If you've used an Oystercard on the London tube, you've used what is called Near Field Communications (NFC). You get the card near the reader rather than having to make physical contact. Such contactless tickets or passes are common in Europe; key fobs, for example, open office doors across the UK. In Hong Kong you can use the same Octopus card to pay for bus, train and ferry journeys or to buy a cup of coffee or an ice cream when you get off the bus. And anything that's small enough to build into something the size of a credit card can be built into a device you already own, a device you already carry with you every day - your phone.

In some surveys people claim they'd be more worried about leaving their phone at home than leaving their wallet behind; with NFC, your phone can be your wallet. It can be your train ticket, your library card, your supermarket loyalty card, your gym membership, your cinema ticket, even your credit card. According to Nokia's Gerhard Romen, "touch becomes the new click".
And if you want to know why France will get it before we do, read my piece at TechWeb

Smartphones have plenty of tools and services, but if you don't fancy viewing them on a very small screen and using them with a couple of softkeys and a four-way controller, look at a PDA phone. You get the widest choice of applications and input, plus a bigger screen-and you don't have to sacrifice phone features either.

If you've used a PDA already, you'll find the familiar names and operating systems here like Palm and iPAQ, alongside Symbian devices from phone manufactures such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson. As with smartphones, many Windows Mobile devices are made by HTC and branded by the operators (the T-Mobile Dash, the O2 XDA range, the Orange SPV models and the Cingular and Verizon own-brand models), though HTC now uses its own brand as well as i-mate and Qtek and other Pocket PC manufacturers like Samsung and Mio have phone models now. Blackberry isn't just for business users and the Sidekick may not have as many applications as other devices but it's more like a PDA than a pager these days. Read the rest...

Social networking sites are so last year, events sites are very this year - and intown2 is trying to cover both bases. If you're in London, or Seattle, or San Francisco or wherever for a day or so, and a friend of yours happens to be there too, why not meet up? Well, usually because you don't know they're there at the time. Put your address book and your calendar into intown2 and as long as they do the same, you'll be able to catch up with people.

This has the same barriers to entry as any other social networking site: you have to put in all your friends (by hand or by importing a CSV file) and so do they, plus you have to enter your travels one at a time. Obviously there are privacy issues with importing your address book and calendar into a public site wholesale, but there has to be a better solution.
- Offer the service as an add-on for existing social networking sites like Linked In, where you can cross-check against your address book, you've already done most of the work and where there is a big enough pool of other people who have too.
- It would be a natural add-on for Plaxo, where you're already trusting them to keep addresses up to date.
- Offer to scrape your address book in the same polite way Linked In does rather than making you export a file by hand, and offer to scrape the calendar for multi-day events as a starting point (always with the option to leave an event out).
- Or go the distributed route like FOAF; when more people have calendar info published on line, a site could aggregate it and help you find passing friends that way.
It's quite late to start a social networking site from scratch, even with a clever idea like matching locations. If a lot of people have to do a lot of work for an non-deterministic reward (you might not find any travelling friends going your way), even a free site has a high cost.

And the free account only allows you to add 10 friends; I think I can keep in touch with that many people by email, actually. The public events categories are an odd mix of sport, theatre and gay pride marches. The site asks for the cities you visit most but doesn't offer those as quick options when you create a trip. There's no widget to put on your web site encouraging people to click through to intown2 to check if they're going your way. It's a nice idea, but there are a lot of rough edges.

PCMCIA and PC Card are showing their age; since WiFi started to come as standard I haven't used the PC Card socket for anything except a 3G data card and I can't wait for built-in data radios because the power management will be so much better. But if your new notebook has an Express Card slot instead, 3G, HSDPA, EVDO and other high speed data cards are starting to come through - or at least the radio modules that can be built-in or used as Express Cards are getting certified. Apple's a bit ahead of the curve on Express Card - as it was with USB and dropping the floppy - but it's at the inconvenient rather than impossible to live with stage. 

Too many solutions are half the answer and that can be worse than no answer at all, because you think you’ve solved your problem so you don’t do it properly.

I left my keys at home today. Two neighbours have keys; one of them was home but of course the keys he has are the old set that only let me into the hall and not the flat. The other neighbour has up-to-date keys but was out. Usually I'd just go to a coffee shop and work (I don't peg Starbucks as a globalising bad influence for having more branches in London than New York because 1. having Starbucks has improved the quality of coffee available generally and 2. they have sofas, WiFi and in some places desks with powerpoints - they're raising the bar on places to get something done when you're between places). This time I had to stay in for a courier, plus I wanted to use the WiFi to grab the files I'd usually have on my laptop or tablet, but this is my first day with a new ThinkPad. Great signal, but I couldn't get a network address; that’s the frustrating bit, along with the fact that the default setting on the ThinkPad is ‘optimise for performance’ not ‘optimise for battery life’ which I think is the wrong default on any portable, so by the time I started trying to connect I was down to 33% battery.

In other respects the ThinkPad seems to be a lovely notebook and a disappointing tablet, because no thought has gone into using it without the keyboard. For example: how do I turn the WiFi off? Software configuration, three levels down in a tab headed Device 3 (I missed the Beware of the Leopard signs). How do I turn screen brightness down? Flip the screen and use the keyboard function keys: pretty futile when I’m in a hurry because trying to quickly cut back on power consumption. Don’t expect me to have prepared everything in advance: give me the tools to work with keyboard or pen as I prefer.

I’m going to implement a half solution to the file problem; stick the basic files on a 1GB flash memory stick and try to remember to update them from time to time. It’s not the real synchronisation I want but it’s useful. To me the utility of a process or a device is not ‘what can it do?’ but ‘what will it let me do?’.  Take the £1.50 apple corer and slicer we bought at Ike yesterday. Usually I’d say it’s plastic tat that duplicates what I can do with a knife because what it does is core and slice an apple. But I saw elimloth’s wife Selene use one last year and I realised what it lets me do is grab an apple and have it sliced up - so I’ll actually eat it rather than leaving it in the fruit bowl - in about 5 seconds. And that means I’ll start eating apples regularly again for the first time since I was 13!

The BlackBerry receives and sends email (except on Oxford Street where I can’t get GPRS for love, money or cursing); what it lets me do is not care if I have an urgent email and a good reason to be out of the house at the same time. Configuring the right soft-key on my Windows Mobile smartphone gives me one key access to my task list; what it lets me do is think of things and write them down really quickly and have them show up in Outlook (this is only wonderfully useful in Outlook 12’s ToDo bar from which I now run my life although I'm looking at add-ons that may do the same thing). Sometimes being useful for one little thing is better than being halfway useful for a whole bunch of stuff.