Besides an absolutely killer Aston Martin opening chase and an even better dog-fight and parachute scene later, two things stuck in my mind from the latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace.

First, James Bond driving hybrids. Ford got lots of hybrid vehicle product placement (listen for the electric motor during takeoff and stopping).

Second, the Bolivian desert. I didn’t know there was a desert in Bolivia. That ignorance induced the whip-phone-from-pocket reflex to load up some Bolivian geography (sociological pressure kept me from lighting a bright screen in a theater). It wasn’t the movie’s doing, but the ability to supplement one’s experience with personalized metadata is finally here. I’ll remember this when future grandkids ask when we finally started wearing computers.

The movie was good. Not as good as Casino Royale, but I’m liking this style of Bond more than any of the others.

For those stumbling upon this post looking for more on the Bolivian desert try these blogs, photos, and maps:

• El Gringo y El Galio – Desert by 4×4
• The salt plains of Uyuni, Bolivia
• Claire Fenton’s fun in the Bolivian desert
• craigiest’s Flickr set of the High Bolivian Desert

View Larger Map

So I shut down for last weekend. Took no calls, just Twittered a bit and stayed in tune with email web browsing. And finally checked personal voicemail on Monday. Holy hell! 14 voicemails… Seriously?

Well – after not taking calls for the first time in months, I wished I had. In those voicemails were messages from family letting me know of my aunt’s passing. Anna, who was my mom’s midwife. An amazing person.

Voicemail is not the way to hear this. That sucks. There’s something to be said about staying connected.

Written on an iPhone on a slow-moving train.

I picked up the Nokia N82 yesterday from Import GSM, a great hybrid brick-and-mortage / online store. Think Dynamism for phones. It was my first visit, right at closing, and despite trying to get stuff out the door for the evening shipment the guys helped out with descriptions and subtle nuances between the N95 and N82 (special thanks to Eric – good guy).

Anyway, so why the heck would someone get a Nokia N82 when the iPhone 3G is getting released tomorrow? There are five reasons, one for each megapixel, and a lot of backup arguments. The iPhone 3G doesn’t hold a candle to the image sensor quality, flash, or lens quality.

This wasn’t meant to be an N82 vs. iPhone 3G post. They’re both the best mobile equipment one can get (imo).

The N82 is going to be my net enabled camera and broadcast machine. No more notebook + Canon SD-1000 combo!

The iPhone 3G is for everything else. I had the iPhone (1.0 / original / whatever). iPhones are the best for usability and communication. I gave it to my wife and she’s gone from check-email-and-browse-at-home to check-email-send-texts-and-monitor-weather-while-away. The wife-o-meter was pegged.

The Nokia’s OS, after 30 hours of tweaking, is finally usable for me. Very steep appreciation curve. I would only recommend such a phone to a power user needing the best tool for quality images… I can’t wait to start posting and qik’ing them.

• sol on Qik
• solyoung on Viddler
• sol on Twitter

Steven Hodson, in a post over on Mashable, describes security risks and the waste of information that mobile phone GPS use brings (when pinpointing and announcing our locations). He poses some extremely valid points in regards to announcing one’s geolocation via Twitter, Brightkite, or FriendFeed being useless noise.

Telling people via a highly conversational medium such as instant messaging or an SMS text that you are currently at 13th St and Ash Lane is nothing more than noise. It’s a waste of precious conversation. To a few of your closer friends it may be relevant, such as a buddy that would meet you for coffee. But for the masses, it is unimportant and you’re guilty for wasting their time.

I’m guilty of this lately. I’ve been trying various mobile phone GPS services. It’s been fun and interesting, but I’m in agreement with Steven about this announcement being a waste (at least if it’s without background information). Steven doesn’t mention it, but my thought on optimal geolocation announcement is in a widget placed on one’s blog. It’s there for interested followers, but not intrusive or annoying.

But that’s where we agree. He describes broadcasting one’s geolocation as a security risk and I strongly disagree. Yes, there are some situations where it is. US soldiers in Iraq will not benefit from this feature. Folks in witness protection programs, runaways, victims of domestic violence, those being stalked, cheating spouses, and those in organized crime probably won’t either.

The typical citizen without conflict is not at risk. It’s easy to figure out when someone is normally at work, so knowing an optimal time to break in to someone’s home is already simple. It’s easy to find a person in a public place, so it’s already easy to find the optimal time to commit physical harm.

Note: If one is being stalked or believes him or herself to be in a situation where announcing location is dangerous, it’s simple to turn the feature off.

As I’ve said before, people are inherently good. They don’t go around looking for someone to damage or rob. There are some people who commit these crimes. These people use crow-bars instead of Facebook, and are stopped by alarm systems and deadbolts rather than a lack of geolocation data.

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense

Just a couple ideas on GPS, tied to proximity of a mobile phone…

• Proximity based ads (walk by Banana Republic and get a coupon via SMS)
• Location based music (Last.fm channels playing artists from your location)
• Mobile OnStar

Think of your favorite services on the net and add a GPS component… It probably enhances it.

Most smartphones slated for release over the next 12-months include a GPS receiver, built in. After that, it will be a marked failure to not include a GPS in a phone. The functionality that comes with GPS is outstanding – mapping, directions, location based experiences, etc. We’re about to enter an age of advancement in technological capabilities that we’re just beginning to imagine.

Consumers are moving to smartphones. The hottest smartphones (iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Bold 9000, most of Nokia’s Symbian and HTC’s Windows Mobile offerings) all include GPS and an exposed API for developing applications utilizing their hardware. Anything people can conceive of for location based mashups will be coming (more on these mashups in later posts)…

Here’s a first application…

BlackBerry is a leader in mobile phone GPS. Recently a few services that announce the location of one’s phone emerged. Initially these were billed as a sort of low-jack for one’s phone, a security service for the insecure (or those who want to spy on their kids, etc).

I decided to try a few of these. Most felt slimy, like, “you always know where your phone is, and you could also know where your wife is!” … I don’t know about you, but my phone is loyal and doesn’t run off with strangers… And I trust my wife far more than a phone.

My goal with trying these services was to mash Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and other social networking services with my location. Such a mashup will allow me to share my real-time location with all friends. I came across BlackberryTracker.com. Much like the others, the idea is to provide you with the location of your phone. However, they have something the other’s don’t… Facebook and Google Earth integration (as well as a drop-dead-simple semi-RESTful API).

Friends can pinpoint me down to the meter on my Facebook profile, updated every 30 seconds. To be honest, it feels strange to openly publish this data. Security, and lack thereof, has us believing we shouldn’t share such information. But this fear is caused by the exception and not the rule. And in reality, my location in public isn’t private. Additionally, there are laws and common courtesies we live by, and I trust that people are inherently good.

Soon these services will be in the mainstream. Everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Let me emphasize that… Soon everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Not publishing your location will be like not having a mobile phone.

Apple iPhone vs. Nokia N82, or complimentary citizens

.

That’s it! Twice in a week I’ve been left with a dead iPhone from snapping pics and pushing them live at an event or outing. Don’t get me wrong; I love the iPhone for most everything, but the lack of a swappable battery is adding some hate to the relationship (lack of video has also been a bone of contention).

The Nokia N82 is looking like a sweet option. Everything but a useable keyboard…

Quick Links to the streams:

• Flickr Photostream
• Twitter
• Utterz

My plan was to Twitter my progress and TwitPic/Flickr the pics out to my followers. But I woke up at 3am from a caffeine rush and a thought of typing for an hour becoming a nightmare – and boring. Utterz.com, a service doing pretty slick mashups of audio/video/text/photographs/etc, while harnessing APIs from pretty much every popular social networking service, caught my eye (more on Utterz later).

Here’s the day – check the Flickr photostream and the Utterz links below for my audio commentary while I running…

1. Lined up and ready to go
2. Started!
3. Mile 1
4. Mile 2
5. Mile 3
6. Live music between mile 3 and 4
7. Mile 4
8. Mile 5
9. Passing Ed Rendell, governor of PA
10. Mile 7
11. Mile 9
12. Finished!

About Utterz: You start an utter by calling or emailing. Either one initiates it. After that, you have 10 minutes to add more content to the utter. Utterz automatically adds audio from a call or content from an emailed pic/video/audio/text to create an utter similar to what I created above. The call-in feature (dial, press 2, talk, hang up) is extremely simple.

Now, none of the above would be impressive except that Utterz.com is doing it right. This is how services today are supposed to work. Utterz is tied in to all the social networking and blogging services. Any new utter is announced on Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, or even your WordPress/Blogger/MoveableType/etc blog (hosted or self-hosted – COOL!)

After a few months of preparing for the Broad Street 10-miler, it’s now the night before and pre-race excitement is setting in. iofy’s new office in the Navy Yard of Philadelphia is a block away from the finish line, so this will be a pretty nice way to finish a race. There are showers and refreshments in the building… Life will be good.

The race starts at 8:30am EDT. For the first time while running a race I’ll be Twittering. This is partially because I want to try it as a social experiment, and partly because I’ve been sick and not training for the last week (read: I’d like an excuse to run slightly slower than usual).

If you see someone blow by you, with the above on the back of his shirt, send a text message to 40404 with “follow sol”…

Gear:

• iPhone
• Nike+iPod Nano

Software & Services:

• Twitter
• TwitPic (Send a pic to twitpic and have it announced on Twitter)
  
• Flickr (Get the photostream here)
• MobileTwitter (stable jailbroken iPhone Twitter client)
• Twinkle (jailbroken iPhone geolocation + Twitter)
• Snapture (jailbroken iPhone camera.app replacement)

Good luck and see you at the finish line!

iofy has a subscription to the O’Reilly Safari. It allows complete online access to O’Reilly’s entire line of books, as well as books they still have in the works. As a tech company, we thrive on this.

Lately I’ve hooked up bookmarks on my iPhone to titles I like. At any time, a single click lands me in the book I left off on. It’s far more convenient to have books in a pocket, on a device one already keeps on hand, than to carry around a Kindle or hardback.

Continue for full-size screenshots…

Yahoo! has a lot more than search to offer – it shouldn’t be their primary business. As Scoble and Winer both pointed out, the wars are being fought on platforms – Especially the mobile platform. Yahoo!’s Go service synchronizes calendars, contacts, etc, from phone or PC and runs on Windows, OS X, BlackBerry, Symbian (Nokia), and Windows Mobile. Heck, it runs on almost every phone out there and OS X has Yahoo Sync built in. It’s been over a year since I’ve synchronized my phone by wire and I’m able to keep three phones and two laptops in sync.

Dave Winer shares insight from past technology wars while asking which platform will be adopted as the standard for synchronization of contacts, social networking, etc. I argue it could be Yahoo!. They’re embracing OpenID and offering Pipes. The Go service has plugins which tie in to MySpace and other social networking sites. They’ve got an identity system, a delivery method, and a decent reach in to the mobile market.

Finally, Yahoo’s two destinations – Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! Finance. These two are both number 1 in their class. Numero Uno. Why? They have content. Google offers search – when you’re looking for content. Yahoo!’s Music and Finance (and other sites) have that content.

These are the Yahoo! products that matter to me and the reason I’m a Yahoo! shareholder. If the sale goes through I’ll happily cash out with a profit and start looking elsewhere for services that satisfy consumer need.

It met its demise in the outer pocket of a WWDC07 laptop bag (yes, my bag, d’oh!)… Cracking the screen and becoming unusable. I don’t feel like doing a screen replacement. It’s now up for sale and I’m using the iPhone as the primary, with the BlackBerry 8800 as a backup. I’m hoping HTC will make another similar all-in-one device for mobile blogging soon – preferably with Windows Mobile 7.

Since I’ve been diving in to a heavier load of server programming, an SSH client has been a priority. Rove offers a terrific terminal app, Mobile SSH, covering Telnet, SSH 1&2, etc. It’s $95, but well worth it. Tailing a log file while walking with my wife last weekend was far superior to sitting at Starbucks and dealing with WiFi. Spoiled? What?

Add to it that Rove offers a combination VNC RDC client called Mobile Desktop and a file manager app (though I have no idea when I’ll be FTPing or SFTPing stuff from the bberry – who has that much content on a bberry??). What Rove lacks in creativity for naming its products, it makes up in enterprise level quality.

If I had thumbs and fingers the size of matchsticks, the blackberry could replace my laptop. The keyboard is small, but so what?… Mobile blogging isn’t about long, drawn out posts (like this one? Sorry.) With WordPress hooked up, posts are possible. We’ll see if this turns in to a true mobile blogging platform… I’d love to hear from people on their preferences in the mobile blogging arena.

So it’s hooked in to WordPress for mobile posts. Flickr is plugged in to the 8800 and flickrRSS on WordPress. Twitter is plugged in to everything. I’m not so hot on Facebook – I’ll write my own apps…