This infoworld article on a very recent preview of Windows Phone 7 is disturbing. Very disturbing. If this is truly what Windows Phone 7 will be then it's going to be a diaster for sure. I hope MS improves it drastically before shipping. No multitasking and no cut and paste are big "WOWs" - especially after several MS people I know baged iPhones for the very same things!

I won't be personally getting one in a hurry but I am looking forward to my new iPhone 4 next week!

At WWDC 2010 Steve Jobs announced details of the new iPhone 4. As suggested on the iPhone 4G dissected post:

• Front-facing video chat camera (CHECK!)
• Improved regular back-camera (CHECK!)
• Camera flash (CHECK!)
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (CHECK!)
• Improved display. (CHECK!)
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack. (CHECK!)
• Split buttons for volume (CHECK!)
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic (CHECK!)

Other facts:

• Hitting the US stores on June 24 - three weeks!
• Aluminosilicate glass - 20 times stiffer, 30 times harder than plastic
• 326 pixels per inch - 960x480 resolution. Finally a decent super res on a small device!
• Based on the A4 processor - Apples own after recent purchase of P.A. Semi
• Gyroscope and Accelerometers - Means measuring direction and angular momentum - much more useful for gamming interfaces
• Shots HD (720p) Hi Def video with direct youtube integration
• Significantly increased battery life - finally!!!

A good round up of the details on a Silicon Alley Insider article. Trying to find out when it hits NZ!

I'm running my SOA Course tomorrow at my company as a 1 day deep dive on Service Oriented Architecture. Should be interesting, have a diverse bunch of people from my own team of EAs to other architects to infrastructure people.

As part of Seâd's "Latest in IT" Seminar Series 2010, I'm doing a talk on Service Oriented Architecture as follows:

Service Oriented Architecture - Friend or Foe?
 
Service Oriented Architecture (or "SOA") is a concept that has been around a while - several years ago it was the big buzz word before "the cloud". Some organisations have embraced the concept and used it to drive significant IT change - especially around introducing flexibility and decreasing the total cost of IT. Meanwhile, many other organisations have struggled to use SOA and see any real benefit.

This session will help to dispel the myths and legends of SOA and will concentrate on explaining why SOA can make a significant difference to legacy IT environments. This session will further drill into the relation between "the cloud" and SOA as well as examining why the premise of SOA is still important today.

Date: Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Time: 5.30pm to 7.30pm (5:30pm – Drinks and Networking, 6:00pm - Speaker starts)
Where:  The Auckland Club, Dorchester Building, 34 Shortland Street, Auckland.
RSVP to Norma Lum at events@sead.co.nz by Friday, 18 June 2010.

The Kobo eReader has just been released on thursday in NZ. Interestingly one of the EAs in my team had his wife talking at the launch in Auckland. She's a fairly well known NZ author and was out to support the launch. The device is an amazing price point at $300 - after some digging I've found out you can put your own PDFs on this device. This opens up some extremely interesting possibilities in training and learning. For example a user walkthrough for an application - which is easier to read than flipping screens on a PC. And at $300 this is a very small additional cost to most desktop platforms. I think I might just have to get one and have a play :) I'm also interested to look at the kobo SaaS offering to see the backend that comes with this.

Apple has just eclipsed Microsoft as the biggest technology company in work by market capitalisation - $222 Billion versus Microsoft's $219 billon. Stunning turn around for Apple and not great news for MS considering it used to be over $500 Billion in the past.

Good round up on Google TV from Business Insider. 

"Google TV takes your existing television experience and adds the internet to it. In short, you will be able to watch TV just like you do today, but you'll also be able to watch web video, surf the web, read websites -- whatever you do on the web on your big screen television. No longer will you have to crowd around the laptop to watch web video. No longer will you have to use half-way solutions like browsing through a Playstation, Wii, or Xbox."

Very interesting to see this technology coming out from Google. To see it being baked into Sony TVs as well as development platform from day 1, apple should be worried - as this is a disrupting to iPads and iPhones as a interaction device for the home. Microsoft should be equaly worried as this will definitely be a huge disrupter to MCE, especially considering how hard it is to develop for MCE (My biggest bug bear to be honest.... MS missed the boat on this one). I'm current using XBMC and I can get pretty much a lot of what Google TV does - but I can see how Google TV will be something else with a open dev environment. Definitely one to keep an eye on. Be interesting to see if it works in NZ.

This is also on the back of a huge amount of new projects Google announced just in the last little while. Very interesting indeed!

Thanks to Hilary for this article on Google storing Wifi information at the same time they are doing street view drive bys:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/3695625/Google-cars-gathered-home-internet-data-without-telling

I've posted some comments on the article (pending moderation), but thought I'd put it here to share my thoughts too:

A related experience to the article: Their [Google] van drove into my townhouse complex and surveyed the entire area for google street view. Problem is that it's private property even though the place is listed on public maps. It was never authorised by the body corporate so technically breaking the law by doing what they did. I wrote to google and asked for an explanation - never got a formal response except to say they removed the street view content from google maps. But I bet they still have the data and now the wifi data too from the complex (and there are tons of WLANs as there are 35 units!). So how can I verify what they do and don't have about my townhouse complex?

For those of you who think this information is no big deal are not looking at the bigger picture. It's the same issue with what's happening with Facebook privacy - it's a matter of my information (and in this case my townhouse complex information) being given away without my permission.

In isolation Wifi information is no big deal. But if my home address together with pictures of my house along with how I connect my network together is publicly available without my consent and without a clear understanding what the information is being used for I'm starting to get very concerned.

I would also suggest that NZ privacy laws also mean the Google should disclose what they know about you or your property if you ask for it and I'm pretty sure they need your permission before they store anything about you or your possessions.

The big problem is that haven't done this upfront as it would completely stifle their ability to collect the information. But that's not my problem - I just think I have a right to own my data and decide who sees what about it. 

Interesting discussion on the TOGAF course this morning. Quite a good conversation across the room kicked off by the concept of a architecture board in TOGAF. Ideally you want your most senior executives on this forum, but the point is - do they care? do they have time? Do they really understand? In an organisation like the one I work for, it's very difficult to get senior management to care about EA let alone even understand it. If we had the right type of buy-in, then getting decisions made on architectural changes should become very straight forward. I don't even know if this is strictly architecture governance issue, it's really a wider IT governance issue that helps any IT capability move forwards. So I'm left thinking - if you don't have effective IT governance how can you effectively setup architecture governance?   

A little while ago - I wrote a paper on IT Innovation for my company. This was at the request of the CFO to help facilitate a path towards IT innovation within the IS department. For the benefit of others I have posted to my blog under a dedicated page on IT Innovation.