Image by fatboyke (Luc) via Flickr

I am in the Belgian city of Brussels at the moment, which means that my mobile phone is ‘roaming;’ off my UK network and being charged a scary amount of money to access data. Travelling to Europe is less scary than going elsewhere in the world, as I’m ‘only’ charged about £3 per Mb here. That’s half what I’d be charged to use data in the United States, but is still an obscene amount of money for my mobile phone company to be extracting from me.

There are plenty of excuses made about termination fees and cross-border this, and intra-jurisdictional that, but at the end of the day a very small number of large telcos are getting away with what is essentially a scam. Much of the time, I’m actually connected to the local network of my own mobile phone company, rendering many of their excuses even more pathetically irrelevant than they might otherwise be.

Still, this post isn’t meant to be a complaint about mobile phone companies. I have every faith in the European Commission, and its power to bring more pressure to bear in reducing those charges. I just wish they’d get on with it.

What this post was meant to be was a complimentary post about a new startup that’s attempting to do something about this. And there’s a cloud connection, too.

Enter Onavo, a startup that uses a small app (iPhone only, for now) to reduce the amount of data you consume when roaming; thereby lowering the size of the bill your mobile phone company sends you. The company claims reductions in data consumption of “up to 80%” in optimal circumstances. I’m not seeing that big a saving, but mine is still significant.

Basically, when you turn Onavo on for a trip and start roaming, the company’s servers step in and start compressing images etc before they are delivered to a mobile carrier and — via the mobile carrier — to your phone. Compressed content means smaller content, which means less bandwidth used, which means smaller bills for me. Should you happen to find affordable wifi, Onavo gets out of the way and the uncompressed content again becomes available to you.

If you’re going to be travelling, have an iPhone, and want to give it a try, the company has given me some invite codes to share. Simply visit www.onavo.com/codata using Safari on your iPhone, and the first 100 will get into the beta programme. It’s working well for me, and might for you too.

Onavo is not paying for this post; they let me into the beta programme, I found it useful, and now I’m telling you that I did.

And the Cloud connection? Onavo’s co-founder is Guy Rosen; he of the Jack of All Clouds blog, and those invaluable State of the Cloud graphs. Speaking of which – aren’t we due another one, Guy?

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And then things went quiet.

Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert Scoble has been amongst those dropping not-so-subtle hints on Twitter for days, and other big names in and around the Valley have also been targeted in a carefully orchestrated programme of pre-briefings and beta invites. That all ends today, as the iPhone app is now out of beta and available this morning from Apple‘s App Store. Versions for Android devices and the Blackberry are coming along close behind, and the company has big plans for building upon what they already have.

I got my hands on the app earlier this month, and put it through as many of its paces as I could from 3,000 miles outside the US market for which the current app and data are optimised.

I’ve written up the results of my play (and my conversation with Siri’s other two co-founders) for ZDNet, and look forward to trying it for real on my next trip to the States.

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Tom Gruber will be one of the keynotes at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose next week, and there’s a lot of interest in what he’s likely to show. I spoke to Tom yesterday to learn more, and the result has just been released as a podcast.

Well known in the Artificial Intelligence research community, and perhaps better known to the Web world as Founder of RealTravel, Tom is now CTO and co-Founder of Siri.

Siri itself came to notice back in October, when a company previously going by the name Stealth Company announced itself to the world. The intervening months have seen the team hard at work to deliver on their vision, prior to once again coming to wider attention in the past week or two with appearances at All Things Digital and (next week) the Semantic Technology Conference. Interest in the tech media has clearly been piqued, with several posts on TechCrunch, and write-ups in BusinessWeek and the New York Times.

Production of this podcast was supported by Talis, and show notes will appear on their Nodalities blog shortly.

As Tom’s abstract for next week notes,

“We are beginning to see a new interaction paradigm for the web: the Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA). A VPA is task focused: it helps you get things done. You interact with it in natural language, in a conversation. It gets to know you, acts on your behalf, and gets better with time. The VPA paradigm builds on the information and services of the web, with new technical challenges of semantic intent understanding, context awareness, service delegation, and mass personalization.

Siri is a virtual personal assistant for the mobile Internet. Although just in its infancy, Siri can help with some common tasks that human assistants do, such as booking a restaurant, getting tickets to a show, and inviting a friend.”

Siri’s first incarnation will be in the form of an iPhone app, which Tom describes in the podcast.

Have a listen, and see whether you think a VPA will become an essential part of your mobile life anytime soon…

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Tarry Singh draws my attention to National Cloud Computing Day, which comes to the UK on Friday 12 December.

The creation of UK-based KashFlow, National Cloud Computing Day

“is being organised… to encourage UK small businesses to evaluate online applications and speed up the migration from traditional word processing, spreadsheet, accounting, email and contact management systems installed on computers to their web-based counterparts.”

KashFlow managing director Duane Jackson is quoted as saying,

“Throughout the world businesses are discovering web-based software and it’s important that UK small businesses don’t get left behind.  They are already enjoying the benefits of a wide range of online services which are virtually indistinguishable – and often superior – from there [sic] installed counterparts.

The Cloud Computing Day challenge is simple – for small businesses to exclusively use online software in their day to day business on December 12th. This is a fun challenge with a serious message.  And we hope National Cloud Computing Day will help to raise awareness of a more efficient, economic and flexible way of working.”

This is in large part, of course, an attempt by KashFlow to gain free publicity for themselves and their award winning online accounting software. As they’re not attempting to disingenuously disguise their involvement, I have no problem with that, as it may well attract some attention to the wider issues around moving applications and data to the Cloud. The Financial Times, for one, has a tradition of seeing how technology might change business on the ground, and the paper is clearly looking closely at the Cloud.

I do wonder, though, if the emphasis on ‘online applications’ is misguided? Looking at my own behaviour, the biggest shift has actually been to move my data to the Cloud rather than the UI through which I choose to interact with it most of the time.

A quick skim of the applications currently running on my machine shows that every single one of them is tightly enmeshed with the Cloud, and every single one of them has (more or less) a Web-based interface that I am consciously choosing not to use whilst sat at my desk watching snow fall across East Yorkshire.

NetNewsWire, Twhirl, Mail, ecto, iCal, Adium, Skype, OmniFocus. And Firefox of course, but that’s different. All are running locally on this Mac, but all are working with data that I can access at will from my iPhone, and all (except OmniFocus?) are also available to me by various means on any net-connected computer with a half-decent browser.

There are plenty of sound business reasons to move toward Cloud-based software, SaaS and the rest. For the end user, though, the biggest challenge must surely be demonstrating the value, security and flexibility of moving data to the Cloud. Leave the decision about whether they actually read their Gmail via google.com or download it into Mail to the individual; they have reasons for their decision, and those reasons work for them.

Right, back to watching the snow. I look forward to seeing whether Duane’s initiative gets any traction next Friday.

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“Now that is actually different than what many Cloud aficionados are doing. They, I would argue, are still focusing on how infrastructure and software will be the difference in the Cloud. I don’t feel that way. The real difference that the cloud will bring about will be in how people interact with the services they care about.”

Using his admiration for the iPhone as the hook (yes, I like mine too), Daryl goes on to argue that;

“Make no mistake. The cloud is about services – not about infrastructure or software. And, what people do with those services will be the most telling bits of reality surrounding this emerging phenomenon called Cloud computing.”

The infrastructure and the software are, of course, vitally important components in realising the Cloud’s potential, but Daryl clearly has a point when he reminds us that we’re all doing this for a reason. A significant proportion of those getting excited about the Cloud today are ‘just’ getting excited about the technology. They’re getting excited about speed, and size, and APIs, and technological disruption.

I’m certainly interested in the technology, but I get excited by the things that become possible when it is put to work; when large sets of resources are put in the hands of a large and interconnected network of people.

That’s why I see so much opportunity in the convergence between the technological, social, economic and strategic threads so loosely labelled ‘Web 2.0,’ ‘Cloud Computing,’ ‘Semantic Web,’ and ‘Linked Data.’ Alone, each is technically interesting (and, possibly, even exciting.) Together, they move us to a whole different level. And that is what this site will increasingly be about.

It sounds as if Daryl may share at least some of those sentiments, and I look forward to the journey.

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