Wak Oentoenk

There has already been a ton of commentary on the “leak” of information about Google Base, a Google service in development that would let people post their content on a Google database. Most of the speculation I've seen has positioned Google Base as a classified ad service that would let people sell things online, competing with eBay. But that’s not what I read into the service. What I think I see is a freeform database, a free-of-charge data publishing service. Right now if you want to post...

Helio is the new name of the MVNO being created by SK Telecom and Earthlink. The name itself isn’t worth a posting (although I’m always happy when a company successfully gets a new brand, considering how hard it is to get legal clearance). But I like the story Helio’s telling about its target market. Helio says it’s going to target young people with phones enhanced for music, games, video, and other entertainment. I like that they claim they’re working on both the hardware and the software together,...

This has almost nothing to do with mobile computing, but I think it's cool and wanted to share it. A longtime friend and co-worker of mine proposed to his girlfriend this week. Like any good technologist, he found a Web-assisted way to do it. Check out his marriage proposal website.By the way, she said y...

I’ve been doing a lot of networking in the last couple of months, meeting new people and getting in touch with old friends and co-workers. It’s fun to have the time to share ideas again, after being heads-down with Palm for six years.Most of the conversations eventually come around to the question, “What does Google want?” It’s a great topic because Google has enough money, and is ambitious enough, that it might be planning to do almost anything. Google is also deliberately coy about its intentions,...

Who will buy smartphones? And what are the “killer” features?One of the most common themes among people watching the mobile market is the quest for the ultimate device. “Which is the one everyone will buy in the future?” reporters ask me. Discussion boards have endless debates over the relative merits of the Treo, Blackberry, Microsoft Smartphone, and so on. The underlying assumption is that at some point we’ll see the emergence of one converged killer device that gets universally adopted.I’m not...

Nokia’s newly-announced e-mail phones are interesting, and I think one of them could be very successful. The three new devices come with a bewildering array of mail client options, including RIM, Good, Visto, Seven, and Nokia’s Business Center (which I believe is the software that syncs directly to Exchange). I wish I’d had a mail client on the market, they probably would have licensed from me as well. I think the client that matters most in the short term is RIM, because a lot of companies and...

Mobile Opportunity is a blog on the technology industry, with a special focus on mobile and wireless. During my six years at Palm and PalmSource, I was constantly surprised by the disconnect between what we believed in the mobile industry and what our end-user customers thought. The pain this causes to companies and customers is immense. The mobile data products and services we create fail more often than they succeed, and customers are often frustrated by products that almost, but not quite, do...