Like the rest of the Hydrapinion team, I'm back home from a three day conference where the local IT media, PR agencies and vendors get together to shoot the breeze and share what's important to them. Sure, we have some fun, but even the social times had us talking shop.

Out for the conference I wrote a couple of new stories for APC (you'll find them in this listing of all my stories at APC). However, a couple of things came to me that I thought would be interest.

Firstly, Australia's National Broadband Network is already here. Research firm Market Clarity showed conference delegates a preview of their Austrlaian Telco Atlas. It is crystal clear to me that almost all populated parts of Australia have access to the Internet over, at least, a 3G connection. The real problem we have with this service is its ownership.

Secondly, an increasing number of people need to have more than one service provider in order to service their home and mobile needs. Local telco gotalk (www.gotalk.com) announced that they'll be offering a new Internet service where you can use both mobile and ADSL from the one account. Think of it like a bucket of bandwidth. When you use ADSL, a tap at the bottom of the bucket will open and you can use the bandwidth. If you're on the road, the tap opens but you empty the bucket faster. That's because mobile broadband costs more than fixed today. My story on APC can be read here.

For the regular readers and new visitors, this will probably be my last column under the "Carry" banner. After writing about the mobile space since the establishment of Hydrapinion I felt like a change. So, I'll be writing about social media under the banner of "Socialise' - probably from next week.

On Tuesday morning, with much hoopla and fanfare, Telstra announced at the annual GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that their NextG mobile broadband network would be given a speed bump up to speedy 21Mbps - that's better than what most Australians get on their ADSL connections. Of course, it will all depend on whether the rated speed is anything like what will happen in the real world.

Just to prove to the world that it really is the fastest mobile data network on the planet they even enlisted the support of an official from the Guinness Book of Records, Chris Sheedy, to show up and officially give NextG the Guinness Stamp of Approval.

Now, all of that sounds great and kudos to Telstra for doing the work to build a network that does deliver acceptable mobile broadband to most of our sparsely populated continent. But really, what's the point of the Guinness World Record? Is there anyone that doesn't know that the rated speed is very unlikely to be achieved by the majority of punters.

In order to actually achieve the rated 21Mbps punters will need a new modem (I'm sure they'll be free to existing customers - not!). Incredibly, even though the network with the right hardware is being touted as a 21Mbps network. The press release says

Customers using the Turbo 21 modem in enabled areas will experience download speeds ranging from 550 Kbps to 8 Mbps.

In other words, the name of the product and all the hoopla is a little bit inflated. Frankly, it reminds me of a bunch of teenage boys arguing over who's is bigger. Sure, it might be faster than their competitors in certain conditions but it seems a little over the top to call it a 21Mbps service.

Just for the record, I pay for my own 3G data service with Three - the carrier that's in the process with merging their local operation with Vodafone. I'm also a Telstra shareholder.

My home state, Victoria in Australia, has been subjected to the worst bushfires in Australia's recorded history. Many tens of thousands of hectares of land have been burned, hundreds of homes lost and the human toll is expected to reach 300 people. I have several friends who have lost loved ones and I have friends who have been trapped by the flames and had to defend their properties and lives. To give some context to the severity of the fires - a fire rated at a severity level of 100 is considered to be uncontrollable. The Victorian fires were rated at 400.

Given that many thousands of people are currently homeless and living in makeshift tent cities, it's not surprising that they lack for many of the things we all take for granted. On Monday I received this email:

If anyone has any mobile phone chargers, they are in need in Whittlesea. Please drop them off to church office by mid morning Tuesday

It's funny how it's the small the things that we take for granted. But how does one source mobile phone chargers? Sure, there are probably hundreds or thousands of these lying spare in people's homes from phones that have been replaced but how do we get to them? It turns out that you only have to ask - in the right place.

I put a request out through some email lists I'm on and Twitter. My message on Twitter simply asked for mobile phone chargers for the bushfires and asked folks to SMS me or send me a message via Twitter. My original request was retweeted many times and by the next morning I had about 50 chargers, mobile phones and other accessories. In addition Nokia have supplied 300 chargers and Motorola and their PR agency have come up with some more phones and chargers.

This post isn't about me - it's about all the people who've freely given to support those who've suffered. And it's about the power of tools like Twitter. Many have dismissed Twitter and being useless but this week it's proven its worth in uniting strangers to a common cause.

It seems that reports of Palm's death were greatly exaggerated. Heck - I'd written them off completely but the new Palm Pre has buoyed the hopes of a market that's all but dominated, at least as far as mindshare goes, by the iPhone. As far as hardware goes, the Pre is unspectacular. It seems to be something of a cross between the iPhone and the HTC Touch Duo. The magic of the Pre is in the software.

The all new webOS replaces the aged Palm OS. Personally, I hope it signals the beginning of the end of Palm's licensing agreement with Microsoft for Windows Mobile. While that arrangement probably saved Palm in the short term, it seems to have stifled the innovative spirit that established Palm as the leader of the handheld market. If Palm gets past the veiled threats that Apple has levelled with regards to patent infringement then it will have a product that is capable of competing with the iPhone's market cachet.

The biggest challenge that Palm faces is regaining their credibility. While they kept releasing incremental changes to the Treo form factor and sticking with either Palm OS or someone else's OS the market moved on. HTC has a stack of smartphone models on the market, there are plenty of solid offerings in the BlackBerry range and Nokia, Sony Ericcson and Motorola have so many different models on the market that it make my head swim.

Palm achieved something at CES this year that it's not been able to manage in some time - getting some positive spin. I predict that they'll also get on the netbook bandwagon with the Foleo 2 and will release it to market at the same time as the Pre. Armed with webOS, the Foleo and Pre could make a killer team,

One of the things I've come to expect when being on the road is that there will be times when my data is somehow out of sync. I run a reasonably robust infrastructure in my home office with a NAS that I can access via FTP, a desktop system that I can access over the Internet using VNC and use shared data services between my desktop and laptop.

The problem is, when I'm away from the office for more than a few hours, something that happens practically every day, the information I have on my laptop and the information back home are out of sync. Some of this is easy enough to deal with. For example, if I add something to my diary and my wife needs to know, I have a shared calendar that automatically syncs to her computer. We use Macs and so i can do that by sharing an iCal calendar over MobileMe but the same can be achieved with Google Calendar at no cost.

With files that need to be kept in sync in near real time, I use the free Dropbox service. Any files I add, edit or delete from my laptop's Dropbox folder are automatically synced up to the "cloud" and back to other systems that are linked to the same Dropbox account. The free service is limited to 2GB, which is enough for my needs, but that can be upgraded to 50GB for $99USD.

FTP back to the office NAS works well enough although the initial set up does require some technical nous. Fortunately, in lieu of that, I found good instructions through Google! With that access, I can send and retrieve data to the office. It's particularly handy when I've forgotten something as I store everything on the NAS. Very little user data resides on the hard drives of the computers in my home or office.

So, I'm curious. What strategies do other folks have to avoid their data getting out of sync and fragmented when they're out and about? Do you use remote services to sync data or just do a manual sync when you're back in the office? Have you found a solution that you'd like to share? I'm keen to hear your thoughts.