The mistakes of version 1.0: "There are parallels between version 1.0 efforts and political or religious movements. All three employ methods to bring groups of people together, develop a shared belief system, and get them to work towards shared goals."

My MMOG 2005 wishlist: a lot of these seems to be around separating off communities within MMOGs - letting roleplayers roleplay, ignoring annoying players, voting players off...

Mobility is more than J2ME: "When enterprises move to mobility, a key consideration is to preserve existing investment. Fancy flashy J2ME games will not do it."

NTT DoCoMo is liquidating its machine-to-machine unit, and rolling back some of the services it offered into other areas of the group.

This sort of application (dubbed M2M by Nokia) has always interested me - I've noticed over the last 2 years that I get really worked up about the stuff that's so unsexy and unfashionable that it just gets taken for granted as part of our everyday lives, and could fit well into this category.

Orange in particular have been talking about M2M for a few years now, but beyond announcements of call plans devoted to M2M I've not heard much from them about it...

But why are DoCoMo moving away, and can we presume that others will follow their lead? Or is the reason that we hear so little about M2M precisely because it's so un-pressworthy?

My resolution for this year is almost being forced upon me: I need to be more efficient, making better use of my working hours to get more done, and better use of my outside-work hours to do Things That Are Not Work (on the subject of which: Ju and I are going to give Capoeira a go, with an introductory course with these guys). Concentrate on doing one thing well (very zen - or do I mean UNIX?) as opposed to jumping between 2000 places at once.

It reminds me of when we're doing lots of sword-work in Aikido. I do a few hundred sword cuts, and it hurts like hell even though I'm desperately trying to substitute technique for muscle strength... but the way I'll learn how to work efficiently is to do it wrong so many times, to make myself so tired that there's no alternative but to do it right: to "grind out strength", as Tom Helsby puts it.

Likewise with work at the moment - we're exceptionally busy, so I'm forced to find ways of organising my time to get more done. And just as with the sword-cuts, it's worthwhile in the long term and rather painful in the short term...