Flurry has an interesting report iPhone and Android applications

Source : http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/12/ipad-app-development-explodes-says-flurry-report/

More M2M from Orange Business Live

As anyone attending last year's Orange Business Live event will remember,M2M is growing into quite a phenomenon. Ten years ago, it was a smart concept with few deployments behind it. These days, businesses across many vertical sectors are using it to lower production costs, optimize the supply chain, lower energy consumption and increase operational efficiency. How many M2M devices are we talking about? Globally, about 412 million within four years according to the latest figures. There's an interesting overview of embedded M2M as the pervasive Internet in this M2M trends podcast.

About 1.5% of cellular network connections worldwide are used for M2M applications, showing that there's a great deal of headroom in the network for more. Utility metering is expected to become the most widespread application, offering lowered operational costs to utilities and more control over energy consumption to consumers. We looked at the main issues surrounding smart metering in this blog. But, hard on its heels will be the maturing of healthcare remote patient monitoring solutions, intelligent transport systems, manufacturing monitoring and security applications such as vehicle tracking and CCTV. We have written about telematics in this blog and recorded this podcast with Romain Jourdan, an Orange expert in in-car telematics.

M2M rubber hits the road

In terms of personal security, the European Commission's eCall initiative is probably the furthest-reaching of its kind undertaken. With nearly 40,000 people killed on roads every year, and 1.7 million injured in road accidents in the European Union alone, M2M has the potential to be the biggest road safety technology of all time. Forget ABS, power-assisted steering or traction control, the EC's eCall promises a very simple benefit to the motorist involved in an accident: time saved equals lives saved.

M2M would automatically place a call to the emergency services in the case of an accident and the location of the vehicle can be found immediately using GPS. The first few minutes of any accident are crucial to the chances of survival of occupants who are facing grave injuries, and eCall is projected to save halve response times in cities and reduce them by 60% in the countryside. You can see how it works in this video. 

This principle can be applied to Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) that promise to reduce vehicle energy consumption by pointing out the shortest route, alert motorists and emergency services to accidents or transport blockages, and also adapt lighting to the prevalent road conditions. Such adaptive lighting takes a feed from local weather reports and dims lights in good conditions, saving local councils money and giving them back budget that's better spent elsewhere, particularly as governments respond to the global recession. ITS also promises to improve the efficiency of any enterprise that relies on transporting products in specific environments by the most direct and economical route possible, automatically pay road tolls, and dynamically responding to changes in transport conditions thanks to M2M.

Modulating the cost

What can we expect from the technology that actually delivers these possibilities, the M2M module? Although the module market has been under pressure to deliver improved designs that conform to the requirements of different applications, there are a number of general trends carrying through from 2009. These include the integration of greater functionality like satellite integration, WiMAX modules, lowered power consumption and probably the biggest development of all - a move from 2.5G to 3G network support. This increases the available bandwidth and opens up a swathe of new applications that require higher data speeds. It's also actually more economical for service providers to supply coverage in densely populated areas using 3G as it makes better use of the spectrum. It follows that over time, the cost of operating an M2M 3G network could fall as service providers reduce prices due to this economy of scale.

Also on the list for module developers is building in greater reliability and compatibility. Many machines that are connected over the M2M network by modules have long life-spans (think of industrial machinery or even just cars) during which time technology moves on. Therefore, there's also been a focus on making the functionality of modules flexible by developing units that are FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) upgradeable. Using the very network normally required for powering an application, an M2M module can automatically upgrade itself to optimize its effectiveness and stay ahead of future requirements. 

Source ! http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/

Secured mail with Gmail and Postini

Message security service sends your outbound messages to recipient mail servers depending of your option :

Send only SMTP: No TLS encryption, and all messages are delivered via SMTP.

Send by SMTP or TLS (Recommended): This is the recommended setting. Messages sent via TLS are delivered via TLS to the recipient. Recipient servers that do not support TLS will receive their mail delivered via SMTP. All other messages are delivered via SMTP.

Send by TLS if possible: This delivers all messages by TLS when possible. Recipient servers that do not support TLS will receive their mail via SMTP.

Send only TLS: Send all messages by TLS. Mail sent to recipient servers that do not support TLS will be deferred.

Send and Deliver TLS: Messages sent via TLS are delivered via TLS to the recipient. If the recipient does not support TLS the message will be deferred. All other messages are delivered via SMTP.

Source : http://www.postini.com/webdocs/admin_msd/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?href=logsearch.20.6.html#2976107

Ten steps to kill open source project

#1 is to make the project depend as much as possible on difficult tools. He noted that most companies have no real trouble employing this technique, since it makes good use of the tools they have around anyway. Community-resistant projects should, for example, use weird build systems not found anywhere else. A proprietary version control system is mandatory. Even better are issue trackers with limited numbers of licenses, forcing everybody to use the same account. It's also important to set up an official web site which is down as often as it's up. It's not enough to have no web site at all; in such situations, the community has an irritating habit of creating sites of its own. But a flaky site can forestall the creation of those sites, ensuring that information is hard to find.
2: Encourage the presence of poisonous people and maximize the damage that they can create. There is a special technique to the management of these people which goes something like this:

1. Take pains to argue with these people at length and to denounce them on the project lists.
2. Eventually, they should be banned from the community by fiat; it's important to avoid any sort of community process here.
3. The banned people will take their flames elsewhere. Follow them and continue to argue with them in those external sites.
4. Eventually the community will complain about this behavior; respond by letting the poisonous people back in. Then go back to step 1 and do it all over again.

Properly managed, one effective poisonous person, according to Josh, can wipe out a community of hundreds.
3: Provide no documentation. There should be no useful information about the code, build methods, the patch submission process, the release process, or anything else. Then, when people ask for help, tell them to RTFM.
4: Project decisions should be made in closed-door meetings. An OK start is to have online meetings with very short notice, though, for best effect, they should be at a time which is inconvenient in the time zones where most community members are to be found. Better is to have meetings via conference call: that excludes about a third of the planet due to sleep requirements, and, for extra value, also excludes a number of people who are at work who might have been able to participate in an online meeting. Best, though, is to hold meetings in person at the corporate headquarters.
5: Employ large amounts of legalese. Working with the project should involve complex contributor agreements, web site content licensing, non-disclosure agreements, trademark licenses, and so on. For full effect, these documents should all be changed without notice every couple of months or so.
6: The community liaison must be chosen carefully. The optimal choice is somebody reclusive - somebody who has no friends and really doesn't like people at all. Failing that, go with the busiest person on the staff - somebody with both development and management responsibilities, and who is already working at least 70 hours per week. It's important, in this case, to not remove any of this person's other responsibilities when adding the liaison duty. It can also be effective to go with somebody who is unfamiliar with the technology; get a Java person to be the liaison for a Perl-based project. Or, if all else fails, just leave the position vacant for months at a time.
7: Governance obfuscation. Community-averse corporations, Josh says, should learn from the United Nations and create lengthy, complicated processes. Keep the decision-making powers unclear; this is an effective way to turn contributors into poisonous people. Needless to say, the rules should be difficult or impossible to change.
8: Screw around with licensing. Community members tend to care a lot about licenses, so changing the licensing can be a good way to make them go elsewhere. Even better is to talk a lot about license changes without actually changing anything; that will drive away contributors who like the current license without attracting anybody who might like the alleged new license.
9: Do not allow anybody outside the company to have commit access, ever. There should be a rule (undocumented, of course) that only employees can have commit rights. Respond evasively to queries - "legal issues, we're working on it" is a good one. For especially strong effect, pick an employee who writes no code and make them a committer on the project.
10: Silence. Don't answer queries, don't say anything. A company which masters this technique may not need any of the others; it is the most effective community destroyer of them all.

Source is : http://lwn.net/Articles/370157/