Guy Kewney

Its “a triumph.” Or something like that. This year, theres no Mobility Developer Conference for Microsoft in Europe. How anybody can say this is good news—with a straight face—beats me. Its a mark of conspicuous failure. Look at the schedule for this years TechEd in Amsterdam. We have canal boat trips, we have Longhorn road […]

When asked “why are you supporting WiMax?” following his appearance at the San Jose Intel Developer Forum (IDF) earlier this year, Intel Corp.s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Pat Gelsinger responded “Money”. Well, duh. The question isnt “does Intel want to make money?” Of course it does. What Europeans are asking is “why […]

I didnt ask the media experts about advertising. That wouldnt have been fair. Advertising is what the future of media is all about, so I didnt really expect them to be experts on that. No, I asked a simple sort of question: “What is RoamNet?” And I warned them: “I dont want a simple answer.” […]

Voice over wireless LAN? Not this year. Or so was my experience this week at Jeff Pulvers VON Europe show here in London. It just so happened that before the show opened, I was on an assignment to test voice-over-IP (VOIP) telephony. So, I was pretty glad of the expertise Id find at the event. […]

I sure hope Bill Carney likes the weather in Taiwan. No, hes not here in Taipei with me. Not far as I know, anyway. But he gets my congratulations: The Wi-Fi Alliance couldnt easily have picked a better new chairman—if it had to lose Dennis Eaton—than the senior director of strategic marketing and business development […]

Traditionally, security consultants have made a passable living by frightening ignorant managers with security holes. Then they charge money to fix them. Recently, Britains government instructed members of Parliament to disable the Bluetooth functions on their cellphones because of the dangers of “bluesnarfing,” so it must be a real threat, right? Well, technically, it is. […]

“Its not safe to have fruit on board a plane. An apple or pear might have a grub in it, which could hatch into a wasp, which could get into the cockpit. If that distracted the pilot as he was coming in to land in fog and if the ILS (Instrument Landing System) malfunctioned, the […]

Quick question: Where, in Europes biggest capital city, London, can you not place an emergency services call to fire, police or ambulance? Its an easy answer: the London Underground railway. You cant get wireless Internet on the Underground, either. Why? “Its not safe.” Why is it so much easier to prove wireless safe in an […]

One of the mysteries of the Tablet PC has been its singular failure in European markets. Behind that enigma lies an even greater one: Why was Microsoft Corp. in EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) so gung-ho about MIRA, or Smart Display? At the Wireless LAN Event in London next week, Im expecting Intel Corp. to […]

Trapeze Networks new chief executive officer, Jim Vogt, thinks a product called Ringmaster is one of his prize assets. Id agree. I think he ought to give it away. Well, if youre the typical business user in the United States, you may well not be an international jet-setter, and you will not know how awful […]

Last year, the worlds biggest mobile phone conference was, as usual, only marginally wireless-enabled. Well, you can sort of understand it. Twenty-five thousand nerds, all with at least three phones each, in a tiny community that normally would expect to have a couple of hundred cell phones in the same area. Finding enough base stations […]

Everybody knows there are several operating systems for phones: Symbian, Windows, Palm. So why would anybody come up with a new one? But thats just what Texas Instruments has announced in its joint venture with IXI Mobile. At this weeks 3GSM World Congress conference and exhibition in Cannes, one of the big surprises is going […]