Bill Ray

Wireless and mobile networks have the potential to provide new levels of security and confidence, as long as we design them that way. With open networks, the responsibility for creating a secure environment must fall to whoever deploys the application, not the network itself. Ev... (more)

Companies are always risking their business, betting on what will be happening next year, and how they can make money out of it. The trick is to get it right. We all know that we work in a fast-moving industry. Even before wireless communications raced ahead, the IT field was al... (more)

While walking through London the other day, I noticed an advertisement for a mobile phone. Nothing unusual about that, except that the mundane practice of making phone calls seemed insulting to a device such as this. Its gamut of features included the ability to listen to music c... (more)

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 design... (more)

Ethernet has been with us for a while now, and setting up a network has passed from an arcane art to something most users are happy to do at home. Home-networking kits and improved operating systems (to be fair, I'm mainly referring to Microsoft Windows here) has made the process... (more)

Cryptography is a wonderful thing. Long keys and well-designed algorithms mean that even the most determined government is unlikely to be able to break your encrypted messages. However, every encryption system has one weak point: Where and how do you store your keys? Most encrypt... (more)

When Pandora was given gifts from the gods, she had many wonderful things, but she also had a box that she was told never to open. The box contained all the bad things in the world, and as long as it stayed closed, the world was a wonderful place full of joy and happiness. But Pa... (more)

(February 28, 2003) - Bill Ray, editor-in-chief of Wireless Business & Technology, talks to Eric Chu, Group Marketing Manager, J2ME Platform, Sun Microsystems, Inc., about the recently announced Java Device Test Suite. WBT: Who will the test suite be made available to? Licensees, o... (more)

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 t... (more)

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 solut... (more)

Mobile games are often seen as the killer application for 3G phones, not to mention the driving force behind advances in hardware and device architecture (as games have been on desktop systems for years). But while devices specifically designed for mobile gaming, such as the Nint... (more)

Bluetooth and Wireless Ethernet can happily coexist, at the same time, in the same space, and sharing the same frequency. "XTC versus Adam Ant, Only one will survive, Beatle-based pop versus new romantic, History will decide" - "XTC vs Adam Ant," They Might Be Giants, 1996 It's str... (more)

Sun recently made what appeared to be a small announcement, that QUALCOMM would be distributing a J2ME implementation for their mobile phone handsets, but it's a small announcement that belies its importance in the mobile phone world. While most phone manufacturers, particularly ... (more)

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, ... (more)

Right now mention Java on mobile phones and most people think of something fun, with potential for the future. Games and puzzles are the order of the day, with the power and versatility of Java reduced to entertaining businesspeople on the train. But Java has much more to offer, ... (more)

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... (more)

Drug dealers love digital mobile telephones. It's not just being able to stay in touch with customers and suppliers on the move, nor the advantages of instantaneous communications in a very competitive industry. Drug dealers love digital mobile telephones for the security they of... (more)

Nokia has a lot resting on the 7650. Despite the almost immediate announcement of the 3650, the 7650 is in the shops now, and represents the first steps away from the core mobile telephone functionality Nokia has provided in the past. The 7650 is the first device to use the Serie... (more)

A secure mobile payment system is essential if m-commerce is to reach its potential. The most-popular method used ­ credit cards ­ has failed in this area, and fallen prey to astronomical levels of fraud and theft. Now, Paybox, a relatively new company with an authorization syste... (more)

(February 28, 2003) - Bill Ray, editor-in-chief of Wireless Business & Technology, talks to Eric Chu, Group Marketing Manager, J2ME Platform, Sun Microsystems, Inc., about the recently announced Java Device Test Suite. WBT: Who will the test suite be made available to? Licensees, o... (more)