Tide Turning Against Copy Protection?: "The ball is rolling, and people are starting to realize that yes, DRM and copy protection are pointless and stupid. The argument that they're necessary evils to persuade content providers to make content available digitally is hogwash; they're used as tools to lock people in to formats, products, brands and stores. "

My god - NetNewsWire is creaking under the strain of a couple of hundred tabs, so here's an attempt to empty a few. First a StatBurst:

• There are now 2 billion mobiles worldwide, and "the bulk of the new growth now is coming from large, less well-developed markets such as China, India, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa"
• 4 million people are using Vodafone 3G, with faster HSDPA networks scheduled for next year;
• Apparently "just 17% of UK mobile phone owners use their devices for anything other than texting and calling -- on a daily basis". So nearly 1 in 5 UK adults are making use of some sort of advanced data service on their phones, daily. Nice - and plenty of room for growth;
• WiMax projections seem to show it isn't a 3G killer, film at 11. That doesn't mean it isn't important, of course.... just that Skype-using PocketPC owners won't be burning down Vodafone just yet;

HobbyPrincess: Pro-Am Panel video and podcast: "Chris Heathcote from Nokia's Corporate Strategy describes how mobile phone users around the world are personalizing the look and the function of their phones, and how device manufacturers react by introducing mass-customizable products."

Nice. Making and giving things are two principles that we're looking to apply across several projects at the moment. Look at MMS: my experience of using it is that it's not a medium for communicating a message as such, rather it's something I use to give pictures to people.

Natural language searches didn't happen: "Don tells me that back in the 90s Natural Language Processing was all the rage. They were hoping customers would put in more words to get better results. In reality, though, that didn't happen. He said that 85% of all searches are one word."

I think we've seen the same with SMS. I used to rant about how keyword-based SMS services were an appalling user interface - and there was solid evidence to back me up. But as Robert pointed out to me a while back, as an industry I think we've trained people to understand the use of keywords with SMS.

We can see (from analysing messages we get to some of the services we run) that some folks still expect to be able to converse conversationally with text messages 5-digit shortcodes. But the incidence of this occurring is way down on a few years ago, and a combination of intelligent handling and interpretation of messages received, plus politely written pointers to the ones you don't understand helps put your customers onto the straight and narrow...

A few weirdies we see a lot of:

1. Users sending in words delimited using full-stops, not spaces
2. Users who send in their messages enclosed in apostrophes
3. Users who send in obscene jokes, or messages clearly intended for someone else
4. Obvious mis-spellings

All easily handled if you put some thought into it (and make an effort to learn from customer behaviour).

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken: " It has now set up computers to reject bug-laden code automatically. The new Vista will be simple. Bells and whistles will hopefully come later - including WinFS."

Is it me, or does this sound like more of an Agile approach to software development? Anyone know more?