"On December 3 1992, engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone. It simply read "Merry Christmas", and Jarvis had no way of replying."

The Short Message Service turns twenty years old today. It's hard for us to consider a world without such common technologies as the SMS and easily accessible mobile communications but think about that statement for a second.

SMS is only twenty years old.

Only twenty years ago a technology came along that has radically changed the way people communicate, in both business and social environments. Think how much harder things would be now if SMS wasn't easily available? The most amazing thing about SMS is that is isn't all that complicated in comparison to most smartphone functionality. SMS is accessible to everyone with a mobile, through a common interface. It doesn't require a special network protocol or data system, it is truly available to everyone, all around the world.

Think about the impact that SMS has had on changing the English language, think of how much English has changed due to the short nature of messaging, look at terms we are all familiar with now (Lol, BRB) that have come around specifically due to human interaction with the SMS technology.

From its humble beginnings things have changed. People are innovators, and they have driven the SMS message on to greater and greater things, like MMS and now modern messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype. These are all essentially driven from the SMS concept.

You can read a lot more information about the background of the SMS here, from the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/9718336/Text-messaging-at-20-how-SMS-changed-the-world.html

Or the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/06/sms-text-messages-20th-birthday

My thinking is that the mobile landscape is still a very new and exciting environment. The technology landscape is still forming and innovations like SMS are frequent and game changing.

The coolest thing about SMS technology for me? Working for the company that made SMS a reality, and that 4 billion people use every day.

A recent blog post on www.overclock.net sparked my interest in a particularly strange decision from Razer. Razer are a hardware manufacturer that produce gaming peripherals, like Mice and Keyboards.

To use your new Razer device as the amazing multi button, Macro driven gaming peripheral that it was designed as, you have to have an account and a profile with them. Without this account your mouse reverts back to a 2 button standard Microsoft mouse.

To facilitate this account Razer have released a new version of their peripheral profiling software, Synapse 2.0. Synapse 2.0 requires allows you to create an account to store your profile information against, things like settings and device profiles. Users have noticed that this software creates your account in a Cloud space. This has the knock on effect of a user having to be online when they create the account, and being online every time they want to use the device.

Essentially if you aren't online then your account cannot be verified and your settings are not used. Now if I were writing requirements for mouse management software, being cloud based would not be one of them. There is one tenuous reason for a cloud based profile (same mouse used on multiple machines) but other than that the only technical reason I can see for doing this is tracking.

Razer just want to know what you are doing. It's all about usage stats and product tracking. By doing this they now have a profile of exactly which of their devices are in the market, and the numbers of those devices. Couple this with average life of a device and you start to get pretty good sales forecasting, if you can work out how many people will re-purchase one of your products if the existing one fails.

But I can't shake the feeling that this is a really poor use of a Cloud based solution. The user gains nothing from it at all, and is restricted at a fairly fundamental level if they don't agree with it. Personally a software firewall will block this every time for me, and I can't think a decent reason to let it through.

Having been with a new company long enough to have completed architecting a few projects I've started to look around to see where I have a lack of knowledge of a domain or a technology base.

Rather than sticking to a single technology base or domain its important to stretch your knowledge into a wider arena.

Sticking to a single type of technology breeds complacency and over familiarity, also how interesting is it day to day just going over the same information?

With that in mind I've been looking for a suitable tool to enable me to map my current skills to technology domains. In this way I'll have a bit of a better view of where any skills gaps lay. Previously I've used tools like Excel and Word, I've even put together relational databases to catalogue this kind of data. What I am after is something a bit more visual, that will show a view of a domain or technology spectrum (for example networks, comms, VOIP, etc) alongside a grade of knowledge. This could be represented as a colour scale or something else.

My initial thoughts are to use a Mind Map to try and do this, as I can create a tree style diagram that branches out into different domains easily, and I know I can colour each branch differently. If it works for me I plan on trying to roll it out to the team, then we can create a collaborative map as well.

Is this something you've ever done? If so what tools did you use? Did you end out with something that highlighted potential directions for you to explore?