I'm starting this year with a brand new phone. For the last 8 months I used a Sony Ericsson T68i, but I've been disappointed by this phone. It's true that considering the feature-set it was cheap, but the fact that I had to reset it every few calls because for some reason it randomly stopped working made it a pretty poor phone.

So I went back to Nokia, buying a 6600. This has been a totally weblog-driven purchase: I picked the 6600 after reading Joi Ito's and especially Russel Beattie's weblogs.

It took a while to get it working properly with my Mac (it's not supported by iSync), but after some googling I got it to synchronize with my Address Book (pictures associated with people in the address book are sent to the phone, cool) and I can get on-line via bluetooth/GPRS with my PowerBook on the road.

The built-in camera seems to be almost usable: I can take a picture and send it via email right away, which is kind of cool. The included Opera browser works pretty well and the screen is big enough to let you do some web surfing directly on the phone.

Another cool feature is the ability to use any midi file as a ring-tone and ring-tones can be associated with specific users or groups. I guess I'll let people in my address book choose which song they want to be associated with when they call ;-)

Okay, it's a week old but it's still pretty new, uh?

I have great expectations for this 2004, it's beginning in a far better way than 2003 did.

2003 started with fears of a war to get rid of Saddam Hussein. 2004 is starting with the hope of elections to get rid of the current US administration. The additional good news is that it looks like weblogs and the web in general can influence this process, at least a little.

On a professional level, having just split up with our VCs in December 2002, 2003 started full of doubts: will we be able to survive on our own for the next year? 2004 is starting with the knowledge that we did quite well last year, we managed to develop a cool new product and we have plenty of ideas for this new year. I have a great team of partners and a great group of customers, we'll do wonders in the next months.

On the personal side, 2003 started with the project of a new house and some empty land. In 2004 we will finally be able to move to our new home.

So, happy new year to everybody. Thanks for being here, fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride: it's going to be fun.