Had a great time over the weekend with friends in St. Petersburg, Florida!

More on Borders/T-Mobile: I filed a brief yesterday for the New York Times on the plan for Borders to have T-Mobile install hot spots in all of its domestic stores, and was thus able to speak to the business development leads at both Borders and T-Mobile USA. Here's a little more detail from those conversations.… Continue reading

More on Borders/T-Mobile: I filed a brief yesterday for the New York Times on the plan for Borders to have T-Mobile install hot spots in all of its domestic stores, and was thus able to speak to the business development leads at both Borders and T-Mobile USA. Here's a little more detail from those conversations.

Frank Ramirez is T-Mobile's director of business products, the head of the team that develops the road map for how the HotSpot service will be used and the marketing for it. Ramirez comes from Microsoft, where he spent eight years, three of which were leading the VPN (virtual private networking) group, so he has a keen insight into the roaming business traveler, and the corporate side of that market as well in IT and management. Ramirez said that T-Mobile views HotSpots as part of their data business. “This is a complementary service to our 2.5G service,” he said. The message he puts out, he said, is that it's all about integration, meeting the “total mobility needs” for mobile professionals. He views 2.5G as “impromptu, on the go” service, while Wi-Fi is “portability,” or recreating your desktop environment wherever you are.

Paul Mozak, the director of business development at Borders, has a complementary view to this. They'd been looking into hot spots for years, and he was familiar with the history of the industry. They had talked to MobileStar, and then engaged in conversations with T-Mobile, and were impression by their ability to manage the Starbucks relationship. Borders wasn't driven by a mass upswelling of customer demand, but “We have had some requests from our customers, and it filters up from our store organization,” Mozak said. Their plan for rollout: “Our goal is to start the rollout in an aggressive fashion in the first quarter in California and other markets and have it done by the summer, which allows us then to do some things in the national launch,” which could include not-yet-decided-on marketing programs. Mozak wouldn't speculate, but Starbucks had provided some limited free service at various points in their trials. 

Telecoms Waking Up to Wi-Fi. Verizon Communications on Wednesday became the second Web service provider to sell wireless home networking equipment directly to subscribers. Six million to 8 million U.S. homes have installed home networks that use Wi-Fi, a technology that allows devices located within a 300 foot radius to communicate without wires. Verizon is… Continue reading Telecoms Waking Up to Wi-Fi

Joel released the spec for the installer he wrote. Interesting if you follow his writing. (He's talked about the importance of writing specs in the past, someone asked if he could post the spec for his installer and he obliged.] [Archipelago]

A Kiddie GPS for the Masses?. A startup is developing a Global Positioning System that parents can use to keep track of junior. Its main selling point is the inexpensive price tag, around $100. By Elisa Batista [Wired News]

Asia Bests U.S. in Broadband Race. The high-speed Internet is catching on around the world. But as North Americans convert to standard DSL, the Chinese are skipping ahead to a newer, fatter Internet pipe. By Will Wade. [Wired News]

I adopted a new kitten on Saturday. Here are a couple of pictures of her.

Borders and T-Mobile to put hot spots in 400 stores by early 2003: T-Mobile and Borders Books announced today that T-Mobile would create hot spots in 400 Borders store by early next year. This begs several questions: Starbucks is the exclusive national partner for cafes for Barnes and Noble — did B and N blink?;… Continue reading Borders and T-Mobile to put hot spots in 400 stores by early 2003

IV = Instant Video. Last month, John Shoch responded to a message about Video on Demand (VOD) on Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list. I found the thread interesting because I do use NetFlix rather than my cable company's pay-per-view VOD service, but John's post made me realize how quickly I *would* use it if they… Continue reading IV = Instant Video

Dreamweaver Certification Challange – The Dreamweaver MX Certification exam is almost ready. We have been working on it for some time and some of the leaders in the community have had their fingers in it to some degree or another tweaking the questions and the answers and it is really rather tough. I think you'll… Continue reading Dreamweaver MX Certification exam