Alex Pooley's Blog

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Reading through my daily blogroll I came across “these stats on China.”:http://randomroger.blogspot.com/2006/04/china-factoids.html I won’t vouch for their accuracy, but here they are anyway…

* 80% of the world’s cranes are now in China for all the skyscrapers being built
* Shangai has more than 4000 skyscrapers, twice the number in Manhattan, with another 2000 on the way
* There are more than 170 Chinese cities with more than 1 million people
* They are building, throughout the country, the equivalent to a city the size of Houston every month.

It’s strange, it seems like there are ‘hot’ areas in technology from time to time for no apparant reason. For example, video on the web is big “right now”, podcasting was big before, blogging before that, and lets not forget mashups somewhere in there too and a heap of others. I’m not sure if this is simply media bias, or maybe a race to VC funding? What ever the case there is something less glamorous but more lucrative stirring on the horizon: mobile data.

I’m not talking about shitty WAP where you are charged per minute to access a fraction of the web that’s ported to WML. I’m not even talking about DoCoMo’s highly popular in Japan, more reasonable i-mode with their subset of XHTML called CHTML. The future is pure XHTML, CSS, and Javascript thanks to Opera.

*Opera Desktop:* Opera’s legacy play. Browse the standard compliant web on your desktop. Nothing new here.

*Opera Mini:* Opera’s mobile legacy play. Browse the web from your old (1.5+ year old) mobile. Seemlessly run through Opera’s proxy and let it clean up the code, reformat, and remove code you don’t need.

*Opera Mobile:* Opera’s browser on a phone play. Surf the web just like you’re on a desktop but with a smaller screen. Benefit from Opera’s “small screen rendering” technology.

*Opera Widgets:* Opera’s Internet platform play. The web is a transparent pool of services in this model. Take your existing web site ‘view’ code. Whack it on the phone, render as a widget on your desktop or an application on your phone. Access remote sites via AJAX. Don’t know what a Beagle is? Open up your wikipedia widget on your mobile/desktop, type in ‘beagle’ and there’s a bunch of info on Beagles.

So back to my original point. What’s bigger, video on the web or a platform that could create a ubiquitous Internet?

The functional components of msgpad are done! The beta date of next month is looking good - “sign up now!”:http://msgpad.com Before next month I need to polish a bit, iron out a few quirks, and test the hell out of it.

Since leaving full time work before my wedding my progress has been fantastic. I calculated that working after hours and weekends only, was four times slower than working full time. I think the reality is quite different. What you can’t quantify is the physical and emotional toll. At least now I don’t feel like I’m rushed to have everything done which is very liberating. The only problem(?) with taking on something I enjoy full time, is that I’ve become consumed by it!