Rococo

Back at Mobile World Congress in February, we were treated to a very early look at the pre-release of Jabra's new Halo Bluetooth Headset/Headphones. Even then, with a demo set that didn't do anything, the looked and felt, well, cool.

Well - last week I went out and bought a pair at FNAC in Paris while attending the Broadband Conference (more on that in a separate post). So I've been using these for just over a week now, every day, and it's time to offer some thoughts.

First off the basics: they look and feel good when you pick them up. They come with a plug charger for wall outlet, and a USB charger, and with a little wired connection for when you want to use them as "just regular headphones". They have A2DP (let you listen to streamed stereo music over Bluetooth and control the stream). The lining on the inside is a nice furry felt-style cushion material that in nice to the touch. The overall styling is distinctly "Apple" like in a kind of sleek/minimal way. I reckon they don't look to dorky when on - the guys in the office coughed loudly when I said that :-)

After charging, pairing was a cinch. and went without a hitch to an iPhone, a Laptop and to two other phones I tried. The halo can pair with two devices at once - very handy if (like me) you'd like to use them with your laptop (for music, and for Skype and VoIP calls) and with your phone (for music, for for taking/making calls).

First thing I did was play some music. They have a strong confident sound - full and not tinny or weak as I've had from some other A2Dp capable headsets. Very encouraging. Plus - they felt good on - comfortable and light. The little ears slide in-out on a light ratchet and so you can adjust them to get a good fit. They're also angled slightly so they kind of "clamp" your head gently so they feel snug. All in all - initial fit and sound was a winner.

That button you see on the right hand ear piece does multiple things: it'll pause music you're playing and re-start it. Holding it in will turn them on or off. And I think it does re-dials as well but I haven't tried that as yet.

The volume control is innovative and takes a little getting used to. You touch near the small plus symbol on the right ear piece to turn up the volume and near the minus to do the opposite. Touching quickly also acts to skip tracks (forward or back). I found I could get the hand of the up/down volume ok - but I Haven't managed to get the hang of track skipping as yet.

Amazingly - these are designed to work as a great pair of headphones, as well as be a wireless headset for making and receiving calls. I was sceptical about the latter at first (there's no obvious place for the microphone and I reckoned the audio pickup from my voice would be rubbish). I was wrong!

So the next thing I did was to make some calls. I was *very* impressed. I expected people I called to be saying "can't hear you' and "huh?" - instead - it was clear as day, even in relatively noisy environs at the Broadband conference. I even called Dial2Do and played with the services in there for a while to test whether my voice made it through to the voice recognition safe and sound. it worked extremely well. I have to say I was not expecting that - the Halo is just an excellent headset, as well as being a quality pair of wireless headphones! Amazing.

So what's the catch? Well - they're not cheap - mine cost Euro 99 in FNAC. However, when you consider their multiple-use as headset/headphones and the overall audio-quality, I think they're worth it. These are one of the few headsets I've tried that I actually enjoy using and wearing for extended periods. yesterday I did a 2 hour bike ride and listened to podcasts from the iPhone in my bag all the time, and took a few calls while en route.

The catch I can see is yet another innovation: the hinged arms on the Halo. These have taken me a little while to get used to - as they take a little ooomph or "english" to pull apart when you want to fold up the headset. They sort of snick in to place and apart, and with time, you get better at doing it. But initially, it's a little nerve wracking when you're pulling at these to fold them up. As I say - with time the action and my method has improved. And they didn't fly apart in my hands like I was afraid of. In fact - the build overall feels solid and sturdy.

Folding them up turns them off, and folding them back out turns them on. This behaves very well (unlike some headsets or car kits) - simply open the headset and click both arms in to place, and it instantly reconnects to either your phone or laptop.

Overall reaction: I'm very impressed. Sound is great, fit is comfortable, and the core functions work very well. I'd recommend these to anyone who listens to music regularly and would like to do so wirelessly over Bluetooth from your phone or laptop, or better still, both. The Halo's a winner, and a great example of Bluetooth-done-well!

Gripes? The only niggle is that some people are going to worry about breaking those hinged arms on the Halo. I think they'll get over that with time.

Posted by Sean at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well - it takes a little while to digest CES - the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every year at the start of the year. And of course, typically after you get back from any travel you have a backlog of "other work" to do - and so - time passes. So I'm only now getting around to putting some detail down of what I saw at CES.

Rather than cram everything in to one post, I'll do a few small ones. So let's start.

Bluetooth was *everywhere* at CES. And as a sure sign of success for a technology, it's moving firmly from that "zowee - it works!" stage to the more mundane, accepted, everyday ordinary-ness stage. You know, the way we now treat electricity and phone systems? Well it's not there yet - but is surely headed that way. Good news for Bluetooth and a sign of the Bluetooth SIG playing a very sure-footed game as they continue to embrace and extend in the short range wireless space, while continuing to do to competing things with the standard : innovate to add features, while simplifying the end-user experience.

As I say - we're not there yet - especially on the "simplify" side of things, but excellent progress being made. I expect 2009 to be a good year for Bluetooth in general, especially in gaming, automotive, and of course, the stalwarts of phones and headsets.

Speaking of headsets, I'll do a round up of headsets from the show in a separate post, but as a taster, check out these puppies from Plantronics: The new Backbeat 906's - stereo, lightweight, and very very tasty. They come with an adapter for turning your ornery audio device into an A2DP source, and look beautiful. Plantronics have a reputation for sound quality, so if they've pulled this off with this pair - they're on to a winner. Me want :-)

(That's the adapter on the table)

Posted by Sean at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've been doing some work with Android, which you'll have spotted does not currently have JSR82 support. If anyone is interested in getting a very very very early release of some internal stuff we've done to offer JSR82 support in the Simulator with Android, drop an email to us a sos "at" rococosoft "dot" com.

Posted by Sean at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, The Guardian ran an article about the CityWare project which is a pretty sizable project out of the University of Bath. The project has several goals, around understanding how people interact and move through their urban environment, but also helping shed light on opportunities and threats associated with the wireless devices that people carry with them. With regard to the latter, it's a little ironic then that the project has come under fire from privacy advocates, with regard to the fact that cityware collects data about people's movements (or more pedantically, about the movements of their Bluetooth-enabled devices) without their knowledge.

In their defense, the Cityware people say that they don't actually collect personal data about people - they're just recording the Bluetooth address of the devices, plus the Bluetooth friendly name (like SOS W350 or Sean's Mobile) if there is one.

It's the latter in particular that I think is causing the problem, although of course, hard-core privacy people would also be concerned about the ability of someone to find out my Bluetooth address and then search the Cityware data (if that were possible) to pick up my "trails" in the system.

On balance, I'm with the Cityware people on this one. Here's why: I reckon I'm "tracked" in some fashion about (wild guess) 200-500 times per day: Credit Card usage, Surveillance cameras *everywhere*, my mobile phone (by the operator), car-tolls (EZPass), Bus passes, ATM usage, and so on, and so on. OK, I know some of these are different, and in theory, they're all in different databases. So argument number one is that Cityware doesn't really add an undue overhead to what's already going on. Plus, some of these are "non optional to me" - I can't ask the store owner to switch off the CCTV while I do my business. Not a great argument I know, but it brings me to my second point: control.

Argument number two is: if you want to not be tracked by Cityware, it's easy. Switch off Bluetooth entirely (safest if you're really concerned). If that's a pain, just ensure your friendly name is set to something innocuous, as opposed to say, your name, your address, and your PIN code :-)

Argument three is: eh, don't live in Bath. Ok just kidding on that one. In fact, the software has been used in other cities also, so even if you don't live in the lovel city of Bath, you may be "at risk".

I have a little bit of sympathy for Simon Davies, of Privacy International who said this:

"For Bath University to assert that there aren't privacy implications demonstrates an astonishing disregard for consumer rights. If the technology is as safe as they claim, then all the technical specifications should be published and people should be informed when they are being tracked."

I agree a little: there are some privacy implications, but in my opinion, they're just not radically different from the environment we're immersed in every day.

Where Simon completely loses my sympathy is when he says this:

"It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control."

This is just untrue, and gives the Privacy brigade a bad name. Somewhat hyperbolic to say the least. Dr Evil will have to install Bluetooth radios within 50-100 feet of every living person in every city in order to make this "ubiquitous", and it's a little unfair to say you have no control when you can , you know, just....turn.....Bluetooth......off.

Anyway - I think the project is way cool, and is genuinely interesting research. I also think that if they force people to opt in to the project (as in, alert people every time they're going to collect a bit of info) then the experiment is affected dramatically, and it alters the data. I think this is data worth analysing, not least because it may have clues for we might better manage how and where our identities are exposed by the electronic bag of tricks we carry around.

Posted by Sean at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was at a Mobile Web 2.0 Summit recently in London. Part of the conference had a "pitch" session for startups. Each company had 10 minutes to pitch their wares to the attendees, who included VCs, Telecom Executives, Press and assorted bloggers and industry people. Dial2Do even pitched (and sang)! But that's another story...

One of the companies that pitched was called aka-aki, from Germany. They are a very interesting startup that mashes up Bluetooth, Social Networking and some other concepts into an innovative service. I asked them if they would consider doing an interview for our blog, and they kindly agreed. This area, which I'll choose to call:

proximity-and-location-based-social-networking

is heating up now, with Imity being acquired by Zyb recently, and with a few other players having emerged in the last 6-12 months. So - without further ado.......

1. Give us a brief background on the company. How did it come about - what was the inspiration? How many people are there now, and where are you based?

aka-aki evolved from the diploma project of 5 of the 8 founders at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2007. The inspiration was to bring about all the functions known from social networking on the internet to the streets. Because real life is still not happening in front of a computer. It happens on trains, in universities, in bars and clubs and airport waiting areas. So clicking people would be very useful here in real life on the streets. So we had this vision and found technologies that everyone carries in their pocket (bluetooth and mobile internet connections) to bring social networking to real life. We created aka-aki, got the best score at university for it and decided to found a company that goes on developing aka-aki and brings it to the market. Now, in summer 2008, aka-aki is a Berlin based startup with 14 people working in the office.

2. Tell us a little bit about yourselves. What's your background? What are you working on in general?

Most of the founders of aka-aki have a marketing background - they studied advertising and strategic communications. With this background they know about the important challenges for any mobile application in a still-developing market. but they also know how to face them and are now working full time in their company to make aka-aki what is called a killerapp. Of course this happens hand in hand with the IT specialist co-founders and software developers! But the fact that the founders do not come exclusively from the IT field, brings a special extremely user-focused way of thinking to the company. A lot of other companies seem to have a great technology first and then hire some marketing people to find something it could be used for. We do it the other way around.

3. Give us the elevator pitch on Aka-aki? Who's it for? What does it (basically) do? We'll go in to more detail on key features later on...

Aka-aki can be used both with a PC via the community website and a Java application on the cellphone. It offers three main features:

1. It lets you click people in reality: When someone interesting is around, the cell phone instantly shows you a photo, common interests, mutual friends and much more.

2. aka-aki automatically writes your personal diary of encounters: it saves all your encounters for future reference on the aka- aki website, so you can even make new contacts later on. It could be the end of the business card and the second chance for missed connections.

3. It lets you carry your friends in your pocket: aka-aki helps you to keep in touch with your friends on the go: text messages can be exchanged, no matter whether from the website to the mobile, from the mobile to the web or whatever. and using microblogging you can show your friends what you are up to right now and see what they are doing.

All in all it is fun on the go. And it is the first mobile community with elk. Yes, elk.

4. How long have you been working on aka-aki?

The diploma project started in fall 2006. Software development started in spring 2007. After having founded the company in summer, we started a closed beta test in late summer 2007 and opened the service to the public on April 3rd 2008.

5. What stage is it at now?

Well, right now it is still in beta. And developing. We research how the users use it, what they think and do with the features we offer them. This is a process that will not stop. As long aka-aki is used by people it will continue to change. Since the public launch we have almost 5000 people signed up and using it as of June 2008. We still consider it to be at a very early stage. And of course, there is much more to come.

6. What's it built or written in? What platforms does it support? What influenced the tools or languages you chose to write the software in?

For now the mobile interface is a Java app for mobile phones. That decision was made very early, because at the moment this is the only platform that is supported by a very large number of phones. Apps for iPhone, Blackberry and WindowsMobile will follow.

We started with Java because it is supported by the largest number of devices. We always knew that the biggest challenge for aka-aki would be to gain a critical mass of users. So we chose to make technical barriers as low as possible. That is also the reason why we chose bluetooth and not GPS.

7. Were there particular technical limitations of Bluetooth, or Java, or JSR82 or other technology that you had to address? If so - give us a little bit of background on that?

No. Even JSR82 seems to be quite widespread today. Bluetooth is limited to about 20 meters, but that is no problem for our approach of telling something about the people that are really THERE. If my GPS tells me something about somebody around the next block and whom I cannot see... well, I probably would not talk to him anyway.

But aka-aki is always open for including other technologies when they become widespread enough and if they enable new interesting features that make the user experience better.

Of course porting is always a problem that needs a lot of time and man power. But we give our best. And we also handle this by having a basic version of the service that can be used without the mobile app. That is what our pending patent is about.

8. You have a patent pending in an area that sounds pretty cool - can you elaborate on that a bit and explain it?

The patent pending technology allows us to log encounters between mobile devices without the need for software being installed on those devices. So we can include information on who met whom when into social community networks. Using this we can make the technical barriers for potential users even lower.

9. What was the biggest problem or roadblock you had to deal with in the project so far? Technology? Money? People? Location?

Well, we had no real road blocks to date. We always faced the problems when they appeared and solved them or adapted strategy.

One of the biggest problems for us are the costs for mobile data services in Germany. But this is changing right now. Though slowly.

And, as everywhere in the European IT industry, finding J2ME developers is a challenge. So, if anyone looks for a job in rocking Berlin... call us!

10. What's next? What do you hope to work on over the next 12 months?

One next big thing will be the launch of the english version to make aka-aki available for international users. Further there will be versions for other platforms.

11. Anything else I should have asked you? Anything else you'd like to say?

Sign-up! www.aka-aki.com

And finally of course, there's the mystery of the elk :-)

Posted by Sean at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An excellent review and round-up of a set of Bluetooth headsets may be found on Tom's Guide here. Ideal for anyone thinking about a new purchase. Top Job!

Posted by Sean at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're users of the Zyb platform/service here at Rococo, and so we were tickled to see it make an acquisition which brought some Bluetooth location-awareness into the fold. Zyb has bought Imity, for an undisclosed amount. The key driver seems to have been to stitch the location-based awareness (aka Pocket Radar) that Imity had implemented in to the Zyb offering.

This usage scenario for Bluetooth (where Bluetooth's location-ness is connected to one or more social networks to tell you something about other people nearby) is now becoming very common, and I'd expect to see it as a standard element of any decent mobile social networking offering within 6-12 months. Imity also brings some very cool crowd-sensing stuff to the party (see their blog for examples).

Good news - we look forward to trying out the newly integrated service when it's been "Zyb'd" and wish everyone involved all the best.

Posted by Sean at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've speculated in the past about some cool ways in which Bluetooth can add a sprinkle of "location love" to already existing applications. For example, we've previously mentioned that when you add Bluetooth to (say) FaceBook client running on a phone, you get a potentially cool mashup: your fb app could now alert you to when other facebook friends are nearby (assuming they're running the same app of course) and all sorts of things could be triggered as a result:

- auto updates of status ("Sean passed Joe in the Office")
- offers to IM / message over Bluetooth on the fly ("Joe's nearby. Nudge him?")
- mini-gaming ("Joe's Androids wish to invade your phone. Fight?")
- and so on

Anyway - another datapoint arrives for this, in the form of MyBlogLog. They've mashed up Bluetooth location with a MyBlogLog client to let you see other MyBlogLog members nearby. As TechCrunch says, there are others doing similar things, also using Bluetooth - Imity, Mobiluck, Aka Aki are cited (some of the others are using GPS). Twinkle on the iPhone is using the in-built location function to show people on twitter who are nearby. All in all, the first wave of potentially engaging location apps are only now beginning to emerge; I'd expect a slew of them over the next twelve to eighteen months. Thereafter, we'll expect to see location as an element being considered in many apps - it'll no longer be a "whoah - cool!" feature.

All of which should be good for FireEagle.

Posted by Sean at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just back from Mobile World Congress, the Artist Formerly Known as 3GSM Conference. One of the coolest things I saw was a rollable display from the gang at Polymer Vision.

This was like seeing something straight out of "in the future, we'll have...." made real. A kind of Minority Report moment. It really works (for reading), and is going to be available end Q2 this year. Niiiice.

Posted by Sean at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These are very tastily done. I see one in my future. Y'know, for research purposes :-) On a serious note - we'll start to see volume Bluetooth-in-watches towards Christmas '08, imho. More information here: http://www.howardchui.com/2007/06/15/sony-ericsson-fossil-launch-new-bluetooth-watches/#comment-8917

Posted by Sean at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the "such an obvious good idea store": The Nokia E51 has a dedicated Bluetooth Key. How handy is that?

Posted by Sean at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Very nice implementation of a game called Rolling Ball, winner of a Mobile Application Contest at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Uses Bluetooth in Multiplayer mode to enable person to person play. Reminds me of a game from long ago called Marble Madness (trackball heaven).

Video of it in action here, details on the project here.

Posted by Sean at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More on Ultra Low Power Bluetooth (formerly WiBree). Nick Hunn of EZURiO gave an excellent talk as part of yeaterday's Ultra Low Power panel session in the afternoon. One of the really striking points he made is about the latent opportunity in connecting "stuff" that hasn't traditionally been connected before. This is sometimes drily referred to as "M2M" or Machine-to-Machine applications, but is better described as "the internet of things".

It's sometimes difficult to convey certain idea, but I think his slide showing (for comparison), how few of our "machines" (washing machine, fridge, car, hoover, toilet, scales, industrial, ...) are currently connected to anything, and how numerous they are. I asked him could I re-use his slide here, and he kindly gave me permission:

Posted by Sean at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A short one this. Day two of the conference focused on the new Ultra Low Power (please, let's get a better name for it than that...) version of Bluetooth coming down the tracks, based on Nokia's WiBree technology. Mentioned here before, this technology is designed to handle Machine to Machine scenarios with ease, and will wireless-enable a new generation of watches, switches, sensors and industrial machinery with potentially profound effects (more on this later).

After an excellent introductory talk in the morning by Mirjam Hirvonen from Nokia, Nick Hunn of EZurio made a small-but-crucial comment to the audience. I'll paraphrase:

People often think of ULP/WiBree as "very short range" wireless (like, 2-3 meters). That's not necessarily correct. For example, a sensor with ULP could communicate with other devices within a 50 meter range, once every minute, for three years, on a single button cell battery. The same device could communicate with devices up to 5 meters away, every 5 *seconds*, also for three years. The kinds of applications enabled by this capability is quite mind-boggling.

Just thought I'd pass that on - as I think it's quite an important insight regarding ULP / WiBree Bluetooth, that's not obvious at first when you review the blurb. Moe anon about the kinds of applications this could unleash. As usual, I'm quite excited! :-)

Posted by Sean at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jens-Uwe Soehner, from Parrot, gave a great talk yesterday as part of the session covering Consumer Electronics. Parrot have really driven the market for Bluetooth in the car. Their car kits were the first ones to look good, be beautifully packaged, and (oh yeah) actually work well! :-) They've been growing rapidly, and have a "fabless" approach to manufacturing (they design the products and contract out the manufacturing), which gives them agility and flexibility in creating new products.

Recently they've been expanding in to other areas, including Photo Frames, and Wireless Speakers. It was the latter area that Jen-Uwe covered in his talk.

In particular, he covered such practical issues as:

- No one wants to pair to individual left and right speakers to set them up - the user perceives it as "a pair" and expects to see the pair appear as one entity when they scan, connect, pair and use. This was a really obvious point, but I have to say, hadn't occurred to me until he said it!

- Some of the issues involved in setting up and calibrating a pair of wireless speakers, especially with regard to issues of latency (basically: how to ensure music arrives and plays through both speakers in sync). He also covered how much more complex this gets in 5.1 surround sound systems, where audio must sync to videa streams.

- Power: could people adjust to the idea of "your speaker needs new batteries" (for home stereo/AV speakers)? Would they be re-chargeable? How can they be designed to minimise power drain.

Great talk. look out for it when the slides are on the site. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on their cool new speakers.

Posted by Sean at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm at the Bluetooth Evolution Conference in London today and tomorrow. I'll drop a few items in as I watch the presentations.

To kick off, here's one I missed, from 2006, that was mentioned in one of this morning's presentations: The Hug Shirt.

Yes, it's a shirt. And Yes, it has Bluetooth. The idea is - you couple it with a Java enabled mobile phone, and use it as follows:

- You and your friend both get hug shirts
- Pair with your phones
- Then one of you, eh, hugs yourself; sensors in the shirt create hug data
- The hug data is sent to the phone, which then sends it to your friend's phone (via SMS, I *think*)
- Your friend's phone then sends the hug data to the shirt, which then gives the hug to your friend (via actuators, also in the shirt)

Apparently it's washable as well. Amazing!

Posted by Sean at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Will the shiny new GPhone have Java / Bluetooth on board? I think so.

Why?

Three simple reasons.

Advertising is going to feature heavily in the GPhone (eh, duh!). And so, who better to capitalise on the encouraging statistics around Bluetooth Marketing than The Google? They'd be mad not too. Plus, bet they'd do a sweet job on the marketing interaction. They'd "add value" to tie in options for their real-world vendors to connect with customers passing by. In one fell swoop, they'd be able to offer a way for you to deploy your ads as mobile coupons, proximity offers, yada yada. This alone is a good enough reason. But I promised three!

Presence. As in - connecting your phone to real-world stuff and real-world people, in real time, mixing together that online/on-phone stuff for magic and fun. You meet a friend. You both have GPhones. You both have "opted in" to Google's presence service (powered by Jaiku plus Google IM plus Google's new open social network platform). Updates automagically flow to your online profile. "Sean met Joe at 4ish today". Nice. Many options to drive value-add apps.

Java. Bluetooth by now is becoming standard on all mid to high end phones, and appearing as a feature on many of the low-cost models. Om says he reckons Java is slated for the GPhone. In which case, they'd just be mad not too. JSR82 ties Java to Bluetooth, opening Bluetooth to upper layer applications, and providing the crucial "near me" presence glue.

So then. Anyone know who in Google we'd talk to about our Market Leading JSR82 Technology?

:-)

Posted by Sean at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can only smile at this. Love it. They've created a driver so that you can use the Wii remote with the Series 60 phones.

Fan-tastic!

Posted by Sean at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Available November. Thin Bluetooth speakers that can be used as handsfree phone speaker (as they have a microphone). Niiiice.

Posted by Sean at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bluetooth in Set Top Boxes has long been speculated about, but actually rarely seen in shipping devices.

Interesting then, that Broadcom has added Bluetooth support to their reference platform for consumer set top boxes.

Aside from the usual "remote control" and streaming audio scenarios, I think this is partly about positioning the platform for the higher-bandwidth versions of Bluetooth coming down the pipe. As mentioned here before, when the newer versions of Bluetooth ship in the next 12-18 months with UWB support, it'll be possible to stream video at high quality from (say) set top box to (say) a suitably-equipped flat panel TV.

More wires that can be junked. Excellent! Imaging being able to drag a flat panel screen to the garden, the kitchen, whereever, just plug it in and start watching. Yummy.

Posted by Sean at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

More sad techno-lust stuff. Toshiba are first out of the blocks to ship a consumer version of a "wireless dock" for some of their laptops. It uses Ultra-Wideband, costs $500 (versus $180 for non-wireless version).

The really sweet bit is the Wireless DVI - you bring your laptop near the dock (within 3 feet) then BING! Your video pops up on your external monitor. Sweet.

I saw a demo last year of Philips HD TVs using a very early version of UWB to play DVDs streamed over UWB from a player to the TV. This is (I think) the first consumer product to do this for real.

Yummy.

Posted by Sean at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're fans here of Salling, especially their Clicker application.

So we just came across BlueShareWare.com, who do something similar to Salling (Bluetooth Remote control for Mac or PC), plus something different:

- Outlook Dialler (lets you dial someone on your phone directly from within Outlook over Bluetooth)
- LockItNow (uses your mobile as a security token to lock or unlock your PC)
- BeamItNow (auto send photos from mobile to PC)

Nice set of applications. Must ask them if they're using JSR82 (and if not, why not!!! :-)

Posted by Sean at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The SoundBall: A football (that's a "soccer" ball for our North American friends) with built-in motion sensors. Transmits motion data via Bluetooth to a computer that makes appropriate noises based on the received data.

From Aleksei Stevens : http://www.alekstevens.com/

Posted by Sean at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another cool project using JSR82. In fact, in this case, it's a little different, as there are really two projects worth looking at here (BlueCove and MicroEmulator ). We're going to concentrate on BlueCove. Vlad Skarzhevskyy is currently the point-person for this project, which is an open-source implementation of Java APIs for Bluetooth. It's not, officially, JSR82 compliant (yet), as they'll explain themselves, and it's mainly been focused on the desktop / PC arena (as opposed to say, the embedded/mobile area).

As you can see, they've had fun and games with different Bluetooth Stacks, and certain bits of Bluetooth hardware on Windows. We share their pain :-)

As an aside, at Rococo we've looked at the MicroEmulator and think it's great, and we plan to offer an option for our Impronto Simulator users to be able to use MicroEmulator out of the box.

Anyway - over to the BlueCove Team!


1. Give us a brief description of the project. How did it come about - what was the inspiration?

Blue Cove is a Java SE library for Bluetooth. It has JSR-82 interfaces. Blue Cove library is not referred to as an implementation of JSR-82, as it doesn't pass all the JSR-82 TCK tests at this time (but we are really close). The Blue Cove Library is licensed under LGPL so it is possible to link and distribute commercial software with it.

As for the background to it, James Scott, one of the original founders, writes:

Blue Cove was created in 2004 by myself and others who were working at the time at Intel Research Cambridge, a small research lab. We wanted to use Bluetooth in Java under WinXP and WinCE, but no JSR-82 implementation existed allowing J2ME's Bluetooth calls to operate in that environment. Blue Cove was built to support a broader piece of research named Haggle, which is still alive and well (its now a European funded project, and has source code on Sourceforge as well as a webpage at http://www.haggleproject.org/ ). Eben Upton was the lead developer on Blue Cove as he was doing an internship at Intel Research during his PhD. I was supervising the project along with Christophe Diot.

Blue Cove was given its own existence since it was clearly useful to others outside the Haggle effort, and the Intel lab's policy was to publish open source code wherever possible. It proved popular, though unfortunately we had little time to support it ourselves. Ben Hui maintained a website (see benhui.net ) which had a great "howto" about using Blue Cove. Denis Labaye eventually picked up Blue Cove in May 2005 when it was dormant, and asked if he could take it over. And that's where I lose track.

I'm really happy to see continued progress in Blue Cove.

Then the project was maintained by Paul Tötterman and he moved it to Google Code.

I joined the project in 2007 because I wanted to be able to compile and tests J2ME application using real Bluetooth connections. So the best option was to join the project and fix all the bugs. I started from creating test application to ensure interoperability with other JSR-82 implementations. Also now I'm using JSR-82 TCK tests to ensure quality of the product. In spring there was an attempt to make OS X port by Eric Wagner. In May 2007 I fixed all the bugs I was aware of and started adding ability to extend Blue Cove with support for additional Bluetooth stacks on Windows and Linux. Now Broadcom WIDCOMM stack is complete.

Also I decided to support the BlueSoleil Stack. There is ~5% (maybe more?) market coverage for this stack, and since devices for this Stack are really cheap, this attracted attentions of many students to Blue Cove project. In spite of the fact that only limited functionality is available on this stack, support for it got users attention.

I graduated Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1993, M. Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Physics. Used to work DIGITAL Equipment Corporation (DEC) now I work for big corporate a provider of software and services for billing, CRM and OSS systems.

I have some Open Source development experience.
Historical: mp3bookhelper, Mp3 management tools http://mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net/
Project completed in 2004, More than 40,000 download, 3 years since last release and still no serious defects found in application.

Now I 'm helping Bartek Teodorczyk with MicroEmulator. MicroEmulator is a pure Java implementation of J2ME in J2SE. http://www.microemu.org/. I joined project in 2006. Since then we created professionally looking website and changed the image of application.

From my point of view the MicroEmulator is an alternative to Sun's WTK. Together with another pet project (http://pyx4me.com/) collection of tools we are using to simplify J2ME build process in maven 2. This is all I need for j2me application development.

It was my desire to have JSR-82 integrated in MicroEmulator thst originally brought me to Blue Cove project.

Since January I have been working on the project three evenings in a week. This comes to approximately 500 hours, may be more. My experience with JSR-82 is dated back to 2005.

The latest release 2.0.0 is really stable and all major functionality is working. The next version 2.0.1 will be very stable and mature. And all implemented functionality will conform to JSR-82 and pass the JSR-82 TCK tests. Anything that does not conform to the standard will be documented.

Actually I already answered this while talking about MicroEmulator and James described the root cause. I can also put a different angle here.

I used Blue Cove for prototyping new J2ME application and found the quality of the product is not acceptable. So I bought avetanaBluetooth and was happy with it for some time until I run out of licenses and found some problems in the product that I can't fix. Also as an example, I created very simple obex-maven-plugin to install J2ME MIDlet application on OBEX Bluetooth-enabled phone via OBEX Object Push. This improved my compile/deploy cycle from 3 minutes to 30 seconds. I wanted to share this plugin....

The major reason for Blue Cove is to offer an open-sourced version. The benefit of having Open Source implementation in repository is outstanding.

Stability of Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. It took me weeks of running long-running continuous tests until I found that the problem can be solved simply by using different Bluetooth USB dongle D-Link DBT-120 instead of Microsoft Wireless Transceiver for Bluetooth 2.0.

Also I spend two weekends figuring out how to properly integrate with the Broadcom stack. Application was crashing, JVM crashing, I was ready to give-up. By the end solution was very simple: compile switch for C++. I had nobody to ask and nobody to help. If I would have minimum support from Broadcom I would have spent much less time.

I expect to create stable java library that can be used on 99% of Bluetooth enabled desktops. Even if it can't be certified by Motorola and can't be legally called "JSR-82 implementation" it will help to create Java desktop applications that need Bluetooth connections. For example, Medical applications, Monitoring and Connectivity applications.

Also I expect that students are starting to learn JSR-82 using Blue Cove. I'm answering all the question I'm receiving by e-mail no matter how simple they are.

Another hope I have is that if I achieve quality and acceptance of the product this all will improve JSR-82 implementations on Mobile devices.

Next would be OBEX, Linux BlueZ and Windows TOSHIBA stack. This way we can cover all JSR-82 PC market :) Also I have an idea of adding JSR-82 emulator so J2ME application communications can be automatically tested and demonstrated on the website together with MicroEmulator.

For now I'm the only one active on the project so it may take some time. But you see how many hand this project had changed.... Hope one day I will receive a letter form a professional like me saying "I'd like to join and I have 5 hours a week to spend on Open Source development".

Recently I contacted big corporation and there was a time when they agreed to help me with Blue Cove, but by the end I still with no support. They just need to give a little more hope into open source and Corporate and Open worlds can mutually beneficially coexist.

Personally I hope not to give up on the project even when Motorola realises JSR-82 RI under the Apache License. I'm committed to quality. I may be busy doing other interesting work but I will keep Blue Cove quality in my hands.

I would like to thank Motorola for making an efforts to move to open source. Hope that some time in a future my employer also will be joining Open Source movement. I think that future is in the professional Open source.

Ask me what is my dream? One day I come to work and my Manager say: "From now on you should spend 5 hours of you working week on any open source project of your choice".

Posted by Sean at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Jawbone have a compelling demo on their website of their noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset. If it really works like they say, it's a winner! Nice design too.

Posted by Sean at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah yes. Smart Cards. Remember them? In "the future" we'd all have smart cards, and they would uniquely identify us, and we could use them ....well...for everything. Logging in, swiping in to offices, securing our PCs, opening our front doors, car doors, paying for our shopping, using the train, and so on, and so on.

Except of course, that didn't happen.

Some manufacturers put Smart Card readers in their PCs and Laptops and waited expectantly for the "killer apps" to appear. Apart from certain SOX-or-security obsessed organisations, where people have to use them for work (or even for the photocopier), they haven't caught on. My mother's never used one, and she probably never will.

However, what smart cards were originally intended to do for the user remains attractive: a single sign-on for computers or the web wherever you are? One card to carry for payment, travel, car, house, office, etc., etc. In certain countries, what DID happen is that the mobile phone began to be used for some of these tasks. In Japan especially, they led the way in using the phone for small payments (vending machines, corner shops), train ticketing (swipe your phone at the turnstile, if you have the right model), and so on.

Which brings us to today's project: PhoneID, the brainchild of Naomaru Itoi. His pitch is to use something most people now have with them (duh, a mobile phone), as storage for your trusted web ids/passwords. He explains it much better than me - so I'm going to shut up.

Give us a brief description of the project. How did it come about - what was the inspiration?

The project, PhoneID, is a framework for using a mobile phone for user authentication. The inspiration was that every Internet user seemed
to be suffering from what I call a "password hell". We all need to remember too many passwords and type them too many times. We end up using the same password over and over, or writing them down, making us vulnerable to identity theft. It is scary that most websites and security applications rely on passwords for user authentication. Once the password is stolen, a cracker can completely impersonate you. All the carefully created security architecture is gone.

This problem must be solved somehow. Smart cards are supposed to be the savior, i.e., the single security token that provides single sign-on to all the websites and security applications. However, they are not growing rapidly enough because nobody has a smart card and a reader to start with.

I thought maybe a mobile phone could be the security token for single sign-on. Almost every Internet user already has a mobile phone, and it has much computational power. Thanks to technologies like Bluetooth and JSR-82, it can communicate with a host PC at a high rate. It is a very good replacement for a smart card. This is how I started PhoneID.

In PhoneID, a J2ME enabled mobile phone stores user secrets such as passwords and keys. The phone would send passwords and other information to a host computer through Bluetooth and JSR-82.

Currently, it supports Windows Login through pGINA, and Website Login through Internet Explorer. We will expand it to support one time passwords, PKI, file encryption, etc. Check it out at http://www.phoneid.org/

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your background? What are you working on in general?

I was born in Japan, and came to the United States for a graduate school. I received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, working on secure hardware (smart cards, HSMs) integration into modern computer systems. After that, I have worked on smart cards and cryptographic programming at Sun Microsystems, ActivIdentity and Arcot Systems. I left a job at Arcot to found PhoneID.org, and this is my main project now. The mission of PhoneID.org is to solve the password problem using a mobile phone.

My resume can be found here.
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/itoi/resume.html

How long have you been working on the project

2 and half months.

What stage is it at now?

The first two applications, Windows Login and Website Login, are in production.

What inspired it. Were there particular limitations of JSR82 or other technology that you were trying to address?

The password hell inspired it. JSR-82 technology has been good enough for me.

What was the biggest problem or roadblock you had to deal with in the project?

The biggest problem is that not all (or not many enough) mobile phones support JSR-82. But I believe this is changing.

In terms of technology, there were a couple of things:

• There is no widely used tutorial to learn J2ME and JSR82 programming. Ben Hui's web site comes the closest.
• There is no ASN.1 parser that runs on J2ME device. I had to write a simple marshaling tool.
• Configuration of Bluetooth device on Windows is done manually, and not pragmatically. I would like to automate this in an installer, but it is hard.

How do you see the results of the project being used?

It is getting attention. The next step is to make it used by a lot of people.

What's next? What do you hope to work on over the next 12 months?

I would like to integrate PhoneID with KeePass, which is an open source password management program. By doing this, KeePass users would be able to store and view their passwords on a J2ME phone. JSR-82 will play a crucial role here, too.

After that, there are many things I would like to add to PhoneID. Implement one time password, especially OATH, with J2ME and send the result to PC through JSR-82. Implement PKI (digital signature) with J2ME and integrate it into existing e-mail applications. Implement file encryption with J2ME and integrate it into encryption software like TrueCrypt.

Anything else I should have asked you? Anything else you'd like to say?

PhoneID tries to solve the real, widespread problem of the password hell. As far as I know, it is the first project to use a mobile phone to attack this problem. It is also unique in that it is an open source project. I chose this route because I wanted to solve many people's problems, not just few. Right now I have no income, but I am looking for a way to make enough money to survive, while keeping this project open source. It is essential for an open source project to get many users and developers involved, so please join in my effort.

Once again - you can get all the information at http://www.phoneid.org/

Thank you for taking your time.

Posted by Sean at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(I stuck a short glossary at the end of this post as I realised I got a little abbreviation-happy!)

You're bored listening to it, and I'm bored saying it (well, not really), but Bluetooth is on a roll. Market-wise, it's never seen so many units going out the door per week (15M per week now, or higher).

And standards-wise, the Bluetooth SIG's strategy of co-opetition (or whatever buzzphrase you're having this week) is working.

The latest to lay down and be absorbed: WiBbree - the short-lived super-low-power alternative from Nokia, has now graciously decided to throw its lot in with Bluetooth.

So now we have:

• UWB: rolled in under Bluetooth for high bandwidth applications (HD Media Streaming around the home anyone?)
• NFC: the tap-n-go instant transfer spec that's now an optional part of Bluetooth 2.1+EDR specification
• WiBree : ultra low power scenarios, such as true bluetooth buttons, watches or industrial sensors (watch out Zigbee)

Pretty impressive. Bluetooth now goes from higher bandwidth usage scenarios where it can stream HD DVDs from a DVD player wirelessly to a HD flat panel TV, down to very low power and NFC-style apps for personal and industrial apps.

Kudos to the SIG and Mike Foley for pursuing the strategy so well and with such focus. It's working, and I think consumers will benefit over the next few years, with a range of products that will continue to be branded as "Bluetooth", and will hopefully achieve Mac-like nirvana and "just work".

See Bluetooth 2.1+EDR in action here.

In a later post I'll outline some of the potential for extending JSR82 to cover some of the new mouth-watering functionality contained in these absorbed standards. One of the great things though is that JSR82 will continue to "just work" with these right now, as they appear in deployed products. Cool.

Glossary:

[UWB = Ultra Wide Band]
[NFC = Near Field Communication]
[ZigBee = Alternative low-power short range communication standard]
[SIG = shorthand for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group]
[HD DVDs = High Definition DVDs or TVs]
[Bluetooth 2.1+EDR = latest version of the Bluetooth Specification ; EDR stands for Enhanced Data Rate]
[JSR82 - the world's only and best standard Java APIs for Bluetooth]

Posted by Sean at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just had some gadget fun in the last week or so. I now have a new phone (SonyEricsson w880i) and a new set of Bluetooth Headphones (Motorokr S9). That's "headphones" not "headset" as they're stereo, support A2DP, and are ideal for listening to music streamed wirelessly over Bluetooth, among other things. Oh joy of joys!

They are both rather excellent (so far) and the Bluetooth stuff has all worked tickety-boo. The SE plays nice with the headphones, and happily streams music to them. The headphones themselves have rather nice audio quality - the controls are a little sensitive and fiddly to get used to, but once you do, they're fine.

The SE of course has JSR82 (ahem, supplied by the world's leading independent vendor of JSR82 technology). The headphones, being small, lightweight and very embedded, do not (AFAIK).

If you're stuck for gadget ideas for the special someone in your life, the Bluetooth SIG have some suggestions, in their Summer Gift Guide!! :-)

Bluetooth Summer Gift Guide 2007

Reviewing this list, it seems to me that SonyEricsson's strength recently has most definitely been on the phone side of things, as opposed to the accessories. Meanwhile Motorola have been having phone woes, but their accessories really shine.

Posted by Sean at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I tried this new Wireless Stereo Headset from Motorola at 3GSM in Barcelona in February.

Even in a very noisy environment (as you get with 45,000 + phone geeks at that show), these were very impressive: super light, comfy, and of course, "cool". Audio quality seemed to be very good, but you need a quieter environment to really tell for sure. I'll be checking them out whenever they finally appear in Ireland, and yes, they will be MINE!!!!

:-)

Posted by Sean at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I snowboard, and I cycle (to work mostly). I got a present from my sister of a pair of O Neill H3 "Fat Controller Gloves". Demo on their site here.

I finally got around to using them this week. Very nice. Pairing is a doddle (press the button on the iPod connector and then press any button on the gloves). They pair and then "just work". Lovely.

You can then control volume and forward, back, pause and play from the gloves. Perfect for the bike, haven't yet had a chance to try them on the snowboard. Now all I need is some Wireless Headphones and I'm sorted! :-)

Posted by Sean at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I first saw this laser Bluetooth Keyboard, over two years ago, I thought "no way". I genuinely thought it was either a) a mockup or b) a hoax!

Nope. It really does work! I took one for a test drive at the recent 3GSM in Barcelona.

Light, portable, not cheap. But very, very cool. More for my shopping list :-)

Posted by Sean at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, I'm definitely in the market for a nice new set of Bluetooth Headphones. The time has come, and so my research is commencing in earnest.

The Plantronics reviewed here look to be some of the nicest (and admittedly priciest) so far. Sweet!

More to follow...

Posted by Sean at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On a minor follow up note to my last post. I should also of course have mentioned the Apple iPhone when I mentioned Bluetooth headphones and music over Bluetooth being "big" in 2007.

Apple really "get" Bluetooth. The consumer experience using it on their Laptops to date is simply one of the best around, and I'd expect them to carry this through to the iPhone. It has Bluetooth 2.0 support, so pretty soon, I expect to s the "cooloscenti" wearing wireless Apple and 3rd party headphones, streaming the music in CD quality to their ears from their new iPhone, and experiencing that seamless handover stuff that Bluetooth does very well when a call comes through (music fades, player pauses, call comes through, do the call, hang up, music restarts and fades up).

Niiiice :-)

Maybe later they'll also put JSR82 support on it, to support their widgety innovation on-phone.

Posted by Sean at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've mentioned them before (way back) - but it's time to mention them again: Salling, the company behind the incredibly handy Salling Clicker, has continued to add features to their software. If you have a phone with Bluetooth, and you use either Windows or a Mac, I strongly recommend trying it out.

What it is? Well, a soft-remote doesn't quite do it justice, but that's the core idea: your phone becomes a remote control for a range of applications on your computer. Start things up, make them run, all from your phone.

The classic business example is this: open your laptop, open your phone, and you can remotely start PowerPoint, choose the presentation you want, put it in to presentation mode, and then flick forwards and backwards through the pitch. Read any notes on your phone as you proceed! And so on.

The fun social example (one of many) is to control iTunes from your phone. So as you wander around the party in your pad, you can see what music is about to be played, change volume settings, and alter / add music in the playlist.

It's beautifully written - and Salling have achieved a lovely elegance to their user interface. They've made a potentially complex process very simple - even (dare I say) enjoyable!

Posted by Sean at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another snippet from GSM show. Talked to the people at Eleksen and they demo'd their stuff to me.

They don't use Java (yet), but they know their Bluetooth, and they've done a beautiful job of enabling a range of very cool products based around their smart fabric technology. This is one of those things that you have to try out to believe, and once you've tried it, you almost want an excuse to have to get one of the products: "Hey, think I'll buy a huge smartphone with a rubbish keyboard, just so I can get their Bluetooth Keyboard". Niiiice!

Posted by Sean at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)