Cradle To Cradle / Not Asteroid Hurtle

8 More iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known

Wrong and Run/ NDA and Mobile Me

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple's standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence....more

The Shadow Of Map Google

In-Flight High Speed Wi-Fi/ Gogo On Go

The flight tomorrow is likely to put much more stress on the "Gogo" air-to-ground system built by Aircell, after their 2006 win in an FCC auction of a thin sliver of spectrum -- just 3 megahertz split between up and down directions, capable of carrying perhaps up to 2 or 3 Mbps. Doug Backelin, American's inflight communications and technology manager, said in an interview today with Xeni and me that, "We're going to do a dress rehearsal."

Gogo will be available at no costs to Wednesday's passengers, and that lets American and Aircell "see how the service performs on a full planeload of people, get their feedback, test our streaming video," and help "fine tune some things before our actual launch."

Lucky passengers on an American Airlines flight from JFK to Los Angeles tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25, 2008) will be the first commercial flyers to access high-speed, in-flight Internet service since the shutdown of Boeing's Connexion service in 2006. Tomorrow's flight is a round-trip test before a full-blown pilot program starts up and runs 3 to 6 months on all of American's 767-200 equipment -- 15 aircraft in total -- wending their way from JFK to SFO, LAX, and Miami.

The full-on launch, slated for "the next couple of weeks," Backelin said, will involve charging for service: $12.95 for flights over 3 hours, Aircell's airline solutions director Dave Bijur said. "Eventually, when we have flights that operate shorter segments, as we will later this year when we launch with Virgin America," they'll also have a $9.95 plan for 3 hour or shorter segments.

To use the service, passengers will fire up a browser on a mobile device with Wi-Fi or a laptop, connect to a portal, and pay a fee after tomorrow's test. Some walled-garden content is available through the portal at no cost: all of American's AA.com site, as well as Wall Street Journal headlines and Frommers' travel information about the flight's destination. There are separate tailored portals for laptops and mobile devices.

The 25 CEOs

[25 most powerful people in business]
Some are empire builders. Others are hired guns. But if they truly have world-class oomph ...

Digital Winter Trip

Designer's Coolest Dream Place 2008
A new hotel will open at Schiphol airport in the Spring of 2008. Called CitizenM, the aim is to create a new ‘hotel experience’ for individuals, and sophisticated travellers who love design.

World's coolest Mobile Phone Shop is in Japan