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RIM, NTP and Lawsuits - More News November 30, 2005

The “Blackberry Cool” folks have a piece here about the continuing legal troubles the Blackberry folks are facing.

Research In Motion Ltd., facing litigation that may halt its BlackBerry e-mail service in the U.S., is this week fighting a case to protect the technology in Britain. Luxembourg-based Inpro Licensing Sarl is suing Research In Motion at a London court for allegedly infringing a U.K. patent it holds relating to the relay of data between BlackBerry phones and pagers and the Internet.

If Research In Motion loses the case, it may force the Waterloo, Canada-based company and partners such as T-Mobile International AG to stop selling or supporting the devices in Britain, according to lawyers acting on the case. Research in Motion has around 375,000 BlackBerry subscribers in the U.K., around 10 percent of its global total.

But the hits just keep on coming…

U.S. District Judge James Spencer has rejected RIM’s request to delay the case and refused to enforce a previously negotiated, and then disputed, $450 million settlement with patent holder NTP Inc. He’s going to set a date to hear NTP’s request for damages, and more importantly (from a Blackberry user’s perspective) to work through the injunction request that would halt Blackberry services in the USA.

NTP’s lawyers have said that they hope these developments will bring both parties back to the negotiation/settlement table. We can but hope.

RIM has issued a press release on the matter.

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links for 2005-11-30


Hello WordPress Dashboard Readers… November 29, 2005

No idea how I ended up on the dashboard as a “growing blog”, but it’s been very apparent once I looked at the referrer’s page!  Anyway, posting has been light the last few days, as you’ll see, due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and a personal vacation, but I plan on getting back in to this.

Coming up, in the next day or three, a post on “GTD With A Blackberry” - as I’ve noticed a few referrer hits from that particular Google search, and practicing the Getting Things Done methodology, with a Blackberry, is indeed something I make a habit of.

Comments welcome, good or bad, on what you’ve seen so far.

Cheers!


links for 2005-11-29


Reviewing Meebo November 27, 2005

Meebo – a web based instant messaging application, supporting the major IM platforms – MS Instant Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ, Jabber or GTalk, or Yahoo! Messenger.

Instant Messaging – it’s not just for kids anymore, and hasn’t been for a long-time. It’s in daily use by millions of folks, using it professionally and personally. One of the everlasting issues, however, is that unlike email, where it doesn’t matter what client you use, it very much matters what IM client you use – the major networks don’t talk to each other. There’s an “open” network out there (Jabber), but it doesn’t talk to the “Big 3” commercial systems. So, you can see there’s an issue.

As a solution, you could, for instance, use GAIM. Multi-platform, open-source, and all that good stuff. Or, you could use Trillian – there’s a free version and a pay-for pro-version, which is my personal choice of IM client and has been for some years. Both of these solutions, however, rely on you being able to download and/or install software on your PC. That’s not always an option – think internet café, work computer, or computer somewhere you just happen to be grabbing internet access, such as a friends computer (who may well already be logged into the IM networks, thus preventing you logging in under your own credentials).

Enter Meebo. Officially launched beyond “friends and family” as they put it on their site only a few days ago, and already revised more than once as a result of the public feedback and commentary, Meebo is an AJAX web-application, offering substantial IM communications, through a regular web-interface.

Find it at http://www.meebo.com
Read their blog at http://blog.meebo.com

Download it from – you don’t. That’s part of the point ;) Go to the website (www.meebo.com), and you’ll be redirected to one of their host servers. The sign-on screen is shown below:

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At the bottom of the sign-on screen, you’ll see “Passwords encrypted with 1024-bit RSA keys. Copyright 2005 Meebo, Inc. All rights reserved.”. There’s a page at http://blog.meebo.com/?page_id=25 that talks about their security. For the sake of clarity and the paranoid – be aware that using this service, yes, the folks at Meebo are getting your password(s), and could record it if they wanted, and that in turn could be exposed if the database was cracked, released or sold. Security is one of those areas where there’s a lot of “if’s, but’s and maybe’s”. You pay’s your money and you takes your chances. Decide for yourself whether the risk is worth the potential reward.

After you’ve signed in to one of more of the services shown above, we get to the meat of the matter:

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This is showing the latest entry from the Meebo blog, an AOL system message (because I was already logged in to AIM on my other PC, and Meebo/AIM correctly identified this, and allowed me to log my other session off), and an obscured message window where I was testing a message through to an MSIM contact.

When a message window is open, you get the “[contact name] is online” or “[contact name] is typing” notifications that we’ve come to know and expect; when I had a different window selected, and a message came in from a contact, the Start-Bar button flashed, and alternated text of the contact name, and the first few words of the message they had typed. That was a nice feature. Tab back to the Meebo window, and the interior window with the message itself has its title bar flashing.

You can logon to a message service once you’ve started the Meebo page – the buttons are at the bottom of the buddy list, bottom right of the screen in the example shot above. Or you could log out of a specific service if you so desired.

The service is openly “Alpha”, and a work in progress. There are a substantial number of “missing features” – and I quote that because, depending on your point of view, they’re not necessarily missing. But, to be clear, at the moment there’s no file transfer, no video or voice communications. This is Instant Messaging, old-school style – you can type, and that’s it. But sometimes – that’s all you want. If you’re somewhere you can’t download and/or install a client, for whatever reason, this is an application that may work for you. Back at home, perhaps the native application, GAIM, or Trillian is more appropriate. Borrowing a computer somewhere – this is definitely an application to be aware of.

My personal want list? Skype integration, for the text instant messaging at least.

Now… the “other side”. The Corporate Security side. I can see this being blocked, deliberately, a lot of places. I don’t know if Meebo has found its way yet into the databases of Websense and the like, but I’m sure it will do in due course. If you manage to get an IM client installed on your desktop, it can “disguise” its traffic and communicate over port 80 (HTTP) or 443 (SSL), which puts you in a position of having to use port-filtering appliances to block the traffic. An application like Meebo relies on a specific website, which is nominally easier to block, although there are “ways around” that, too. At a minimum, *.meebo.com is a target for blocking, as the web servers are www2., www3., etc. I wonder how long it’ll be before someone finds an easy workaround to this…

My advice on the above? If you’re somewhere where Meebo is blocked, be it school or work, accept that, and/or make a written case for the communication benefits of IM to the appropriate “authorities”. There are plenty of studies on the various aspects of communication out there on the internet. Pitch, for instance, that you want the text IM, rather than the file-transfer option (which causes security concerns) or the voice/video functions (which causes bandwidth concerns). See where that gets you.

But for the internet café, somewhere you’re just popping into to check mail and such – here’s a nice, new option for checking IM as well, and I wish Meebo every success.

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links for 2005-11-26 November 26, 2005


links for 2005-11-24 November 24, 2005


Referencing, without showing…

Does this work? Hobart Swan, at the MindManager Blog, has a piece about Using MindManager for Patent Applications. It’s a reference to a piece on Russ Krajec’s “Anything Under the Sun” blog that somewhat adequately leaves me informed, but above all wanting to see the MindMap! Or at least a part of it… Does saying “I have this, and it’s cool”, cut it, or does there need to be more than that to it?

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links for 2005-11-23 November 23, 2005


Mind-Mapping November 22, 2005

My friend and colleague Ant posts about Mindmapping, with the observation “I was introduced to the concept by a colleague a few months ago and now I’m hooked.”. What he neglects to mention is his original assessment of the technique - “oh no, Gary’s on another management fad!”. Just thought I’d call him out on it ;)

Glad you’ve come around to this stuff Ant - I don’t think a day goes by at the moment that I don’t do some form of mindmap. Not always as formal as a MindManager produced version, maybe just a back-of-the-envelope one, but it definately helps with the thought process.

And if you haven’t already seen it, you might want to look at the browser plugin for MindManager.

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links for 2005-11-22


OneNote Mobile

OK, so, if the RIM/NTP lawsuit goes in favor of NTP, and RIM actually does have to close down US operations (getting more unlikely, given the recent brief filed in interest by the US DOJ), this might be enough to make me happier about moving to a Windows Mobile device again.

Enter OneNote Mobile. OneNote Mobile is your portable extension to OneNote that you get when you purchase OneNote. You install it on your Windows Mobile SmartPhone (this is semi-automatic so it is low hassle) and you’re good to go. A few weeks ago, David Siedzik, the program manager for OneNote Mobile showed it to the mobile devices MVPs who were on campus and actually got a standing ovation! Read on to find out why.

When we shipped the syncing feature for mobile devices in OneNote 2003SP1, we had a few constraints that limited us to simply one-way sync (device to PC). A big one was that the built-in note applet was not designed with OneNote in mind, so it couldn’t handle our data unless it were “dumbed down” to plain text more or less. We didn’t have dev resources then to build our own SmartPhone client so that limitation wasn’t going away. We also found that most people were interested in the “upload” scenario, although plenty were also interested in bringing their data with them. So we did the relatively cheap thing which let you take notes on your device and see them in OneNote.

OneNote Mobile goes way beyond that. It is a real note taking app for your mobile device. You can take text notes, voice record, or snap them with a camera. It has a cool picture viewer for navigating the image in detail.

Goodies:

No PocketPC version at the moment - there’s several “votes” for that functionality in the comments of the source post, so that may change - you never know.

I’m a satisfied Blackberry user, but I also make a lot of use of OneNote as part of my personal GTD methodology, using OneNote as a primary capture device during meetings, brainstorm sessions, and so forth.  Being able to use it in a mobile fashion…  That’d be useful.


Microsoft - Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE)

Ray Ozzie on the above.

An extension to RSS intended to facilitate the sharing of data between disparate applications, such as calendar data between private, corporate and public calendar objects. Sounds like a better method than iCal at first blush. Be interesting to see what comes of this. The draft spec (0.9) for the extension is here. From the FAQ, this isn’t limited to calendar data though:

Just as RSS enables the aggregation of information from a variety of data sources, SSE enables the replication of information across a variety of data sources. Data sources that implement SSE will be able to exchange data with any other data source that also implements SSE.

From the user’s perspective, this means that you will be able to share your data (such as calendar appointments, contact lists, and favorites) across all of your devices and with anyone else that you choose, regardless of infrastructure or organization.

SSE is particularly useful for scenarios in which there are multiple masters and/or asynchronous updates. For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse—either of you could enter new appointments, even if not currently connected. Similarly, SSE could be used to replicate a set of calendar entries among a group of people, each working in a different company and using different infrastructure.

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links for 2005-11-21 November 21, 2005


RIM/NTP Lawsuit - RIM “Workaround” November 20, 2005

http://www.blackberrycool.com/2005/11/17/001090/

Users of the popular BlackBerry wireless device will not lose their service if maker Research In Motion Ltd. is hit with an injunction in a U.S. court case, a top RIM executive said on Wednesday. RIM Co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said the company recently completed a software upgrade that it may deploy in a bid to work around the patents involved in its legal dispute with NTP Inc.

“We’re endeavoring to plan for every scenario,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the UBS Global Communications conference inNew York. “Our customers can be calm that there won’t be an interruption of service.”

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