Bill Ray

Setting out to start programming a new wireless device is never easy. A lack of documentation and badly thought-out development environments, conspiring with a prepubescent developer community, ensure that the information you need is always somewhere else. But things are changing; as fast as authors can get the words down, publishers are rushing to fill the gaps and provide comprehensive and affordable guidance. Unfortunately, in their enthusiasm they sometimes forget what they were trying to do, to the point that the cynical might accuse them of just trying to cash in on a technology trend. For those starting out in Windows CE, and more specifically Pocket PC development, the choice is obvious. Pocket PC Game Programming from Prima Tech is the book of choice. Even if you never intend to write a game, or just don't like games, its step-by-step approach and clear expl... (more)

Making Money from Messages

Short Message Service (SMS) has been the unpredicted golden goose of mobile telephone networks, with more than a billion messages flying through the airwaves every month over the GSM network alone. Even at a few cents a message it's not difficult to see how SMS might be the solution to the growing debt problem faced by companies that massively overbid for 3G licenses... at least until 3G starts to make some money. MS messages don't tend to overload the network. Being non-time critical means that delays during peak times can be tolerated. While a network may regret a campaign to g... (more)

Wi-Fi with Your Big Mac, Sir?

IBM thinks what you need with your Big Mac is Wi-Fi connectivity, so they are deploying access points in McDonald's restaurants across the U.S., starting in New York City. This is being done under the Cometa brand, the alliance between IBM, AT&T, and Intel on the technical side, with 3i and Apex providing the finance. Always keen to combine fast food with fast-network access, WBT's Editor-in-Chief, Bill Ray, tracked down Dean Douglas, VP for the Telecommunications Industry, IBM Global Services, to talk about Wi-Fi, burgers, and the problems of cleaning ThinkPads... WBT: So you'r... (more)

Bluetooth Revealed & The McGraw-Hill Illustrated Telecom Dictionary

Bluetooth Revealed: The Insider's Guide to an Open Specification for Global Wireless Communications reviewed by Bill Ray Authors: Brent A. Miller, Chatschik Bisdikian, Anders Edlund Publisher: Prentice Hall ISBN: 0-13-090294-2 Paperback: 320 pages Bluetooth is a new protocol designed to replace the tangle of wires that seems to accompany all technical advances.  Operating over radio, it's not limited to line-of-sight and is destined for everything from keyboard connections to wireless Internet surfing. Clearly a standard was necessary to achieve the ubiquity it needed. Thus the Blu... (more)

Culture Matters

Successful products and services may rely more on where and when, rather than how, they are launched. It's very fashionable to talk of globalization and the world market, but the reality is that public acceptance of new products depends more on cultural factors than the use of the latest technology. No killer application is going anywhere without mass acceptance, and no society is going to accept a new way of communication unless it fits in with their cultural lifestyle. While American culture has spread around the world, its impact is still measurable, and many cultures have mut... (more)