Amazing. These guys have created a vast semacode tag for google earth in a farm field.

It's got enough contrast that it will scan, in inverted mode (invert the image before giving it to the reader SDK).

Update : I think they intend that eventually it will here in google maps satellite photos

A few weeks ago I was at JavaOne in San Francisco. I've got the Flickr set if you want to see some narrated photos . Although there isn't there much about the show. Basically the biggest reason I went was to present with Nokia's Jaana Majakangas for JSR-257. I demoed semacode's SDK running on my trusty S710, the Nokia N93 and a SavaJe Jasper.

In order to prepare for the demo I borrowed the N93 and played around with it a bit. It's a prototype so there might be some fit & finish between the one I used and the final, but it was a pretty cool phone. If I had to sum it up in one work it would be this. This is a big phone. And that's not only physically but in terms of features too.

I mean, what do you say about a phone where the optical package is the size of your thumb? It contains a transverse mounted zeiss lens with a 3x optical zoom — you can see it moving around in there if you look. It's also got a big screen — 320x240 — and that's in a flip phone. It's a bit of a beast, but on the other hand, since it does absolutely everything, you can forgive it a bit for that.

Starting with the basics. Obviously it's a good phone. It's got external and internal screens. It's a S60 model so it's got all of the good smartphone features and there's tons of software you can load onto it.

It also apparently has WiFi but I didn't have time to try that out. Still, that will be really useful for transferring your pictures and videos because they will be big. That's because it's got a 3 megapixel camera and it shoots DV-quality video.

That's nothing to sneeze at ... just a few years ago I bought a DV camera (Sony) and this phone takes movies that are just as good. The video and audio are crisp. It's easy to operate with thumb buttons on the side for start/stop, and zoom. There's also a separate button to switch from video to camera mode.

For loads of camera snaps examples see Mobile-review .

And here's a video example I shot myself. It's taken indoors, and you know how much trouble crappy videocams always have inside. N93 example video 3.8 MB (it's my friend Paul registering for the expo).

I have a few small gripes. The first is the size ... it will be nice when the nice optics shrink down to tininess. The second is the lack of a Skype VoIP client that can take advantage of the WiFi. But it's hard to blame that on Nokia. No, my real, genuine, justifiable gripe is this. Where's the bloody headphone jack???

A few weeks ago I wrote a rather negative post about a pull-out feature in Business 2.0 magazine. I think it's safe to say that I had it in for that article. I don't know why ... Partly because I was stressed out about going to JavaOne, partly because most magazines are really bad at covering mobile, partly because I was in a curmudgeon mood, and partly because I hadn't actually read it.

At the time I started to write the blog I haven't even read the whole article. I just assumed that it was really bad and started writing and reading at the same time. And actually (in my own defence) by the end of my blog I admitted that it wasn't so bad and rambled off into a criticism of the whole mobile industry and talked about how Apple could blow them out of the water. So my choice of title wasn't very good either.

And after I finished it writing it, I was actually a bit surprised as I finished the Business 2.0 pull out and found that actually, it wasn't that bad at all. In fact it was pretty good. But I was dumb and posted the blog anyway without editing it at all.

So it was a bit of horror that I looked at it again this week and saw that it was written by Carlo Longino, a mobile tech writer who I know and respect and who probably has written the most accurate and knowledgeable articles about mobile tech industry as, well, anyone!

Oops!

So now I'm going to go back through the whole article again and re-review it and we'll see how I feel about it in a more thoughtful frame of mind.....

Let's start with the Location Based Services section which is where I'm most personally knowledgeable. Personally I would have called this "Ubiquitous computing". Some days years from now everyone will agree with me but for now I can accept that ubicomp is fairyland for most people and LBS is a lot easier to get a handle on. Anyway, the 4 other featured companies are all LBS proper.

I agree with Longino that basic LBS are good and urban annotation is even better (like what Kamida is doing). I think that location-based marketing is going to be seriously annoying and I expect a consumer backlash if the "salivating" marketers are allowed to run free. And obviously I agree about barcodes, and it's easy enough to look now at Japan where QR codes are used quite a bit for ticketing already. The potential for ubicomp goes quite a bit further too...

For Mobilizing the buddy list the first message is that all content will be available via the mobile device. Yes. Secondly, is that social software and p2p on the mobile will be huge, in the form of instant messaging and presence, podcasting your own content, and collaborative media ... I absolutely agree that this is true. Is this going to be useful and cool to use? Definitely. Is it an interesting area to develop in? Maybe not. I'm not convinced that anything truly new will be happening in this area (compared to ubicomp) and I think that mostly it's a matter of converting stuff that works on PCs to make it work on mobile.

A flexible presence kind of touches on some of the same points since presence is definitely a social software area. I think that presence will wind up being a very important part of life with mobile devices. And that ties into the way that we socialize and also where we are (so all these different sections are starting to run into each other). Technologically this is a somewhat difficult and interesting area because all of the different presence systems out there right now (IM, Skype, etc.) there's no standardized way to publish your presence to all of them at once. Kind of a hassle — someone ought to do something about that.

The other side is VoIP and fixed-mobile convergence, which is obviously going to kick ass and be huge and I'm confident that market forces will lead to massive reductions in voice costs for users because there's now this competition that's going to happen between cellular and WiFi.

Finally, The everywhere office . We've already seen a bit what this will look like in terms of the Blackberry. But that is, looking at what Longino writes, just a small part of the story. He quite rightly points out the utility of fixed-mobile convergence in routing calls to routing calls to the mobile. Being able to browser your PC files on the computer would be nice, although I really, really can't figure out how that's going to work with PDF, powerpoint slides, and other large-format media. And if Longino is implying that being "always on" might have personal drawbacks, I agree 100%.

So, in summary , if you just emerged out of a cave and needed to know what you need to know about what's coming next, it's a pretty good show for 4 pages. I'm sure it was heavily edited by Business 2.0. But it's cool to see caaarlo getting some big-media ink. I still think that the magazine overall is crap, but then I only really respect two magazines in the world, Scientific American and The Economist . However if they employ Carlo more often it will be better off.

(OK, did he miss anything? I'm glad he skipped quickly over mobile TV because it's really not that exciting. On the other hand, I think such an overall summary probably should have talked about the eventual merging of the iPod with the phone. Ditto with the eventual disappearance of both the digital camera and the video camera into the phone as well, making the phone the one-stop shop for creating your own media. Maybe these are just too obvious but they will have large economic impacts on the companies that currently make those devices.)