JAJAH Development Blog

Last week Facebook announced it has become an OpenID relying party: any user with OpenID URI can seamlessly login and register to Facebook. After users link their Facebook account to GMail account, they will be automatically logged-in to Facebook after having previously logged-in to GMail. This move is very good for the user. By using OpenID URIs, the user needs only one set of username/password with which he sign-in to his OpenID service provider. From that point on, the user doesn’t need to remember other set of credentials. Yoohoo! Freedom from long lists of passwords at last! Single sign on (SSO) poses great advantages to users and web sites. Registration and login processes become much easier to both sides. Users will be more inclined to register to a site without having to manually type their details, wait for the confirmation mail, press on conformation links and so on. Emerging web sites will benefit from easing registration to new users. However, one has to wonder why Facebook, which already managed to have hundreds of million of registered users without OpenID, would spend resources on this standard. One might say that being open to the web, playing nice and live in harmony with the rest of the big boys is good enough reason. I certainly support this attitude. Sharing, collaboration and overall openness is definitely the direction the web should aspire too. Still, in the wrong hands, utilizing OpenID can have negative consequences. Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe I’m missing something but for me, the easiness of registration can also be honey trap. When a user links his Facebook account to a GMail account, Facebook ask for the user’s email, contacts, language and country. That information is not required for SSO. Facebook can use this information to learn more about the user, customize  its offerings, match GMail contacts with Facebook accounts and suggest user’s contacts to join  to Facebook. This kind of information is the bread and butter of many web sites. Web sites uses it for promotions, advertisements, customization and much more. Potentially, this information worth a lot for the web sites asking it. I wouldn’t be surprised if major players will start charging for that information crossing over. Maybe we can call it “Information border tax ”. What do you think?

  As the concept of Social media grows so does the concept of Social Marketing. Yesterday I  attended a one of a kind dinner at Forelin, which is a chef seafood restaurant. The event was called “Eat & Twitt” and the purpose of it was to promote the restaurant and their new summer menu. This is the first time this is done in Israel, and I have not heard of a similar event done abroad… The event was organized by Liat Vardi–Bar, the talented  “out of the box” thinker I know and love and promoted by Yosi Tagori, which “invented” the concept of #fiddme on twitter. The guest included magazine and blog writers that are related to the food  and restaurant industry and twitter geeks which tweeted the entire dinner. In addition to the wonderful dinner served, there were different wines from Agur winery, and a lecture about food photography techniques, and there were even give always: a cooking book from selected chef  restaurants. This is the second time I attended  Forelins private room and enjoyed it so much. I love the setting and the service there! was one of the more fun events I have been to lately, waiting for the next one. Thanks Forelin! For more pics:http://picasaweb.google.com/jasmineah/EatTwitt# tweeting about it:  

Windows Mobile 6.5 is done and that’s a good opportunity to provide a quick jump-start to developers wishing to learn more about the OS. Microsoft has a tendency to overload developers with abundant API of its various platforms and technologies. Windows Mobile is no different. Managed and native API, .Net, MFC, ATL, Win32… it’s all there for the confused developer. Luckily, Microsoft has recently published an article discussing APIs for Windows Mobile 6 and later, and how to select the best fit for your application needs. BTW, don’t be tempted to choose managed .Net API before fully understanding the functional requirements from your application and the devices it needs to run on. Win32 is better if you wish the application to run on as many devices as possible.  A good place to learn Windows Mobile development is MSDN’s ramp up which is a community-based learning program, teaching various aspects in development for WM. Another excellent source for learning and help is blogs of mobile gurus. I recommend subscribing to the following blogs: Raffaele Limosaniblog, Alex Yakhnin, Christopher Fairbairn, Windows Mobile team blog, Reed and Steve blog, the Moth, and finally, Chris Craft (especially his 30 days of .Net series). OK. You’ve done your reading and fill ready to start developing? hold on. Make sure you took into account globalization and localization issues. Simon Judge lists many of them. Once done development, you need to QA your application. If your application aims for numerous devices in many countries, involving different networks, you should consider using DeviceAnywhere or maybe even Mob4Hire. Finished the cycle? congratulation! Now you can go and publish your application on Windows Marketplace.

After a long time of no women events, we are planning a women only event for entrepreneur women. The goal of the event is to unite women in the Hi-Tech industry and create an inspiring and supportive platform for women entrepreneurship. The event is of the F5 – Refreshing women’s venture group and will take place this upcoming Sunday, in the private VIP room at Foreline restaurant in Tel Aviv (there is free parking!!). The event will include dinner and a lecture “My entrepreneurship experience and about leveraging new media to live a LIP (location independent professional) lifestyle." by Maya Elhalal, which will share with us her experience. There are limited places, so RSVP ASAP on the Facebook Event here.

Mobile devices are no longer tools for calling someone. That’s a known fact. You can take pictures with it, read emails, navigate, read web content, check your calendar and more. However, in the mass user eyes, it is still not regarded as an extension to your computer. Sometimes, when I’m outside my home or office, I come across interesting stuff; movie posters, concerts, commercials or even a quick glance at a newspaper’s headline. For example, I can see a poster about  Antonio Gades’s flamenco version of “Carmen” and wish to learn when and where it shows. Until recently, my mobile options to get this information were limited. I’d have to  open my browser, go to Google and type something like “gades carmen tel aviv”. Then I’d have to go over the results and look for the information I want. That’s very tedious even if you have iPhone. Next comes Nokia. Nokia has recently launched a beta application called Nokia Point & Find. The application, currently available in USA and UK only and for Nokia N95 models, utilizes the compound of phone’s camera, Internet connection and GPS to recognize a real life object and get information relevant to the context and location. For example, users of the service could get information about movie like reviews, local show times, trailers and could even buy tickets on-line. What I like most about the service is the management portal Nokia provides for publishers. Nokia wouldn’t want to have a dedicated professional service team to configure campaigns. Instead, Nokia’s management portal enables the publishers to do it themselves. What I don’t like is that the application is relevant only to N95 models in the USA and UK. Plus, the user will have to download and install the application.  Finally there’s  Kooaba. Koomba is a spin-off company from the ETH Zurich, an outstanding science and technology university in Switzerland. Their technology was already used in several campaigns and looks very mature. Mobile users can send images in various ways: email, MMS, iPhone and J2ME applications, although video calls are not available yet. Publishers can use  a web-based campaign manager to set up their account. The company also offers API for partners and developers.   Overall, this is very exciting! The products above demonstrate how to use the distinctive benefits that mobile device has to offer to provide new experiences for mobile users and business opportunities for publishers.

I recently got a new W500 Laptop (4062-2GX), while it’s supper fast and has a great display it is somewhat of a disappointed. As an avid ThinkPad users I can tell you – this is not an IBM laptop… it’s not built the same way my old T43 is built, and there are small things that make what used to be a great product into a good to very good product. It started with my W500 mouse getting hanged, drove me crazy, I reinstalled the OS, drivers, searched the web only to realize there’s a known hardware malfunction – it was replaced super fast (2 days), but yet I did not expect this from an IBM laptop. Than came the Blue Screens. After a while I decided it’s time to dig deeper and get this resolved. My Blue Screens where at iaStor.sys – to make a long story short there’s an Intel driver called AHCI driver that you can see here: When you update your driver, or go to Windows Update it will look at Intel to see if this driver needs an update. But Surprise! while the Windows / Driver Update thinks your driver is updated there’s a new driver on Lenovo’s web site (which they are not too vocal about) Version #8.6.3 (which is newer than what I had from Intel) that you can download here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70477.html Once I installed it BSoD are gone, at least for now… Putting all this aside there’s a great lesson for me as a developer – it is the small but annoying things that make the difference between a very good and an excellent product. Hope you find this helpful. Amichay

iphonetouch.blorge has recently published a story from Arnold Zafra about top 40 best iPhone optimized web sites. Our own iphone.jajah.com is one of the top 40 web sites!  The site is amongst a respectable list of other iphone optimized sites like Amazon, CBS News, Digg, Meebo, Google and Twitter. Mr. Zafra found these sites to be “useful and highly iPhone optimized sites that will enhance your online iPhone experience”. JAJAH iphone’s dedicated web site, launched at December 2007, has aimed to fully optimize the device capabilities while maintaining a simple and easy user experience. Mr. Zafra story is a testimony for JAJAH efforts in providing a variety of mobile solutions to make low cost calls.

Google’s latest revolution and the usual suspect

By now, the news of Google Voice has spread all over the web. Some celebrates the new revolution from the world’s web seminary, while other raise the usual concerns about invading your privacy. To the skeptics, I can only say, common! Nobody’s forcing you to use it. Google’s power is incredible but there’re still alternatives out there. Besides, free services in exchange for some level of privacy invasion already exist and gain popularity. (Gmail, being the most obvious example, but there’re others). Moreover, we already deliberately provide so much private information about ourselves in Facebook, Twitter, windows messenger status and others that privacy claims about big brother monitoring seems somewhat archaic.

One number, many friends

However, Google Voice is facing other challenges before it become globally  available and gain widespread use. First of all, Google Voices should help its users to spread their new number with their friends, family and colleagues. Perhaps a variation of Google Mobile sync service could help in that. Another related problem is that the numbers given to users are still only US. Even if the service becomes global, the given number is always local to the user. So, if I get a US number and my friend live in Austria, it will still cost a lot of money to make the international call from Austria to Germany. Of course, this is a common problem with all international calls. However, if Google has ambitions to make their service ubiquitous, they’d need to find a solution to this issue. JAJAH Direct can provide such a solution and at low-cost rates.

I’m sorry, what did you say?

One of Google Voice prominent service is it’s voicemail transcripts. It’s a great service, if, Google can indeed make fully automated transcriptions. Personally, I don’t see that happening in the near future. Google’s Speech-to-text services are gaudi and GOOG-411. Both services are limited to recognizing specific words out of a pre-defines list like Joe’s Pizza, economics, Texas. At this point, it’s not possible to fully transcribe complete voice mails without making mistakes, asking the user to repeat some words or have human intervention. A partial solution might be to make an educated guess about the nature of the voicemail content. If Google could assume a particular voicemail is of specifi context (entertainment, sports, business), it could reduce the number of transcription mistakes to a minimum. Since Google already has vast knowledge about its users habits and interest areas, that seems to be taken care of. Also, let’s not forget that transcription service should be able to understand different accents, languages, oral mistakes made by the user’s themselves,  nick names, voice interference and more before it become accurate. I know of only one such device that does a similar task, but, it will be in production state only 142 years form now.

One last thing

In addition to the above , Google has to overcome huge operational and regulatory challenges. Call termination, VoIP-related fraud, IP call routing and hosting are just few of issues any valuable VoIP company has to deal with. I wonder how much Google Voice is ready to cope with these issues, especially if it wishes to become a global service provider like JAJAH.

I like wiki. It’s a good platform to share information and ideas in your organization, community or the entire web. Occasionally, you’d like to add links to local files in your organization wiki like list of phone numbers, some how-to documents or something else. However, Firefox users find out that nothing happens when they’re clicking on the local-file links. This is actually due to security reasons. So, if you wish to override the behavior, this article will explain what to do.  The article suggests two add-ons to use. I prefer to LocalLink and not IE Tab because the later reloads the entire page on the IE engine and loses your logging session.

Meanwhile, on the wiki pages

The correct format for links to local files is to prefix the path with file:/// and wrap it with brackets. Let’s say your file resides in C:\MyFolder\MyFile.ext. The link in wiki will be edited as [file:///C:/MyFolder/MyFile.txt]  (make sure to use slash and not backslash). In case the file resides in a server, the format will look like this: [file://///MyServer/MyFolder/MyFile.txt]  (did you noticed we’re now using 5 slashes?). After installing LocalLink you could open the file by right-clicking on the link and selecting from ‘Open Link in Local Context’ menu. You might consider setting your application configuration in Firefox. Go to Tools, Options and choose the Applications tab. Now, for each relevant file type, choose the action you want Firefox to take.

By default, WordPress posts have ugly links like http://yourpost.com/?p=12. It’s very easy changing the links to become more aesthetic and usable:

1. Open your WP account.
2. On the left-hand side, click on ‘Permalinks’ under ‘Settings’ options.
3. Now choose the preferred settings