Whenever I travel, I usually research providers beforehand to try and find those with greatest coverage. My research on India led me to believe none of the providers were that great – with no one providing 3G outside the major cities. So, I went with my second strategy for selecting a provider – the one that has the best presence at the airport.

As of today, I still don’t have internet access working on my iPhone. I’ve wasted about 3-5 hours with various Airtel employees and researching online, below is a summary of my experiences:

• Been straight up hung up on at least 10 times by agents working their “help” line.
• Been SMSed 5 times that “Your phone will be activated within 24 hours” to no avail.
• Been redirected multiple times to a “supervisor” whose phone simply rings forever
• Been redirected to a manager who told me “maybe in 4 days it will work, thanks for calling!”
• Talked to at least 4 agents who could not speak english, this despite me picking the english option via the automated system
• Been laughed at by Airtel employees in Kerala who told me “you had to activate it in Delhi!”
• Found that even in Delhi, there is only EDGE coverage – meaning even if you get internet working, it’s dead slow.

In short, I simply can’t believe the incompetence of Airtel. It is truly shocking. If you are a traveller looking for mobile access while in India, pick any other vendor – there is no way you could have a worse experience.

SmartBro Network Settings

After doing some research, the best providers for 3G internet access around the islands of the Philippines seem to be Globe and Smart – with Smart ahead by a landslide. As you get off the plane in Manila, there are a number of Smart booths where you can pick up a SIM for 40 pesos (about $1 Canadian). They’re even open late as we got in at 11pm and they were still staffed. If you arrive at 3am, there are vending machines to provide the SIM cards.

Enabling 3G access on our Nokia E51 was simple – simply text “SET E51″ to 211 and you’re done. Internet is 40 pesos per hour.

The iPhone however, wasn’t recognized and required going to the SMART Wireless store in Robinson’s Mall as the telephone operators were pretty clueless. I’ll save you the trip – in order to enable it you can simply text “SET E51″ to 211 and then go into your network settings and enter “Internet” into the APN field.

You can also get a USB Internet stick for $22 Canadian if you prefer to plug that into your laptop over tethering. I’m hoping the USB stick will work with Airport Extreme so I can setup a local wifi network to share the 40 pesos per hour rate.

One of my favourite sessions was Banking the Unbanked: Opportunities for P2P in the U.S. and Developing World. Long interested in microfinance and mobile payments, it was great to hear some of the latest statistics and more detail about stories like M-PESA in Kenya. Basically M-PESA stole majority of the Kenyan market for money transfers in just 1 years time from Bus and Postal companies. A few of the interesting mentions in the session:

• 75% of the world’s phones are in the developing world
• Most of this 75% uses a prepaid service
• Just-in-time education is working when it comes to the underbanked
• People are using balances on their phones as a savings account
• Mobile is the first communication technology in the hands of more poor than rich
• 1 billion unbanked have mobile phones
• Cash to prepaid minutes has been a big success (see M-PESA)
• What other technologies will evolve that allow people to turn cash into online cash?
• Blue Label mentioned that In and Out channels are extremely important

During the VC Keynote on the second day, one of the speakers mentioned how in China today 95% of the business is being done as cash on delivery (COD). That said, they saw big opportunities right now in B2B payments, Prepaid and Overseas.

In the panel discussion on Digital Goods and Micropayments, the rep. from Offerpal shared that upon localizing their PayPal “Buy now” button, they saw an immediate 20% increase in conversions. Someone else mentioned that when they tested credit card only payments their conversions declined. There was general consensus that the more ways to pay the better – credit cards, PayPal, mobile etc.

The new APIs will definitely help streamline the user experience and there was big news around reduced cost if the buyer has funds on balance or is funding via bank transfer. Basically, where PayPal is able to cut costs on moving money in, they seem to be willing to cut costs in turn on money moving out to you.

Parts of the conference felt a bit heavy on the marketing, and the wifi was horrendous, but overall I think probably exceeded expectations on both sides.

I think PayPal has made a very smart move in reaching out (marketing to) the developer community. Those companies who can create a vibrant developer ecosystem can ride the wave of innovation from the crowd to a dominating market position as has been proven recently by Google, Facebook and Apple.

With all the flights I was also able to start and finish Paul Theroux’s Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. It was entertaining enough to keep me glued for 8 hours straight on the way to San Francisco.

The service I’ve been using and highly recommend is fring – and other than the unlimited data plan on my Thai SIM it hasn’t cost me a thing. After years of being gouged by local Canadian phone and cable companies, there was a certain euphoria in being able to call fully across the world from a tropical island for absolutely nothing.

• Handling all the different RSS variants is still not simple (many feeds aren’t even valid). After harvesting direct turned out to be challenging, I switched to using Google Base to authenticate with Google and then retrieving feeds from the undocumented Reader API (still waiting for official Google Data API) – eg. http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://www.yourfeedaddresshere.com. This way at least Google has done the work for you in terms of standardizing the feed to a common format, atom, and ensuring validity.
• Converting contents encoded with HTML entities is easily undone using the htmlentities gem.
• You can skip ruby-feedparser and simple-rss and move straight to hpricot, especially given the clean results from Google Reader.
• A rake task is perfect for scheduling and queuing updates (make sure you throttle and cache appropriately).

def googiespell
  @lang = params['lang'] || 'en'
  @payload = request.raw_post
  http = Net::HTTP.new('google.com', 443)
  http.use_ssl = true
  path = "/tbproxy/spell?lang=" + @lang
  response = http.post(path, @payload)
  render :xml => response.body
end

Does anyone know of a Jquery plugin that could be used in place of Googiespell?

Registration, originally uploaded by lectroidmarc.

Last week I was fortunate enough to take in the GoogleIO conference in San Francisco. This was google’s first developer conference – a quick 2 day event. As you can see from the photo, the event was well attended. Some take-aways from this past week:

• GWT really should be evaluated on any project with aggressive javascript/ajax use.
• Translation API mixed with crowdsourced editing is a very interesting global strategy
• Steve Souders is diving deep into performance bottlenecks and his presentations are must reads.
• Storage API coming soon to google maps allows you to free your user generated geodata, allowing it be found more easily via google search.
• Android, running on hardware similar to iphone, with streetview maps and overlays would really solve the local promotions/coupon problem
• Still no gdata access to search Youtube via geo. Having this for Picassa might actually take some market share from flickr.
• Google Gears makes me want to find a problem that needs offline access as part of the solution.
• Once they crack facebook, there will only be one choice: opensocial
• The visualization api has a number of interesting components – intensity maps with events would really come in handy

Audience, originally uploaded by duncandavidson.

A photo of myself and Jamie Zettle (I’m behind the guy in focus – in the green shirt) at the Tools of Change conference in San Jose last week.