the stockholder payout.

A couple of other thoughts on the impact of the deal:

Bye-bye 3Com. Palm gets three very well respected people for its board, and removes Eric Benhamou, the last vestige of the 3Com legacy. Somewhere I have a photo of the Palm and PalmSource combined management teams from just before the two companies were separated. The photo includes everyone in the company from Mr. Benhamou down to senior directors. That was about 30+ people. Every single one of them is now gone. So if you didn't like Palm's management back then, you should take another look at the company because it's now 100% different.

Irresponsible speculation about politics. After a change like this, the standard sport in Silicon Valley is to speculate about what it means for the job status of the people involved. In that vein, the thing to ask is, "Who's running Palm in the long run?" The weirdest part of the whole Elevation deal is the arrival of Jon Rubinstein as both Chairman of the Board of Palm and head of product development. As Chairman, Jon is technically the boss of Palm CEO Ed Colligan. As head of product development, Jon technically reports to Ed. So Jon is kind of his own second-level manager.

That feels...unstable.

Palm seems to now have a surplus of product leaders. Jon is in charge of product development, Jeff Hawkins is the designated product visionary, and marketing SVP Brodie Keast is supposed to control the product road map, according to the press release Palm issued when he was hired. It's hard to picture a car with three steering wheels. Who will really be in charge? In the conference call Palm said that Jon would be the execution guy and Jeff the visionary. "The combination of those two guys is one of the most dynamic... combinations on the planet." Maybe. Any organization structure can work if the people involved get along well, and I presume they would not have made this arrangement unless they were all comfortable they could work together. So good for them and best wishes.

But if you want to be a cynic, you'd speculate that Jon probably didn't leave Apple just to be the head of engineering execution at a much smaller company. You wonder if the current situation is just a stage in a longer-term changing of the guards at Palm. I don't have any evidence that's the case, and I am not trying to start any rumors. But when you see a nonstandard reporting structure like this, it usually triggers speculation that another shoe is going to drop later.

Only time will tell.

What's the effect on products? That's the most important question, and it's impossible to answer at this time. Hardware product development usually takes 18-24 months, so the earliest Jon could change the Palm road map would be very late 2008. But that's the middle of the Christmas selling season, and you can't announce products then. So realistically, the Rubinstein product era doesn't start until spring 2009.

In the meantime, there's a lot he can do to make the development of the currently-planned products be more efficient and predictable. Palm has said publicly on numerous occasions that its on-time product delivery needs to improve, and presumably Jon can help with that.

But personally, I think Palm's bigger problem has been its lack of innovative new product designs. Unless Palm has a bunch of surprise products already in development, it will take quite a while to turn around the product road map.

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Thanks to Twofones for including last week's post on the Palm Foleo in the latest Carnival of the Mobilists (link).

4th International Austrian Moodle Conference

In case you missed the announcement at Moodle.org, I'd like to invite everyone to attend the 4th International Austrian Moodle Conference this September in the lovely city of Graz (Austria). The conference has no participation fee and it will be a great opportunity to exchange Moodle experiences, and of course make new friends and get some fresh ideas for the new study year. I will most certainly be attending the conference, so I hope I can also meet some of you, dear readers of my blog, there :)

More info about the conference can be found on the conference Moodle site, where you can also download the Call for Papers (also in German).

See you all in Graz!

First Slovenian graduate in Media Communications

With joy and pride I am excited to announce that yesterday I successfully made the last step towards my bachelor degree in Media Communications. Yesterday I presented my diploma work (dealing with the role of online tutors in e-learning) at my faculty, and officially became the first Slovenian graduate in Media Communications (the news even got some press coverage). I was among the first generation of this new study, and although being the first to deal with this relatively new subject was not always easy, I'm really satisfied that my undergraduate study is finally over. Despite many problems, I've learned quite some new things, especially about the characteristic of communication, informatics, and graphic design that I will able to use in my future work.
During yesterday's presentation
Now I'm of course already looking towards the future and searching for an interesting postgraduate study program. I'd like to continue to work and study in the field of e-learning and instructional design, and I would really welcome any suggestions of a good postgraduate study in this field (preferably online). Please leave a comment or e-mail me (ialja(at)mac(dot)com) if you know of any - I really need some help here :)