Flashcode: 2D barcodes in France

The flashcode service has launched in France. Flashcode(s) are basically Datamatrix barcodes that allow a user ( from SFR, Orange or Bouygues telecom) to scan the flashcode and access content situated in the Gallery portal of the carriers.

More info in french: http://www.flashcode.fr/

Intro Greeting on Tmobile's Caller Tunes

I have been playing around with Caller tunes on my phone and have had only a few complains so far about the sound quality of the music. Bet the quality will improve eventually. Found something new while managing my tunes on the Tmobile website: "Intro Greeting". This is a 5 second piece that i can record and personalize and will play before my the caller tune starts. Hopefully, this should decrease the confusion to the Un initiated ppl who call me and hang up immediately thinking it was the wrong number.

Well, the intro greeting is something interesting but I am still looking for a way to record my own caller tune or upload a mp3 from my personal collection... common T-mobile... lets take personalization to the next level.

Shopping by cellphone has a few kinks

Found this interesting review of cell phone shopping services by ANDREW D. SMITH
on Kings5.com. Read the original post here. Services compared include Frucall, Scanbuy Shopper, Mobsaver, Froogle and Pronto. I cannot agree more with Andrew on the status of mobile shopping sites. Here is an excerpt from his post:

" Barcode-based services such as Frucall Inc. always return the right product – except when they don't return anything, which is often. Enter the barcode from a wine bottle or a cocktail dress, and they'll probably fail."

Barcode based search can be extremely affective for certain types of products like Books, Media (CD's, DVD's etc) and also consumer electronics like cameras, printers etc... but it ends there. Most of the mobile services are mashups and rely on existing shopping engines like Amazon for their data. The type of products mentioned above are tagged in these engines using the UPC values or ISBN numbers and that makes it easy to locate them and provide exact information to the user. There aren't a lot of API's out there that provide access to info on Cocktail dresses... specially since the UPC values for clothes are recycled ever so often. This is where services like LIKE.com could come into the picture. Like a dress at Macy's, snap a pic from your phone and the phone will show u similar dresses in the Marshalls across the street. Another issue plaguing the barcode is the absence of boxes on the store shelves, all u see is the Code 128 barcode on the label identifying the SKU not the UPC of the product. The UPC is almost always missing.

So... will mobile shopping eventually make it big... it will.. but there is still a long way to go. The final result would be a combination of barocde, text (keywords) and picture search that would not only provide the user price comparison but complete piece of mind in terms of reviews, specs etc. Another advantage that the mobile shopping service will leverage is location based shopping...

Has Open-Source Lost its Halo?

Found this interesting article on PC World about where the open source movement is heading or seems to be heading. Kinda makes you think ... doesnt it???

ECMAScript Mobile Profile: Client Side Scripting for WAP pages

ECMAScript is a scripting programming language, standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification. The language is widely used on the web, and is often referred to as JavaScript or JScript, after the two primary implementations of the specification. (More info on Wikipedia)

I had read about the support by WAP browsers for ECMA script Mobile Profile or ECMA MP (ESMP) about a year back but there werent many phones out there that had these browsers. The number of models with browser support for ECMA script has shot up quiet significantly since then. This makes it more interesting. I would love to be able to prompt the user about a wrong entry in a form without making a expensive (in terms of time) connection back to the server.

I searched around for documentation and samples on ESMP but couldnt find a lot of information. The best place to start would be the Sprint Developer Site, they do have a bunch of examples and tutorials to get you started. Sprint also has quiet a few handsets out that support ESMP. Search for ECMA in the documents section on the developer site. Nokia too has a document explaining the ESMP script but I did not find it useful. OMA website has a PDF that explains the whole shabang: OMA-WAP-ESMP-V1_0-20040709-C.pdf.

Detecting phones with ECMA Script Support.
I guess the easiest way is to check the HTTP Accept header of the request for 'text/ecmascript' mime type.
------
boolean bECMASupported = false;
String accept = request.getHeader("accept");
if (accept != null && !accept.equals("") && !accept.equals("*/*")){
int index = accept.indexOf("text/ecmascript");
if(-1 != index){
bECMASupported = true;
}
}
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I tried out client side validation with a simple length check on a form field. I am including the XHTML code below:

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Screenshots of how the page looks and behaves on a Samsung A900 included here.












This stuff is really cool. ESMP might not make a big dent as Javascript is already supported on a bunch of smartphones and also the new Nokia Web browser for 3rd edition handsets but on "vanilla" handsets, it could provide an edge to the WAP applications.