Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Aardvark

My Neighbor is a civil servant in his working hours and an artist in the rest.

He's got an eminent good taste:
he has a beautiful car, a beautiful gate, a beautiful dog, a beautiful garden, a beautiful house. In his living room there is a beautiful drawing he made 20 years ago when he prepared himself to be an artist. I asked him to comment on Zohar Stolars' suggestion for a new QTSaver home page and here are his fantastic comments:

QTSaver is an excellent name but the design of the word QTSaver does not match the standard of its meaning- the QT doesn't look cute.
The Q looks too complicated and the T is ending with a slope that is to contrastive. the Q doesn't "speak" with the T, their relationships are not close enough - they have to emerge one from the other, maybe you have to make the Q in a white empty contour while the T will be full and red.

the search button is two dimensional and it doesn't look like a button.


the White background conveys an impression of a newspaper and an ambiance of a matter of fact . You'd better put here some pastel mustard or Azure colors and the background of the logo has to be different from the background of the rest. The logo is an independent entity.

The logo is too big and it has to move a little bit to the left. The words "Micro Content Engine" are too thin and their length does not match the length of the word QTSaver above them.
the word "saver" in the logo is designed very nicely and the design of the letter E is just bright.

You have to find an animal which will convey the idea of finding a needle in a haystack. I suggest you put a little aardvar on the left hand of the logo.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Table of Contents

Foreword (My profile)
Preface (notation at the head of the page)
About Me

Chapter 1: EXPLENATIONS

My hall of frustration
Questions I frequently ask myself
Reducing illiteracy
Oni's vision - Education for All
Education for all part 1
Education for All background
Education for all part 2
Education for All is looking for a new name
Plan to use SkyPe for instruction
Eucalyptus
Free Web School
Let Me Go
Suite101 Free University
Free-Web-School Blink List
The Future of the Search Engine
Datablogging
Group Browsing
How to Save the World
One Right Result
Macro Content Relevance
Monkey in the Zoo
Monkey in the Zoo /3
Understanding Web 2.0
Is QTSaver Web 2.0?
Webish
The $100 laptop
Right but Not Relevant
Homonyms synonyms unique words and relevance
Surfing the Web without a Computer
Help Me Think
Help Thinking
Help Thinking 1
Microcontent Manipulation
Micro Content Revolution
The State of the Mobile Web

Chapter 2: DEMONSTRATIONS

How to Write Your Article in an Hour
How to Write Your Research in a Few Hours?
Air pollution in the Haifa bay area in Israel
banana that has an apple flavor
Indirect hit
Wondir
Finding a needle in a haystack
using book contents to learn
cabalist woman
The dominance of English on the internet
About translating a verse from the bible
A challenge- finding info about senior citizens getting too many results on the web
Web surfing as a listening activity
Web Searching Tips
The weather in Los Angeles
Import your Blog into a database
Skate sneakers
Web Search Logic
Looking for Definitions
Laurel Leaves
Picasa
Tennis shoes
JAWS

Chapter 3 - RESEARCH

Black Jack Research
Poker Research
Roulette Research
Mobile Gambling
Google Base
Pileup Query
WinDOTS
Virgo Screen Reader
Hal Screen Reader http
WinVision
Window Bridge Screen Reader
GALILEO Screen magnification
Interferential Therapy outSPOKEN Screen Reader
Asaw Screen Reader
LookOUT screen reader
Simply Talker Screen Reader
Window-Eyes Screen Reader
Winkline Screen Reader
QTpedia
Bukowski
ZoomText
Gnopernicus
Sensus Internet Browser
theConcept
Orion Ori Allon
Dyslexia
Dyslectic Screen Reader
Bar Mitzvah in Jerusalem
Neot Semadar
Magen David
Research- 777mobile
Mobile Betting
M-gambling
SurfWax on Mobile Gambling
Mobile gambling possibilities
I- Mode
Mobile Horoscope

Chapter 4: EVENTS

My old Blog was stolen
a short method to extract bibliography
Falling in love with a whore
Schemes, Scams, Frauds
P U B L I C I T Y
Plagiarism
Brand New Blog
Welcome On board, Eddie!
QTSaver speaks Hebrew
To Change the World
Furl it
Qtsaver alert
Microcontent Engine
Great Supporter
Orion
The More the Merrier
QTsaver - how did I miss it
Big Day
Getting Better All the Time
Beta http
Why There Are No Blind People on the Internet (Gidi Ahron ovich)
NewsForge
Yahoo My Web Beta
DIGG
A letter to the European Blind Union
Herald to the visually impaired population
First Bug
Importance and Anonymity (American Foundation for the Blind)
Categorize Postings
Meta Micro Content Engine
QTSaver Meta Search Research
A Close Look at What I Did in this Blog
Blog Directories
Blogtopsites
Free URL Submitter
Google’s Microcontent Engine
Fair Use
First Commercial Client

Chapter 5: INTERFACE DESIGN

welcome design
Qtsaver on the operating table
Who needs HELP files?
Designing our home page - the new look
Mandalaz
Blogo
Interface
Keep It Simple
Microcontent engine
New Homepage http
Zohar Stolar

Chapter 5 - Illustrations

Zeevveez portrait (by Dvorit Ben Shaul)
banana that has an apple flavor
reducing illiteracy
Eucalyptus (by Dvorit Ben Shaul)
Skate sneakers
Web Search Logic
Logo1 - Who needs HELP files?
Mandalaz
To Change the World
Honor Thy Supporters
About the site
Keep It Simple
Analyzing My Visitor Counter
Qtsaver New Microcontent Meta Search Results Page
Recent visitors
Folding Paper 3D Silver Magen David

Chapter 6 - Feedback
It takes a whole global village to raise good software
Who needs term papers?
Copyright information
Interim Summing Up
Honor Thy Supporters
Duplicates on the Web
Collector of Visions
Analyzing My Visitor Counter
Interesting Piece of Reading
Having a Dialog with the World
Transparence
Mysterious visitor
Stumble Upon
Originality
What People Say about QTSaver
Great Readers
Where Are My Postings?
Recent visitors
Traffic Summary

Monday, November 28, 2005

Blogs and Tables of Contents

Blogs are unfriendly to their visitors – they don't have a table of contents. They are arranged by dates and it doesn't help the curious visitor to understand what are the issues the Blog deals with.

To make a table of contents you only have to decide the names of your chapters and then drag each heading to the right chapter.

I think this can be achieved quite easily by adding a tag window next to the heading field of each posting and by allowing filtering and sorting of these tags separately from the body of the posting.

I'm going to publish a table of the contents and put a link to it on the beginning of the links list of my Blog. This way my curious visitor will have a new option to chose the contents he's interested in…

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Mobile Horoscope

Trying to research the Mobile Horoscope phenomena on Google I got 2,080,000 results for the words Mobile Horoscope. No sane researcher will read them all. So how should one collect the data he needs for his research if nobody wrote an extensive Wikipedia article about his subject?

First I phrased my research questions:
What is Mobile Horoscope?
How does Mobile Horoscope work?
Who are the main Mobile Horoscope suppliers?
Who started Mobile Horoscope?
What's the value of the Mobile Horoscope market?
What are the trends of the Mobile Horoscope market?


This research mission seems to be hard since most of the links on the first Google results pages are in fact ads that try to sell you a service and not to describe it.
Then there is the problem of synonyms:
Mobile, cellphone, cell phone, Mobile Web, Wireless, handheld Mobile, mobile Internet, Horoscope, Horoscopes.


Synonyms are fine candidates for pileup queries. I took the original search terms "Mobile Horoscope" and added to them each query another synonym and here's what I got:

http://www.mymbn.com/mbnhoroscopes.jsp
Access "Web Sites" from the cellphone deck Choose "Entertainment" from the list Select "MBN Horoscopes" Choose your Sign Follow subscription instructions using your Nextel Wallet
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/classifieds/Content?oid=oid:58076
Your Future Is in your hands! Have your horoscope sent direct to your cell phone - every day! To subscribe send text message with the word HOROSCOPE and your astrological sign (example: HOROSCOPE GEMINI) from your cell to the five digit number 25378.
You will be charged 50 cents for each horoscope message.

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/Mar/1124895.htm
Makes Horoscopes Mobile VIENNA, Va., March 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The Mobile Media Company (http://www.mobilemedia.com/), a leading provider of global wireless games, interactive entertainment services, and marketing applications, today announced an agreement with CosmoGIRL! publisher Hearst Magazines, to launch the CosmoGIRL! TXT Horoscope Service, a cross-carrier, daily mobile horoscope service with CosmoGIRL! magazine.
Mobile Media will work with Hearst's Brand Development Group to bring the TXT Horoscope Service to millions of CosmoGIRL! readers. Subscribers of the service will receive one alert per day via text message at a cost of $1.99 per month.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/mobilewebf/faq_msn/faq.html
What kind of Alerts can I receive from Mobile Web? MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Calendar, Money, News/Headlines, Lottery, Sports, Weather, Horoscope, Music and Carpoint Traffic.
http://help.yahoo.com/help/uk/mobile/mobile-68.html
Mobile Horoscopes provided by Zed works as a subscription service that sends you your horoscope daily. Each morning you will receive a text message of your horoscope for that day.
http://www.katazo.com/
Get a Free Ringtone, Poly Ringtones, Mono Ringtones, Backgrounds, Games, Horoscopes, Jokes and more for your mobile cell phone! We support LG, Motorola, Sanyo, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NEC, Samsung, Siemens, Sharp and Ericsson cell phones on AT&T, Cingular, Verizon and Sprint.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/print.php/719431
In its latest push to drive wireless platforms beyond horoscopes and news, Ericsson has launched a Mobile Commerce Platform to provide a secure solution for operators to deliver their own m-commerce services.
http://fury.com/article/911.php
Undoubtedly the worst part is the horoscopes. Call me spoiled from having read some truly great astrologers, but Cingular's daily cellphone horoscopes plainly suck.
Heck, that's what computers are for! So, to share my wry amusement with these horoscopes, I've taken several dozen of these cellphone horoscopes and broken them apart and last week on the train (where, incidentally, I'm writing this post, while slogging through the south bay salt beds (yeah, really funky timeshifting in the editing process here... Deal with it. :-) ) ) I wrote the Cellphone Horoscope Generator.
If you haven't noticed it yet, it's be there in the navbar on the left, under 'Cell-o-scope.' Every reload will give you a new cellphone horoscope!
http://www.t-mobile.com/services/tzones/overview.asp?nav=hm
Get unlimited access to the mobile Web for one low monthly fee. t-zones turns your phone into a mobile entertainment and information source. Customize the information you receive--get news, weather, sports, your horoscope, whatever you want.
http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc0.asp?DOCID=1G1:132316086&refid=ip_encyclopedia_hf
PR Newswire: Summus Chooses Astrology.com for Wireless Horoscope Content.@ HighBeam Research --
Help us improve HighBeam Research. Click here to take a survey. -- Advanced Search ALL NEW!-- Summus Chooses Astrology.com for Wireless Horoscope Content.
(USA) (BULLETIN BOARD: SUMU) , a leading provider of solutions that change the way information is communicated and processed through mobile devices and networks, today announced it has signed a licensing agreement with Astrology.com, the world's largest syndicator of astrology content and services, to provide daily horoscope content to wireless consumers. The daily horoscope content includes 19 types of horoscopes based on consumer interests such
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/superpat/Weblog/is_liberty_panoptical?catname=
As an aside, one interesting feature of Liberty and similar protocols that we are starting to see in the real-world is that users can access services at SPs without actually identifying themselves to the SP. For example, I could access a wireless horoscope service. The horoscope provider doesn't care who I am, just that I am a paying subscriber of my wireless operator (the IdP) and my birthday is July 7th, which information I have explicitly directed the IdP to share with the SP.
Is my privacy enhanced or reduced here? Sure, the wireless operator knows that I visit the horoscope service every day, but it knows that anyway, since it is in a position to monitor all my wireless internet traffic. But in this instance, the horoscope provider has no idea who I am.
http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2004_03_02.shtml
Wireless Horoscopes Provider's IPO Debuts Wednesday [by rafat] : Repeat this after me: a wireless horoscopes provider is doing an IPO now...yes, and this is 2004. Shanghai-based Linktone, a Chinese provider of horoscopes on cellular phones, expects to price an IPO in New York on Wednesday, with its stock debuting on Nasdaq the next day under the symbol "LTON".
http://rdrw1.yahoo.com/click?u=http://goliath.ecnext.com/comsite5/bin/pdinventory.pl%3Fpdlanding%3D1%26referid%3D2750%26item_id%3D0199-2050039%26words%3DEyematic_Launches_Mygenie&y=02D6428FECC23B1F&i=482&c=24388&q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7hvmzszll%3Fwpmpl%7Cpozl%3F6&e=utf-8&r=5&d=wow~YHOO-en-us&n=D5L45H3HU6447P66&s=10&t=&m=43893B1E&x=014958C9D956B5CE
Eyematic Launches ``MyGenie'''' Animated Horoscopes for Verizon Wireless'' Get It Now; New Graphical Mobile Application Built on Eyematic Multimedia Software. from Goliath Industry and Business News
http://www.cincinnatibell.com/residential/wireless?id=infoondemand&t=6
Cincinnati Bell - Wireless - Info on Demand Horoscopes
http://www.freebeeps.com/News_Pages/MSNMobile/article.htm
MSN was the first of the major Internet portal sites to provide wireless information services, starting in June 1999, and continues to show leadership with further advances. MSN Mobile one-way notifications provide news, sports, weather, stock quotes, horoscopes, personal alerts and lottery information as selected by the user. MSN Mobile 2.0, scheduled to be available on devices in April, will provide not only notifications but also interactive access to MSN services, such as the Hotmail® Web-based e-mail service and the MoneyCentral™ online personal finance service, for Web-enabled mobile phones and handheld devices.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

I-Mode

Here's a demonstration of another kind of pileup queries which can be executed without "Leads" ("suggestion to refine your query") – just by free thought associations.

I started by entering the keyword "I-Mode", then I piled up a few "Leads", and eventually I piled up a few "free thought associations". Here's what I got in the first phase:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode is a wireless Internet service popular in Japan and increasingly elsewhere. It was inspired by WAP developed in the United States and was introduced to DoCoMo by McKinsey in 1997.
After a two year development, i-mode was launched in Japan on 22 February 1999. The content planning and service design team was led by Mari Matsunaga, while Takeshi Natsuno was responsible for the business development.
As of June 2005, i-mode has 45 million customers in Japan and over 5 million in the rest of the world. i-mode is being provided world-wide [1] through DoCoMo's partners through a licensing scheme involving mobile operators in the following countries: Germany, the Netherlands (KPN[2]), Belgium (Base), France (Bouygues Telecom), Spain (Telefonica Moviles), Italy (Wind), Greece (Cosmote), Australia (Telstra) and Taiwan (Far East Tone). United Kingdom (O2), Singapore (StarHub), Israel (Cellcom), Ireland (O2) and Russia (MTS) have launched i-mode services on October 2005. The worldwide partnership is called the i-mode Alliance.
HTML is used for producing content, the i-mode mail is interoperable with e-mail, images and sound formats are the ones used on the Web. i-mode users have access to various services such as e-mail, sports results, weather forecast, games, financial services and ticket booking.
The current i-mode center is called CiRCUS, which consists of 400 NEC NX7000 HP-UX servers and occupies 4600 m² floor space in DoCoMo's Kawasaki office. The operation support system is called CARNiVAL, which is hosted in the Toranomon JT Building.

http://www.nttdocomo.com/corebiz/services/imode
With i-mode, mobile phone users get easy access to more than 94,000 Internet sites, as well as specialized services such as e-mail, online shopping and banking, ticket reservations, and restaurant advice. Users can access sites from anywhere in Japan, and at unusually low rates, because their charges are based on the volume of data transmitted, not the amount of time spent connected.
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode network structure not only provides access to i-mode and i-mode-compatible content through the Internet, but also provides access through a dedicated leased-line circuit for added security.

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/devices/i-mode.html
Macromedia Flash Lite: Beginning with the 505i series mobile phones, every i-mode handset has included this Macromedia Flash profile. Designed specifically for use in mobile phones, Flash Lite uses Flash 5 objects and Flash 4 Actionscript.
Future i-mode phones will have Macromedia Flash Lite embedded within the browser

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=23748&seqNum=4
Paul Wallace provides an overview of considerations for developing i-mode content. These considerations include hardware and memory, screen size and color depth, as well as browser differences.

http://www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq-gen.htmlNTT DoCoMo's mobile internet access system. "imode" is also a trademark and/or service mark owned by NTT DoCoMo. The "i" in "imode" stands for information, internet, etc. (according to one of i-Modes inventors, Ms Matsunaga. i-Mode is also a whole multi-billion Dollar eco-system, and its part of Japans social and economic infrastructure.
As of Summer 2004, there are about 42 million imode subscribers in Japan, and about 4 million i-mode subscribers outside Japan, therefore in total about 46 million i-mode subscribers. While the number of i-mode subscribers in Japan is close to saturation, we believe that the number of i-mode subscribers outside Japan will grow substantially.
Since there are over 70 million mobile users in Japan, imode and competing mobile internet systems have around 70 million users in Japan. imode started in Europe (Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Greece and Italy) in April 2002 and expanded to Taiwan and Australia during 2004.

http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/01/CD_proceedings/6/INET-WAP.htm
The WAP and iMode architectures have great similarities. The WAP New Generation proposal also aligns WAP with the mainstream Internet... iMode was developed based on much the same premises, but with a different use case in mind. Whereas WAP was intended primarily to be a businessman's tool, iMode was created as an entertainment platform. WAP was intended to be a global standard; iMode nothing but a semi proprietary solution.
Today, WAP and iMode are both minimized versions of the World Wide Web, albeit in different ways. Where iMode is defined solely by one company, on the basis of HTML - which the W3C, its specifier, has stopped supporting - WML, the markup language in WAP, is an application of XML, the rule system for specifying markup languages defined by the W3C (HTML is based on SGML). The most recent version of iMode contains a number of non-supported elements, such as BLINK and MARQUEE, which makes it a superset of a standard subset - i.e. not an application of a standard.
Both the iMode and WAP 1.x are based on the browsing paradigm made popular by the Web. The architectures consisted of the origin server, gateway, and user-terminal environment.

Here's what I got in the second phase of "free thought associations" - I saw the name of my country among the countries that use I-Mode and added it to the original query:

http://www.slashphone.com/74/2504.html
update: 06-09-05
Cellcom Israel announced that they started marketing DoCoMo's i-mode service in the Israeli market on the same day.
Cellcom is Israel's leading mobile operator, both in terms of subscribers and profitability. DoCoMo concluded an agreement in November 2004 to provide Cellcom with know-how, technologies and patents necessary to launch the i-mode service.

Then I added "DoCoMo" and got:

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/BUSINESS/09/16/japan.docomo.bizCNN.com - DoCoMo weighs UK i-mode switch - Sep. 16, 2003
CNN) -- Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo will look for another partner in the UK if 3 UK does not adopt its i-mode platform, according to the Financial Times newspaper.
A spokesperson for DoCoMo, quoted by the FT, said the company had been asking 3 for a decision on adopting I-mode for "four or five months".
If 3 chose not to go with i-mode, DoCoMo would have to look for another opportunity with another operator in the UK, the spokesperson said.
http://sts.scu.edu/nexus/Issue1-1/Ratiliff-NTT_DoCoMo_and_I_mode.asp
Making full use of the advantages offered by its status as a subsidiary of Japan's largest telecommunications provider, DoCoMo's top management constructed an overtly entrepreneurial corporate culture, recruiting for top positions on the basis of merit and creativity. The i-mode approach was founded on a commitment to creating a branded standard that embodied an innovative business model, featuring effective methods of offering and billing services, which guided technological development. The i-mode standard was perfectly positioned to take full advantage of a Japanese domestic market environment that offered a springboard for global competitiveness in wireless Internet…
NTT DoCoMo has carefully designed the menu system that greets the user to link the initial display to official DoCoMo content partner sites, numbering about 600 in August 2000. One of the great attractions of official sites is that DoCoMo handles the transaction billing. But i-mode is an open system, allowing the user to access any compatible site.

Then I added the word CiRCUS to i-mode and got:

http://www.nec.com/global/features/index14
To deal with the increasing traffic and to prepare for future expansion, DoCoMo began the CiRCUS project to build a new i-mode center in the Tokyo area, where the majority of its content providers are based. The new center integrates four older centers under one roof.
By February 2003, all i-mode subscribers were successfully transferred to CiRCUS, now one of the largest and busiest data network operations in the world. The i-mode gateway system integrates 400 servers, 1,000 terabytes of storage, and 600 routers, connected by 370 km of optical fiber cabling in a building designed to survive the most severe earthquakes that experts can imagine in the region. Optimized for mobile data communication, CiRCUS delivers 100% of email messages sent between i-mode users within one second; 97% of messages move between i-mode users and other email users via the Internet within one second.
130603_docomo.jsp?printtest123=PRINTABLE
CiRCUS is the core of NTT DoCoMo's groundbreaking mobile i-mode service, which provides email and Internet access to more than 38 million mobile phone subscribers in Japan. EMC networked storage systems and open management software ensures i-mode data availability and significantly reduces recovery time, while protecting and restoring data.
The driving force behind NTT DoCoMo's investment in CiRCUS was to increase the performance and reliability of i-mode. Two years ago, DoCoMo began deploying an advanced, 400 terabyte EMC Symmetrix storage area network (SAN) to support 400 UNIX servers NX7000 and to ensure 24/7 availability of CiRCUS. Now complete and in production since March 2003, the high performance environment ensures reliable processing of 50,000 accesses per second for browsing web sites and 25,000 accesses per second for exchanging emails over i-mode.
EMC's information management and business continuity software has helped NTT DoCoMo manage the exponential growth of CiRCUS. The EMC ControlCenter family of management software simplifies and automates many processes required in managing a SAN as large as CiRCUS. EMC business continuity software ensures 24/7 availability of i-mode users and enables the system to operate non-stop during failures, maintenance, or inspection.

http://www.forrelease.com/D20040121/sfw086.P1.01212004035327.04583.htmlSAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 21
Foundry Networks(R) Inc. and its partner in Japan, BUSSAN Networks, Ltd., announced today that Foundry's ServerIron(R) Layer 4-7 switches have been adopted for the i-mode (TM) gateway system "CiRCUS" of NTT DoCoMo, Inc. This system was constructed to provide over 40 million i-mode subscribers in Japan with highly functional and stable mobile Internet services, including e-mail and Web access.

Friday, November 25, 2005

The State of the Mobile Web

There are currently four ways to mobile surf the Web:

1. through cache databases (for race scores, weather, horoscopes, etc).

2. through mobile surf.

3. Through I-mode.

4. through our solution, QTSaver WAP.

Let's take a closer look at these four possibilities:

1. "Through cache databases" –it is not really "mobile surfing of the Web" because surfing is only on the cache, which is a pre-arranged process of structuring the raw web and caging it in rows and columns. (There are 1,510,000 sites in Google that answer the query "mobile weather horoscope". For example: Yahoo).


2. "Through mobile surf"- Few people use this option because of "The Sad State of the Mobile Web":
Sites don't fit mobiles; there are too long or too short answers for the queries; Images are too big, etc.

3. "Through I-Mode" - Works only on few thousand special sites and doesn't scratch the vast info that populates the Web. I-mode has "43 million customers in Japan, and over 3 million in the rest of the world".

4. "Our solution" - QTSaver WAP.
is the first real mobile surf of the Web!!!
It gets the vital Web micro contents text (not multimedia) that fit the mobile screen perfectly.
Our solution is in a development stage and works only in English. You are invited to test it on http://qtsaver.dynalias.com/wap and we'll appreciate it if you'll take the time to send us a little comment.

To sum it all up I suggest the following table:

Zohar Stolar


Zohar Stolar surprised me with this beautiful suggestion for a new homepage.
He designed it all by himself but got ideas from a few other supporters.
Zohar is a Website developer and a consultant and among his clients you'll find:
http://www.new-spirit.org.il
http://www.sikkuy.org.il
http://www.barkat.org.il
http://esek.linnovate.net/index.php

I sent his proposal to a few other supporters and got enthusiastic reactions, so I suppose that in the near future we'll see this new design instead of the old one.
Conclusion: QTSaver managed to attract a bunch of creative supporters that really care for its development.
Welcome on board, Zohar.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

First Commercial Client

David Best wrote to me the following letter:

Is QTSaver available to purchase, license or open source?

This is exactly the type of program I have been looking for and I am hoping that there is some way we can work out an arrangement so that I can use your program on my site. My site covers over 35,000 trails and trail related activities in the USA.


I asked him for more details and he wrote:

TrailsHQ.com was just launched in May '05…An example of a page with content included in it from QTSaver is: http://www.trailshq.com/Alabama/TrailsActivities/BankheadNationalForest/BordenCreekTrail1/
As you can see on the page I am including a lot of graphics and content on the trail and the surrounding area. I have included the MSN Virtual Earth API at the top to show the trail in relation to the state and surrounding areas.
Next is the area for content from QTSaver. What is so great about your product is that the sites found by your program are already providing this Micro-Content, yet no other program I have found displays this content.
Using QTSaver also gives credit to the site for providing the info. I could include the content from QTSaver as a cut and paste as the example shows or include live content from QTSaver either in a I-Frame or some type of Javascript. Any suggestions??
Next are driving directions provided by the Google Map API and a Topo map below the driving directions that is really the Google Map API with a unique layer displaying the Terraserver topo on top.
Next is the Local Area Retailers map, provided by the Yahoo Map API, showing area retailers, hospitals and shopping.
Last is the weather provided by WeatherUSA.net.

David Best sets an example for many site owners that need this kind of QTSaver content.
I only hope that he will have many followers.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Micro Content Revolution















I tried in this table to sum up the differences between current prevailing search engines like Google and Yahoo and next generation micro content engines like QTSaver.

To clarify a bit the too short phrases in the table I decided to add paragraphs from my past postings that shed light where needed.

Authors' intention
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/microcontent-manipulation.html
I believe that the future of search engines is in microcontent manipulation. The current sequence of articles from a certain beginning to a certain end will be shattered to pieces and the development of an argument from assumption to deduction will lose its hypnotic power. Each excerpt will have a life of its own in cyberspace and will find its place sometimes in one role other times in another role. The original intention of the author will be forgotten and each new author will recycle the excerpt for his new intention.

Relevance
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/09/macro-content-relevance.html
When people talk about relevance they are talking about Macro-Content relevance. Macro-Content is almost always a mixture of relevant and irrelevant content. When you're looking for a monkey in a certain zoo you usually get many other animals and many other zoos.
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/10/homonyms-synonyms-unique-words-and.html
Computers are simple. Language is complicated.
Computers look for a match between words in a query and words in a result. They don't care about the meaning of these words.
The simplest case is when there is one unique word with one unique meaning… Then there is a case of one word that has many meanings (synonyms)… In case many meanings have one word (Homonyms) for example:' apple' from the tree and ' apple' the company - the computer can find a right match or a wrong match or both. If it found a right one there is no problem, and if it found wrong ones the user is either frustrated or confused.

Copyrights
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/fair-use.html
I found the terms "fair dealing" or "fair use" as relevant to cover this issue. I found many answers to this question which say the same thing over and over again. Here's one of these excerpts:

You may use short, direct quotations without the need to obtain written
permission from the copyright holder provided that you give proper credit to
the
author and sources. We define 'fair use' as excerpts under 400 words (or
a
series of excerpts totaling fewer than 800 words as long as no single
excerpt is
longer than 300 words) from one work. If extensive, longer
extracts are being
used, you must obtain permission if they amount to 10% or
more of the original
work. If the whole work is being used, e.g. a poem,
written permission is required.


http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/08/plagiarism.html
Michael Arnzen wrote about The Work-for-Hire Plagiarist:


There's been a spate of job listings coming in from student plagiarists looking
to hire professionals to write their papers for them...

It seems that there is a potential market here for QTSaver which delivers similar results without being a plagiarist.

Automatic multi queries (Pileups)
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/pileup-query.html
Since QTSaver retrieves sometimes too few excerpts other times an avalanche of excerpts I started exercising a Pileup Query which will take the first "suggestion to refine your query" and add it to the query phrase, then the first Suggestion to refine your query from the second results page and so on until I get 18 excerpts. This might bring some homogeneity to the retrieval and the user will get used to receiving 18 excerpts in each query.

Filtering by place, by person or company, etc.
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/microcontent-manipulation.html
There will be several views to choose from:

· View by country
· View by date
· View by person or company etc.

In order to rearrange the microcontents future search engines will need first to unify the scattered answers into one document and then to retrieve the "views" according to special algorithms.

User feedback (more frustration-less frustration
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/07/my-hall-of-frustration.html
My hall of frustration

Why QTSaver?
- In order to reduce search engine frustration.

Why frustration?
- Because we want to find information and we can not find it. In our imagination we translate our failure in survival terms:
I will not finish my term paper
so they will kick me out of school
so I will never find a decent job
so I will never find a spouse
so I will never have kids…

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

WAP

Lately we started testing a new WAP site that is going to serve our future Phone users. That's the reason I was curious to see what QTpedia has to add to Wikipedia's extensive article about WAP. When I entered only the word "WAP" to QTSaver the results were very disappointing, but looking for "WAP conference" ""WAP book" " WAP Gateway" "WAP device" and "WAP customers" brought a lot of good new information.

Conclusion: QTpedia will have to be much more sophisticated than I thought…

http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/archives/2001-12/0223.html
Maybe some of you are interested in a WAP/imode industry conference in London from 21-23 January 2002. Key speakers will be from KPN, Access, IBM, Vodafone, Sonera, Ericsson, Eurotechnology, and other important players. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/05/26/magazine/wap.html
"The real point about WAP is not that it's not very good," Psion's chief technology officer Charles Davies told the Ninth International World Wide Web conference last week in Amsterdam, "but that it's going to be in 100 million devices."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000709.html
Most speakers at last week's NetMedia'2000 conference in London proclaimed WAP a temporary aberration that delivers substandard services. British and continental newspapers are full of stories about WAP phones that don't work and services that are difficult to use. Many commentators point out the simple fact that since you have a phone in your hand, most tasks are faster to perform by simply placing a voice telephone call than by using WAP.
http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/channels/wap/
Ask The Expert: WAP, WML, and WMLScript Developer, author, and noted speaker Wei Meng Lee kicks off our WAP "Ask The Expert" column by answering questions commonly asked by developers new to WAP.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1861004044?v=glance
Editorial Reviews Amazon.comWireless Application Protocol (WAP) and its related technologies are emerging as the standard way of creating network-wise software for wireless computing devices, such as mobile telephones. Wrox Press's crack team of programmer-writers have put together a winner in Professional WAP. To a greater extent than any other WAP book on the market, this volume shows its readers how to do real work by using WAP, Wireless Markup Language (WML), WMLScript, and various toolkits and servers that ease wireless application development. Best of all, the authors realize that most folks working as WAP developers have Web roots; they explain their subjects in terms that anyone with a bit of HTML and Web-scripting (JavaScript or VBScript) background should be able to follow easily.
Aside from the overview sections that explain WAP technologies in broad terms, this book focuses on code. Readers see software literally "develop" through the course of each chapter, as the authors start out with a relatively simple illustration and build on it, adding features and demonstrating capabilities as they go along.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893115933?v=glance
In addition to tackling the wireless Web's software development challenges, Rischpater examines equally important but often overlooked issues such as user interface design and optimizing wireless sites for presentation on today's screen phones. Download DescriptionWireless Web Development with PHP and WAP is a brilliant complement to Rischpater's first textbook, Wireless Web Development (Apress, 2000), melding those languages used to communicate over the wireless Web with one of the most powerful Web languages to date: PHP. Rischpater delves into those issues not only most relevant, but also mystifying, to the beginning and intermediate wireless application developer, using concise and practical examples to ensure that the reader can quickly begin using the knowledge gleaned from his book.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521005612?v=glance
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This is an intermediate-level guide to building WAP applications. This book details the WAP Forum, mobile devices, and what makes a good WAP application. Using real world examples, this book examines the WAP standards, focusing on those essential to building working WAP applications. It outlines the critical success factors in designing WAP applications and helps the reader select the right architecture for his or her WAP project. Complete tutorials on WML (the HTML of wireless web), WMLScript, and Push technology are combined with the many examples to make Practical Wap ideal for software developers, architects, and managers.
http://www.palowireless.com/bookshop/bookswap.asp
This book contains basic information necessary for WAP development as well as the first professional GUI tool for building WAP applications. It presents a proven methodology for building WAP applications and includes two of the major SDKs will allow the readers to test applications in the environment where they will be used.
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is the key force turning mass market wireless phones into Internet companions. These lightweight, inexpensive smart phones are well equipped for high-quality voice communication, modest-bandwidth (9-14 Kbps) data communication, seamless Internet connectivity, and access to Internet services via built-in WAP microbrowsers. Written with the creators of WAP, this book/CD-ROM package will guide you through the process of creating software for WAP-enabled cell phones and handheld devices.
http://www.atinav.com/aveaccess/modules/wapgateway.htm
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a global, open standard that gives mobile users access to Internet services through handheld devices. WAP Gateway, proves to be the perfect answer to the growing demand for wireless mobile services across the world.
The WAP Gateway acts as a bridge between the Internet world and the mobile world and offers services such as end-user authentication, encoding of WML pages, and WML script compiling. WAP uses the underlying web structure to render more efficient communication between content providers and mobile devices.
An important feature of WAP is the support of telephony service integrated with microbrowsing of data. aveAccess WAP Gateway acts as a proxy between the wireless network and the Internet while encoding WAP data into byte code so as to conserve bandwidth.
http://www.kannel.org/overview.shtml
Kannel is an open source WAP gateway. It attempts to provide this essential part of the WAP infrastructure freely to everyone so that the market potential for WAP services, both from wireless operators and specialized service providers, will be realized as efficiently as possible.
Kannel also works as an SMS gateway for GSM networks. Almost all GSM phones can send and receive SMS messages, so this is a way to serve many more clients than just those using a new WAP phone.
By using a semantically equivalent, but binary and compressed format it is possible to reduce the protocol overhead to a few bytes per request, instead of up to hundreds of bytes. Thus, WAP defines a new protocol stack to be used. However, to make things simpler also for the people actually implementing the services, WAP introduces a gateway between the phones and the servers providing content to the phones.
The WAP gateway talks to the phone using the WAP protocol stack, and translates the requests it receives to normal HTTP. Thus, the content providers can use any HTTP servers, and can utilize existing know-how about HTTP service implementation and administration.
http://www.waptunnel.com/
Welcome to the Public WAP gateway WAPTUNNEL.
Subject to the warning notice below, you are welcome to use this free version of our public gateway with your WAP phone or emulator to:
To configure your phone or emulator to work with waptunnel, simply type in this WAP gateway address: 207.232.99.109
http://mobileways.de/WAP/
The WAP Gateway is a very unique product providing semi-automatic redirection of HTML documents to WAP compatible mobile phones.
The picture below shows the new Nokia 7110 mobile phone accessing Yahoo. COM with the help of the WAP Gateway.
http://www.ssimail.com/WAP_gateway.htm
SSi WAP Gateway Products Most Popular and Widely Used WAP Servers
A WAP Gateway is a server through which all wireless (WAP) data is transferred from wireless devices (using WAP requests) to content sites (in WML format) and back again. A WAP Gateway is a server that typically resides within the wireless carrier's network but may also reside within a corporate business environment.
Scalable - The Infinite WAP Gateway supports over 5,000 concurrent sessions and can be configured in server clusters to support thousands more user sessions. Infinite WAP Gateways have been deployed in numerous commercial sites around the world.
http://inetis.com/ttemulator.asp
TTemulator is a web based WAP emulator which acts like a real WAP device. It gives you the possibility to browse WAP sites and see how they look like on a real phone.
TTemulator reads a WAP site page, converts it to HTML format and sends it back to the browser. This way you are able to browse WAP sites with your browser without having to buy a real WAP device.
http://www.wapforum.org/new/20000705110Mob.htm
SINGAPORE, 5 July 2000 MobileOne (M1) and Cable & Wireless HKT announced today that the two companies jointly launch the worlds first WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) roaming service. It enables customers of the two companies to access the same WAP portal service whether they are in Singapore or Hong Kong.
With the WAP roaming service, M1s WAP customers traveling in Hong Kong can enjoy Mi World, M1s wireless portal. They can also log onto the Cable & Wireless HKT mobile network to enjoy its wireless portal service i.
http://www.itouch.co.za/products/products1d.php3
Setting up a WAP phone is tough for any user, including your customers or staff. iTouch's iConfigure service simplifies the configuration of WAP phones.
Using iConfigure you can send a special SMS message (OTA - Over The Air settings) to a WAP phone. You can even allow customers or staff to auto-help themselves and send the WAP OTA SMS from your Website. On receiving the OTA SMS the WAP phone will automatically be configured to the settings you dictate.
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2000/01/28/085735.html
"Our partners will enable us to bring richer content and services to Vodafone's Interactive and WAP customers," commented Paul Donovan, Vodafone's Commercial and Marketing Director. "This is the beginning of a major shift in internet access from the fixed PC to the mobile phone in our customers' pockets. With the advent of m- commerce later this year customers will have a shopping centre at their fingertips." To make WAP services as easy to use as possible, and similar to regular web browsing, the Vodafone WAP Directory provides a direct click through from WAP mobile devices to any of the sites listed.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Microcontent Manipulation

I believe that the future of search engines is in microcontent manipulation. The current sequence of articles from a certain beginning to a certain end will be shattered to pieces and the development of an argument from assumption to deduction will lose its hypnotic power. Each excerpt will have a life of its own in cyberspace and will find its place sometimes in one role other times in another role. The original intention of the author will be forgotten and each new author will recycle the excerpt for his new intention.
The user will enter his search terms and get (accurate) microcontents as answers.
There will be several views to choose from:

· View by country
· View by date
· View by person or company etc.

In order to rearrange the microcontents future search engines will need first to unify the scattered answers into one document and then to retrieve the "views" according to special algorithms.

In the following example you'll see a "view by country" that I arranged manually in Microsoft Access. I unified into one document the following collections:

http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/mobile-gambling.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/roulette-research.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/poker-research.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/black-jack-research.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/research-777mobile.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/m-gambling.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/research-777mobile.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/mobile-gambling-possibilities.html

Then I read the whole document and gave each record a tag (country name).
Then I filtered the countries and sorted them by alphabetical order.
I slightly erased superfluous repetitions but I never added a word of my own.

Austria
As if gambling weren’t addictive enough, European companies are making it easy, too. The hot trend overseas is games of chance via cell phone, otherwise known as “m-gambling.” Lottery tickets now can be bought through mobile phone in the Netherlands, Austria, Britain, Germany and Sweden. It’s even easier to bet on games or enter sweepstakes by phone.
Forget about grand casinos and shady bookmakers. Europeans can now satisfy their gambling urges on the spot -- with their cell phones. "M-gambling" is gaining speed after a sputtering start in the late 1990s when it relied on a far slower technology called WAP. In the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Britain and Austria, regular mobile phones can now be used to buy lottery tickets, bet on sporting events or enter sweepstakes for prizes.

China
Roulette history is hard to come by because the origin of Roulette is lost, and there was likely some form of a wheel based game going back almost as far as the origin of the wheel itself. There are stories that the game was invented in China and brought to Europe by traders who were trading with the Chinese.
The origins of the game of casino Roulette remain unknown until this very day. Some speculate that casino Roulette was invented by the Chinese people. The Roulette game made its way to Europe sometime during the 17th century via merchants who learned how to play Roulette game during as a result of their travels to the Far East, where they use to trade merchandise.

Europe
EMC calculates there were some 16 million users of European GPRS networks …
The origins of the game of casino Roulette remain unknown until this very day. Some speculate that casino Roulette was invented by the Chinese people. The Roulette game made its way to Europe sometime during the 17th century via merchants who learned how to play Roulette game during as a result of their travels to the Far East, where they use to trade merchandise. Others suggest that Roulette games were originally invented by the French at the dawn of the 17th century.
Roulette history is hard to come by because the origin of Roulette is lost, and there was likely some form of a wheel based game going back almost as far as the origin of the wheel itself. There are stories that the game was invented in China and brought to Europe by traders who were trading with the Chinese.
The "En Prison" rule - This rule is offered in some European casinos. According this of the Roulette Rules, when the outcome is zero, it is allowed to leave the bet for another Roulette spin. In the case when the following spin the outcome is zero again, then the whole bet is lost.
Single 0 wheels may be found in North America, but often require an unreasonable minimum bet. Online Roulette wheel's may be either American or European, but of course this only matters if the online casino keeps it's odds straight.
The Roulette rules - European: On European Roulette wheel there are thirty-seven numbers, including 1 to 36, and zero. That's why the European Roulette is called "Single zero roulette". Roulette player has the option to bet on certain number, combination of numbers or pick whether the number will be red or black. In European Roulette there are several rules.
Forget about grand casinos and shady bookmakers. Europeans can now satisfy their gambling urges on the spot -- with their cell phones. "M-gambling" is gaining speed after a sputtering start in the late 1990s when it relied on a far slower technology called WAP.

France
With its popularity arising in the mid 18th century in greater Europe, some say the inventor is none other than the famed mathematician and early computer mind Blaise Pascal. If this is true, then the game has truly come full circle, as the new wave of players log on to try online roulette.
The Roulette game made its way to Europe sometime during the 17th century via merchants who learned how to play Roulette game during as a result of their travels to the Far East, where they use to trade merchandise. Others suggest that Roulette games were originally invented by the French at the dawn of the 17th century.
History of Roulette The first form of Roulette was first devised in 17th century France, by the mathematician Blaise Pascal, who was supposedly inspired by his fascination with perpetual-motion devices. In 1842, fellow Frenchmen Francois and Louis Blanc added the "0" to the Roulette wheel in order to increase house odds.

Germany
Lottery tickets now can be bought through mobile phone in Germany ... It’s even easier to bet on games or enter sweepstakes by phone.
In Germany... regular mobile phones can now be used to buy lottery tickets, bet on sporting events or enter sweepstakes for prizes.

Hungary
The device also comes with a t-zones key to access the multimedia portal of T-Mobile Hungary. 777mobile, the most popular mobile content service in Hungary, will soon be replaced by t-zones and can now be easily accessed via GPRS, and in some areas of Bud
Mobile Hungary is offering the Nokia 6230 mobile phone as of today. This is the first handset offered by T-Mobile following the introduction of the new brand in Hungary. The EDGE-capable camera-phone has a 65,000-color display, organizer, stereo FM radio,

Ireland
DUBLIN, Ireland -- Global Gambling Market, an Extremely Large and Growing Industry, with Valuations Currently around One Trillion Dollars Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com) has announced the addition of Mobile Gambling - Casinos, Lotteries and Betting to their offering.

Japan
EMC calculates there were ... 38.5 million i-mode subscribers in Japan alone

Netherlands
The Netherlands and Sweden have already created 'mobile' lottery licenses and Britain is set to follow suit.
In the Netherlands... regular mobile phones can now be used to buy lottery tickets, bet on sporting events or enter sweepstakes for prizes.
Lottery tickets now can be bought through mobile phone in the Netherlands... It’s even easier to bet on games or enter sweepstakes by phone.

Sweden
The Netherlands and Sweden have already created 'mobile' lottery licenses and Britain is set to follow suit.
In Sweden...regular mobile phones can now be used to buy lottery tickets, bet on sporting events or enter sweepstakes for prizes.
Government-approved mobile lotteries have recently been introduced in Sweden…

UK
In Britain… regular mobile phones can now be used to buy lottery tickets, bet on sporting events or enter sweepstakes for prizes.
Chances are if mobile betting proves lucrative in the UK and elsewhere, carriers will look to protect their own partnerships and revenues to do something to try to block the third-party Java apps and services.
These certainly aren't the first moves into mobile betting, which has been around since the early WAP days, and the famous Hong Kong Jockey Club now takes more bets from mobile devices than it does online.
Lottery tickets now can be bought through mobile phone in ... Britain...It’s even easier to bet on games or enter sweepstakes by phone.
UK -- With the Government looking to review gambling regulations for the first time since 1968, the legislation around m-gambling is provoking huge levels of interest. The Netherlands and Sweden have already created 'mobile' lottery licenses and Britain is set to follow suit.
Government-approved mobile lotteries have recently been introduced in the Netherlands and Sweden, and the United Kingdom is likely to follow.
UK -- With the Government looking to review gambling regulations for the first time since 1968, the legislation around m-gambling is provoking huge levels of interest. The Netherlands and Sweden have already created 'mobile' lottery licences and Britain is set to follow suit.
Ukbetting plc (AIM: UKB. L) is the UK's leading digital wagering operator and owns and operates four sports content sites (sportinglife.com, sportal.com, bettingzone.co.uk and TEAMtalk.com) and two wagering sites (ukbetting.com and totalbet.com). Through these sites it is possible to find in-depth information, and place fixed-odds bets, on a variety of sports including horse racing, football, cricket, rugby, tennis, and many more. ukbetting plc currently supplies a range of betting and sports content services to the UK's major mobile networks including Vodafone, Orange, O2, T-Mobile and 3.
Growth in m-gambling is based largely on the success of text messaging, or SMS, technology. In Britain alone, more than 1 billion SMS messages are sent every month.

United States
The use of the double zero Roulette wheels survived in the United States and is sometimes called the “American Wheel”. The introduction of the single zero wheel (with better odds for the player) resulted in the demise of the double zero wheels in Europe and has become known as the “French Wheel” in Roulette history.
Eventually, the game was brought to America. However, the single "0" modification was rejected in the United States and Roulette history was altered forever with American Roulette wheels being made standard with the two zeros "00". Western miners made the game very popular in the United States Although both the double zero and single zero wheels originated in France, the double zero became known as the "American Wheel," because it was accepted with open arms and survived in the states.
The history of poker in the United States has a bit more consistency. Poker traveled from New Orleans by steamboat up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The game then spread via wagon and train. Modifications such as stud poker, the draw, and the straight became popular, during the Civil War. European influence of poker ended when the joker was introduced as a wild card in 1875.
The history of poker is a matter of some debate. The name of the game likely descended from the French poque, which descended from the German pochen ('to knock'), but it is not clear whether the origins of poker itself lie with the games bearing those names. It closely resembles the Persian game of as nas, and may have been taught to French settlers in New Orleans by Persian sailors. It is commonly regarded as sharing ancestry with the Renaissance game of primero and the French brelan. The English game brag (earlier bragg) clearly descended from brelan and incorporated bluffing (though the concept was known in other games by that time). It is quite possible that all of these earlier games influenced the development of poker as it exists now. English actor Joseph Crowell reported that the game was played in New Orleans in 1829, with a deck of 20 cards, four players betting on which player's hand was the most valuable.
The history of blackjack, as we know it today, goes back to the 1800's, when it reached the United States. Back then, in the card rooms of the Wild West, craps and poker were considered the ideal games for high rollers.
Roulette was brought into the U. S. in the early 1800s, and again in order to increase house odds a second zero, "00", was introduced - although in some forms of early American Roulette the double-zero was replaced by an American Eagle.
The game was called 'twenty one'. It came to the US in the 1900s and was soon the most popular casino game in the Vegas casinos. At the internet today, there are hundreds of online casinos offering the game of black jack. Most casinos allow to play for free to experience the casino software and tryout the casino games.

In Microsoft Access each excerpt is a record.
Summing up these records per country I got the following table:

Country Count Records
UK 9
Europe 8
United States 7
Sweden 3
Netherlands 3
Hungary 2
Germany 2
France 2
China 2
Austria 2
Japan 1
Ireland 1

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Help Thinking 1

This is a suggestion for a future feature of QTsaver that will use the "special words to refine your query" to help the user think about his subject.
 Posted by Picasa

Help Thinking

This is a suggestion for a future home page of QTsaver in which the Leads (special words that QTsaver suggests to refine your query) will help the user think about the subject he chose to explore. (see the results page on the next posting).
 Posted by Picasa

Mobile gambling possibilities

I started my research about mobile gambling with http://www.777mobile.com/ where I found the following mobile games:
Slots
Cards games: black jack, poker, HiLo,
Roulette

But there are lot more possibilities and today I started to explore them with my QTSaver:

Mobile Bingo
http://ubiks.net/local/blog/jmt/archives3/004400.html
A company called Techno Wing developed so-called Mobile Bingo System that allows consumers to play a Bingo game while shopping at a retail store. A customer first need to sign up for the service, then she receives a QR code from a server. After shopping, she can display the QR code on her mobile phone and show it to a reader device. Then, she receives an SMS message that notifies her about the points she earned. Now she can open her home page on her phone to check the current status of her ongoing bingo game.

Mobile Baccarat
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=13189
Mobile Casino Games include: Baccarat, Blackjack, Caribbean Poker, Craps, American & European Roulette, Pai Gow Poker and more! Requirements: - Any QVGA or VGA Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC - 2.2 MB of available RAM.

Mobile Lotteries
http://goliath.ecnext.com/comsite5/bin/comsite5.pl?page=description&purchase_type=ITM&item_id=0199-566589&words=Research_Markets_Mobile
Research and Markets: Mobile Gambling - Casinos, Lotteries and Betting. - Journal, Magazine, Article, Periodical
Research and Markets: Mobile Gambling - Casinos, Lotteries and Betting.
Description DUBLIN, Ireland -- Global Gambling Market, an Extremely Large and Growing Industry, with Valuations Currently around One Trillion Dollars Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com) has announced the addition of Mobile Gambling - Casinos, Lotteries and Betting to their offering. The global gambling market, in all its forms, is an extremely large and growing industry, with valuations ...

Mobile craps
http://www.electricdiary.com/diarybrowser.aspx?DiaryID=2026&sEntry=10/21/2004&eEntry=10/21/2004
Craps:The most popular game in the casinos Thursday, October 21, 2004

Mobile Chess
http://www.pocket-games.com/javaphones/
Get connected with this multi-player chess game! Login, find an opponent and play a good game...wherever you are. The LiveChess server will change your rating after each game, so you know how good you are compared to others. The server validates moves and checks the time. Impossible to cheat!

Mobile Strip Poker
http://www.pocket-games.com/javaphones/
The Java-phone version of our ever popular Strip Poker game. Use skill and luck to get your opponents fully undressed. Features full-screen hi-res images of your opponents, a good AI and attractive sounds.

Mobile Betting
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-15-2003/0002036501&EDATE=
Ukbetting plc (AIM: UKB. L) is the UK's leading digital wagering operator and owns and operates four sports content sites (sportinglife.com, sportal.com, bettingzone.co.uk and TEAMtalk.com) and two wagering sites (ukbetting.com and totalbet.com). Through these sites it is possible to find in-depth information, and place fixed-odds bets, on a variety of sports including horse racing, football, cricket, rugby, tennis, and many more. ukbetting plc currently supplies a range of betting and sports content services to the UK's major mobile networks including Vodafone, Orange, O2, T-Mobile and 3.
http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/101042.html
Sep 2004
These certainly aren't the first moves into mobile betting, which has been around since the early WAP days, and the famous Hong Kong Jockey Club now takes more bets from mobile devices than it does online. Most UK carriers have some partnership with bookmakers, an industry that tends to stay on top of technology.
http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2003/07/07/111540.html
Munich -- With its new UMTS platform for mobile betting on horse races, scaraboo allows users to place bets via mobile devices such as Pocket PCs and mobile phones. Scaraboo, a portfolio company of Siemens Mobile Acceleration, developed the UMTS platform for horse racing in cooperation with Bremer Rennbahn GmbH. The company's technology features digital bet placement and the transmission of live results and images to mobile devices. This system is not only interesting for users, but also for network operators and betting agencies.
http://www.icreon.net/cs_inos.shtml
Business Requirement Gambling is a popular activity in Japan and iNOS wanted to tap this market during the Football World Cup 2000. In this effort, iNOS wanted to develop an online betting game that would be available on i-mode mobile phones
http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=12509214&postID=111479753754762778
However, the rapid proliferation of mobile services in Asia, combined with an increasing tolerance of sports betting (cricket is now the second most popular sport for betting, thanks primarily to Indian gamblers) should see the percentages using these services rise markedly in the medium term. Overall, this means that the number of individuals placing bets via the mobile phones should rise from its current level of around 4.6m to more than 100m by 2009.
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=12823
Mobile Golf Scorer™ BIRDIE Version 1.30 The tool to record and analyze your Rounds and to improve your Game. Includes GPS for Distances and Betting functionality.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

SurfWax on Mobile Gambling

The phenomenon of Mobile Gambling is so new that a thesaurus like Surfwax doesn't have it on its index, although it retrieves 19,246 pages for a query about "Mobile Gambling".

 Posted by Picasa

M-gambling

My research about mobile gambling with a special focus on http://www.777mobile.com/ is developing – I started with searching for mobile gambling, continued with mobile betting, and now I discovered on a news search engine that there is another well knows synonym for Mobile Gambling – "M-gambling".

The phenomenon of Mobile Gambling is so new that a thesaurus like Surfwax doesn't have it on its index, although it retrieves 19,246 pages to a query for "Mobile Gambling".

So here's what QTSaver fished about M-Gambling:


http://www.textually.org/textblog/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=405
TrackBack URL for this entry:http://www.textually.org/textblog/mt-tb.cgi/128 Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 'M-Gambling' from textually.org.
http://www.osneymedia.co.uk/tracker/osneytracker.asp?magazineid=902
11:45 Panel: Establishing the m-gambling value chain and choosing the most effective business models
Who should take responsibility for driving m-gambling forward?
Planning and implementing your m-gambling strategy
14:30 Panel: Educating the customer on m-gambling opportunities
Educating the consumer on the possibilities of m-gambling
Promoting m-gambling to the masses without tempting the vulnerable
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2003/apr/14/514943826.html
M-gambling is a largely anonymous pursuit, which is part of its appeal to players and operators alike.The technology obviates the need for face-to-face contact, and participants never see their competitors.
With sales of traditional lottery tickets falling and state-run lotteries looking to attract a new generation of customers, the time is ripe for m-gambling.
This new sector is also attracting major companies: Hewlett-Packard provides hardware and systems to Openlot, a mobile lottery software developer in Amsterdam. Siemens provides financial and marketing support to a German m-gambling software startup, Scaraboo.K. betting companies access to its customer network.
Selman also notes that m-gambling offers inherent control mechanisms, such as daily spending limits.
http://www.rgtonline.com/Article.cfm?ArticleId=54530&CategoryName=Online+Gaming
UK -- With the Government looking to review gambling regulations for the first time since 1968, the legislation around m-gambling is provoking huge levels of interest. The Netherlands and Sweden have already created 'mobile' lottery licenses and Britain is set to follow suit.
M-gambling applications are coming onto the market with increasing rapidity and m-gambling has the potential to be a highly lucrative market for both service providers and operators. According to Alatto Research Group, the m-gambling market could reach almost £500 million by 2006.The danger this level of potential revenue brings is that the market could grow to fast. If users are targeted with low quality applications, the market will create low levels of customer satisfaction, leading to unsustainable expansion and lower revenues in the long-term.
Positive legislation is therefore important to prevent companies exploiting this new market without the right technology and without a license. In addition, as m-gambling evolves, regulation will promote user confidence in the industry by ensuring that there are legal requirements for user security such as age verification and accurate pricing and billing information.
M-gambling is completely portable and now that network coverage has reached almost 100%, the mobile phone could rapidly become ideal tool for having a flutter.
http://www.tecbet.com/news.asp
Tecbet helps to develop and implement a marketing and sales strategy for Rapid Mobile, an Edinburgh-based supplier of m-gambling technology.
http://www.bwirelezz.com/new/news/news.asp?news_ID=50
April 2003 USA Today
Built-in cell phone technology has done away with problems that gambling Web sites face in determining if a user is in a country where betting online is legal. Operators can use the satellite-based Global Positioning System, built into some phones, or simply be "looking at the phone number to see what country they're in,"
http://www.igamingbusiness.com/featuresDetail.php?articleID=136
With respect to channel partners, mobile network operators will do their best to use their own m-portals (e.g.Vodafone Live!) to favour their preferred partners and frustrate independents offering m-content outside the m-portal. The success of that strategy, and therefore the size of the opportunity for m-gambling independents, will depend on both the networks’ appetite for m-gambling and whether m-commerce tends towards either a “walled garden” or “open fields” model over the long term.
This depends on whether the m-gambling operator is offering sports betting, casino gaming and poker, or a lottery-type product.For non-lottery gambling operators, the mobile channel will complement, rather than substitute, their existing product offering.There are 3 main reasons for this.
The third reason that non-lottery m-gambling will tend to complement the existing online channel is that existing online gambling operators have a head start into mobile in respect of their transferable competencies and assets.These include customer account management, branding, payments and (often) Java content management skills, alongside a database of customers to whom the new mobile channel can be marketed.
http://www.clickz.com/experts/brand/brand/article.php/837931
M-commerce is instant commerce. It's impulse-driven commerce and will remain so for a long time to come. Gambling, too, is instant and impulse-driven, and this compatibility is the key reason for m-gambling's probably bright future. So, is m-gambling likely to be the next big mobile hit? Odds are, gambling qualifies as a top contender for the role of mobile phone moneymaker.
http://www.emediawire.com/newsbycategory/410/2005-06-16/560
Prepaid Game Cards for Mobile Casino Gambling Increases Casino Loyalty Technology provider helps physical casinos retain and increase loyalty from their consumers with casino M-GAMBLING games for mobile phones, Smartphones and PDAs - 2004-04-09
http://www.keralanext.com/news/index.asp?id=389123
Studies reveal that one third of traffic to online casino sites come from work stations. Surely, m-gambling will interest them as it will free them from the monotony of work and internet.Not only the employees but m-gambling is certainly going to be popular with the compulsive gamblers.They will be excited to access their favorite casino games like Poker and slots all the time.Will m-gambling create too many gambling addicts is a question to ponder.Also children will have an easy entry into mobile gambling which is a matter of concern.
www.logicacmg.com/countries/Wireless_ Enterprise_Solutions/Sublevel/page350228724 - 19k
LogicaCMG offers an end-to-end m-Gambling solution in a managed service environment. We work with gambling licensees to create new revenue opportunities in the mobile gambling arena, quickly and efficiently. Together with Dutch Lotto, we launched the world’s first regulated SMS lottery. LogicaCMG offers an application service provider (ASP) business model which operates at the centre of all operator connections, both within and between countries.
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news2003/apr03/apr21/1_mon/news9monday.html
As if gambling weren’t addictive enough, European companies are making it easy, too. The hot trend overseas is games of chance via cell phone, otherwise known as “m-gambling.” Lottery tickets now can be bought through mobile phone in the Netherlands, Austria, Britain, Germany and Sweden. It’s even easier to bet on games or enter sweepstakes by phone.

http://www.nordicwirelesswatch.com/newsletter/archive/2002-05-24.html
Gambling, just like adult visuals, represents lucrative opportunity for mobile operators. A new report from Dublin-based Alatto Technologies suggests that 4.5 percent of all global mobile users will gamble to some extent. According to Alatto, this will yield projected ARPUs (Average Revenues Per User) of EUR78 for operators and correspond to estimated sector revenues of almost EUR700 million by 2006.

Friday, November 18, 2005

Mobile Betting

As preparation for my research about mobile gambling I assembled 5 collections of internet excerpts with a special focus on http://www.777mobile.com/:

http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/mobile-gambling.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/roulette-research.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/poker-research.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/black-jack-research.html
http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/research-777mobile.html

In this collection I'll try to broaden the view by presenting internet info about mobile betting (synonym for mobile gambling that I found on Clusty).

Collections were powered by
QTSaver.

Contents:

Introduction
Market
Legislation
Innovation


Introduction
http://www.777mobi.com/
Mobile betting has completely changed the way people think about betting. Once, you had to go to the racetracks or the different games in order to place bets.
However, then came mobile betting and changed all that. Today you can place bets on any race or game that you like, without having to trouble yourself to go to the tracks.
Sounds simple, but technologically speaking, mobile betting is far from that. It is the culmination of years of developments, and now it all comes to this.
There will come a day in the not so distant future that people will not go to the races anymore, or to see the games. It will suffice for them to watch the games and races on television, and to place bets via mobile betting for their cellular phones. http://www.marketresearch.com/land/product.asp?productid=1083186&progid=3602
The traditional methods of gambling such as casino gaming, betting on sports events and playing lottery games are increasingly being augmented with electronic forms of gambling, most notably using the Internet, where casino services and betting services are already generating substantial revenues. The next progression in this process is to transfer these and similar services to the mobile handset.
http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?id=3471
Betting on advanced phones
This new service does not require additional software download to the phone. Phone interface is not just a plain money transaction application but it gives the punter access to results services, future start lists, scratches, tips, news, game history, customer profile and of course the possibility to play. At the moment users of the mobile systems need to register and open their betting account and transfer money to the account via mobile internet.
http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/101042.html
Betting On Mobile By Carlo Longino, Sat Sep 04 01:15:00 EEST 2004
These certainly aren't the first moves into mobile betting, which has been around since the early WAP days, and the famous Hong Kong Jockey Club now takes more bets from mobile devices than it does online. Most UK carriers have some partnership with bookmakers, an industry that tends to stay on top of technology.
Gamblers are a good fit for mobile content and services -- they're generally devoted customers, they're likely to be looking for improvements in service and their activity, of course, generates money. Freeing punters from having to get down to the betting shop to gamble seems like an easy way for the companies to increase their potential revenues.
Chances are if mobile betting proves lucrative in the UK and elsewhere, carriers will look to protect their own partnerships and revenues to do something to try to block the third-party Java apps and services.

Market
http://www.onlinecasinonews.com/ocnv2_1/article/Article.asp?id=4728 To gauge the potential, EMC calculates there were some 16 million users of European GPRS networks and 38.5 million i-mode subscribers in Japan alone, all of whom are potential customers of mobile and Internet gambling operators. While the legal issues related to mobile and tele-betting is yet to be ratified, the infrastructure and awareness is now maturing.
http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=12509214&postID=111479753754762778 However, the rapid proliferation of mobile services in Asia, combined with an increasing tolerance of sports betting (cricket is now the second most popular sport for betting, thanks primarily to Indian gamblers) should see the percentages using these services rise markedly in the medium term. Overall, this means that the number of individuals placing bets via the mobile phones should rise from its current level of around 4.6m to more than 100m by 2009. http://telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_intelligence_broadband_economy_73
Apr 25, 2005
According to a separate Juniper report, the market for mobile sports betting is set to explode from current levels of 4.6 million wireless gamblers per year to 100 million high-rollers by 2009, spurred by an Asian market. Mobile betting in all forms is currently prohibited in the U.S., however, although Juniper says the market — currently projected to generate revenues of $19.3 billion by 2009 — could be worth much more should U.S. legislators loosen the reins.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-15-2003/0002036501&EDATE=
J., Oct. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Interactive Systems Worldwide Inc. (Nasdaq: ISWI) announced today that its wholly owned subsidiary, Global Interactive Gaming Limited (GIG), has launched its play-by-play mobile wagering product in conjunction with its betting partner ukbetting plc. This product is to be initially offered to one of the world's largest mobile operators with over 13 million UK customers. The SportXction(TM) System will be made available through an existing suite of products offered by ukbetting plc to its WAP enabled users. The new mobile platform now enables users the ultimate freedom to play SportXction(TM) during a live match from anywhere. Users can now watch live sports at home, at sports bars and cafes or even at the Stadium and make real-time wagers through their mobile phone on events as they happen. The mobile market in the UK is one of the most sophisticated in the world with four major suppliers providing services to over 47 million users.
http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/101418.html
The Guardian cites a research report saying mobile gambling will be an almost $20 billion-per-year industry by the end of the decade, and reports that mobile phones are quickly supplanting the Internet as punters' tool of choice. One particular aspect of mobile gambling that's expected to fuel its growth is the ability to make "in-running" bets -- wagers made after the events have started. In addition to gambling offerings from operators as well as traditional bookmakers, a new style of bookie -- the betting exchange -- is emerging. It's tech-saavy and has no offline presence such as betting shops, but most importantly, it only matches up gamblers' bets.

Legislation
http://www.heingartner.com/msnbc-html.htm
LEGAL POSITION UNCLEAR
Beyond text messaging, the latest multimedia phones open more possibilities. A few years from now, mobile phone users might be able to respond to live streaming video of a match. Mobile betting could still face legal challenges in Europe, which doesn’t have legislation addressing the growing phenomenon. “There aren’t specific laws that really forbid it here, so the lotteries have to push regulators to either clarify the law or sort of nod and say it’s OK,” said Tymen Selman, chief executive of Openlot. “In most European countries, from a legal point of view it’s not a problem.” In the United States, though, interactive betting is illegal.

Innovation
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=271715
NEWBURY, UK, 21 September 2004 - Mobile Streams, the global mobile content company, announced today the launch of a range of innovative Pay-to-Play mobile betting games including a choice of three reel slots and scratch cards.
Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams said: “We are excited to be the first company to offer a really compelling range of Pay-to-Play betting games. By enabling players to pay through reverse SMS, we are opening up the services to the mass market.
http://in.tech.yahoo.com/050127/137/2j9j9.html
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Betting agent Ladbrokes has introduced fancy casino games for mobile phones aimed at a new market which will grow to billions of euros in the next few years, the company said on Thursday.
Spin3, a mobile phone software company that works with UK-based Microgaming, provider of the betting engine, also competes with rivals such as Casino Phone Technologies, Cometa Games and vsGaming, which have experience in Internet betting services and want to take that business to cell phones.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/11-01-2005/0004205595&EDATE=
Coral Eurobet, one of the leading gaming operators in the world (recently been acquired by Gala Group Limited -, operator of 166 Bingo clubs and 32 casinos in the UK and Gibraltar - has recently launched the mobile casino service, developed by Zone4play. The service is available through the Coral website http://www.coral.co.uk, and is being distributed by iTouch UK Ltd, one of the world leading mobile content distributors, using newspapers, SMS campaigns and soon TV advertisements. Zone4Play has developed its Mobile casino product during the last 2 years.
http://goliath.ecnext.com/comsite5/bin/comsite5.pl?page=description&purchase_type=ITM&item_id=0199-463405&words=Victor_Chandler_Launches
10-JUN-04 Victor Chandler is launching a full mobile sports betting service this week in one of the most ambitious wireless moves by a bookmaker. The firm says its sports book will work across all networks, initially for Java phones and then for any WAP-enabled handsets...
http://www.netimperative.com/2004/09/03/Stanleybet_launches_mobile_betting_service Bookmaker Stanleybet is to launch a new mobile betting service at the Sprint Cup at Haydock Park this Saturday. The service enables UK mobile phone users to bet on sporting events, including horse racing and football.
http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/Sept2004/8260.htm Europe : 3, the UK's first video mobile network, and Ladbrokes, the world's number one bookmaker, today announced the launch of the first video mobile betting service.