MyFoodPhone, Coat tail riding

Riding on the coat tails of diet/fitness and mobility is Sprint’s new MyFoodPhone service. For your monthly $10US fee, you can send cameraphone photos of the meals you eat to MyFoodPhone, where you’ll receive periodic feedback on your photos. Log in to track your photos over time, attach bio data to photos, and view graphs of photos and diet progress. Check out the feature list.

All due respect to the folks at Sprint, who will undoubtedly make a little coin from this product, but this feels. . . forced? Can you imagine the brainstorming session that came up with a food feedback service as a way to advance mobile technology and use? Forget that the same goals can be accomplished for free (albeit with less polish) with services like Shozu or Flickr.

There are several mobile apps out there that are pushing the limits of what can be done on a phone, and a few that are trying to bring a common experience to all mobile phone users. These apps live in relative obscurity compared to the PR whirlwinds generated by services like this (mentions on/in CNN, WSJ, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC).

Just another one of the catch-22’s faced in the mobile industry: the worst products (from an innovation standpoint) are the easiest to understand, and so, have a better chance of attracting the mainstream press. That and Sprint’s PR budget and contacts, I suppose.

Check out MyFoodPhone. Or don’t.

Opera Mini 2.0 Released

Wow, version 2.0 already?

I’ve been very impressed with Opera Mini 1.2 — my only complaint was the lack of download support. Find something you want to download, wait 20 seconds to get a “downloads not supported” error, fire up my carrier’s WAP browser, and proceed. Version 2.0 now supports downloads directly to the phone, and the footprint is still under 100KB.

Skins are also on the menu, if you’re so inclined, as well as a “speed dial” feature that I have yet to try myself.

Get it while it’s hot: Point your WAP browser here to download it, or check out the download wizard to view details specific to your phone.

Tags: cell phones, Opera, mobile applications

Optimus configurable keyboard — spectacular!

This is the neatest keyboard I’ve seen in a long time. Each key is a standalone LED display that is completely configurable for your current application or goal. If you’re gaming, configure the keys for your game; if you’re Photoshopping, configure them for Photoshop shortcuts; etc. It doesn’t have much going for it in the ergonomics department, but it’s sleek and stylish.

Optimus keyboard via Art.Lebedev Studio

Insecurity Assessment: Daily WTF

Friday’s Daily WTF offers an amusing and altogether terrifying look at the inept coding on a large brokerage firm’s web site — the same site that controlled things like statement access, wire transfers, and trading. Check out these gems:

ViewStatement.jsp - Responsible for
displaying electronic versions of the monthly statements, this page was
always called with a single querystring parameter: StatementId. And
because StatementIds were sequential … you can pretty much see where
that went.

TransferFunds.jsp - This page would
initiate an ACH transfer between the brokerage company and the users
stored bank account numbers. Only certain users were authorized for
this page, but a sophisticated hacker might be able to figure out that
setting the “canUseACH” cookie token from “N” to “Y” might do the trick.

All of these goodies and more via The Daily WTF.

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Update:

And while we’re at it, let’s take a look at a very web 2.0 method of link-tracking:

When a user clicks a hyperlink, the followLink() Javascript function is executed and the following occurs:

• a translucent layer (DIV) is placed over the entire page, causing it to appear “grayed out”
• a “please wait” layer is placed on top of that, with an animated pendulum swinging back and forth
• the XmlHttpRequest object is used to call the “GetHyperlink” web service which
• opens a connection to the database server to
• log the request in the RequestedHyperlinks table and
• retrieves the URL from the Hyperlinks table
• returns it to the client script, which then
• sets the window.location property to the URL retrieved, which causes
• the user to be redirected to the appropriate page

This is why when I hear “Web 2.0″ I hear “kiss of death.”

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