We have a date chosen for launching the Java SDK. yay!

Sending me an email? Check out this article about email overload — especially the bit about writing good subject lines. I'm trying it out myself. Really good good tip. My own email situation is a lot more under control than it used to be, thanks in part to finally admitting I can't answer it all and giving a big chunk of it (mainly commercial inquiries) to my business developer Maciek!

I met with a CEO/Founder and some of his staff this week in Waterloo. "R" has a company that's been doing java software for mobile phones for like, forever. We talked a lot about my software and business plans. They were very challenging but really helpful too. "R"'s company has recently joined another, larger company, and they seem to be sensitive about publicity and issues around the acquisition, so I'm withholding "R"'s name and I won't tell you what companies they are. I'm sure you can figure it out anyway if you really want to. And no, I didn't ask about what they're doing or any secret type stuff.

3GSM is coming. Is it worth going? Because it would be expensive and take up a whole week, what with all the travel time.

We finally did some major updates to the hardware support page . Some changes:

• All of the Qtek, i-mate, MDA, SPV, XDA, VPA, Dopod phones are just rebranded versions of Taiwanese stealth manufacturer HTC s various devices such as the "HTC Wizard" (etc.). Since they all have the same specs, they all appear under HTC now. (By the way, they don't support camera access. Sadly. Yet. Maybe if you bother them they'll do it.)
• Many of the Sony Ericsson (SE) models have "a" and "c" and "i" variants — these are all the same so they are now listed together as well.
• No, the Treo 650 STILL doesn't work. Tell Palm to get their ass in gear and support camera access like everyone else.

The big news of course is that Nokia is finally shipping at least one S40 phone that has camera access (the 6280). So, if you can be the first person to confirm that this is true with your 6280 (send photos :-) I'll let you alpha test the upcoming SDK. Let's see if there's any takers on that.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I'm thinking of going or sending someone to 3GSM. So contact me if you're going to be there.

I had to get up early today. Normally I get up after noon, but today I was up at 9.15 am to drive to Waterloo for an 11 am meeting. I met at Chapters with a guy who's a pretty well-known and -respected businessperson in the local tech community. We talked about many things, including the accelerator, one of the companies he's funding, and obviously Semacode too. I'm trying to recruit him to do some business stuff for me :-) It was a pretty informal chat, about 1.5 hours, at the end I gave him a copy of the bus plan to peruse (with NDA of course!).

Prior to that, on the way up, I did an interview with a woman from a UK marketing mag that went pretty well I thought. We've been trying to connect for weeks, and my schedule doesn't work well with talking to people in Europe because it's 5+ hours there. By the time I get up, they're going home.

And then after all that, I popped over to the accelerator centre to sign some checks and do some bookkeeping type activities. Checked the company voice mail, got VM from a chap in the UK who sounded australian or kiwi, one from a recruiting agency, which I'll probably ignore, since I'm doing my own recruiting for now, and another one that was just static.

So what else is new. I'm writing up an application for a government tax incentive program called SRED (pronounced by everyone "Shred"). It's a Canadian program where you can get back a substantial amount, maybe more than half, of the wages you pay to your R&D staff. I didn't know about this before, but fortunately, SRED is cool because you can file for it AFTER you've paid the people. And then the CRA writes you a cheque.

Oh yes, and I have been doing some software too... mainly right now I'm going through build automation. Build automation = GOOD. Build automation = not worrying that I'm going to release software that isn't what I meant it to be. Consistency, and all that. Oh, and I'm writing manuals for all the software too.

Nokia just shipped some new phones using their new operating system "S40 3rd Edition" : the Nokia 7370, 6280, 6111, and 6270. I'll have to order a few but the hot question is, do they run semacode's Java ME reader? According to this post on Forum Nokia the answer is yes, but I'd like to get a confirmation on that.

Meanwhile, it's only been a few months since I last updated the hardware compatibility list, but already the Sony Ericsson section at least has grown horribly out of date. Sony Ericsson's Global phone portfolio is growing insanely fast, they seem to have a machine-gun approach to model marketing. I guess a shopping spree is in order soon.