Anyone wanna’ know what’s been lighting our fires recently? I know we’ve been posting on Happy Packages, Bournemouth and a sunny day on the beach, but there’s been a few interesting moments been happening outside our bubble too.

Money in your Mobile

First up is some news I’m following very closely regarding payment of services from your Mobile Phone. It seems that Mobile Banking team, Monitise, are working with the Carphone Warehouse to develop a secure money application on your phone which you can use to check balances, view transactions and transfer money.

Judging by the amount of phones my house-mate’s lost on nights out, is it really a device that people want to have their full bank details? That could mean a lot more than needing to start a Facebook group to get all your contacts back, more like no more drinking money for a while.

I’m assuming that all these creases will be worked out to provide some sort of a secure solution by partnering with the banks and I’m seriously interested in seeing the API to interact with that. Could it be the end of Premium messaging services and paypal’s mobile payment solution?

Chumby wumby

“Wake up your internet life” is it’s USP, and my golly-gosh, that’s what it does. The Pervasive Media Studio got it’s excited hands on one this week, the alarm clock with a touch-screen, Wifi and we can make our own widgets!

It’s opened the doors to a whole range of amazing applications you’d like to see when you first open you dainty eyes in the morning, so how about,

• a throwing flash game to snooze
• Facebook pictures from last week’s nights out,
• List-o-things to do that morning.

I’m opening up the comments on this post for your very cool suggestions,

Check them out at the chumby site and have a gander at peoples’ chumbys already.

Live-Mesh all over your shiz’

Mickey-soft are having another go at the Hailstorm project, a cloud like XML service which failed in 2001, but now hoping it will catch on the wave of more standard applications and products using web-services to power their abilities.

Live-Mesh, is the re-named product and the keynote announced that, “The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people. It will be more focused on being user-centric. Microsoft will deliver platforms that will let people build applications. Those applications will run not only on the PC, they’ll run up in the internet, or in the cloud, as we say, on the phone, in the car, in the TV” tinyurl.com/5k303p

I’m not much of a Microsoft person any more and I know this stuff is all being done already, but for once, I’m impressed, they’re providing a service which developers will be freely allowed to muck around with. They’re also putting the money where there mouth is, it’s all being backed up with huuuuuuuge data-centres in Seattle, Chicago San Antonio and there’s one planned in Dubiln.

Right now though it’s all in the balance and I wonder if it’ll fail the same as Hailstrom, or was the original project just an amazing idea a little before it’s time?

Tags: alarm clock, chumby, internet widget, live mesh, microsoft, mobile payment, money, paypal, thinking

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 4:43 am and is filed under Discussion, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.