At the end of last month, my debit card expired and until now, I hadn’t realised just how many online/subscription-based services I use which depend on that card number. Services which would stop working when the card expired. I must have spent the best part of a morning working out which services had my debit card details and then visiting each to update the number.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a service, like Gravatar, where I could enter my card details once and have that propagate to all the services that needed it? I see the major challenges facing a service like this as:

• Trust – it would be hard for a start-up to offer this, because who would trust their debit/credit card details with an organisation they’d never heard of
• Proliferation – tied into the first point. If, say, Paypal offered this, it would quickly gain traction because they’re a recognised brand
• Security – goes without saying. Any service that stores credit card numbers better be as secure as they come, especially if that data is being fed into other places. (And maybe that’s the showstopper?)

Perhaps Paypal is the answer, and if more services supported Paypal as a payment method, this would solve the problem – I could update my details there and have done with it.

Of course, there was no way I could afford one of these mythical things, so I opted for the next best thing: the Amstrad PenPad. In January 1995, when an Apple Newton was weighing in at around £700 (a lot of money for an underpaid IT Manager!) the Amstrad PenPad could be had for less than £100. You get what you pay for, and for reasons that will become clear, it was consigned to the bottom of my work bag within a month of purchase.

The spec on this thing was amazing. For a handheld device. Of the time. Boasting 40 hours battery life, handwriting recognition for calendar, contacts, tasks, meeting notes and Other Things, the PenPad had a capacity of 330 full pages of addresses (“Full” pages, mind you!) or 6000 diary entries.

You could expand the storage (to a whopping 2mb) via a PCMCIA slot on the underside; but you were only able to write to the internal storage or the PCMCIA card; there was no dual usage. There was no wifi, so sharing was done manually – in other words: you printed stuff via the serial cable interface on the top.

The first time I turned up to a meeting packing my PenPad, my colleagues were green with envy… until, that is,  I actually tried to take notes. The handwriting recognition system still didn’t recognise my handwriting, despite hours of supposed training to get it to do just that. I’d input all of my contacts and thought the crappy recognition was all part of the device’s learning process!

After retraining the thing twice more, and even going as far as to adapt my handwriting in an effort to suit, it just wasn’t working and my Penpad’s days were numbered.

Despite it’s failings, I’ve kept it, boxed with manual and handy multi-language help stickers since then! (What can I tell you? I’m a pack rat – which is why I’ve still got a boxed copy of Windows v1.03, too!)

OK, I’ve shared my “dodgy gadget purchase” story; it’s time for you to ‘fess up and share yours – even if you bought the Sega 32x.

(thanks to China Guccio for the Newton photo, used under Creative Commons)

For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.

I do sympathise with Om and everyone else who has put their trust in Google to run their email, but we need a reality check here. Just because Google has seemingly infinite resources, it doesn’t make them immune from the kind of challenges that face IT departments in companies, large and small, all over the world.

Anyone who’s provided, implemented or supported IT services for any length of time will tell you that, no matter what risk mitigation/platform resilience measures you put in place; no matter how well you test your changes ahead of implementation; no matter how thorough your change review process, every now and then the technology will fail, something will screw up and service outages will occur.

As Om himself offered in one of his previous posts, following the last Gmail outage:

1. Get used to outages. Why? Scale forces history to repeat. As the Internet matures, we expect it to operate more smoothly, so outages make it look like you’re falling behind. But outages can also be a sign of that very maturation. Companies will learn to avoid them, then as the whole thing scales up and grows more complex, it will happen again. There will always be outages, inside the cloud and out.

I couldn’t have put better myself.

Now, with PubSubHubbub, if there is any slowdown, it’s clear it’s with me, because Google has the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.

This got me thinking. My Reader stats (right) are far lower than Louis’, and yet there are times when I feel swamped by the amount of information I’m trying to filter. The volume of information scrolling down my screen right now on Friendfeed is such that the first page often refreshes before I’ve finished reading one article.

Although PSH solves the problem created by the latency of RSS-client polling periods, the next challenge is making sure that we don’t miss the stuff that really interests us. As consumers of shared items, blog updates et al, we will need to get smarter about making sure that the “interesting”stuff bubbles to the top of our attention stream.

How do we do that? How can we define “interestingness”? Can we build attention flags into our software tools in such a way that we don’t lose sight of why we’re wading through our real-time river?

At the moment, I rely on a combination of Google Reader – although I find Feedly to be a more configurable, usable top layer for Reader – Friendfeed and Lazyfeed. Even then, I’ll come across articles on one or other of those services a day or so after the fact and wonder, “how did I miss that?”.

Maybe I’m not using the filtering capabilities offered by my chosen services to their fullest; maybe there are other services that are worth taking a look at. If you’ve got any insights about you filter your feeds for the interesting stuff, do share them in the comments, below.

Whereas, the pitch for the Origami was very much along the lines of a single device-type you’d have to throw in a backpack (or, Heaven forbid, a “man bag”), the next incarnation of the UMPC may take the form a number of smaller, connected devices. (I’m not sure I’d ever vibe on the glowing communicator bracelet thing, but I like the idea of the Inspector Gadget watch.)

The adoption of Origami has been spectacularly underwhelming and the Pocket PC is as good as dead. Providing smaller form-factor, interconnected, devices might just save UMPC. Why? Because people simply don’t want to carry a brick around with them all the time.

Cell phones, especially the Windows Mobile models, are turning into the kind of devices that UMPC aspires to be. Sure, there will be times when I curse the size of the screen,  but I’ve got my calendar; I can takes pictures;  listen to music; watch video; use GPS; surf the net; get my email. Oh, and it makes calls too. All of this on a device that fits in my shirt pocket. Now that’s Ultra Mobile.

[tags]UMPC, ultra mobile, Origami, Smartphone, mobile computing[/tags]

I think this has less to do with Steve wanting what’s best for the consumer and more to do with the recent news that Norway declared Apple’s DRM - specifically the way iTunes is locked into iPod - violates their consumer rights laws.

If Norway were to shutdown the iTunes Store down, Apple probably wouldn’t be too bothered, but the EU have been rumbling about the very same issue and if the EU were to make moves to shut the iTunes Store down, that would most definitely hurt, so Jobs’ call is a not-very-subtle way of deflecting the attention away from Apple.

If the big labels did drop DRM, I wonder if Apple would be as good Steve’s word and “drop DRM in a heartbeat”?

Edit: Robert Scoble sums it up much more succinctly than I did…

[tags]DRM, Fairplay, digital rights management, Apple, Steve Jobs, Norway, EU, consumer rights[/tags]