TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

Dr. Schaffer’s Mobile Computing facility at the Austrian FH Hagenberg has produced quite a few really amazing projects (think Shaker Racer) in the last years; the knowledge of their faculty staff is top-notch and contains loads of Forum Nokia champions. Cutting a long story short: the price (free) is more than right – I am there for about 18 months now and am happy overall.

In case anyone of you feels like adding a Bachelor of Science in Mobile Computing to his business card, definitely consider these boys. As tuition is free and living in Linz is dirt cheap (900E/month max), interested German-speakers are well advised to visit their open-house day to find out more about how to get great education for a very low price…which is held on Friday:

FH Hagenberg Campus
Softwarepark 11
4232 Hagenberg/Austria

Open: 9h to 18h local time

Yours truly will not be around this time. However, it would be too cool to have a group of Tamoggemon Content Network heads at this university…

Dear Readers,
file this straight into the “we love our editor” folder. Yours truly will be talking about Symbian application distribution on the Nokia Mobile Developers forum on the 6th of the month:

My presentation will be held in English, and will be added to the web site shortly. Hit the link below to find out more:
http://www.nokiaappforum.com/conference/

P.S. The current schedule is in this PDF…

Dear Readers,
just in case anyone of you is wondering what the hell happened to TamsPPC and TamsS60: these sites were renamed. The URL’s and the content remain the same.

However, TamsPPC is now known as “the Windows Phone blog”, while TamsS60 now carries the tagline “the Symbian blog”. Once again, this has nothing to do with the content or editorial line – it remains the same.

The reason for this renaming was that the terms PocketPC and S60 are starting to get less and less popular. In order to make the TCN more visible for new readers, this renaming had to be performed.

If anyone of you has any questions or issues, please leave a comment here!

All the best
Tam Hanna

Dear Readers,
just in case anyone of you is wondering why its so goddamn silent here today.

The Vienniese TCN team is packing for Barcelona!

Yes, we are on our way, and expect to bring you loads of live coverage and thousands of shots by tomorrow. Stay tuned!

P.S. In case anyone of you wants to meet up: SMS me at 0043 676 7886431!

Tradeshows are struggling for some time: most manufacturers think that the money spent on a booth is better invested into direct advertising. After all, journalists can be reached significantly faster by just sending them a press release – and a free sample goes quite a long way, too.

Keeping an event successful thus requires not only smart management, but also an effective way to attract the media. Unfortunately, the folks at MiLiberty’s seem to have issues understanding this basic rule of thumb.

Their response to an accreditation request by the yours truly looked like this:

From: Sam Tring [string@miliberty.com]

Your message

To: press@mobileworldcongress.com
Cc: pressregistration@mobileworldcongress.com
Subject: Press accreditation
Sent: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:38:50 -0000

was deleted without being read on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:18:19 -0000

Well, well – it’s a bit difficult to say much here. I should have no issue covering the event due to exhibitor passes from partners – but it nevertheless serves as an excellent example for how to kill events!

The folks at Nokia’s have already ditched the GSMA – I can understand them well. After all, the purpose of such an event is to get press exposure – and if you keep the press out, well, you get the idea…

Now that the talk is over (and yours truly is on the way back to his safe internet connection), enjoy the slides below. The original talks were held at the IT Underground 2009 in Warsaw, videos might become available shortly:

Attack vectors on mobile devices

Symbian: code signing methods for mobile

Enjoy!

Oh, the horror – some people are simply insane. One such critter has set out on a hacking spree across mobile computing web sites yesterday, taking down large and small sites alike.

At Tamoggemon’s, we fortunately weren’t first in line (kudos to AllAboutSymbian for that) – and thus had some time to reinforce our defenses.

Unfortunately, this has caused some outages for some of you, for which we can but ask for understanding and forgiveness. As of 9am local time, service should be fully restored on all news sites…

Yours truly
Tam Hanna for the Tamoggemon Content team

Image: public domain / NASA

This is another message for all hardcore Tam Hanna-fans (or those who happened to miss my talk on Symbian at the MetaLab).

Yours truly will hold two presentations at this year’s IT Underground conference, which will be held in Warsaw. Both talks are focused on mobile technology and are currently scheduled to take place on the 17th of November – look forward to the following:

Attack vectors on handsets – 13h15 to 14h15
The first of the two talks will look at the various ways mobile devices can be attacked. Look forward to a round-up of the various scams, exploits, physical attacks and – last but not least – a discussion of why carriers don’t do anything about rampant mobile theft.

Symbian Code Signing – 15h00 to 16h30
Talk number 2 starts off with a recap of native Symbian development methods, and then moves on to look at the implementation of mobile code signing/code security environments using the Symbian Platform Security model as a working example.

Afterwards, I will likely take place in a podium discussion where questions can be asked.

Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://itunderground.org/en/wydarzenia/50-IT_Underground_Warsaw

With slight delay due to the SEE2009, the Tamoggemon Content team is proud to bring you all this week’s issue of the Carnival of the Mobilists.

For all those of you new to the topic: a blog carnival is a list of topics from various blogs, which are aggregated on one site to help the readers of the site find out about what other news services are reporting. The Carnival of the Mobilists covers all things mobile – here is what got my mates scribbling last week:

Advertising / marketing
mjelly unveiled an extremely interesting post named iTunes App Store SEO. Even though the title is somewhat weird, it is a must have for all who are currently selling applications on a carrier or device manufacturer store.

MobileMandala covers 10 reasons why mobile advertising has not yet reached its full potential.

MSearchGroove talks about a survey of companies of the mobile advertising space.

Carriers
Consuming Experience’s Improbulus brings us a good look at Hutchison UK’s Skype service. Unfortunately, I feel that my solution (real Skype client on WM) still is better than iSkoot – but this is a question of taste…

Masabi takes a look at the current state of the NFC economy.

OpenGardens looks at various reasons why LTE is needed, and what’s currently holding it back.

Miscellaneous
Jamie Wells brings along some news on the WikiMobilePedia – whatever that may be.

MobiThinking takes a look at why mobile versions of web sites still pay off.

As usual, no best post will be nominated. However, stay tuned – next week’s Carnival will be at GoldenSwamp…

This one should probably be filed in the non-existing “fan base support section”. However, those of you who feel like some real-life interaction with the Tamoggemon Content team and want to learn more about Symbian in the process should mark the 25th of October in their calendar.

Austria’s MetaLab hosts its famous Linuxwochenende: a weekend full of talks about open-source technologies. I will be there on the 25th – my talk begins at 12h local time:

So: see you all there. Don’t leave /me hanging .

Dear Readers,
thanks to all of you, the Tamoggemon Content network has grown significantly in the past. This has led to server performance issues due to overloading.

Our web host brainsware has advised us that a server migration would help combat these problems and would allow us to provide you with a better user experience.

In order to facilitate this, we will go down shortly on the 20th of this month. As of now, the maintenance is scheduled for 22h Austrian time, and will take approximately one hour.

As this move is absolutely necessary, I can but ask for your understanding. I furthermore hope to be able to welcome you soon on our new, faster server!

Yours
Tam Hanna and the Tamoggemon Content team

Image: abc texte / Dr. D. M. Kohrs

Our Crazy Sunday promotion spread quite a few free licenses among all of you – but good concepts always can be improved further. My wife and I are thus proud to introduce you to the new Crazy Sunday – the rules have changed a bit in order to make getting your hands onto software easier.

As before, entering is free: all you need to do is leave a valuable comment on a post. Comments like “Hi” or “cool” don’t count – we want added value here. However, there is a second way not – purchase an app in the TamsShop to participate with equal chances!

In order to make purchases more interesting, use the discount code CRAZYSUNDAY. It gets you 20% off any software which has not been discounted before – and is valid while the promotion runs.

This week, our prize is a free license of HanDBase. HanDBase is an excellent way to manage databases on your handset – think Access on S60!

So: good luck, guys and gals! See you all here next week…same news service, same venue!

Dear Readers,
the Tamoggemon Content network is powered by a team of editors working 24/7 to ensure that you, dear readers, always receive the best and most current information on all things somewhat related to mobile computing. We brave nights, early mornings, low temperatures and cops to bring you the latest bit of news to your desktops…but were not able to do so this Sunday.

The reason for this is an outage at our web host brainsware. Due to ill health, I was not able to contact them until 15.00 local time; afterwards, an emergency service team managed to restore service by about 17h Austrian time. As of now, we do not know what happened, and hope that it will not happen again.

Please rest assured that we are doing all we can to ensure availability of service. I am on this personally and will do my best to keep you posted.

I can do little more than ask you all for forgiveness and thank you all for the torrent of emails and comments!

Yours
Tam Hanna and the Tamoggemon Content team

Image: abc texte / Dr. D. M. Kohrs

Dear Readers,
the Tamoggemon team is proud to announce that this week’s issue of the prestigious Carnival of the Mobilists will be hosted by our sister site TamsIJungle. Being selected for hosting a CotM is a great honor, and shows that Tamoggemon is committed to being an active member of the mobile computing market!

In case anyone of you runs a web site about mobile computing: please send your best work to us for consideration! Just follow the instructions outlined at the web site linked above – and see you all next week at TamsIJungle’s!

With best regards
Tam Hanna and the Tamoggemon Content team

We have covered the World Business Guide Scam some time ago – don’t ask me why, but the jerks still don’t give up (even though they know that I covered them on here some time ago). The email below has just hit my inbox:

Ladies and Gentlemen.

In order to have your company inserted in the registry of World Businesses for 2009/2010 edition, please print, complete and submit the enclosed form (PDF file) to the following address:

WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE
P.O. Box 2021
3500 GA Utrecht
The Netherlands

email: register@wbgtoday.net
FAX: redacted

Updating is free of charge!

If you are not the intended recipient, please submit an email to unsubscribe@wbgtoday.net Your request shall be dealt with accordingly.

Once again: if you get ANY communication from these folks, just delete/destroy it unless it comes from a court in your home country (which has never happened so far). The boys have never sued anyone AFAIK, and are sending these emails out illegally themselves.