Finally! Nokia releases Sync for Ovi

The long-awaited sync for Ovi.com has been released. The OviSync online service provides a much-needed synchronization of contacts, notes, and todo lists with your mobile phone and an online website. This is in addition to the existing games, photos, video, and file services available through the ovi.com site.

This is a fantastic offering for Nokia phone users and represents the first real and direct competitor to Apple's MobileMe service. I have given it a brief run through and although it is labelled as beta (if you aren't Google, I assume that when you say beta, you mean beta) and it works as promised. I signed into the site with my Ovi username and password, the same used by files and chat, and had the service send me the configuration in a text message. I opened this message, it make the necessary adjustments, and I went to my sync profile (see screenshot) and synchronized without error. Even the images I had added to a few of my contacts were synchronized up to ovi.com and immediately viewable on the website. This makes a great way to organize contacts or enter a large number of todo items with a full keyboard or when you are away from your phone.

The real gem of this service, however, ought to be its ability to be used without a Nokia phone. My real hope for Ovi is that it is available -with at least some modicum of functionality- on pretty much any phone. As the OviSync service uses the standardized SyncML -available on most phones and other mobile devices- for synchronization, it should work on any device supporting that standard. I have written about this before, but it bears repeating: Nokia should use such a service, providing and promoting it to all phone users to demonstrate what can be done on a mobile phone. Most people do not realize the potential of the mobile handsets in their pockets or purses and for a company like Nokia, designing, developing, and marketing some of the most advanced handsets on the planet, this is a real problem. Until people realize the potential and what can be done -and done easily- with their phones, they will stick with the crappy ones that cost $20 with a contract plan.

There is better and more useful stuff out there, give it a try.

How not to do a promotional Rewards Campaign

I was excited when Coca-Cola, a couple years ago, released its MyCokeRewards program. Of course I like to get things for free, especially when the place I worked had 20oz bottles of coke for a mere $0.30. But, I also guess this was due in part to a fond memory of a coke promotion about 20 years ago where you saved and turned in red-colored tab tops for certain prizes. Most of those prizes were just coke schwag, although I did not know that term back then. Still, they were simple and cool. I had a coke t-shirt I wore at many a tennis tournament, and some coke glasses (the old float-style kind) that my parents may still have one or two of at their house.

Fast forward to the MyCokeRewards promotion and you will see an utter failure. Whereas the former one had an easy system (collect tabs, turn them in at the mall) the current promotion has a website that is such a pain in the ass to navigate, I never visit it. The site does not remember my username and password (even with Firefox), so I have to log in each time I want to enter a code, and it is laden with so much Flash that I hesitate to use it on anything but my gaming computer. Luckily, you can associate your mobile phone with it, and enter codes with a simple text message. So, even though it is a pain to enter a 10-15 digit code (they vary) in text message, it is much much better than using a computer.

But the real failure with the promotion is that the rewards are not very good. Sure, there is a flat-screen television, but it would take days, if not weeks, of straight typing just to enter the codes. The attainable rewards are pure rubbish. Most are just marketing items, and they're not even useful like the ones I mentioned above, and many of them are just entries in sweepstakes. So, even though I continue to drink Coke, I mostly ignore the available rewards.

And, I didn't give it much thought until I was looking at Amazon's new video offering, and even though I think they need to enable the videos to run everywhere, it is not a bad-looking service. The big takeaway from looking at it, however, was the ability to spend your PepsiStuff points on music and video downloads from Amazon. The music downloads are DRM-free, which is huge. Hopefully, Amazon will be heading in that direction with the video offering.

I present the pepsi offering as the way to do it. Tie yourself in with a popular website. Now, I can go to Amazon and buy some things I actually want with either Pepsi points or a credit card. How perfect is that? And it drives both products. I do not know how easy it is to enter the rewards, but at the very least they have rewards worth pursuing, and that's the most important part.

Spinach Casserole: A Break from the Usual

For the most part, this blog is about tech, either the latest and greatest or how it integrates with and involves people's lives. However, man cannot live on tech alone and he needs to eat once in a while. Using some leftover and frozen items, I concocted this amazingly tasty dish, modified from a recipe I found at about.com.

Because of my time using The Grocery Game to purchase groceries, in my freezer, I have a lot of different items I am trying to get through, so it is always a fun exercise to pull out a couple random items from the freezer and create something to eat.

Ingredients

• 1 package frozen spinach
• 3 strips of bacon, chopped
  
• 1/3 cup grated Parmesan
• 1/3 cup grated Pecorino Romano
  
• 3 eggs, hard boiled, sliced
• 1.5 cups milk
• 3 tbsp. butter
• 3 tbsp. flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. paprika
• ground pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Thaw the spinach in a colander in the sink, making sure to get as much of the water out of it as possible. In a saucepan, melt 3 tablespoons butter; blend in 3 tablespoons flour. Add salt, pepper, and paprika. Gradually stir in milk. Cook, stirring constantly, until sauce is thick. Add the grated cheeses until melted and remove from the heat as it starts to thicken.

Evenly, place the spinach in a lightly greased 9x9 casserole pan, top with the sliced eggs. Cover this with the sauce mixture, and then spread the chopped bacon on the top.

Bake at 350 for 30minutes.

Garlic bread makes a great accompaniment. If that is too much butter for you, just a plain baguette would also be good.

The Island of California

Today on Jaiku, Stefan posted two interesting articles, one about people accessing Engadget from their (i)phones, and the other about the perils of refusing to change in the marketplace. Together, I think these articles make an interesting point about the perception of the mobile market from both the manufacturer and the customer points of view.

Although it only gets a brief mention in the first article, and it still has a tiny percentage of the market, there is no doubt that the Apple iPhone is the darling of the U.S. mobile market. Market dominance shifts at the drop of a hat nowadays, where development can be done on computers instead of costly labs, and just-in-time manufacturing is a reality.

Nokia overtook Motorola with a technology choice. Sure, there was branding and what-not, but Motorola's (and indeed the greater US market) decision to wilfully blind itself to the emerging GSM standard, giving Nokia a huge opening. This technology shift is behind-the-scenes as far as the users are concerned and what it amounts to in the US is the belief that to change networks, one must change their phone. Half the time this is true, as the networks are not compatible, but as long as you switch with compatible technologies (from AT&T to Tmobile) you can continue using the same (unlocked) phone.
Samsung added cameras to the phone. Sure, they sucked, but people loved them and used them for all sorts of goofy things. This opening, left by the other phone manufacturers was a customer-facing one, but it was obvious. The phone user could see the camera lens on the phone and know what it was for.

Now look at the other article, where a (technophile-centric, to be sure) website is reporting that over 95% of its mobile visitors arrive via some sort of iPhone. That is amazing, especially considering most phones can browse the web just fine. What this tells me is that mobile phone manufacturers and networks (other than AT&T, who has paired itself with the iPhone) need to do a much better job at informing their users on how to use their mobile devices effectively.

The "Island of California" (neat history lesson in the "perils" article) here is the belief that a phone is just a device to talk to people and take crappy pictures. If you want e-mail, you have to get a blackberry, and if you want to browse the web with your phone, you need an iPhone. Of course, this is all crap. Most phones can do both these things with varying degrees of success, but the experience is better than you might think. Go ahead, give it a try, and for e-mail, Google's gmail app will install and makes e-mail on your phone easier than a blackberry. Or, Exchange users, try Nokia's Mail for Exchange. There are a number of solutions out there, but the problem is the users are not made aware of them. The users think the phone is a device used for talking, rather than the mobile computer it is, and the networks have either bought into this, or at the very least, perpetuate it with little effort to change perceptions.

I suppose releasing a new device is the simple answer, but the simple fact is that -other than the nice touch screen- Apple's iPhone is not that good. A phone and your wallet are the two things that go pretty much everywhere with you, and the phone -a computer in its own right- has the ability to tell a story, and to share that story with those you love. The newest iPhone can start to do this, but the Nokia N95 has been able to do this for two years. And now, they have a number of other handsets that can do all this, for a lot less money than one would end up paying to AT&T and Apple.

Leave the island and take a good look a the Nseries and Eseries models, plus some interesting Samsung models, and you can get a good idea what you are missing. Without the high price tag and lock-in that you will get from jumping in with the iPhone crowd.

Revolution -not Evolution- needed to win in Online Music

In my last post, I gave a brief overview of why I think that Nokia Music signing with the Warner label does not amount to much in a space that is dominated by a new kind of music offering: Apple's iTunes. I claim that the only way to beat the 800lb. gorilla is by doing something radically different from what people can currently get. Nokia, with their huge base of mobile phones, is in a position to do just that. But my proposal is not for a company to implement, it is for a community to do it. This community is going to need the support and aid of some major players and that is why I think Nokia or someone similar should take the lead, release the bull, and see what happens.

To win this, Nokia will need to be innovative. Don't get me wrong, Nokia is a very innovative company and I love their products, but there are many innovative companies out there and they have all been hampered by the sleeping lion in the room: the major labels and the RIAA (the "Majors"). These guys have what Nokia wants to sell, they are tied to their old business models, and are not looking to rock the boat. They have stifled innovation at every turn and only caved to Apple's iTunes model because it is not really all that different from what they were already doing. The iTunes tracks are hampered by DRM, so they are purchased by the user and then get around the First Sale doctrine by their non-transferability. The only thing bad about this model for the Majors is that people can only buy that one good track on an album, rather than the whole album. Other than that, this model was a complete win for them, although you would never know it by all the complaining they do about online sales.


So, how do you innovate in this music space? That is certainly the multi-billion dollar question, and no matter what the innovation, the Majors are going to fight it all the way. But something needs to happen. Without a cohesive, workable solution, piracy will only become more rampant. No one wants to go to the store at $5/gal of gasoline to buy a $16 CD which they have to then rip, import, and transfer to their preferred listening device(s). Catchy song as a jingle on some commercial? I want the whole thing /right now/, not in a couple hours or so.

But most of all, it needs to be Universally Inclusive. By Universally Inclusive, I do not mean that is has to contain every song recorded. What I mean is that it needs to have the /potential/ to include every song ever recorded. What Nokia Music should do, no, what it should /BE/ is a framework for accessing, sharing, and selling ANY music.

Any Music: The framework should allow artists and labels alike to easily plug-in to the interface/storefront. If you know me or read this site very often, you know that I am a proponent of openness, but even more of interoperability as a way to tie together multiple services. The music industry needs to change. This old model of a few Majors running the show, signing 100s of acts so that a few will actually make it is no longer sustainable. No one other than the studios make any money that way, and I believe the artists are (rightfully) fed up with this. MySpace and the Internet were supposed to change this and there are some success stories, but most of those revolve around a band using the Internet to get noticed by and sign up with the Majors. Not much of a revolution.

What I propose is for the stores to link directly with the artists themselves. The Music Store framework should include an easy way for artists to sort of "plug-in" to the network, offering their music for listening and for sale.

And, what is more, this framework should be not only an open API or similar, but it should be open sourced, allowing for other music storefronts to offer the same type of functionality to the artists. This would increase the availability of music to the store's ability to add an artist's "feed" to its catalog of available music. I use feed here because I envision this to be as easy to use as adding an RSS feed to your feed aggregator (Google Reader or whatever else you choose to use). Feed aggregators make a perfect example because they usually support two different standards: RSS and Atom. And there is no reason this new music framework should not support more than one type of distribution method, so long as that method is transparent to the user. I propose that the music storefront offer the aggregation and search functionality. The better and more seamlessly they can do that, the better their store will do financially. Just like a traditional store. There is no need to lock in the user with proprietary Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) algorithms. Music is a simple commodity. This is like department stores from the 60s. They all carried the same basic items, but some did better than others, based upon service and setup and attractiveness or whatever else the market demanded. I propose the exact same thing here, only instead of freight-liners, this will use a sort of digital syndication and accounting for the music. And instead of a few inefficient and biased distribution channels (i.e. the Majors) this would allow any artist to plug-in and offer their music to any and all of that store's visitors.

1. Accessing: Nokia Music should be a part of the person's personal cloud. This should be a repository (locker, if you will, to borrow the term from mp3tunes) for all the music a person owns. This accessibility would let a person listen to whatever is in their collection at any time, from any device. On your phone? Sure. On your Internet-enabled car? Of course. On your work computer through a web or similar interface? Naturally.

2. Sharing: The framework should include the ability to easily share the music one likes and discovers with others. And what is more, the users should be rewarded for sharing the music with others, perhaps in the form of free downloads, increased access, or exclusive promotions. Last.fm allows you to quickly send a song link to someone else, and this can be played in most places. I am thinking something like this. And if that person also uses this service (remember, this is an open framework, so even if the person is not using the same provider, they should still get the notice) they could go into a "my recommendations" playlist which plays the music that has been recommended to them.

3. Selling: This has to make money to somehow, but people do not all want to own music in the same way. Some will want to buy the tracks, so this should be an option to whatever you are listening. Some want a subscription, and this should be tiered, to grant more access to the network to the most amount of people. The main thing is that it has to be easy and allow for simple and seamless up and downgrades in a person's service. Perhaps playing on certain devices costs more or requesting a certain song will cost a bit where listening to radio-style music would be free. The ability to seamlessly up and downgrade one's account based upon what and how you choose to listen at that moment would approach a micropayments type of system, allowing for the most even distribution of payments possible.

The key is to make it easy and make it interactive. If it is fun to use and communicate the music to others, then people will use it. iTunes is the current market leader in this, but each person's iTunes collection is basically an island of music with no connection to other islands except via a very slow boat. With no motor. The above proposal will allow for instantaneous visitation to anyone else's island, as well as sharing a part of your island with your friends and contacts. ...Read more

Warner signs with Nokia Music - So What?

This is just Nokia playing catch-up with the only real online music store that matters: iTunes. And the major labels are more than happy to sign up because they are sick and tired of being dragged over the coals by Apple (let's be honest here, by Steve Jobs himself). CD sales are down, way down, so the labels have to do something to staunch the bleeding, but the only real game in town is iTunes, and Jobs knows it. Yes, there are others, like mp3tunes, Amazon's new offering, and eMusic (Disclosure: I use the eMusic service and like it, but it is really just a DRM-free online music shop with an ugly interface, independent music, and a sort of clearing house for older albums).

In response to Apple's iTunes dominance, Nokia creates this hybrid subscription/purchase model where, based upon a handset purchase, you get a year's worth of free music and some sort of one-touch purchase deal where you can conveniently purchase a song you listen to. It sounds great, but I have some pretty strong reservations about it actually working.

First of all, this has to be an easy and seamless experience. This is the one and only reason that Apple has succeeded in this space where everyone else has failed. (well, their products are cute, too, which helps). I am sure it will get better, but my experience with Nokia Music is that it crashes, and crashes hard when trying to import my music into it. I never even got to the point of importing the music into my phone. So, after fiddling with it (uninstalling/reinstalling .NET and so on) for a couple hours, I simply chose the mp3 folders I wanted and dropped them right onto my phone's memory card. That took two minutes.

I assume that Nokia will get the music client working (although from recent experience, this is a big assumption). And, certainly, their focus is going to be on the phone's software and interface. They want (and must first) make this service usable solely from the handset. Many people (like me) will want some sort of PC client, but there are many that simply will not care about a companion desktop application (young people living solely on their phones), and then there are those of us left out in the cold anyway: Mac and Linux users. For this article, I am going to assume the handset interface will be perfect and that the PC music client will at least be usable. And even with those assumptions, I am going to say Nokia Music will be marginal at best.

The one advantage Nokia has over Apple's iTunes is that you can buy the music when you are listening to it, namely, when you are on the go. Oh, wait, Apple has an iPhone and an iTouch, so they're already on the go. Uh-oh. Like I said above, Nokia is just playing catch-up with Apple here. They are hoping that their massive mobile phone market penetration will immediately propel them into this space. I do not know what the numbers are for Nokia handsets vs. Apple iPod/iPhone/iTouch devices, but I would bet real money that if you qualified the numbers with "daily usage" the Nokia handsets would be far and away more than the iDevices. Further qualify it with "able to play music" and we will start to see some interesting numbers (by the way, if you know where these stats are, I would love to see them). But there also exists a huge percentage of the "people owning phones able to play music" that either do not know about this feature, or ignore it entirely and also carry an iPod around with them. Why? Because Apple has done a superlative job in marketing the ease and usefulness of the iPod as a music player.

In my next piece, I will explore a possible option for innovating in the online music arena, and how only something that is revolutionary will take the reigns away from the DRM-laden iTunes store.

Gizmo: Total VOIP Fail

I tried, I mean I really tried to love Gizmo (also called Gizmo5, but i refuse to call it that). For a short time, it was a complete telephony saviour for me, with its ability to be run on anything, and have a single phone number point to both it and to any ohter phone I chose: mobile phone, home phone, friend´s phone, whstever. But for the past year, the service has not only stagnated, it has actually become worse than when I first started using it.

What is it?

Gizmo is a Program and Service that will let you talk to people using VOIP. VOIP basically means using the Internet to make telephone calls. If you are familiar with Skype, it is similar to that service.

What makes Gizmo better than Skype is its use of SIP as the communications pathway. SIP is an open protocol, meaning that anyone can write or use software to plug into it. This means you can use your own client to connect to Gizmo, but still use their service. This allows you to access THE Gizmo services in a number of ways, rather than be tied to how Skype will let you use their service. This means that although you can install Gizmo on your phone, you do not have to. If it supports connecting to SIP services, you can just use the built-in functionality, rather than installing more software.

Setup, Use, and Cost

To use the service you need three very simple things: a gizmo account, some sort of computer, and an Internet connection. You then install the software on your computer, Internet Tablet, or mobile phone, sign in, and as long as you have a connection to the Internet, you are good to go.

The basic service is free. At this point, you can either IM or make a call to someone else using Gizmo at no cost. This makes sense because at this point you are only using your own computer and Internet service. You can purchase call-out minutes which will allow you to call practically any number in the world, usually resulting in greatly reduced rtes when you call internationally. Check the Gizmo site for pricing, but last time I used it, it was less than two cents per minute in the united states, meaning that $10 bought you over 500 minutes of talk time. That not only beas international rates, but it is better than pretty much any mobile phone plan.

For people to call you with their regular phones, you need a number. You can get one with an 775 area code for free, or pay a nominal fee of $4/mo. for a number with any area code and voice mail. I used callwave, which has a partnership with Gizmo because it provided the ability to ring multiple phones at once. This means that even if I do not have the Gizmo software running (say, my computer is off) it will still ring whatever phone I specify. Receiving a call does not use up any minutes.

Why Gizmo Fails

Based on the above, Gizmo sounds pretty great. And, as long as everything is working, it is. But Gizmo fails because they cannot provide service to their customers. I have run into a number of problems with the service, some minor, one kind of major, and in nearly every instance, Gizmo has provided substandard service and help with my issue.
For example, a minor issue is that I cannot and have never been able to log into their help forums. The reason I got was that there was a problem with accounts created within a certain timeframe related to some transition and that it would be fixed. That was over a year ago and still prevents me from contributing to the forum or asking questions.

The major problem is that I cannot log into my Gizmo account from my mobile phone. Since I have started using the service, the use of mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets is the preferred way to use the service. Go to Gizmo5 and the first thing you see is a place to enter your mobile number so they can text you the link to download the client. I can use Gizmo on my computer and on my tablet (these are virtually the same) but it fails from my phone. I have tried two different phones, and three different programs, so it has to be a failure on their end. But when I sent a support request to get it fixed, I received a response that basically said they did not know about that problem and it had been sent to the engineers. I reopened the case saying that wsa unacceptible and asking them to at least try to troubleshoot the issue, but never received a response.

This is the problem. To beat an entrenched service, you have to offer something that is superior to what they have. Gizmo ha a better variety of ways to use the service, but this is completely worthless if you cannot get any help when something goes wrong.

Addendum: I finally got my "show-stopper" problem fixed with the Gizmo service. After much troubleshooting (all on my end, without any help from the company) I determined it to be a problem with my specific account and asked them to reset the account. They did so and it is working again.

Openness and Cloud Computing, Part II

In a recent post, I wrote about cloud computing and data and how nice it would be if users could reach out and access all their data, no matter what it is, in a seamless fashion even if it resides within different services. The magic that would glue all this together would be a heavy and carefully thought-out use of open standards.

The fundamental problem with web applications is their schizophrenic nature. They tend to be simultaneously open and closed. What I mean is that many times the underlying technologies can be open (Apache, WordPress, etc. and even the HTML and scripts are readily visible) but the fact they are located in a single place makes them something of a closed system. Take the numerous photo-sharing sites that are available out there: Flickr, OviShare, Picasa Web Albums, not to mention all the sites like Facebook. These websites are open in the sense that anyone can join, more or less for free, and many of them have open APIs so that they can interface with other programs (Shozu, for example). However, they are still closed in the sense that you are limited to what services the site chooses to offer, and it is very difficult to migrate from one to another.

So, even if there is a fully open source social web application out there (picture facebook, but with all the code fully open so anyone could take it and create their own facebook site, rather than just some open APIs), you are still limited to using that particular site because if you do not, then you cannot connect with all your friends that are using that site. No matter how great the amenities of an island are, if it is cut off from the rest of the world, it still feels pretty lonely.

So, to me, the ability to plug into an application is the really important open aspect. I want my stuff to be in one place, accessible at anytime. I do not necessarily need an Apple MobileMe offering, closed and complete, so long as you only want what Apple is willing to give you. What I need is the ability to use some applications, and then plug in the missing parts via other applications, either self-written, cobbled together from other people's code, or simply accessing multiple services but having it setup in such a way that it is as seamless as going to a single service.

Today, I am going to look at Nokia's Ovi offering. Although it is not complete, you can get a good idea what it will be: offering services on a website for your mobile phone (not limited to Nokia phones, however, I can imagine a scenario where Nokia phones have a more feature-rich offering) that extends and enhances the information and content you have on your phone, making it available anywhere, and synchronizing with multiple devices. This means you get a new phone, Bam! the info is there. You are in a meeting, Bam! the info is on your PC in Outlook, Thunderbird, .mail or whatever. Now, open this offering up to not only non-Nokia phones (which generates positive benefits from network effect and creates an essentially captive audience for marketing your vision; a vision which can work everywhere but works best on Nokia handheld devices) but also to a person's everyday information management needs, such as their Files, their contacts, grocery lists, conversations, etc. and you would have an offering that blows the socks off the competitors.

This is not all here now, Nokia is just getting started and they have some interesting plans. The Share on Ovi -which does photos and videos- has a nice interaction with the Nokia Photos application that runs on the desktop. What is interesting about this, is that the Nokia Photos app is the old Lifeblog application, which doubles as a place for one to synchronize the important information on the phone, such as pictures, text messages, etc. and organizes them in a timeline so you can look back at what you were doing that day. From here, you can add the Ovi site to the application and use it to upload the photos you want, to whatever channel fits most appropriately. Of course, you can just set the phone to automatically upload the pictures when they are taken, but not everyone wants to do that. Similarly, the new Ovi Files application gives users a chance to access their files from anywhere, PC or mobile phone, any time they want. A Nokia phone is not necessary, but it works with it.

The above two examples demonstrate exactly what is better about a more open offering than one that is completely closed. This is not to say Nokia's Ovi is open in this way, but if they were to make it a bit more of a framework, where people could create their own interaction with the service, then we would really see something interesting. If it has to be monetized -although I fully expect a really good service to drive their core business, namely, selling handsets- then access limited on a user basis, with paid accounts having more access than non-paid accounts, could still provide an open offering, yet fund the service.

Any service like this -one that holds and maintains personal user data- will benefit from the use and implementation of an open model. Because it is too difficult to predict how any given person will use a service like this, the more configurable and adaptable it is, the more useful it becomes.

Online Banking Fail: No additional security at the cost of customer time

As you are no doubt aware, I am for technology making our lives easier and more efficient; getting the mundane out of the way as quickly as possible so the good and enjoyable can be experienced. This means that a simple and short e-mail such as "You owe $200 on your credit card due on September 5" is a good thing, where as "You have received a notice in your online banking site, please click this link to view it" which is followed by username, password, confirmation of first girldfriend, mother's maiden name, and 6 more clicks past ads for mutual funds and CDs is a Very Bad Thing. What is worse, this adds no security that I can see.

The following is what I sent to my credit card company, but banks do this too.

I recently received an e-mail from Discover which contained the following information:

All messages with this type of important account
information will now be housed securely at Discover.com
starting in September 2008.

Here's what you can expect:

- An e-mail notification when you have a message
- Directions on how to access the message
- Password protected security allowing you to control who
sees your account information

and I would like to take this chance to explain why this solution fails in its goals.

First, when I received an e-mail from Discover in the past, it was short and to the point. For example, it might indicate how much the minimum I owed on my account for the upcoming payment. Now, I will receive an e-mail that informs me I have an e-mail waiting for me? I have my e-mail open for the better part of every day, and it takes me about five seconds to read an e-mail from Discover and glean the pertinent information from it. If it required banking action, I could either take care of that right away or move the e-mail to a to-do folder for action later, preferably when I had other banking tasks to accomplish. An e-mail forcing me to login to the Discover site to -pardon me- discover what information I have received adds at least 90 seconds to this entire process, and sidetracks me from whatever I am currently working on. A complete waste of time.

Second, and equally important, this does absolutely nothing to enhance security. There is nothing Discover sends me in e-mail that could compromise my account. The only thing in an e-mail tends to be ``your account ending in 1234'', which, because I have separate accounts with Discover requiring separate logins, will still have to be in the new e-mail notifications.

In fact, the only goal I can see where this succeeds is in driving more traffic to the discovercard.com website, which would be beneficial for Discover (and not Discover's customers) because it will add to Discover's advertisement revenue. (I define revenue here as being either direct revenue, should Discover choose to advertise for other sites on its website, or in an increase in additional services sold by Discover to its existing customers. Either way, it is shameful to disguise ``customer security'' this way.

At the very least, Discover ought to allow its customers to opt-out of this program and continue receiving informative e-mails regarding their accounts. An easy solution, should you continue to claim that this is insecure, would be to offer the chance for your customers to receive encrypted e-mail. There are many easy and readily-available solutions for this, such as PGP (and the free, compatible product, GPG) or S/MIME encrypted e-mail. Implementing either of these is as easy as setting up the online account with Discover in the first place.

MobileMe Not up to Apple's Standards

It looks like Apple will not run away with the "personal information in a cloud" prize just yet. The Washington Post is reporting that the MobileMe service, released concomitantly with the Apple 3G iPhone is not up to Apple's standards and that Jobs does not believe the service to be up to Apple's Standards (ArsTechnica).

This is good news for Nokia and their still-incomplete Ovi offering, as it still gives them a chance to release something worth using. They have released pieces and have provided excited lookers-on like myself a glimpse at the remaining offerings, but the real trial will be in their ability to deliver something useful very soon. Apple is giving you an opening Nokia, so go ahead: take it and release something on servers that do not crash.