So I’m moving my blogging efforts to http://agevik.se. Short and sweet! Lets hear that again to make sure you got that: http://agevik.se. While the new domain name is just as incomprehensible as the current one, it is by a stroke of luck my last name.

Rock on people!

ps. Sometime in the future I will start using Framtiden.nu for a completely different purpose, a small pet project of mine that I have been wanting to do since 2006. ds.

I had an epiphany: the less old code I touched, the better. It’s been such a long time since I worked with computer code that even when the code didn’t seem to make any sense any attempt at trying to re-write it better than before would invariably lead to disaster. Letting me near Visual Studio these days should be viewed by the UN as a crime against mankind.

Not surprisingly really, since the only thing I have programmed in the past five years that even resembles code is MySQL and PHP for Fabset.com. And before that, the only programming I did was university courses and hobby programming.

Do I regret not becoming a programmer? No! I would have sucked more than a new-born baby. But I have a huge amount of respect for all you professional coders out there and I do recommend anyone in the tech industry to learn the basics of computer code . Computer code is revolutionary at best and beautiful at worst!

This is a question to every single operator out there: Why do you make my life so difficult? I just want to spend money on your services.

I´m starting to believe operators don’t actually want my money.

Some pain points I have:

- Atrcious process to top up SIM-cards. SMS PIN-codes back and forth, passwords sent my snail mail, three day waiting to get access to my online account. Why can´t I just type in my phone number and my PayPal account and have a SIM-card topped up?

- Impossible to see my online purchase history. This one is even more crazy – the web interfaces the operators had back in 2005 were bad. The ones in 2011 does not seem to have improved, in fact they are worse! And typically they are buried somewhere deep down on operator web sites so that you can´t find them. Oh – and they keep switching the URL:s around so that you can´t bookmark it.

- Data roaming for prepaid is still spotty. I just can´t wrap my head around why it is so difficult to solve. Or the fact is – it is a solved problem, it´s just that the solutions are buggy and work 50% of the time. (And don´t get me started on the cost of data roaming that makes it an unusable service for any  normal prepaid customer)

- Money magically disappearing from SIM-cards. It seems to be a well established truth that on prepaid cards you have to live with money sometimes disappearing without any explanation. I´m sure there is an explanation for it, it´s just that the operator don´t care about explaining it to their customers.  E.g. someone calling the voicemail service and me being forced to pay the roaming-tax for travelling with my phone. Imagine if money just started disappearing from my PayPal account without explanation!

I was on the phone with Vodafone Germany who refused to explain why money was missing from my card. The only thing they could say was that I was probably subscribed to some Premium SMS service. How´s that for an explanation?

- Impossible to find the price of a service. Here´s what I want: an online tool where I can check what it will cost to use a SIM-card aborad. For example – lets say I have a prepaid card with operator A and is travelling abroad and roaming with operator B, how much will my I pay for an SMS, MMS and data? Getting this questions answered seems more difficult than solving who murdered JFK.

And don´t get me started on customer support reps that can´t actually solve any issues.

Whew..glad to get that of my chest. I feel so much better now. I love you all!

What Google should have announced to make things exciting:
- That they are launching their own mobile operator. All android devices with their SIM gets unlimited data at a low cost.

- Google Search adds semantic analysis. When I search for Abba it should ask me if Im looking for the music group or the Swedish brand of tuna fish sold at IKEA.

- Their self-driving cars have been proven to cause *less* accidents than cars driven by humans and will start being sold to consumers in a cooperation with Toyota in 2012. nuff said!

Playing the prediction game is fun, but impossible. One of my core beliefs is that the future is inherintely unpredictable. The best way to predict the future is always to guess that things will be the same as the last year. So lets try that:

Apple will launch a new version of the iPad and a new version of the iPhone. They will both be huge succeses and outsell any other single smartphone or tablet. Nokia will remain the market leader in terms of market share. Analysts will debate if market share is a valid measure of Nokia’s and Apple’s success.

Google will continue to be the #1 search engine. They will take a stab at launching a new social product to replace Google Buzz. It will be mildly successful.

Mobile operators will continue to debate if they should become smart bit-pipes or if they should launch their own app stores and API offerings. The only ones who will be profitable in this space will be WAC (who charges huge membership fees) and STL Partners (who runs the Telco 2.0 conferences).

My conclusion: the iPad is 70% there.

Now admittedly my work on the road is basically mail and PowerPoint. Obviously, if you have applications on OS X not available on the iPad this is not going to work for you.

Overall, I was satisfied with the experiment. The extreme light weight and excellent battery time is something you appreciate quickly. Not only can I leave my computer at home – I also can leave the charger!

There were four things that bothered me though:
1) Inadequate coy and paste. The copy paste does not work in all apps and especially not on all websites. For some reason I was unable to select text in the Gmail iPad optimized interface and in one internal web application we use.

2) Dropbox is a must to access files. But the iOS app does unfortunately not auto-sync all files like it does on the Mac. Instead, only starred files and recently viewed files are available. Dropbox needs a Sync all button that I can use when I am home on my Wi-Fi to be useful to me on the road.

3) No ability go edit PowerPoint files. Admittedly, Keynote for iOS might do what I need. But from what Ive seen on YouTube it only seems to support light editing. This is my biggest problem as it is scary not to be able to make last minute changes in a presentation before a meeting. Any PPT editor also needs DropBox integration.

4) Not possible to mail files from DropBox or import files from mail to DropBox. Dropbox needs a Send as attachment feature and the Mail app needs to be able to save files into DropBox.

Yesterday was one of the most exciting days in the office in a long while.

A colleague, lets call her M, came back after lunch and discovered that her iPhone4 had been pickpocketed. I tried calling it and to my surprise it seemed to be on. I asked her if she had installed MobileMe and the “Find my iPhone” feature. To my big joy and surprise she had!

We logged on to MobileMe. Since it was still turned on I was expecting that she had just dropped it at the restaurant. I assumed that if it had been stolen the thief would have turned it off. The seconds slowly ticked by as MobileMe was trying to track the phone. A few seconds later it got a fix. Lo and behold – the phone was not in the café! It was in another part of town. The accuracy was roughly the size of a city block. Another colleague recognized the spot as being the home of Stockholm’s largest internet/gaming café (according to their website Europe’s largest gaming café!). The hunt was on.

It was the middle of the day so the quickest way to get through traffic was to get on the subway. It took us roughly fifteen minutes to get to the café. By now, the phone had been missing for roughly 30 minutes. I spent several nights at the café (years ago) so I know exactly what it looked like.

Courtesy Google Street View

On the way there, M asked me what we should do if we found him. I had not thought about that, but assumed we would figure something out once we got there. Even though it was in the middle of the day the café was almost full of school kids playing World of Warcraft and there were plenty of dark corners where someone could sit unnoticed. We rushed through the café and a colleague back at the office kept track on the map of MobileMe where the thief was. High on an adrenaline rush I ran through the dark rows of WoW-players, trying to see an iPhone4. Just as I was going to tell the manager to lock the front door the iPhone had left the internet café and headed north. Since there is a slight delay in the map updates from MobileMe this means we probably met the thief as we entered the café.

We rushed on and a few minutes later the phone disappeared down into the subway. By now I was ready to give up the search since I figured it would be impossible for MobileMe to track the phone in the subway. But amazingly it kept updating the position and I got on the subway too. Just two stops later the thief got off and so did I.

By now my collegaue back in the office could see that I was close to the thief. MobileMe has a feature that allows you to remotely make the phone start playing a sound. He did but unfortunately I could not hear anything. When we tried the remote sound feature later back in the office we found out that the sound it produces is very low and if someone have the phone in a pocket it is almost impossible to hear. A few seconds later the phone was turned off and the hunt was off. So a sad ending to an exciting story. But it sure was fun while it lasted

To be honest, the app is pretty much worthless. Using Google Translate is free and more accurate. Half of the time the app won’t recognize text and unless you hold the phone completely still it doesn´t work. It´s still impressive though and will probably get better over time. I wonder if it was even possible to do this on a desktop computer with a webcam ten years ago? Someone needs to compare the iPhone specs with a $599 desktop from 2001 and also factor in that we have much better algorithms for image processing now than back in 2001.

WordLens is the first app that earns the name “augmented reality app”. Why? Because it actually uses the camera for it´s data input instead of displaying it as a background. Layar and similar apps are just a fancy way of displaying map data on top of a background composed of the input from the phone´s camera.

If I´m gonna make one prediction for 2011 then I would predict that we will see more apps like WordLens that are true augmented reality apps. For the first time we have image processing algorithms and mobile processors that are powerful enough to do realtime  processing of the camera input and recognize salient features in it. The app stores of the world are just waiting for developers to take advantage of that!

February-March
Lets skip the dark Swedish winter months, shall we?

April
Me and Stefan launched whentotweet.com. A very succesful launch, lots of press!
Got my iPhone 3GS pickpocketed right in the middle of Stockholm of all places.

May
Bought a new car, a Volvo V50 of course (what can I say – I´m Swedish).
Got married! I never wanted a big wedding but I´m happy Sophie convinced me otherwise.
Note to self: Don´t get married, buy a car and take a honeymoon trip during the same month. It can put a strain on your bank account.

June-August
Family issues during the summer that I won´t go into detail here. Thanks to all who supported me.

September
Resigned from Ericsson.
Decided to get UL flight certificate. Didn´t realize that it would consume all of my spare time during the rest of the year.
Got my iPhone4, an amazing device.

October
Lots of flying lessons as I was waiting to leave Ericsson…

November
…to join Payfone as Director Solutions and Technology EMEA. Can´t wait for next year and all the stuff that we will be rolling out.

December
Lots of hard work in preparation for next year. Here´s hoping I can blog about the stuff I´m working on at Payfone during next year.

Artists illustration of an iPhone without mobile data. Source: Gizmodo

Both the iPhone and Android phones are noisy, data-wise. Even if you don’t actively use mobile data, things like push notifications and playing games with game center consumes data.

But I’ve noticed that there are only two mobile data services I *really* need while travelling:
1) Google Maps
2) E-mail

So here’s what I want: a VPN solution that does the following:
1) Only allows IMAP data to/from Gmail
2) Blocks the download of any Gmail attachments
3) Compresses Google maps so that the tiles are just barely readable.

Sounds like a great idea for a Y Combibator startup, no?