Colly Myers former Managing Director of Psion, the Symbian OS. Some quotes form the interview:

Asked how many Symbian applications are running on his phone (a Nokia 6600).
"Not one," he says. He simply doesn't see a mass market for software. Instead, he thinks, most people will want "a lot of things you can get on the Internet on your phone translated as a service, piece by piece".

The appetite for data cannot be underestimated - people are just looking at the wrong type. It's just not going to be download or video data - it's going to be transaction data.

You already don't carry money or a ticket with you. I have a wireless card for my car and I don't carry keys: if only I could get rid of my wallet! Then my passport. This has a very high consumer appeal, but you've got to make it easy to access.

The reality is that trying to push everything into everything just doesn't make sense. We'll see an unfolding of more things like the iPod - focused at a particular consumer solution. Everything doesn't go into there. Where you can break out groups of functions - the phone and the camera may work for some segments but not others; some might never want it, or might never use it. As we get more and more digital, all this complexity has to be tamed in a way that the consumer can access it.

Symbian OS is a very, very good OS for a phone. It remains well ahead of the Microsoft offerings. All the comms side that we haven't seen will come into play yet. It's already in the phone - such as MobileIP and IPv6 - and that's real comms value for the Nokias.

So what innovation and what services do you think we are going to see?
Ask yourself, what are people going to with all their pictures in the future? What are they going to do? Is writing to CD-ROM really safe? Sorry - it's gone in a few years. Are people going to do a 3-stage offering, or make one of their copies in an alternative geographical location? Nobody does that.
No one has designed architecture for the home. We've got Wi-Fi and broadband and Bluetooth but there's no way to put it all together.
You have to tackle the product offering yourself. You start doing something vertically because you can't work with everybody. So somebody has to break through, starting with a niche.
Whoever does this has got to do the hardware, and the software, and the systems infrastructure, and not many people can do that; and they must have a brand that the consumer respects. On the one hand they have to be known for style going into the home, and on the other be able to manage infrastructure. And they've got to be big.
So they need to establish a beach-head, and some companies wouldn't even bother to try to cross this chasm. And it needs a really big organization to be able to deliver. So I don't even know if they know they should be doing this.

I have a client, the Government Office for the West Midlands. In their building, in central Birmingham, are other, smaller UK Government departments or local sections of larger centralised departments. (I'm not going to name names nor actual departments.)

I have been told of websites that needed content management systems, as most frequently updated websites need these days. However, one site in particular, which has had a content management system written especially for them has me aghast at the waste of public money.

Over the past 4 years that it has taken to write this system, the company developing it has charged around £100,000 each year.

The RSS feed cost £12,000 to develop. To add department or category RSS feeds will cost another £2,000. I could list several simple components that cost this sort of money, for example, It uses a shortcut sytem that that is so tricky to use, that it isn't used. This cost £15,000.

It uses it's own desk top application, which is not user friendly.

I'm not saying that the company developing this platform, for that's what it is, has ripped off or cheated. I believe they have worked hard. Some of the money came from an IT grant (still, public money).

However, out of the box, one Manila site will do 95% of the requirements. While the other 5% can be written, easily, and much of that 5% is merely connecting to a simple SQL database the rest mostly simple web design for the theme. It has a further 50% worth of features (some that I have developed) that aren't in the requirements but would be very handy—the aggregator for example, or the slide shows, thumbnailing and soon rollback (which Userland are developing), scheduled press releases (which I'm developing)...

Each Manila installation can handle, to my knowledge over 1,000 sites, take over 150,000 dynamic page builds per day (though statically rendered pages can take much, much more—obviously).

It's UI is far, far, superior, with 7year old children using quite merrily, it's been around for 4½ years with hundreds of thousands of users, so it's been bug tested to hell and back.

When Radio Userland is connected up to Manila, then you have an out of this world, powerful desktop CMS application. Radio, itself opens up several orders of magnitude of functionality on top of a Manila site's functionality. Throw a developer in there and you'd have more easy to use features than you could shake a stick at.

The list price for a Manila installation is nearly £600 (plus some developer time for that extra 5%). Against nearly £500,000 for a CMS that nobody else will use. What's worse? I know of several other departments thinking they need to spend hundreds of thousands also! There seems to be two reasons: 1) the hard-on of spending so much taxpayer's money, 2) the apparent comfort in thinking, "it must be worth it."

Perhaps I should tender with Manila's functionality yet at a price that's one thousand times more than it's six hundred quid, take an afternoon to install it and use the rest of my life trout fishing.

But when you add in full sized daily postings, this page draws up 7 days x 800px = 5,600px wide page... No good even for very wide screens, but fine for printing out posters.

A blog doesn't have to be a community, particularly and open free speech community. It can be locked, with no commenting available, or the comments edited or deleted. This just seems like another 'what is a blog' article. I thought we'd figured that: a blog can be anything.

Dumb question. Of course you need a real, authoritative person behind the blog. Otherwise the information becomes canned laughter without the comedian. How unfunny is that?

Out of my reach, pity. But in a few years, when prices have dropped to... A few grand?

85% of all email is spam. 83% of all email is spam. Between 80 and 90% of all email is spam. 80% of all email is spam. 76% of all email is spam. Between 64 and 78% of all email is spam. 64% of all email is spam. 63% of all email is spam. 60% of all email is spam. 52% of all email in 2004 will be spam. 50% of all email is spam. By 2006 98% of all email will be spam.

Some of the replies on the MeFi thread are worth noting:

But the upside is we'll be happily sitting in our mortgaged homes high on prescription drugs stroking our huge penises.

In 1977 there were 150 Elvis impersonators. By 1999 there were 35,000. If this rate of growth continues, by the year 2019, more than one third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators.

Russell Beattie: Friendster's switched from JSP to PHP.
Is this a good thing? I mean, they're the guys with 9 million members, a large majority bitching about sluggish response times, etc. so they should know, but it seems awfully strange to me

Who's the biggest, fastest server beast in the jungle?

PMN: The results highlight a major issue for network operators - customers are taking photos with their handsets, but they are only sending a handful of them over the network. Operators are becoming increasingly frustrated with the expensive subsidies they are paying for camera-enabled handsets without seeing a corresponding increase in mobile data traffic.

Ah! They get shrunk from 300k to 30k, depending on the phone/service, it seems. And MMS uses GPRS, as it's carrier method anyway. So, one button sending? That's hardly revolutionary. Ideally, I'd like to be able to drop the picture into a folder, like I do with pictures on my PC, and for those to be upstreamed just like Radio Userland does. But somewhere along the way, I'll need to caption and describe the action in the images or pix.

So, GPRS as a carrier is just like a phone line, or leased line. When Cognima say they use GPRS, what do they mean? FTP, HTTP? More GPRS specific protocols are about.

[update—04/07/04:] So, why are mobile phone companies screwing about? They failed with WAP—it was crap, and it looks as though MMS is a mess. Why don't they just open up their GPRS, and have more browsers fitted on phones. Thus, people will have fairly fast web access, and that's all we want. If all mobiles have their own IP address, they can have their own website—right there is a tonne of connectivity.