Rococo

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)

Bruno is putting a nice Wiki together on the Java.net site dedicated to JSR82. If you have a project, an article, a product or anything else - you might want to list it here.

Posted by Sean at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

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)

The Automotive industry is one of the key growth markets for Bluetooth, and Java/Bluetooth, over the next few years. Bluetooth followed the typical trend for new technology in cars. The auto industry tends to "refresh" at a much slower rate than (say) the more fashion-oriented and almost disposable phone industry, so initially, Bluetooth appeared as an optional extra on high end cars (BMWs and Mercedes I think), and then gradually trickled down to mid-range and now compact cars. Initially the key application was of course handsfree access to the phone (often driven by regulatory requirements in various countries).

Now though, we're seeing initial demand for Java/Bluetooth and JSR82 to be built-in to cars for applications other than hands-free. For example, to download new diagnostic applications to Engine management Systems (EMS) that can then "report back" wirelessly to auto-technicians, or (my favourite), to enable a user to select some information from their in-vehicle navigation system (local map, places to eat, directions to hotel) and to send that over Bluetooth to their phone/PDA/laptop, thereby extending the useful range of your GPS system when you leave the car.

Anyway, enough of my ravings. Today's project has no official name as yet. If you have a good suggestion, then maybe you'd send it in. It's the brainchild of Yoshua Victor, from Indonesia. Over to him:

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

My project is to enable remote control from mobile phone to a car. The usual analog car remote typically has some functions, but the basic function is to start the engine, to lock the door and unlock the door. I’m inspired from the many times that the analog remote is out of battery and then you're stuck, because the car can’t be opened! So I came up with this idea, when your normal car remote doesn’t work, your mobile phone may always be to hand. If you could use it as a replacement remote, that would be very useful.

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

I’m 21 years old and studied Information Technology in Maranatha Christian University Bandung, Indonesia. Major in java programming, and I’m working on this project for my final exam to get my bachelor degree.

How long have you been working on the project

About 3 month since this February until now.

What stage is it at now?

Early days. I’m still learning and reading tutorials about JSR-82, and I’m also getting up to speed with J2ME programming, as this is my first project with J2ME, JSR-82 and other stuff. So now I’m just working on how I use Bluetooth to send data (Strings in this case) to another device. And after I can send data, I’ll start programming in JavelinStamp (which is the micro controller). I get lot of information from parallax.com (micro controller stuff), Nokia developer web site and Java forum that discusses JSR-82 (JAWBT newsgroup on Yahoo Groups).

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

The major block in this project is programming in mobile phones. Despite the promise of Java, if I write a program for Nokia, maybe I can’t use it for Motorola. It makes it difficult to test my project in a real device, so it's hard to make real tests for what I’m trying to do. The other problem is to connect the PC and the mobile phone with Bluetooth because often the PC doesn’t support JSR-82. Finally, I'm on quite a "learning curve" with the MicroController and figuring out how to write a program on javelinstamp that uses Bluetooth. Plenty of issues! :-)

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

I see if this project is a success, it could have a big impact, because I can control certain aspects of my car, which could be very interesting and useful. Also, and if I can develop it further maybe I can use this remote for my house system, or control something else with my mobile phone and Bluetooth.

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

I hope I can finish this project before 12 month from now, maybe 6 month from now I hope I can 100% finish, and if I have finish this project maybe I want to try to have some little experiment to develop this project for home system (control home, ex: light, door, alarm, etc).

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

If anyone out there has tutorials, guides, suggestions for where I should start, I'd very much appreciate it, as I'm trying to learn a lot of stuff in a short time! Thanks! :-)

Posted by Sean at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We sent the call out to JSR82 Java/Bluetooth developers everywhere - tell us about your project! And the replies have started to flow in. So today is the first in a regular series of short articles about projects (academic, hobbyist, commercial, whatever) that use Java/Bluetooth technology and JSR82 specifically in some way. We're structuring these as an interview-style Q&A with the developers themselves, so you hear it from the horse's mouth.

So without further ado, please welcome: The Marge Project!

The brainchild of Bruno Ghisi and Lucas Torri, Marge is about making Java Bluetooth application development even simpler for developers. As you may know, the JSR82 APIs are quite low-level, and tend to slavishly follow the underlying Bluetooth Stack profiles as defined in the Bluetooth Standard. All fine and well, but Java developers also need richer, simpler and more powerful abstractions that let them focus on the application they're trying to build, not the technology they're using. That's where Marge comes in. [Aside: Marge Project is named after Marge Simpson, yes that Marge Simpson. Why? Well - her hair is blue, big and tangled, something which the guys felt reflected the general state of Bluetooth for many Java developers. What a great name! :-) ]

Over to the guys themselves....

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

Marge is a framework to facilitate the development of Bluetooth enabled applications in Java, build in top of JSR82. The main idea (besides having fun with it) is to make the developers focus on the logical part of their software, hiding the JSR82 complexity, so they can build things easier.

Bruno was choosing a subject to his final year project and he saw this gap and started the idea of creating a project that could help developers in this way. After the initial startup, Lucas joined the project to help make it grows.

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

We are two guys from Florianópolis, Brazil. We study in the same University: Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and work at the same company, which is called Praesto Convergence Ltda, a digital convergence company. We have an interest in subjects like digital convergence, mobility, wireless, digital tv, ubiquitous computing and other ones.

Bruno Ghisi is finishing his Information Systems degree this year and Lucas Torri is in the middle of his Computer Science course.

3. How long have you been working on the project

The idea started last year, but the first line of code was written 5 months ago. We are now planning a new version for very soon!

4. What stage is it at now?

Marge is now at 0.3.4 version and it is already simplifying the inquiry/search and communication process, with RFCOMM and L2CAP protocols. The framework is not finished yet and maybe never will be (not because we will leave it, but because we are always thinking about improving it). So, the next step is make it even more simple to use and implement the OBEX protocol.

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

Talking with other developers, we have noticed that is quite difficult for someone to make applications that uses Bluetooth with Java, like remembering all the connection parameters, always implementing the inquiry/search process or opening streams. So, we are trying to simplify the use of Bluetooth in a certain common context, for example: inquiry for a device, searching for services, connecting and then exchanging information.

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

Make it suitable to Java ME and Java SE and create automated tests to the framework.

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

The project is new and because that, there are not too many people using it yet. Anyway, we believe the project has a good chance to be successful, and we are working for make it so! In the worst case, we will use it to change music in our laptops without the need to get up out of bed =P

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

We now want to make it even easier to use and implement the OBEX protocol. Besides this, create a better documentation, make specific Marge extensions for J2ME and J2SE, improve the current demos and also create new ones. In addition, we met a guy called Neto Marin that will help with a Marge extension for J2ME games.

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

In the beginning, we said that one of the main ideas of the project was to have fun, and that's true, cause when it was started our wishes weren't just to build a framework, but also get people together and build a bluetooth java community, which is the whole idea of Marge.

Also it's worth mentioning how people can collaborate with the project. We're interested not only in coding help but also with documentation (tutorials, cookbooks, howto's, etc), translation for other languages, promoting the project, using it and sending ideas or doubts, 'cause it helps us to make it better.

Thanks for giving this space to promote Marge. If anybody is interested and curious about the Project, can join us on http://marge.dev.java.net, everybody is welcome!

Posted by Sean at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)