Congratulations to NetCom and TeliaSonera, they opened the first operative LTE-net (4G) in the world today. This net is now launched in Oslo and Stockholm with about 2/3 of the Oslo area covered! NetCom will continue this work and are aiming for 100% coverage in Oslo in the near future.

NetCom started selling USB LTE-dongles today (manufactured by Samsung) so that NetCom customers in Oslo can start using the LTE-net on their computers today. This gives you a theoretical speed of 100 mbps but I guess that the more realistic speed will be about 10-20 mbps.

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When developing applications for mobile devices you often find the need to use a rapid application development (RAD) platform to achieve your goals and meet the time to market requirements for mobility projects. I have been developing mobile applications for several years now and I have seen many development platforms/frameworks. There are many reasons why you often need to take use of a platform/framework; wide device support, rich and flexible UI, secure and reliable communication, back-end integration and so on. If you were to take care of all these challenges by your selves the application development project would be expensive and time consuming. This post is written with large commercial enterprise applications in mind.

You should be very careful when selecting a platform for your project, by selecting the wrong platform your in for failure. The most important you need to do is to define your needs and make sure that the platform your are choosing fulfills those (or at least the most of them). Many companies/developers have different views on how to develop mobile applications, make sure that your chose a platform developed by a company that shares your view on this.

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Netcom succeeded to connect to a commercial LTE-net, as the worlds’ first, just a few days ago. They did this by connecting a laptop to the Internet using a LTE-modem. Netcom have already several LTE-cells up running in Oslo. Netcom predicts their LTE-net to be fully commercial available in 2010 (in Oslo). The LTE-technology are delivered by Huawei and they work close together implementing the system.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) are often called 4G, the next generation mobile radio communication technology. This technology can theoretical provide you with 150 mbps which is amazing compared to Turbo 3G, the fastest mobile radio communication technology available today, with its’ 7,2 mbps!

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I have always liked iPhone with it’s superb user interface and wide range of applications. Just after a few months on the market iPhone sat a new standard for usability concerning mobile devices and applications for mobile devices. In my opinion iPhone changed the user patterns for mobile devices and quickly helped maturing the mobile application market ( mBricks’ thoughts about what Apple have achieved for the mobile application market with their iPhone).

For quite a long time I thought that iPhone would only reach into the private market with consumer applications distributed via AppStore. Based on the low percentage penetration in the total market and the proprietary solutions I never thought that iPhone would set any noticeable foot prints in the enterprise market. I might have been wrong…

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It is a tough technology race in the mobile software business that have been ongoing since the early years of applications for mobile devices. I have been developing mobile applications for several years and asked my self many times; who will win this race? After all these years I still ask my selves (and others) the same question, I guess that is why I enjoy this business so much

I were asked at work today if I could help contributing on a presentation about mobile application trends, therefore I will write some of my thoughts regarding to this. The technologies I find most interesting are: Android, iPhone, Java ME, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Let’s have a closer look at these. Continue reading »

Ever dreamed about a computer with zero boot-up time?  This can be reality if the researchers at Cornell University succeeds in their research on ferroelectric material and silicon. They have now been able to lay a ferroelectric material directly onto silicon. It’s the first time ever this have been done.

Ferroelectric materials are polar and the polarity can be changed from positive to negative by an electric field. The good thing with ferroelectric materials are that the polarity stay fixed when removing the electric field. Meaning that if the computer are using this technology for memory you can turn off the power and the current state will still be in the memory. When you turn the computer back on booting-up are not needed and you can directly continue were you left.

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GPS (Global Positioning System) is a well known technology used for tracking and navigating. Everyone that have used GPS knows that the signal is blocked when you are inside a house, in a garage or surrounded with tall buildings. IPS (Indoor Positioning System) is a technology used for positioning were GPS can not be used. The most common technologies for IPS are radio, infrared or ultrasound signals.

Lets have a quick look at the three different IPS technologies.

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Image: Georgian Institute of Technology

I love mobility in terms of tiny devices that I can bring with me everywhere. I don’t go far without at least having my mobile phone with me and most of the times I also bring my mp3 player. I walk around in my own little world with my favourite tune playing in my ear and just a push of a button away from talking with my friends or checking my e-mail. Then it happens… my mp3 player runs out of battery and I’m stuck on the subway listening to all kind of stupid conversations people around me are having on their phones. I fetch the phone from my pocket to call some friends, but WTF the phone is out of battery too!

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Earlier today I was at the MSDN Live Oslo conference (earlier post about MSDN Live Oslo) and between the sessions we went around to the stands that several Microsoft partners had in the lobby area.  On one of the stands they had the Microsoft Surface table displayed. Along with my colleague and other curious conference attendees we tested the Surface table for quite a while.

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A few weeks ago I attended a partner meeting at RFID Innovasjonsenter AS (web page only in Norwegian) which is a center for research, development and testing on new RFID solutions. We talked about a new RFID show case room/center that is planned to be in operation by the start of 2010. I’m very excited to see what the result of this will be. They are planning a 500 square meters area showing how RFID can be used through the whole life cycle of a product.

But what really caught my attention was the METRO Group Future Store Initiative founded in mid-2002 with more than 85 companies from retailing, consumer goods, IT and service sectors. The aim for this initiative is to drive forward the modernization process in retailing. They say that RFID is the key technology for future retailing.

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