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Mobilmag: Nokia Designs Intuitive Pen-based Nokia 6108 Optimised for Messaging The last couple of features on mobile phones (color, polyphonic sound?) seem driven to sell more products - not actually solve problems. That naturally leads to new features that do not actually sell a lot of units.

Problem: Text messaging in Chinese involves hundreds of characters. Think about how clunky predictive text is on a cell phone (called T9, where the phone tries to guess the word you are typing) when the possibility is not 25 letters but hundreds. Text messaging in Chinese on a tiny keypad is horrid. Solution? Okay, so click on the link about and experience that "doh why didn't someone do this before" of a really good idea.

Social Software Encodes Political Bargains Blogs and online communities encode some of the basics of social networking. From from being "lone wolfs" posting on the net, these communities develop tools and approaches to establish social norms, no matter how independent the subject matter is trying to be.

As always, Shirky provides a well thought out overview of the current age of social software. Also jump over to Don Park's interesting note on the dangers of these political bargains.

Bayesian Nets, Latent Semantics, Despamming and other speculations At Tom Oren's blog a post about spam filtering software leads to some nice explanations of the difference between Bayesian networks and Latent semantic analysis (aka indexing). While generally most have been lumping them in with Bayesian networks they are distinctly different, and worth understanding. He should know, as he did a good deal of reasearch on it when he was at Apple. Read it.

The NoCat Night LightAhh, the inginuity of coffee-shop hackers. Take one extra large coffee shop with no WiFi, and a couple of geeks looking for wireless internet. You need to place an access point in an location where it can reach the whole room, so closets and corners are out. And you can't string CAT5.

A solution is born.