Some bright sparks have created a new mobile marketing company called "Mobilopia". Hmm. Where have we heard that type of name before? Ahh, that's right, the oft-neglected, never duplicated, still chugging, original Mobitopia. Can you believe these guys? Mobilopia.com? Are you kidding me? The name "mobilopia" doesn't...

It's funny, I don't have nearly as much of a "not built here" syndrome when it comes to work. I did install a version of the software that runs this weblog for our "IntraBlog" and that worked out okay once I got rid of the restrictions for commenters not to use HTML. And now I just installed the incredible JSPWiki...

There's a very interesting article over at CIO Magazine called "AT&T Wireless Self-Destructs: The story of a botched CRM upgrade that cost the telco thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue." It's a pretty straight-forward postmortem of their customer service upgrade fiasco just before the number...

This past week was the MySQL conference in case you missed it. Here's some of the stuff I found pretty interesting. First, Jeremy Zawodney's new book High Performance MySQL has been published and is on Safari (if you have a subscription). Right off the bat it's very informative: Many binary distributors of MySQL mold it to fit...

This is post number 1,840. Just something I noticed while looking at the db. It's a nice round number, isn't it? Maybe I should've waited until post 1849 and had some California commemorative post or something. Oh well. Exactly 5,420 comments as well. (I remember when my comments were way less than my posts...). I'll have to...

Every customizable web page on the internet has a sign in page. Username and password. Every secure application or server as well. Whether it's MySQL, Microsoft Money, Unix or Amazon.com you have the same paradigm for just about every single computer system that exists: Username and password. But that doesn't work well on mobile phones...

Something that Anthony reported from the MySQL conference really struck me yesterday: MySQL connection setup is very fast and therefore Mark recommends not creating more connections than necessary when pooling. The only use for pooling when dealing with MySQL is to throttle and limit the number of connections available to one particular server...

I'm just curious about Sun's Java Application Server Platform Edition 8. It's new and *free* to use and deploy, which is incredible. Since I'd love to have a reason to get away from Tomcat I figured I'd try it out. I went to Sun's site and grabbed it a couple days ago and installed it. I couldn't work out how to...

You have to wonder what the marketing department at Nokia is smoking. QD is the name of the new N-Gage. It stands for something in Latin. Since no one is going to remember what that means, they're going to make up their own definition for what QD stands for. Next Gen? SP? I mean, these would've been fine. But QD? What a fiasco. This...

I'm doing some maintenance stuff today on my computer - general clean up of my hard disk and now I'm ripping a bunch of CDs. I *really* wish there was a way I could just prove to someone online that these CDs are mine so I could just download the MP3s without having to go through all this effort. Remember MP3.com's thing they had...

Do you know who Harry Chapin is? He sang Cat's in the Cradle and some other great tunes (The Rock, Taxi, etc.). He died in a car crash in 1981 - I didn't discover him until almost a decade later. The double CD that's available of his work is really great. And he was very progressive as well - very cool guy. I was listening to NPR...

The new Nokia 6225 - a CDMA flip phone with video functionality running on the "Series 45" platform, will be launched soon and you can see that unlike many of their recent phone launches, Nokia has gone back to basics on the design. Fantastic. That phone is truly lustworthy - and not just because of the functionality, but because of the...

Here's a quick update of some of the topics I've written about this week. First, I have to say I've been astounded at the feedback I've received. I wrote about Nokia's tools, and got an email from someone in the tools area at Nokia. I praised TiVo and got an email from a VP at TiVo. I wrote about Real Media and got an...

There's going to be light posting here for a bit as I'm heads down on an important deadline. Here's my FeedDemon Mobile/Tech OPML file to keep you busy. If you see any important mobile feed or blog that I'm missing, please leave me a link in my comments. Thanks! :-) -Russ

I can't figure out what to think about Real. Are these guys evil or not? Their marketing for the past several years or so has been evil as it gets: bait-and-switch downloads, no way to cancel accounts online (I had to make an expensive international call to cancel Real One a few years go, the bastards), pop-ups, secretly-installed agents,...