A pinch point is battery life. Rapid character input is another pinch point. Accurate pointing too. Client system emulation. All pinch-points in using a portable device as a development machine (Y Combinator YCRFS 5: Development on Handhelds). One thought is to break the problem into two contexts; the portable context (walking, driving) during which you will rarely be developing and arriving at a destination suitable for developing (office, home, cafe, bus, train, plane.) Identify the pain points of each (fitting in your pocket for the portable context, input and screen-real estate for the second context) and seeing if a device can be made to adapt to both at different times. Sort of like those pull-out PDAs the actors had in Earth Final Conflict. Battery life is a problem only if a: the power cord is a pain to carry around and b: the battery can’t survive between recharges at locations where you can get power.

“Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day.” Telcos complain about becoming data-pipes. Why aren’t they making gold out of this data?

The thinking behind, and reason for, Google Chrome OS is illustrated in this video. It may seem childish, even a bit annoying, but the man has a point. When my laptop boots up it takes well over a minute to load my browser and get me to my email, Twitter, RSS feeds etc. My first hour at work everyday involves nothing on my laptop. I’m catching up on stuff stored and running on the internet. Some days it is all I do, I don’t touch a single document stored on my laptop. I read, I write, I research, I store, all on the internet. Not my laptop. Days when I do some coding involve a text-editor and some shell commands, all which push stuff to my browser. I’ve not yet found an online text-editor that beats the native TextMate but that day is not far off and will be greatly helped if there is no separation, no jump between my browser and my OS. That jump is important, when you alt-tab between Firefox and iTunes. Promote the browser to first-class citizen and I believe something interesting is going to happen.

Chromium OS (Google Chrome OS) is even more web-based than I dared imagine. No native apps beyond the OS, the Chrome browser and its supporting functions. Imagine your current web-browser maximised on your screen without any sign of Windows or Mac OS X or Ubuntu. Just the browser. “Apps” are websites and are launched via a first tab. Apps then run in the browsers. I like it, it is where the majority of OS users should be going.

Pen and paper is getting an app store thanks to LiveScribe.

Anil Dash is to head up a US government idea lab for how developers and entrepreneurs can build apps and systems to make a better government and country.

Microsoft have patented “sparklines” and Edward Tufte is asking what he can do about it. All very odd.

Bebo anti-bullying button sounds like a prank call waiting to happen. When I was a kid the police were the last people I’d turn to if I were bullied or had a problem. Gone are the days of the village policeman everyone likes and trusted.

Not a protocol geek but Memento seems like a very useful addition to HTTP. It gives HTTP versioning, something you can’t do without mucking up URLs.

Irish WordPress users and developers can look forward to WorldCamp Ireland in Kilkenny, 6th and 7th of March 2010.