1. Fring

The best and ultimate aggregator for Social networking, Skype and leading Messenger services including Win Live Messenger, ICQ, Y! and Google Talk.  Fring brings all of your contacts into one list, including those from the handset, Messenger and Skype accounts.  As you scroll down your list, Fring indicates whether they are are a Messenger or Skype contact, and you then connect to that contact via chat, VOIP or a normal mobile network call.  It also now supports an open developer API, and new app's for Fring include Facebook, Google Mail indicator and Olympic reports and news.  It's not quite as powerful as the individual applications...so for instance Win Live messenger has allot more features in it's original stand alone version (see below), but the beauty of Fring is that it brings everything into one place.  Very good handset support already, which is key and pretty challenging to get right.  Great branding too.  Not sure what their business model is..but one to watch

2. Google Maps for Mobile

Still the easiest and most impressive of the mapping services, particularly just for on foot city navigation...less good as an in car alternative.  Easy to use, intuitive search.  Perhaps it's best feature is that it does not need GPS, and can make a pretty good stab at your location by triangulating mobile phone mast locations - not as accurate as GPS, but surprisingly good, in Sydney at least. It's also fast,  it really bugs me when even the latest phone takes five minutes to get the necessary number of satellite links when I'm running late for a meeting.    When they incorporate Streetview (already enabled in the PC version for Sydney) this will take on a whole new way of navigating through cities.

3. Windows Live Messenger app

Easy to use and gives instant access to all of your Messenger contacts.   Most of the power of the PC version...see who is on-line update your profile and personal message just like the full PC version.  With a QWERTY keyboard phone it is superb.  Favourite feature - the ability to record your voice and send your buddy a voice file.

4. Gmail app for Mobile

Just streets ahead of Hotmail for mobile....man, why is Microsoft so slooooow at stuff.  This is POP 3 enabled, easy to use.  But best of all, it enables you to read html formatted emails, and as around half of mails are now in this format this is a pretty important feature.  Neither the Hotmail wap version, or trying to bring Hotmail into a native handset email reader, enables the user to read html mail, and just renders it in a meaningless techo babble.  Come on Microsoft, give us a decent version on Hotmail for mobile yer lazy geeks

5. Music Station from Omniphone

A simple, powerful premise....get unlimited music from a library of 1 million tracks, for a low weekly free.  Music station gives us a real alternative to iTunes, and it's custom designed to work on mobiles.  This means that it cleverly plays to the strengths/limitations of Mobile phones, and optimises play lists based on how much you play a particular song, and the extent of your phones memory, dropping out less played songs for more popular ones.  This is going to be an awesome way of getting music on your mobile.  The main barrier to mass take up?   Handset support

6. Zyb

Vodafone's recent acquisition, and big ambitions lie ahead for this Scandinavian company.  The premise for now is a simple one - store and back-up all of your phone contacts on-line, and never worry about losing them if your phone get's nicked or lost down the back of a cab.  I use it to manage and transfer contacts across multiple handsets.  In the future, Zyb will play an important part in bringing the contacts that are truly important to you, the people in your mobile phone, closer together through innovative sharing of music, location and a bunch of as yet un-imagined mobile based experiences

Google have switched on Streetview for Sydney in the last couple of weeks. As usual, it is a predictably brilliant execution, though not without controversy.  The street level photography  as well as filling Sydnersiders with wonder, as they take a virtual walk around their City, has already exposed several cheating spouses, and one bloke who had passed got drunk on the side of the road, caught on camera by the passing Google camera, and then spread across the Aussie press for everyone to have a good laugh at.

Anyway, here is my 'hood. Click on the link here, click on A, then click Streetview on the window, and then use the nav keys for a squiz around Kirribilli

I was lucky enough to go to the main winter music festival here - Splendour in the Grass - at the weekend, with some very friendly record label people.  Great weekend, smallish festival, about 30k people, up in beautiful Byron Bay.  The music scene here is un-expectantly brilliant...i say un-expectantly as about four years ago it was shite and seemed to be comprised of second rate guitar bands. Now it's electronic eighties influences a gogo, with Ladyhawke (brilliant tho strictly speaking Kiwis), the Presets, Cut Copy, Sam Sparro, most of which are good enough to be picking up plenty of air play back home.  We've got my other favourite electro band of the moment Ladytron visiting these shores next month.  Happy Days

I had an interesting night the other day, at a very enjoyable dinner organised by Random House.  Their MD was in town, and they got a bunch of Australia's Digital leaders to talk to them about where we think the digital content business is headed over the next few years across devices, mobile and the web. 

One of the interesting things about the book business is how resilient it has been in the age of digital delivery.  Book sales, especially fiction, have been pretty much stable over the last ten years, while broadcast tv viewing, and paper newspaper sales have been in a tailspin, ravaged by new digital distribution channels.  And they remain a refreshingly advertising free haven by and large. 

They're also portable, relatively cheap, and DRM free - by which I mean you can just quite happily pass it onto another interested reader without fear of being prosecuted by the publisher (unlike the record industry).

I think we all agreed that even in their current, environmentally unsound, dead tree format, they'll be round for quite alot longer, until roll out paper thin electronic displays become the norm (which is a way off, but not light years away).

For my business, i.e. distributing content over mobile, the audio book phenomena doesn't really work - they're way too long to download over a 3g connection.  apparently audio book sales through iTunes and other channels are a big growth area now

I refer not to the Pope, who also arrived in Sydney today, but to the new 3g version of the i Phone, or the Jesus phone, as it's become known, due to it's devout band of Apple disciples, who queued for much of the night last Thursday for the official launch.

Went sailing on Sunday.  22 degrees, sunshine and blue skies.  A pod of 15 Dolphins jumping in front of the boat. Pretty good.

Me and Australia's most famous home grown band The Living End, at a Universal Records shin dig last week. The Living End are the ones not smiling.  Pretty good live band, sort of like The Clash meets The Stray Cats.

Diving couple rescued - Brisbane Times

Apparently they were left in Bait Bay, which wouldn't have been be very reassuring...

Terrible news about Burma.  The Burmese are some of the greatest, friendliest and selfless people I've ever met.  Now they not only have to deal with living in an impoverished country under the greedy mismanagement of the Junta, they now have to deal with the widespread grief and loss caused by one of the worst SE Asia catastrophes of the last 100 years.

You can support Burma by making a donation here - Unicef

Specific site for Unicef Australia currency - Unicef Oz Donations

Google are doing a GREAT job in supporting this too (US dollar donations but requires Google account) - Google Burma Page

Thank gawd MS is walking away.  Be interesting to see what happens once the dust settles.  Y! shares will crash out once Wall St opens of course, and there should be a nice bounce in MS.  Reading the text it looks like Yang was threatening to do a deal with Google before MS could complete an acquisition.  They are mad if they do that.  Sure their business is fucked but partnering with their biggest threat (Google) is not going to save it in the long term.

ZD Net: Microsoft Walks

My tutor sent me through the article on his photography courses from Digital Photographer magazine this week.  It features yours truly as one of the featured students. Got four photographs published in the article which was pretty good. So far this year my photographs have scored one big pic in The times, 4 in Practical Photography Magazine and also a book cover to a new book on Stonehenge, to be published this coming June in the UK. 

Need to get out again and start taking some more...been neglecting my photography a bit recently, though I just joined the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, and plan to get in there and do some darkroom printing soon

Here is the book cover, with my photograph of the mighty 'Henge

A couple of news items emerged this week about Burma, a subject that is close to my heart.   The US have announced further sanctions, some of which are aimed at limiting the Junta's families from accessing their vast wealth.  To put the Junta's wealth in context, it recently emerged that General Shwe's (leader of the junta) daughter's wedding is purported to have cost three times the countries entire annual health budget!   Most of her countrymen exist on about $20 a month.

It is good that the US are still thinking of ways to exert pressure on the country's leaders.  But unfortunately laudable tho' some of these new sanctions are, it is going to have no effect whatsoever on their intended aim of forcing meaningful elections. 

For change to take place, the US and EU need to put harder pressure on China to limit trade and hit the generals flow of income, particularly from oil and gas.  Is this likely to happen?  Do Roman Catholics make good babysitters?  Er, no.  In fact thrice no.  For one the Chinese don't give a shit about human rights - look at their own shoddy record.  Two, the US and EU are dependent upon the Chinese market for future growth, especially now their domestic markets are facing a downturn.  And thirdly, the Chinese have just invested billions with Burma in developing a pipeline to pump gas from Burma's southern gas fields, to provide energy for China's almost insatiable need for energy, especially in it's South West region.  If you add to this the $2bill of Burmese energy sales with Thailand, then the Junta have little reason to do anything than maintain the status quo. 

Although the situation looks bleak for the Burmese, there are things the ordinary person can do, one of which is to boycott Total oil and it's subsidiaries, who have extensive exploration and refining businesses in the country.  In the UK there is a excellent and active movement encouraging just this - click here for details

One other thing I learnt this week from the BBC's From our Own Correspondent, is that the latest Rambo movie, has a plot line about the eponymous hero saving the Burmese from their evil oppressors.  Apparently the film is of course much sought after in Burma (even tho' the DVD counterfeiters face certain imprisonment for selling it).  Although it's tempting to say, haven't they suffered enough, the film's strapline "live for something, die for nothing" has been taken up as a rallying cry amongst some dissidents. 

I caught the latest, and probably the last, film about my favourite band tonight.  It affected me more than Control, and of course it's not the most up-lifting of tales in the first place. Oddly, it has much more of a sense of Ian being a real character than Control, but he retains a strong sense of being not entirely of this world and a channel for something extraordinary but deeply unsettling.  For die hard fans it is pretty much the definitive story, with a fair bit of unseen archive footage, all very well edited and put together.  All the usual characters are there - a jovial but gruff Hooky, Tony Wilson on his last legs sadly, Peter Saville cool as ever, a thoughtful Bernard and Stephen - even John Peel gets a look in.  One of the most illuminating participants, and central to the whole story is Anik, who comes over as a thoughtful and serene person, especially when she talks movingly about "Love Will Tear Us Apart" - you get a sense of why he fell for her, and the depth of feeling that she has for him even to this day, thirty years later. 

Not really a surprise, it's been rumoured for at least 18months, and as soon as Y! announced their disappointing results last week, with a dip in their share price, it looks like a bid could be coming.  Just wish I had followed my gut last week and had a punt on Y! shares.  

I can't see that this deal is ever going to be good value for MS shareholders though - Y! products are largely crap, their search is as poor as Microsoft's (at least in terms of share, if not relevancy), and their social networking site is shite.  I guess Flickr is good though I have never used it.  $46bil is a heck of alot of money to lay down, and it's hard to see how that is going to be re-couped just through lay off's in both businesses, economies of scale and product portfolio rationalisation.  Steve B was very late in making a decision in the on-line space.  Most of the assets Y! has (e.g. Flickr, Overture, Delicious)  could have been bought for a song if senior MS management had had more of a vision and strategy for this space 5 years ago.

As Anonymous on minimsft puts it "Two ugly parents getting together make ugly children. Two losers in search do not make a winner" .  The Microsoft/Live/MSN on-line offering is already very confusing - just look at the MSN UK homepage for evidence of that - and it's hard to see how this is going to help

Mini Microsoft blog

Had two good bits of feedback on my photography this week.  The Times on-line short listed one of my Burma photos in their current competition -

http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/travel_images/article3103829.ece (it's in the Week 4 shortlist, shot nine), and my photography tutor wants to reference my work in an interview with one of the UK photography magazines. 

It's my last day off before starting work on Monday.  I was hoping for another scorcher so I could laze on the beach or the Botanical Gardens (which on a sunny day really are stunning). But no, it's been raining again. There's only been one sunny day this week and it's supposed to be the height of Summer. It's more like bleedin' Manchester.  It's surprising how stormy Sydney is, seems to be a big thunder storm a couple of times a week