The average iPhone owner for example, spends £80 in Apple’s App Store. When I recently switched to a Google Nexus One, I lost use of all £80 worth of my apps. That money is now wasted, those apps have absolutley no use to me anymore, because I cannot install them on my new phone.

Online stores are become more and more popular with handheld devices. I’m not talking about your ebuyer or bestbuy, I’m talking about your App Store or Market Place. The problem is, they’re all locked-down to some extent.

Fair enough, if I buy another android phone I can install all the apps I’ve bought on my Google Nexus One, as I did when I moved from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS. The same is probably true for Kindle to Kindle 2.

But what happens when Apple stop selling the iPhone, or someone releases a better eBook reader than the Kindle, or if Google end the Android project? All of your purchased applications, books, mp3s become useless.

We need to make things transferable!

This is the exact reason I used to rip my mp3s (before the magnificence that is Spotify), instead of paying for a service like Napster or Yahoo Music. Most of those services were DRM based. There were just too many restrictions on what you can or cannot do with the music you purchase.

So before you splash out on the iPad, Kindle or any other eBook reader – and before you upgrade to an iPhone, Nexus One or other smartphone – remember, the money you spend on books/apps/music for that device, may well be thrown away with the device.

Why should you have to hack your Kindle in order to read eBooks you obtained from somewhere other than Amazon (see: over-priced)? Why should you have to jailbreak your iPhone to use apps that Apple doesn’t want to ‘approve’? If you ask me, you shouldn’t,

Think about it, when you buy a new mobile phone, you’re usually focusing on the hardware – you find something you really like, then you have to battle with yourself and the providers, to try and find a tarrif that fits you. For the most part they’re overly expensive. If there’s ever a reason you don’t buy a new phone, it’s usually because of the contract surrounding it. Wether that be having to move network, or getting locked into another x month term, it’s never pleasant.

Google are big enough to bring VoIP into the mainstream. I know, I know, Skype have been trying to do this to, and I give them props. But they just don’t have the mainstream clout that Google have. I think betweeen the two companies we’re seeing some amazing changes in the mobile space.

Imagine purchasing a handset, simply because you like it. At a reasonable price. Now imagine not having to shift providers, or sign up to 12/18/24 month contacts. You simply login to your Skype or Google account and you’re away. All your contacts, voicemails, text messages in tact. People can even borrow your phone, and use their own accounts!

VoIP is cheap as chips, you could quite easily cut your current mobile phone expenses in half (or more) by switching to VoIP. But what’s holding it back? … mobile network providers.

At the moment, there are too many rules about what kind of applications can and cannot by used over 3G. While there area a minority of networks that allow users to run VoIP software of a 3G connection, the majority are scared shitless. So they should be.

As I can see it, there are two ways for Google to take over the world mobile market. If Google get hold of some mobile spectrum, forming their own network, or if they provide blanket wifi access. Both of which are not new ideas. Google are already thinking about acquiring wireless spectrum, and they’re already providing blanket wireless internet in some places. But neither of which are on a large scale. At least not anywhere near enough to threaten the current mobile network providers at current.

VoIP still has a long way to go in the commercial market, people still pay silly “line rental” (mostly because a PSTN line is required for most broadband connections) when they could be plugging their phone into a router. Most companies use some form of VoIP, because they understand the cost savings – especially with multiple handsets, and/or international calls. I just can’t wait for the day that VoIP rules the commercial sector (especially mobile handsets) as it currently does the business sector.

One thing that’s really bothered me about Skype is the lack of SIP compatibilty. Skype has always been very proprietary and closed-off. For example, with any other SIP provider you can call cross-network for free, as well as the obvious internal SIP-to-SIP calls being free. Skype has always offered free Skype-to-Skype calls, but that’s as far as they went. The other, arguably more important aspect of supporting the SIP protocol is the option of using SIP hardware. I mentioned before, most businesses use VoIP telephones these days, most of which are SIP compatible. If Skype wanted to reach a broader audience they only have to allow regular SIP phones to connect to the Skype service. This is what they’re testing at the moment.

With Skype-to-SIP you can use a regular SIP phone to connect to the Skype network, which not only allows you to use your Skype credit for outgoing calls and keep your Skype number for incoming calls, but also allows you to call Skype users for free. This is fantastic, a good move from Skype. Now the sexy Cisco 7960 sitting on my desk can be used to make calls to my Skype friends for free.

I’m so excited about Google Voice on the mobile, and Skype over SIP. These technologies are really shaping the future of telephone communications. Let’s face it, nobody likes wearing a headset plugged into a computer to make phone calls.

So last night was The Europas – an award ceremony for Europe’s finest Internet Start-ups, hosted by TechCrunch UK. I have to say this was easily the best Tech-scene event I’ve been to. There were so many interesting people to talk to, the awards were greats, and of course the sponsored bar was better than a kick in the teeth!

I’m still quite hungover actually, so I’ll write up a more in depth review of the actual event on Sporkings.com over the weekend. But for now here’s my experience; What a night! I spoke to so many people, about so many cool projects, namely;

The nice guys (and girls) from MindCandy.com,
Paul Walsh, the Irish opportunist himself.
It was great to see Nikhil Shah again, he’s doing big things with new startup mixcould.
Nick Ferris Photography (your site is down! where can I see all those photos?)
Miranda, Jon, Tash and Sandy from the soon to be launched odbody.com, Huddle, Clio Collins, Said, Amazee, comufy, Morgan Stanley, ViCommerce (Gemany), econsultancy.com, Google, Spotify, Seraphim, hub.india, Infocomm, and of course Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica – I bumped into these guys on Monday, just outside our office. Farringdon’s a small place.

There were so many other internet peoples I can’t possible list everyone. Plus alcohol seems to affect the memory – who knew!

Speaking of bad memory, I cannot recall what time the actual event itself ended, but there was a very packed after-party across the road at ‘The Hide’. I remember backing up Jasper from oneDrum when some drunken guy was wanting to pick a fight lol. Something to do with Jasper greeting the drunken guy as ‘baldy’. Then once the after-party dispearsed, Ruk and I ended up at the odbody.com appartment, where we ate cheese on crumpets (yes, we’re British!) from a roof-top apartment with views of the London Eye – dangerously high after that many units.

I also remember getting a decent discount on cab ride to Oxford St due to being able to have a Germany conversation with the taxi driver. That’s entrepreneurship right there, lol.

The beautiful @rassami has setup a new venture off the back on The Europas, with co-organiser @petrajohansson . So watch this space for more interesting events in the London Tech-scene, hopefully in the not-too distant future. More start-ups launching off the back of start-up events, got to love it.

For everyone I met last night, it was really good to meet you. Even @yiannopoulos, but I’ll so no more on that one

SQL

I don’t really need to discuss this, I mean who uses MS SQL?

Azure

I can see where/when Azure would be useful, but again, just go Open Source for more control and more options.

Silverlight

Silverlight 3 is actually looking quite cool and is set to release by the end of July (shh ). Silverlight currently works on Windows Mobile, when they’ve tested it – but it just hasn’t been implemented yet. Expect to see this in Windows Mobile 7.
MS brag about the cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility of Silverlight, but at the same time they offer no support to Novell with the Moonlight project (to get Silverlight compatibility in Linux).

IE8

There were few IE6 jokes of course, but that’s to be expected. At least MS can laugh at themselves – because the rest of us already are – IE8 offers some interesting features, I just don’t know how useful they are;

Slices allow the user to save a section of the site, like a bookmark but not-quite. It’s almost RSS replacement, but it’s something that I can’t really see taking off on a large-scale. The biggest down-fall of this feature is that it needs hard-coding in the HTML to be able to work, so a user can’t ‘Slice’ any content, only content that has been tagged in the source code.

Accelerators are more interesting, this is the tool that cuts down Copy&Paste steps in the browser. Simply right-click on selected text and you have the option to search that text in Google, Bing *groan* (yes it’s good, but I don’t have to keep admitting it!), Amazon and all other site that you’d expect with this feature. You can also e-mail the text, useful stuff like that. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Firefox already provides a much better plugin (more feature complete. Accelerators doesn’t even have an eBay search).

Deep Zoom

Apart from the goofy name, this software was actually pretty cool. Huge image rendering through Silverlight. Visit the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia page and hit the magic ‘v’ button, then just keep zooming out – you’ll see a nice demonstration.

ASP.NET

People still use ASP? All jokes aside, .NET is a good idea. One development environment for all your applications, whether they are web or desktop. With Mono, it’s almost Open Source friendly too. But ASP? Really? … Just go Java.

–

So I went into this meeting thinking ‘Apache + Java > IIS + .NET’, and I came out with ‘FF > IE8′. The Microsoft guys were really friendly, we had a good chat. I didn’t rebel too much, although I was the only one in the room with a MacBook Pro and iPhone, and I may have been the only one asking Open Source questions – but that’s not rebellious, that’s just tech-savvy. MS offer no innovation, they are a bore to the market. People moan that Apple provided no Copy&Paste, it could be said that Microsoft give us too much Copy&Paste.

Quote of the Day: “We’d never try to make our tools the only tools you could use”

Any web developer will tell you what a pain in the backside this process is. First you design your site, which will tend to work in Firefox, IE7 and Chrome, with maybe a few tweeks. Then you have to re-design a whole bulk of the site again, in order for it to work in IE6. It’s a real joke.

Google really stood up for the team recently, when they started urging Gmail users to ditch IE6, and replace it with Firefox or Chrome (they’re keeping open minded, proving it’s not a bias thing, they’re doing this purely for technical reasons). Personally I think this is great news. Google is one of the few big voices that the masses of web users may actually listen to, especially small business, who I assume are the majority of people still hanging on to IE6 – but also the home users who are just totally unaware that there are better browsers out there.

Good one Google. Glad to see you have our back.