Framtiden nu

For a number of reasons I will stop blogging at framtiden.nu. Foremost, I’m tired of maintaing a WordPress blog. And the name framtiden.nu, while being a cool name in swedish, didn’t make any sense to the 6.919 billion people that didn’t speak swedish.

So I’m moving my blogging efforts to http://agevik.se. Short and sweet! Lets hear that again to make sure you got that: http://agevik.se. While the new domain name is just as incomprehensible as the current one, it is by a stroke of luck my last name.

Rock on people!

ps. Sometime in the future I will start using Framtiden.nu for a completely different purpose, a small pet project of mine that I have been wanting to do since 2006. ds.

Every time I work on computer code I wrote earlier I feel the urge to throw out the old ugly code and re-write it from scratch since I learnt so much since last time. At least that is what I thought until yesterday when I helped a friend take a look at some old code I had written.

I had an epiphany: the less old code I touched, the better. It’s been such a long time since I worked with computer code that even when the code didn’t seem to make any sense any attempt at trying to re-write it better than before would invariably lead to disaster. Letting me near Visual Studio these days should be viewed by the UN as a crime against mankind.

Not surprisingly really, since the only thing I have programmed in the past five years that even resembles code is MySQL and PHP for Fabset.com. And before that, the only programming I did was university courses and hobby programming.

Do I regret not becoming a programmer? No! I would have sucked more than a new-born baby. But I have a huge amount of respect for all you professional coders out there and I do recommend anyone in the tech industry to learn the basics of computer code . Computer code is revolutionary at best and beautiful at worst!

I spend alot of time testing mobile services using SIM-cards bought from all around the world. Some of them are prepaid, some of them are postpaid. There is just one universal truth abouth them: the operator online services to manage them universally suck.

This is a question to every single operator out there: Why do you make my life so difficult? I just want to spend money on your services.

I´m starting to believe operators don’t actually want my money.

Some pain points I have:

- Atrcious process to top up SIM-cards. SMS PIN-codes back and forth, passwords sent my snail mail, three day waiting to get access to my online account. Why can´t I just type in my phone number and my PayPal account and have a SIM-card topped up?

- Impossible to see my online purchase history. This one is even more crazy – the web interfaces the operators had back in 2005 were bad. The ones in 2011 does not seem to have improved, in fact they are worse! And typically they are buried somewhere deep down on operator web sites so that you can´t find them. Oh – and they keep switching the URL:s around so that you can´t bookmark it.

- Data roaming for prepaid is still spotty. I just can´t wrap my head around why it is so difficult to solve. Or the fact is – it is a solved problem, it´s just that the solutions are buggy and work 50% of the time. (And don´t get me started on the cost of data roaming that makes it an unusable service for any  normal prepaid customer)

- Money magically disappearing from SIM-cards. It seems to be a well established truth that on prepaid cards you have to live with money sometimes disappearing without any explanation. I´m sure there is an explanation for it, it´s just that the operator don´t care about explaining it to their customers.  E.g. someone calling the voicemail service and me being forced to pay the roaming-tax for travelling with my phone. Imagine if money just started disappearing from my PayPal account without explanation!

I was on the phone with Vodafone Germany who refused to explain why money was missing from my card. The only thing they could say was that I was probably subscribed to some Premium SMS service. How´s that for an explanation?

- Impossible to find the price of a service. Here´s what I want: an online tool where I can check what it will cost to use a SIM-card aborad. For example – lets say I have a prepaid card with operator A and is travelling abroad and roaming with operator B, how much will my I pay for an SMS, MMS and data? Getting this questions answered seems more difficult than solving who murdered JFK.

And don´t get me started on customer support reps that can´t actually solve any issues.

Whew..glad to get that of my chest. I feel so much better now. I love you all!

The Google IO keynotes were boring. I cant believe I wasted ten minutes watching before I turned off. In-app payments in Chrome Web Store? Yawn…

What Google should have announced to make things exciting:
- That they are launching their own mobile operator. All android devices with their SIM gets unlimited data at a low cost.

- Google Search adds semantic analysis. When I search for Abba it should ask me if Im looking for the music group or the Swedish brand of tuna fish sold at IKEA.

- Their self-driving cars have been proven to cause *less* accidents than cars driven by humans and will start being sold to consumers in a cooperation with Toyota in 2012. nuff said!

Funny, I wrote this back in December but forgot to publish it!
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Playing the prediction game is fun, but impossible. One of my core beliefs is that the future is inherintely unpredictable. The best way to predict the future is always to guess that things will be the same as the last year. So lets try that:

Apple will launch a new version of the iPad and a new version of the iPhone. They will both be huge succeses and outsell any other single smartphone or tablet. Nokia will remain the market leader in terms of market share. Analysts will debate if market share is a valid measure of Nokia’s and Apple’s success.

Google will continue to be the #1 search engine. They will take a stab at launching a new social product to replace Google Buzz. It will be mildly successful.

Mobile operators will continue to debate if they should become smart bit-pipes or if they should launch their own app stores and API offerings. The only ones who will be profitable in this space will be WAC (who charges huge membership fees) and STL Partners (who runs the Telco 2.0 conferences).

Today I decided to bring my iPad instead of MacBook Pro for a one day business trip as a test of the iPad as a true post-PC device.

My conclusion: the iPad is 70% there.

Now admittedly my work on the road is basically mail and PowerPoint. Obviously, if you have applications on OS X not available on the iPad this is not going to work for you.

Overall, I was satisfied with the experiment. The extreme light weight and excellent battery time is something you appreciate quickly. Not only can I leave my computer at home – I also can leave the charger!

There were four things that bothered me though:
1) Inadequate coy and paste. The copy paste does not work in all apps and especially not on all websites. For some reason I was unable to select text in the Gmail iPad optimized interface and in one internal web application we use.

2) Dropbox is a must to access files. But the iOS app does unfortunately not auto-sync all files like it does on the Mac. Instead, only starred files and recently viewed files are available. Dropbox needs a Sync all button that I can use when I am home on my Wi-Fi to be useful to me on the road.

3) No ability go edit PowerPoint files. Admittedly, Keynote for iOS might do what I need. But from what Ive seen on YouTube it only seems to support light editing. This is my biggest problem as it is scary not to be able to make last minute changes in a presentation before a meeting. Any PPT editor also needs DropBox integration.

4) Not possible to mail files from DropBox or import files from mail to DropBox. Dropbox needs a Send as attachment feature and the Mail app needs to be able to save files into DropBox.