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March 31, 2006

So Typical

So this is a pretty typical startup story. We are going to be at the CTIA show in Las Vegas next week and needed to have some materials printed up. We submitted them Monday and paid for 2nd day air to make we would have them this week, with time to spare. So the show up today, and instead of our materials, we received a box of someone else's business cards. I called the printer, Overnight Prints, and the best they can do on a reprint and ship is next Thursday.
This is the kind of stuff that just eats up your time. Some days I feel like I haven't accomplished anything. This is the reason; right here.
So I called the guy on the business cards and hopefully he is going to be receiving my stuff. He agree to fedex them to the hotel where we are staying in Las Vegas, so it might work out. It'll be close if it does.

What's the moral here? I have no idea.

Posted by David Adams at 01:46 PM | Comments (2)

March 29, 2006

SMSpam

I just got SMS spammed by singular for their ringtone/images service. Blech. Seems I have a lower tolerance for SMS spam than I do for email spam. More work to delete I guess; plus the beep and vibrate and I thought I was getting a real mesage. So they gave me the option of opting out by returning the sms with the word "stop" in it. So I did. 30 seconds later. The message me back telling me I've been removed. More spam. I had assumed that. I didn't need the message. Now it is going to take 10 days for my preferences to take affect. 10 days? Why doesn't the MT application that responded to my SMS just set a boolean value in their database that they check before they spam. Should be instantaneous. Ten days? Wonder how much spam I'm going to get in the next 10 days.

Posted by David Adams at 12:58 PM | Comments (2)

March 08, 2006

Microsoft Launches Google Killer Search

Microsoft launched the Beta of their search site on www.live.com today. It doesn't work in Safari. I know it's a beta; but show me a Microsoft product that isn't a beta and I'll show you a product that they haven't released yet. The continuous scroll navigation is not great either. I think they would have been better of paging the results out. Pagination makes it a LOT easier to go back and find a link. Scrolling up and down to find a previous link is tedious, especially with their "custom" scrollbars. Google killer? Maybe version 3.

Posted by David Adams at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2006

Not Fooling Around

One of the problems that we constantly run into profiling phones is poor coverage. Where we are located, we get good CDMA coverage, and T-Mobile is good, but Cingular is very bad. We tackled the problem last summer by purchasing a PCS signal amplifier. I posted about it at the time. The one we bought last summer is small and gives us pretty good gain for CDMA and GSM (Cingular is still pretty bad though), but doesn't handle iDEN. Well this has been a problem for us this month because we have started in on the task of profiling Nextel phones and we get absolutely no coverage inside our office.

So this time when I bought a BDA (bi-Directional Amplifier) for iDEN networks, I made sure I got one that had some serious gain to it. I ended up picking up a used Dekolink which has 60dB of gain. What's really nice is that is has separate gain control (manual and automatic) for uplink and downlink. So after switching to manual and cranking the downlink gain up, we are now getting 3 bars our of five in the middle of our office. Also, this BDA has the same standard antenna connectors so I didn't have to install another YAGI antenna. We just switch between them as we test.


Posted by David Adams at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2006

Seattle Mobile March


We just announced the speakers for the March meeting of Seattle Mobile. This month Chetan Sharma and Hans Hanspal will be giving a presentation on 3G entitled "3G Diffusion, Impact, and Opportunities".
Chetan gave a great presentation almost a year ago at Seattle Mobile on the mobile industry in India. Should be a great presentation and a great meeting.

The meeting is on Monday the 13th of March. Info is here: Seattle Mobile.

If you'd like to get up to speed with the current state of 3G, Chetan has written a great cover article for Wireless World titled 3G: Hitting the Mass Market.

Posted by David Adams at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2006

Mobile Startup - Mobile Blog Page

Well I decided since mobile is what I do, I should probably have a mobile web version of this blog. I have been doing a lot of visual comparison between browsers the last couple of days and am going to spend some more time this weekend doing some research comparing the different device browsers visually. Brian Fling and I have been discussing the state of the mobile web a lot lately in anticipation of a panel he is moderating at SXSW Interactive next week on "De-mystifying the Mobile Web".

So if you are interested in seeing version 1 of this page on your phone, check out http://wap.mobilestartup.com.

Note: I'm not wild about using "wap" as the hostname, but what are my alternatives? Automatic device detection, which I'm working, on sure. .mobi domain? No thanks on that one.

Posted by David Adams at 07:25 PM | Comments (2)