Anaheim's first taste of EarthLink muni Wi-Fi

ZDNet has a short piece about EarthLink's Anaheim roll-out. It is nicely balanced between the hype and the hassle that is intrinsic in the municipal WiFi experience.

I liked the interesting parallel between Earthlink's $21.95 a month tariff and The Cloud's recent announcement of an £11.99 all-you-can-eat package in the UK. These rates are clearly aimed at displacing wireline solutions: in the UK you are required to pay at least £11 for your telephony line BEFORE you can even add broadband (for somewhere between £10 and £20). The question is whether they are maintainable rates for the WISPs, or if they are loss-leaders to build a market and win hearts-and-minds?

Earthlink's investment in Anaheim to date is estimated at $6M and they claim to be able to make profit in 2 years. They are betting on 15K - 20K subscribers and a handful of "day-trippers". In my opinion this is incredibly optimistic given that their projected coverage is only 340K people - are 6% of these people really going to sign up, and do so in the next 2 years?

However, if these companies can recoup their investment in anything less than 10 years, they will be outperforming the mobile operators who bet the farm on 3G and are unlikely to see it turn a profit for a long time to come.

Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys

Excellent set of power toys for mobile application developers: Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys

• Emulator ActiveSync Connection Tool - Allows Activesync to connect to your Emulator session from Visual Studio .NET 2003.
  
  
• ActiveSync Remote Display - Display Pocket PC applications on your desktop or laptop without needing any device side configuration.
  
  
• CECopy - Command line tool for copying files to the device currently connected to desktop ActiveSync.
  
  
• Convert PPC DAT to SP XML - Command line tool for generating Smartphone CABWizSP XML docs from existing Pocket PC CAB files.
  
  
• Hopper - User input stress simulator.
  
  
• JShell - UI version of the Platform Builder Target Control Window.
  
  
• PPC Command Shell - Command shell for the Pocket PC 2003 device.
  
  
• RAPI Debug - Displays detailed information about currently running processes.
  
  
• RAPI Start - Command line tool to remotely start an application on your Pocket PC from your desktop.
  
  
• TypeIt - Send characters/strings to the Smartphone 2003 Emulator via ActiveSync.
  

Parcour Programming

Parkour, or free running, is like gymnastics with no gym. This video is a great example of what it is all about. One of the principles behind parkour is that you don’t go back: you set your sights on a destination and just get there. If buildings, lamp posts, vertigeous drops or frankly anything gets in your way, you overcome it quickly, economically, and elegantly.

At Keima we are developing prototype products, and it strikes me that this feels a lot like parkour: we wish for functionality and we start coding; if anything technical gets in our way, we overcome it ASAP.

A prototype only needs to work on one platform, under tightly controlled conditions, and for a short period of time. This contrasts sharply with the process of product development, where the majority of effort is spend stabilizing the code to work under all situations, and to fail gracefully when it cannot. This is more like building a wall than vaulting over one.

In the days before I programmed professionally, all my projects were prototypes, and they were all infused with this spirit. It is nice to have that feeling again. It is the closest that somebody as nerdy and risk averse as myself is likely to get to real parcour :-)