Blog by Paul Golding

Cool Platform job at O2...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:37:00 GMT

Within the Futures and Innovations group at O2, I currently lead the technical "Platform Strategy," which is all about finding new ways to enable open innovation and co-creation of services that utilise underlying O2 assets for a number of ends. I also lead the O2 Incubator scheme (more experiment at this stage), which is thus far going well.

There is a job opening within the newly formed platform team.

However, this isn't just about Network-as-a-Service (listen to my podcast interview "Open Mobile" with Andreas Constantinou). Much of the role is about looking at new platform opportunities - i.e. creating new capabilities and new network effects that combine with the substantial O2 (and Telefonica) base. There is a lot of thinking and experimenting to be done in the area of low-friction interaction between telco services and Web. Much of the platform work involves re-thinking what a "connected service" is in the age of the "Social Web." Lots of telcos talk about this stuff. I'm trying to do stuff, not just talk about it.

Under my technical direction, we have begun a series of experiments, such as the creation of #Blue, which is an evolution of the original Bluebook service, but built entirely using lean-web methods and atop of modern scalable storage (e.g. MongoDB). Whereas the original Bluebook was (and is) positioned as a "back-up", which is a useful and highly requested service, its delivery is relatively closed, unable to exploit the potential for other services using the data.

One of the innovation questions for #Blue is how might interactivity with texts on the Web create new types of user experience, somewhat uniquely because of the network ability to carbon copy text messages in mid-flight. One way to find out is to try new ideas, which is easier when using a lean-web set-up. The other is to let innovators dream up their own ideas and build them on top of the #Blue API, which is what we did at the WarbleCamp hackday, leading to Adam Burmister's interesting smsowl.com hack, which copies P2P texts to Twitter if the sender includes a #owl tag.

Although I'm told that the use of the term Ninja is now un-hip, the role was originally penned as "Platform Ninja." Of course, I should explain the term... It's a multi-tasking role that requires a fair whack of strategic thinking supported by an acute knowledge of Web trends (social and technological) and Web technologies, combined with the ability to code. The coding skills need to be proficient hands-on and able to work or play in a range of languages and frameworks in order to build demos and try out ideas, or perhaps just to sniff around an interesting open source project or API to see what's up. The role requires the combination of all these skills to their maximum combined effect, hence "Ninja."

As a strategist and technologist, you will need to demonstrate clear thinking about the future and then be able to evangelise it. However, this isn't about creating slide decks. As a coder, you will need to show the next step ... to go build something, or find a way to get it built, thereby demonstrating or proving that the strategy makes sense.

If the role sounds fun and exciting to you - then waste no time in applying.

Big Data, Spawn, Connected Services and Other Stuff

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:20:00 GMT

I thought that I'd just give a summary post of what I've been up to and thinking of late in my many wireless wanders.

As many of my associates know, I spend a lot of time consulting at O2. I'm now responsible for platform strategy. I was already playing a "tech push" role, evangelizing various Web and start-up methods into the enterprise as a catalyst for new types of thinking and innovation. This is how I founded the O2 Incubator. I can report that the winning teams and ideas, which I hope to share with Debi Jones on the new Telefonica Developer blog, are showing exceptional promise. The "incubator experiment" appears to be working. One idea is in the area of business events aggregation and the other is in sentiment analysis of UGC sources. The teams are fantastic and I really get a buzz out of watching them develop their ideas.

(p.s. for those of you interested in working in the O2 Platform team - tech visionaries with the ability to still think in code when necessary - I'm looking for a couple of "platform ninjas" to join the team.)

As for platform strategy, my focus is mostly on trying to put the right ingredients in place to enable open innovation. This isn't just about NaaS and APIs. There are many ways to think about platforms. The issue is trying to get the telco mindset to adopt a different method of working where the final result of a project isn't known in advance, unlike most projects in a mature operating environment. In this sense, much of the education and evangelizing internally is about trying to encourage "start-up" thinking.

We successfully used start-up-think with the #Blue project, a new take on the existing (poor) Bluebook service. It was an experiment in pursuing various "Lean start-up" and Web-venture methods, that I won't elaborate here, but which proved to be very useful. The project will continue into a live service beyond the current prototype. There are some very exciting developments in the pipeline, many of them radically different to the telco "business as usual" approach.

I am on the fifth chapter of my new book (working title "Connected Services.") I'm currently writing a chapter about the "Big Data" developments on the Web. It's a wide set of technologies dealing with data sets big enough to require distributed storage and processing. This rapidly leads to the exciting area of schema-less storage solutions, like Hadoop, MongoDB and Cassandra. These are all interesting, but I'm much more interested in the "meaning of data" - analysis, statistics, regression, prediction etc.

I like what Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, said in the Jan 2009 McKinsey Quarterly:

“The *sexy job* in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.”

I got excited because my wife has a statistics degree and I spent most of my early career working with signal processing, pattern analysis, even neural networks. Perhaps a new career as a "Big Data Guru" is in order. At least I know many of the tools for "thinking" about data. (That said, when I read my 1997 paper about Fuzzy Clustering recently, fuzzy is what it was - I couldn't think how I'd ever written it!)

Ultimately, the analysis of data is where the action is ultimately going to be. Big Data is really about getting value from the processing of unthinkably huge amounts of data. For some interesting provocations, I suggest reading the book Super Crunchers.

By the way, I recommend the Kumon maths system for those of you with kids. It's not about stats, but about really getting to grip with mathematics and numbers, based on encouraging independent learning.

And talking of kids learning, some of you will know that I have had various attempts at teaching my own kids computing and programming. I still like the approach of tools like Alice and Scratch. However, the bridge between these and a "grown up" system is very large. Also, I really want something that works on mobiles.

UPDATE [14-July-2010] - Google has the App Inventor, which actually uses the same graphic UI framework as Scratch.

What I'm really excited about is producing my own programming environment. It's merely a thought-experiment at the moment, called Spawn. The essence of the idea is to create a new programming model that is inherently distributed from the start and can run on desk, embedded or mobile platforms. The model is heavily influenced by the idea of modelling processes as organisms. The default UI paradigm being considered is also "virtual/augmented reality." I've written many times before about how inappropriate I find current UI paradigms are for teaching kids about computers - they don't really know of the history of disks, folders, icons, threads and all that stuff. In this regard, this is the genius of the iPad - it's lke a computer without being a computer.

Spawn might sound a bit grand, but the kernel of the idea - and the objective - is very simple: to allow kids to program immediately and to learn through doing, progressing in the same way a child does with reading. I recently met with a programming guru from the Telefonica R&D lab in Barcelona, who had similar ideas. I suggested we just go build it! I'd be interested to hear other views on the topic of making programming accessible to kids.

Eduserv Symposium - The Mobile University (is years behind)

Sun, 30 May 2010 13:22:00 GMT

I recently gave the opening keynote at the Eduserv Symposium 2010 - The Mobile University. (Slides and video below.)

Andy Powell did a fantastic job of chairing the event and of posting a useful summary (back channel - #esym10), which includes links to other participants' thoughts. One recurring theme that I heard was how most lecturers were a long way behind their students in adopting new technologies, mobile included. Whilst not surprising, this is nonetheless a worrying prospect for the future of education, which I expressed as fantastic opportunity for educators and innovators in the UK.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

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Day one of Chirp conference and my hack...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:53:00 GMT

No point in rehashing all the coverage of Chirp, as I have been tweeting live from the event - what else? You can read my stream, or scan the coverage on the #chirp stream (or the #chirpqa back channel).

Just a note here to convey my impressions of the event and to describe my hack.

During the warm-up music, they played Pearl Jam - some old school rock. To me, it summed up the whole event at an emotional level. I recall seeing Pearl Jam backing in their early days. It was their first London gig at the Brixton Academy. The "early days" is the sentiment here. It was one of those gigs that you could say (years later) - "I was there, at their first gig." It was during the early history of grunge about to go mainstream. (The pre-history was lost on UK-ers who couldn't attend the earlier gigs of the Sonic Youth era.)

Ditto the feeling for Chirp, the first ever Twitter developers event. It feels as though this is a special event at the beginning of history. What history is that? The transition of the web to the real-time web, or the "streaming web."

I've been a Twitter user (on and off) since it's earliest days on the radar. I picked it up via a friend who knew that I was working at the time on a site called Thumbcrowd, which was intended to be a text-message group-share service, Twitter-like. With no funding and not a chance, I ditched it.

I can only look with excitement and awe of what these guys are doing. The platform and the ecosystem around Twitter is, to use the fave adjective of the day "awesome." (Although the new verb of the day, which must surely adorn any "streaming web" biz plan is 'Curate.' I'll leave you to discover its meaning in this context.)

This is surely an ecosystem that is here to stay - and about to explode. It will evolve at a rate of knots. Some of the new API announcements from Twitter, like @anywhere and the User Streams are going to blow an even bigger hole in the net. Check out the new Twitter developer site for details.

The announcement, at last, of a business model, is also interesting. Lots of questions about promoted tweets and whether or not the concept of "tweet resonance" is the new secret sauce of search. Who knows? The Twitter execs certainly didn't seem to know. But it seems they're in no rush. Their ambitions are for 1 BILLION users. With that kind of ambition and the talent that they seem to possess, it's not an unlikely target.

Moving on to my hack...

It's a simple idea, but something I had been dying to try.

I have a US number that I rent from Twilio. For the hack, I connected it to a backend that scans my tweets and uses them to control the call. I can DM a tweet to the Twitter account associated with the number and the content of the tweet will be used as the voice announcement upon answering (using text-to-speech).

If I append the hashtag #call, then it means that I'm available to take the call, in which case the announcement will play out, followed by "connect you..." and then a call forward to my mobile. If I'm not available (leave off the hashtag), then it forwards to a voicemail (to email) service (which also includes speech to text).

It seems like the obvious thing to do. After all, if Twitter is all about "my status," then that's what I want to use to control comms. It just seems more natural.

If I miss a call, I get a direct message to tell me the caller ID, so I could phone back if I wish. I had also been thinking to use this to initiate an immediate IM chat online (like one of those Livechat services), but that's for another time.

I'm around at day 2 for anyone who wants a demo.

No such thing as a smart pipe...

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:50:00 GMT

The phrase "Smart Pipe" is an oxymoron, which is a word I love because it says "moron" on the tin - and it's generally morons who promote such nonsensical ideas.

I mean, give me a break. A pipe is a pipe is a pipe. In the real world, what would a smart pipe look like? What would it do? Is it like a hose pipe with a high IQ?

When people use this term, it's just a lame attempt to validate something that doesn't actually exist. If it did exist, then prove it! Show me, Mr Smarty Pipe what you can do....

I'm waiting (last x years)....

Didn't think so.

I've had a GSM phone since they were launched. Heck, I helped design and launch parts of GSM and have the patents to prove it. I was a customer of Vodafone for eons. I would have probably remained so, had it not been for the iPhone. Oh - because Vodafone are so bloody great? Nope. Because who cares?....

They didn't. When I left, not a peep - after 10 years as a loyal customer - going up to 15 contracts with them back in the day of running my own mobile software company before it got screwed between one big company and another over a patent dispute.

Let me boil it down a bit.

I have been running the O2 Incubator program. It was my idea. It's not about smart pipes. It's about smart people. One clutch of bright developers met with me in O2 Media's swanky new Soho offices (nice enough that I might just switch to advertising and use the word "edgy" as my uber-adjective - and thanks to my brother Vince for making up the word "disedginess," which he warned me to avoid.)

One of the developers told me how many hours I slept and when they were likely to be. In other words, he knew my sleep patterns. Pretty cool, although he was slightly off. But when we discussed why, we figured there was probably a way to improve the algorithm. (I would have been even more impressed if it had figured out that I suffer from insomnia, but I think that's do-able too.)

"And how long did it take to write the code to figure out sleep patterns from the net?" I asked.

"I think I started at 5...," turning to his mate, "Was it five?"
Mate: "Yeah, I think it was about 5..."
"And I had finished by about 10..."

Initially, I thought he must have meant "the 5th" and finished on "the 10th," as in "of March," or something. Five days. Not shabby. Then again, maybe he meant his 10th Red Bull. He didn't. He meant it took him five hours. Within five hours he had written some software to go figure out people's sleep patterns based on what they do on the web.

Smart people can do smart things in incredibly small amounts of time.

And that's what matters. Smart pipes, if they do indeed exist (which they don't) are not going to emerge from dumb pipes. Generally speaking, operators fail to escape the laws of entropy. So, dumb isn't about to morph into smart any time soon. The opportunities are there: The brands, the customers, the assets, the golden "billing relationship," and all that other stuff.... except, that is, the people.

It's not that the people aren't smart. They're just the wrong sort of smart.
And I'm probably no smarter...

But those guys with the code and the sleep patterns... they are smart. And there are others like them, like the smart guys I'm working with to create the #Blue service for O2. I didn't even give them a spec. Heck, they knew what to build without me even telling them (did they use that algorithm to figure out my app habits?)

And that's the issue with all this "Web 2.0" stuff and BIG DATA, and every other such meme, pattern and trend on the internet. It's a language, a way of thinking - and even a way of being. There are certain cultural norms in the internet world that just don't exist elsewhere, least of all in a business predicated on building a pipe. Not to underestimate the skill and resources required to build infrastructure, but it's the cathedral, not the self-organizing bazaar.

Marc Andreesen said it well, as featured in my visual tale of BIG DATA and operators, when he said:

"These new companies have built

a culture, processes and technology

to deal with large amounts of data

that traditional companies simply don't have..."

"These new companies have built

a culture, processes and technology

to deal with large amounts of data

that traditional companies simply don't have..."

"These new companies have built

a culture, processes and technology

to deal with large amounts of data

that traditional companies simply don't have..."

The smart bit of the smart pipe, which doesn't exist, is rapidly building up on in the internet, which is what I was trying to say in my pitch at MWC -- skip straight to the last slide for this point. The new "infrastructure" of connected services is self-assembling on the internet. To operate in this world, operators need to become internet companies. OK, the "become" bit is the problem. They can't.

People who build pipes don't get this stuff. It's not their fault. They're good at what they do. Web platform people are good at what they do too - and this is the new infrastructure. It's a software one. It's being built as operators watch.

Get some smart internet people. Figure out how to standardize some of this "connected services - or contextual - infrastructure" stuff and take the power back. It's never too late to innovate.

Start-up ecosystems...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:29:00 GMT

There are an increasing number of ecosystems designed to assist start-ups: mentoring schemes, incubators, developer communities and so on. I have been involved in all manner of these, inside and outside. It is great to be running the incubator scheme for O2. We have had some brilliant applications from lots of great teams. This is just the start - there are many ideas and schemes in the planning.

Meanwhile, start-ups wanting to get more of the action should tune in to the live interview with Chris Shipley of Innovate!100 - as hosted by the brilliant Mobile Jones - see here for more details - http://bit.ly/bppvK8

Some great things on the horizon 2010...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:50:00 GMT

I'm really excited about a few projects just now.

First there's the O2 Incubator, with the deadline imminent (14th Feb). Some great teams have pitched in some really interesting proposals. Next stage is to get down to a shortlist and start moving with some funding. The support and interest from various start-ups and tech enthusiasts has been encouraging, especially given the usual frostiness shown by developers towards operators. I have a shoe in both camps, which is new - and often uncomfortable - territory for me. However, it also provides some unique opportunities. My mission is nothing short of trying to change mindsets and enable some outstanding ideas to flourish.

Then there's the #Blue project, which is one of the most exciting projects I've set up in my 20 years in mobile. Why? Simply because it's a rare chance to combine the power and unique assets of an operator - O2 - with the brilliance of a really cool web start-up, both of whom I respect.

I've spent way too many years, especially whilst Motorola's Chief Apps Architect, knocking on operator doors to preach the benefits of "the Web 2.0 way" as an alternative to death by "Telco roadmap." The same old refrain every time - "what's the biz case?" I'm sure Clayton Christensen should write a book about this! (Or I should? - More on my book about innovation later in Q1.)

My hat goes off to O2 for taking a broader vision towards innovation, thanks to the bravery and ambition of some of its broader minded leadership team. Sure, they want a biz case, but they're willing to take a few risks to get there.

Watch this space for some early announcements about the project and a chance to watch it unfold, especially if you're one of the lucky 1000 beta users who'll get selected to join the fun. Stories already building nicely in Pivotal Tracker - velocity = take-off!

Other areas that I'm working in are OpenID, which has some really interesting prospects for connected services. One of my long-standing fellow mobilists in the industry, Ed Moore, has some interesting ideas in this space. He's a dude!

And this is just the start of 2010. Some even better projects being planned, combining talents and resources from the best of mobile and web, UK and US.

Meanwhile, things are starting to move nicely with mConnected, the emerging mobile social network network, with its recent release of the mpul.se platform that enables threaded conversations to evolve around Twitter, Facebook and anything else visible on the mobile web. Watch out for the PR at MWC...

...which is where I hope to see some of you. Ping me @pgoldiing for a meet-up. (Will be at the AR summit on Weds and presenting on Monday at 4pm.)

O2 Incubator has been upgraded...

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:48:00 GMT

Following on from the announcement by O2 of their O2 incubator program for start-ups, the program has been upgraded to include the possibility that multiple start-ups can be funded in the initial phase. This will enable more than one idea to be run at the same time, so long as the ideas are good enough to impress the O2 SME team, who are the initial sponsors of this campaign.

The upgrade is to enable more ideas to run and was in response to feedback from the developer and start-up community. This is a reflection of how the program is being run in a flexible manner. It was launched with a deliberately lightweight set of principles, hoping that it would take shape as more start-ups got in touch to tell O2 what they wanted.

I seriously encourage budding web entrepreneurs to assemble a small team and apply. If your idea is good, you stand a chance of getting selected for initial funding and then getting through to the extended funding phase towards possible acquisition. It all boils down to how good your idea is and how well you can prove it! It's a great challenge. There are also lots of chances to impress O2 in other ways that could lead to other opportunities for innovators. O2 is always on the look out for hot ideas, especially ones that extend into web and offer meaningful experiences for O2 customers.

Project Raindrop and Project #Blue and 2010...

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:39:00 GMT

One of the exciting projects for 2010 for me is #Blue, which is a project that I am leading for O2. It involves the innovative use of mobile network features blended with web 2.0.

It's more than just a software project. It's also about a whole new way of doing things in O2. There is nothing "Telco" about the project. It will be an experiment in new ways of working and new platform approaches. Lots of open source software will be used, including some platforms from the so-called "No SQL" pattern of data stores. It is also an exercise in design and design-driven innovation. It will be an attempt to find new meaning in old telco habits. As I have argued and blogged for nearly 10 years now, there is just so much wrong with the telco user experience, which is still predicated on old switch-based ideas: connecting numbers, not people.

The web has taken the innovation initiative with so many new ways of connecting and communicating. It is no longer a case of "telco versus internet" - we have, at last, moved on from this, although many old-guard executives still cling to this idea, as reflected in so-called initiatives, like the JIL and RCS. They might happen, but they won't change an industry.

Hopefully, #Blue will set the scene for a swathe of new projects. If I can succeed in influencing a major telco like O2 - by far one of the best operators in the world - to adopt more internet-like ways of thinking and working, then I will be satisfied that my years of running workshops and training courses for operators globally on the theme of "mobile 2.0" will finally have paid off.

So-called "Mobile 2.0" is just a logical conclusion of what mobile and web convergence should have been about - socially enabled apps. It's not as if I'm new to this. I built one of the first ever SMS-Web gateways (96), the first ever SMS connector for MS Exchange (98), then the first WAP connector for MS Exchange (99), designed the first converged mobile/web portal (Zingo) back in 1998 for Lucent, later modified for NTT DoCoMo. I helped launch one of the first ever LBS start-ups in Asia (Metrowalker, HK). And on the list goes...

And this year I am hoping that mConnected, a company that I advise in Singapore, will become successful in the relatively crowded area of mobile social networks, thanks to some interesting features they have planned for the launch. The difference is that back in the 90s, we had to invent and code nearly everything. Today, the array of seriously cool and useful software platforms out there makes it almost impossible to fail - at least at building something interesting. Getting users onboard in the dizzying world of "there's an app for that," is a whole different ball game.

Of course, with O2's acquisition of Jajah, a new era is possibly now under way. The team I work with in O2 was responsible for building the acquisition story and they did a great job of pulling it together. There are some exciting possibilities for O2 with the availability of an all-IP platform and an incredibly talented team. James Parton has already mentioned the intentions for API integration, but I'm hoping that the #Blue project will pave the way for new levels of API performance and functionality, long overdue in the operator world, where they mostly spend years talking about these things, killing innovation in the process.

Similarly, the O2 Incubator, whilst still in its infancy and received with some trepidation by Techcrunch, will hopefully demonstrate new ways of working in the mobile industry. There has been lots of interest from the right sorts of people - including those with a contrary view, which are usually the people I listen to most.

In open source land, one of the most interesting projects to me, apart from the nearly inevitable dominance of Android in 2010, is Project Raindrop over at Mozilla labs. It has a cool architecture and some really great intentions. It has some great intersections with #Blue, which, if I get my way, will also become open source. Let's see....

In any case, I intend to get involved with Raindrop - I've already emailed the key designers - and see whether or not this is a project that the mobile industry should rally behind. If it is, then expect me to be pushing this agenda hard in 2010.

Good luck with all your projects in 2010. If you're interested in working with me on any cool projects, then track me down.... and let's meet up for coffee, chat and back-of-napkin scribbles...

O2 Start-Up Incubation Program - already rocking!

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:51:00 GMT

Launched only last Thursday (17th Dec), the O2 Incubator program has already attracted a number of applicants and potential applicants, and not just from the traditional mobile developer circles. The project has piqued the interest of some web dudes who probably haven't heard of Mobile Monday and don't do app stores. This is great news and I'm excited to be leading this initiative for O2.

Keep in mind that despite having worked with operators all over the globe, I have been one of their fiercest critics when it comes to innovation and understanding the developer mindset, not that I deem to represent that mindset. Actually, it's more like mindsets. To O2's credit, they hired me as a consultant with a two-word job description: "Be disruptive."

That's where the O2 incubation scheme comes in and how it should be understood. This is not really about O2 following a chapter from the corporate manual. This is not a standard corporate play for them at all. It is not part of a grander plan, nor is it, as one developer suspected, just a cheap way to get some funky web stuff done. It's mostly an experiment, but one that O2 is seriously prepared to back.

The essence of the story is that O2, with its significant marketing expertise and customer base, has some insights into user behaviours and needs. Here, we're talking about SME customers. When I sat down with Simon Devonshire, who heads up SME marketing (and inventor of 'One Water'), he told me that he had been trying to get an idea off the ground that would enable SMEs to network with each other and their customers using the web.

My response was simple - O2 can't do this. It's too "webby" and needs a crew who understand how to innovate on the web. Sure, there are some potentially great cross-over points with telco and more traditional services, but it's essentially a web play. So I tossed in the idea of incubating a start-up, leaving them to innovate using the language of web innovation that a telco can't speak. And so the incubation scheme was born.

Those (few) developers who have ever worked with an operator will know what a flip this is on the more usual and restrictive supplier arrangement. This really is O2 stepping back to let the innovation happen at the speed of "internet thought" and only lending a hand where it makes sense. The incubation process is deliberately vague because it hasn't been finalised - that will happen in open discussion with the finalists and over the next month. The principles of offering money, support and a potential big pay-off are all there, but the emphasis at the moment is on finding serious talent who can make things happen in code, unhindered by a big corporate breathing down their necks with requirements and project charts. It is truly intended to be a win-win situation for the winning start-up and O2.

The opening launch is seeking entrepreneurial coders who can innovate around this theme of networking for small businesses - a kind of social marketing tool designed for small businesses. However, there are other themes being considered, some in them in really exciting consumer spaces.

O2 has taken a step towards trying a new way of innovating. Elsewhere, I am leading another project to use completely Internet-like paradigms and architectures to build a new service (by re-inventing an old telco one). I got together a group of internal and external talent, including some seriously cool UK web talent (from the Ruby gang) and some Hadoop experts, and I told them that we're going to run this like a start-up. In other words, if there's a "start-up way" versus a traditional "telco way," we're gonna pick the former. This is serious out-of-comfort-zone for some people, but that's how change happens.

I hope to put this project together with the start-up program, which will hopefully grow, and mix it up with some of the other cool stuff that we're plotting behind the scenes of O2 Litmus - watch out for some fantastic developer events that are totally beyond the conventional telco boundaries.

Seriously cool stuff is going to happen in 2010 (my zeitgest commentary coming later - thanks for the reminder from Martin Smith - @mjs1.)

Slides from OpenMIC 3 - Augmented World Mash-Ups

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:04:00 GMT

Mobile Augmented Reality and Mash-Ups

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Slides from NCVO meeting - Mobile 2.0: Ubiquitous Connectivity

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:13:00 GMT

I recently participated in the NCVO Foresight Leading Lights seminar, exploring major themes for technological change in the voluntary sector. I was invited to talk about the key theme of Ubiquitous Connectivity. The slides are an overview of where we are with mobilization of digital services and where we're headed in the next five years.

Mobile 2.0: Ubiquitous Connectivity

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Design-driven innovation - what is it?

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:50:00 GMT

Those paying attention to the latest business books might have noticed the current fascination with design. It's a word that instantly evokes a certain type of meaning, which is usually about the way things look. However, most of the books dealing with design as a business tool are not talking about the way something looks. They are not about the beauty of products. Or are they? It is sometimes hard to tell.

One might be forgiven for having suspicions about this "design fad." It seems like people who have a "design background" are positioning themselves as the new vanguards of business innovation. It is possible to read some of the books and come away wondering what the point was. One is left thinking that "design" is some secret sauce that only the initiated understand.

Roberto Verganti's book more or less says as much, referring to "circles of the initiated" and the "design discourse," which is some mysterious activity carried out by the gods of design, an elite crew who understand what design is really about. Presumably, because we - the lay readers - are not part of the initiated, this is why we might fail to grasp the point of the book by the time we hit the end. We get a sense of excitement and thrill, but come away none the wiser. It's a bit like listening to a coffee taster refer to the "tones of fruitiness" and "waves of acidity" that rise from the swig of espresso, whilst we only taste coffee. We stare at the cup wondering if we're missing something.

At the other end of the spectrum, we hear a lot of people talking about "User Experience," often as if they've invented it. The term is used interchangeably with user-centred design (UCD) and the new god of the user. "We must have participatory design," we are told. It's part of this thing called Web 2.0, where we "co-create" with the user. Isn't it? There are so many variations on the theme, so many experts to go with it.

Is this the culture of design that Verganti is writing about? Is this design-driven innovation?

No, it certainly is not, because, as Verganti relays to us from many of his Italian design contemporaries, radical designers ignore the market (i.e. the user) and simply "make proposals" - i.e. they propose products to it. To the UCD enthusiast, this is perhaps a sin. "What? Ignore the user?"

Let's be clear what Verganti means, although I think he fails to spell it out in his book.

When he talks about designers proposing ideas to the market, he doesn't mean a product designer sitting in the lab whose job it is to make sure that the buttons are usable and the base looks nice whilst supporting the weight of the screen. That might be part of the product process, but it isn't part of the innovation process. To understand Verganti, we should think about artists and art.

When a great painter or sculptor sets about creating a work, they don't set up a focus group and ask "the market" what it wants. They create what they are compelled to create and then propose it to the world. Can we imagine Damien Hirst sending out a survey: "What kind of work would you like: a. picture of flowers, b. a colourful vase, c. a sheep in a tank?"

Great innovators use design to propose their ideas to the world. They bring new meaning to ideas. They transform book cases into works of art, per Verganti's example of the Bookworm. They transform console games into physically charged family experiences, per Nintendo Wii with its MEMS technology.

In effect, they are proposing a new language around with product proposals. With the Bookworm, we are not interested in its capacity to hold books. We are interested in how we might configure it (the worm can be shaped into any curve that the user likes), which books to display and what their combined statement will be about the user e.g. "I am a traveller," for the one who displays a well-thumbed collection of travelogues.

This idea is not too dissimilar to our exploration of culinary languages in a previous post about the different types of chef.

Radical innovators concern themselves with proposing new ideas. They are concerned with meaning. Design is a tool to convey the meaning that the designer wishes to give to the product, service or business. This is the essence of what many of these "design of business" books are trying to tell us. They are not about the process of designing products and how they look. After all, how the Wii looks is of little meaning. What it does, what it enables and what it means to the (mostly) families that use it is what really matters.

Museums, Mobiles and QR Codes...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:01:00 GMT

I recently gave a talk titled "Situational Web" at the Victoria and Albert museum in London (see previous post for slides). The V&A museum is undoubtedly one of the cultural treasures of London. The array of exhibits is staggering, including the inspirational Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook. It is worth a visit just to see this curious codex that from one page to the next jumps from anatomy to optics to lock design to crane design and so on. It gave my kids new impetus to keep their own ideas logs, which I have encouraged from an early age.

My talk was a state-of-the-nation view of location technologies and their intersection with the web, including augmented reality and indoor proximity possibilities. It was interesting to visit some of the Iranian exhibits beforehand to observe a 17th century astrolabe, which must have been one of the earliest location-finding instruments (based on star navigation).

This is why museums are so important. One can absorb different cultural, artistic and scientific perspectives and enter into other streams of thought and design discourses beyond the immediate realms of one's own experiences, especially mobile. This kind of intersection is important in order to foster alternative design perspectives that can lead to radical innovation. As a former silicon chip designer, I'll never forget that one of the key breakthroughs in molecular beam epitaxy (i.e. defining circuits on silicon) came from an engineer whose passion was oil painting. The art of layering and scraping oils led him to new insights for silicon deposition.

Mike Ellis invited me to talk at the museum, himself an inspiring provocateur of new ideas in mobile. He is a museum computer geek, having led the Science Museum's online project. It is no surprise that someone who spends much of their time in contact with a vast wealth of exhibits will have a different take on life, including mobile life. How else would one coin new terms in their presentations, such as "Everyware?"

Mike set up a QR code project for us all to try during the event, using QR codes printed on our name badges and the One-Tag website. I won't explain it here, but rather send you to Mike's blog post about the event, which is well worth a read if you're at all curious about how to use QR codes at your next event.

What I will mention is how my three kids (ages 7, 10, 12) came home from the event and produced their own QR code treasure hunt around the home without any encouragement or intervention from myself. It is a proof point that many of these 'exotic' technologies really are child's play for Digital Natives.

Situational Web Presentation (given at V&A Museum)

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:01:00 GMT

Situational Web

View more documents from Paul Golding.

See you at OpenMIC - augmented reality and location mash-ups unconference

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:20:00 GMT

Thanks to Chris Book (@bookmeister), OpenMIC is rapidly becoming one of the best quality mobile gatherings, simply because it attracts real enthusiasts from across the mobile spectrum - the unconference sessions are superbly creative. Everyone gets to learn or discover something. I love discovery.

Too many events for me are the same old stuff - and too much reliance on well-known brands to turn up and give us their spiel.

I'll be there to present augmented reality and related stuff - "virtual world mash-ups" - my objective is to provide a brief survey of what's going on, make a few connections between different memes and posit some futures. It's just food-for-thought for the unconference sessions.

My good mobilist chum Richard Spence (@spugamola) will be there ready to hack with the Layar SDK! See you there.

Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley - Highlights

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:32:00 GMT

It's always a pleasure to mix-up with different folk from the mobile crowd, especially from such a diverse set of backgrounds across the value chain. I think that the Mobile 2.0 formula for this works well - diverse set of people, community participation, lots of panel sessions.

I'd prefer to see some unconference stuff included, perhaps a quarter-day slot, just to allow the crowd to drive the whole event for a while and get their issues on the table(s).

If you want to see what I said throughout the two days, you can ping Twitter for a search "pgolding mobile20" and "pgolding mobile2" (as the hash tag seemed to changed halfway through day one.

During the developer day (day 2) and wearing my O2 Litmus hat, I ended up taking James P's slot for the "Evolution of the Mobile Web Browser" session, much to James' delight (he's not technical :)

The session was chaired by Raj "Mr Browser" Singh, that dude from Skyfire -- a slightly cool browser ;-)

For me, the most interesting thing happening in the browser space is obviously HTML5, so glad that we had a chance to discuss this and clarify a few of the features and their significance for mobile. Indeed, we agreed that mobile is what is driving HTML5 in some areas. I intend to post some updates here about HTML 5, summarizing its features and significance for mobile. I'll do that by posting an update to my deck that describes the evolution of the mobile web towards the "real-time always-on web."

No need to write a long-winded post about the conference. I will probably post up a few slides to summarize. Meanwhile, a couple of key insights for me came from the VC session. I'd love to pass these along to my fellow mobilist readers - I also plan to update the deck "The Mobile Developer's Dilemma," to produce a more robust document.

Tim Chang (Norwest Venture Partners) suggested that the one area that gets his attention generally, and this applies to mobile, is where an innovator manages to include gaming mechanics into another area, such as gaming with healthcare, gaming with LBS, gaming with music (e.g. Guitar Hero) and so on. We saw a great example of this in the Waze app, which won the Smaato prize.

Greg Franklin (Intellect Partners) also said that any service/app that can lower the cost of healthcare whilst improving it would get VC attention. Greg's an interesting guy because of his long association with operators and trying to help them with innovation via partnerships and innovation programs etc. His word of advice to me was that innovation initiatives inside of an operator have not worked anywhere that he knows of - and can't work! We're kinda getting that, which is why O2 Litmus and other programs (to be announced) lean more heavily in the direction of open innovation. It's still early days though.

With those couple of nuggets, I'll let you ponder on your next healthcare and/or gaming-inspired innovation! Good luck.

I will be attending Mobile 2.0 - hope to see you there...

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:29:00 GMT

Fellow mobilists and bloggers...

I shall be attending the Mobile 2.0 Silicon Valley conference next week, wearing my O2 Innovation Evangelist hat - a grandiose title, but one with some validity that I can explain when we meet. I help to influence strategy.

One really exciting project that I'm pioneering for O2 is in the start-up incubation space, so I'm hoping to get lots of great ideas and insights from the conference.

Anyone interested in meeting at the conference or nearby - please drop me a line - goldingp at gmail dot com. Or you can phone me once I arrive (Weds 14th evening) on 941-350-2364.

Looking forward to meeting up...

M-Thinking, classroom 2.0 and innovation...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:26:00 GMT

There is a huge emergent opportunity for disruptive innovation using mobile technology. It is m-Learning - the use of mobiles to learn new and interesting things. Not only that, but the use of mobiles, eventually, to augment our thinking processes. This is a future of mobile. Correction. This is probably the future of mobile. Call it m-Thinking perhaps.

m-Thinking

The current obsession with mobile is still with the relatively mundane. It is with communication. No doubt, the future of mobile has a lot to do with communication - one of the five Cs that I wrote about in a thought piece for the future of mobile, as printed in Stefan Bertschi's interesting anthology Thumb Culture.

Slowly, we are beginning as a species to understand ourselves. In particular, with the help of various techniques, we are beginning to understand better how we think, although the brain is still very much a mystery and one of the great unconquered frontiers of science.
What we do know is that, by various measures, many of us are poor thinkers much of the time. We might apply faulty logic and reasoning or, more likely, allow ourselves to overly influenced by underlying emotional currents. Goleman was on to something with Emotional Intelligence as a more revealing measure of intelligence, debates about defining intelligence aside.

It is clear that it ought to be possible to augment our thinking processes with the use of computer power. This was the promise of AI. Put crudely, we can think of computers as an extension of our brain's computing power, but one that can be entirely controlled, structured and driven in a direction that we can control. That is, by running an explicit program, unencumbered by faulty logic and emotional influence. At least that's the theory, although we should always remember the old computer adage - garbage in, garbage out. And much of what passes for ‘brain theory’ is garbage.

Clearly, augmented thinking is still very much in its infancy. After all, how many of our current uses of computer could be categorised as aids to thinking. I don't mean the event of thinking. Of course, reading a blog - perhaps this one - will fuel your thinking. What I mean is the process of thinking. The use of technology to assist in how we think about a blog post, a project, an opportunity, a risk, even a piece of art.

Take email, for example. It is still an incredibly crude tool. Having used many of our biggest brains to invent it, all we really have is a faster version of letter writing. Yes, habits have changed and formed around email, but let's not pretend that it's anything that stupendous in terms of augmenting human communication. How many of us struggle to find an appropriate subject for the message? (Why do we need a subject?) How many emails aren’t really communication at all, lacking any cogent point, arguments or calls to action.

Indeed, how many man-years are wasted in corporations by inappropriate messages, inappropriate emails and other inefficiencies of email. We can send letters faster, but we have multiplied the number we receive by an order of magnitude.

Where is the intelligent email program? Where are the education programs to teach us how to use these tools better - to understand their essential characteristics, pros, cons, limitations and so on? Never mind that. We are told by endless numbers of university teachers that many of our school leavers are unable to write. Add that to the email magnifier effect!

Now imagine taking that mass of communications confusion and squeezing it into the mobile? No wonder that mobile email has had such a slow adoption rate. I recall vividly trying to sell my own mobile email solution at a trade fair and being asked by one irate individual “Why do I want it on my phone? I have a hard enough time with it on my desktop.”

Let's hope that the chasm is never crossed, that instead we invent a better means of communication for mobiles before it's too late.
The march of the Internet towards the so-called Semantic Web, Social Web, or whatever the big brains are calling it these days, is clearly a move in the right direction, although to be clear, the semantics we are talking about with Web 3.0 are all about ways of enabling computers to label context and, by implication, derive meaning. We are not talking about a Web connected with the mind, although that is possibly the next step.

If we can use computers to augment our thinking in some favourable direction, then what better opportunity than to use the computers we always carry with us, namely the mobile. It could become a surrogate brain. Most likely, the 'brain' will be in the Cloud somewhere and the mobile will provide the interface, or be the brain's proxy - what we used to called an agent in artificial intelligence lingo.

Putting mobile brains aside for a moment, I'd like to turn our attention to another area of mystery and controversy, which is education. The thing about education is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory. “This” is good for education and “that” is good for education. Fads galore!

Whatever the flavour of the month in education, there is a growing consensus that our current ideas of education are not equipped to deal with various global trends, including the dramatic shift of knowledge working to an artisan activity easily outsourced to low cost brains or scalable IT systems. Many of our educational systems are basically funnels into the world of a shrinking knowledge-based industry. What's the use of a funnel when the thing we're funnelling into is no longer relevant.

This has led various educationalists, both professional and amateur, to posit the idea of Classroom 2.0. It is another 2.0 fudge of ideas, but not surprisingly characterised by common 2.0 attributes: accessible technology, open systems, social-power, relevancy. A kind of Darwinian education system.

It is scary stuff of course. Education, no matter its flavour, has been underpinned since the Industrial age by the idea of measurement and grading. In a world where the education system becomes organic and more real-time in terms of achieving contextually relevant results, the idea of abstract measurement and grading begins to break down. When faced with a problem, what you really want are the tools that enable you to access the higher percentiles of statistical success for that problem. You don't want to be on some bell curve defined in an ivory tower and measured according to political efficacy.

Mobiles are not ideal devices for learning. They’re small, clunky and, if used for a mass-consumption service, like education, require truly universal access, which we don’t really have - so many areas still without any usable 3G coverage.

However, they are potentially disruptive. New devices are emerging (such as e-Readers) and LTE is only “just around the corner.” Once the innovators figure out how to deliver effective personalised learning programs via mobile, educators and educational suppliers (e.g. Publishers) will be challenged by the new order.

Garage innovation

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:08:00 GMT

Some of you are aware that I have been working for O2 as a consultant Innovacion Evangelista (forgive the poor Spanish). I am responsible for putting together various innovation initiatives. We have been doing some interesting experiments with crowd-sourcing, micro-blogging, agile methods, new media and various web 2.0 tools/paradigms that foster innovation (open and closed), many of which deliver a culture shock.

Creating a culture of experimentation and risk is not easy in a heavy operations-centric business where the bulk of innovation is in marketing, not technology. In fact, most mobile operators out there are not technology companies at all. They are operations/retailing businesses, usually extremely good at what they do.

Most operators outsource the bulk of their technology requirements in one way or another. There is very little technology creation, if any. This is a problem if there's a desire to get into new areas of business where the competition are likely to be technology companies able to innovate in any direction that gives a clear strategic advantage. In some companies, like Google and Amazon, the amount of technology creation is quite stunning.

But much of the interesting technology creation is still with the outliers - those band of eager Web 2.0 start-ups who play and build at the same time. And it is here where my attention is going to be focussed with one initiative, which is related to working with start-ups in an innovative way.

This will be an exciting opportunity for any would-be entrepreneurial web developers. And this won't be the usual work-with-an-operator gig. As a developer myself with one of the longest records of working with mobile, I know all there is to know about the friction between operators and developers. Believe me, I don't hold back on my views in this area ;-)

Watch out on the blogosphere and twittersphere for some announcements in the coming month.

Netflix cultures and innovation...

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:30:00 GMT

Who hasn't been impressed by the Netflix Prize? It's another incredible example of open innovation. If you haven't heard about it already, Netflix wants to improve their online recommendation system in order to better predict what types of movie their customers will like. The prize for beating Cinematch by 10% is a cool one million dollars, and so far two teams have edged into the 10% bracket on the leaderboard.

I was impressed by the following paragraph from the competition rules:

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch(SM). Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies. We use those predictions to make personal movie recommendations based on each customer’s unique tastes. And while Cinematch is doing pretty well, it can always be made better.

The statement reveals an underlying culture of innovation. Here we have a company that professes to have "a ... world-class system," and then goes on to say "...it can always be made better."

In search of an innovation culture, I went off in search of more insights about Netflix. It wasn't long before I found their culture guide posted on Slideshare:

Netflix Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Sure enough, Innovation is one of the Netflix core values. Now, ordinarily I'm not impressed by such statements. After all, who doesn't talk about innovation as part of their culture or important to their business? My local DIY store has a giant banner with "Innovation" plastered all over it.

But, clearly, our co-innovators at Netflix really mean it. After all, they're offering one million to better their already innovative recommendation engine. Their tapping into the brains of innovation teams beyond their four walls. Clearly, they're a no-bull company when it comes to meaning what they say about innovation.

As I repeat all too often in various circles that I travel through, it all starts with the people. So-called "Cultural Change," (a team that I HATE WITH A PASSION) is usually something that change agents like to talk about, but seldom have a clue about how to bring it about, other than endless slogans and powerpoint slides that seldom make power(ful) points.

It starts with hiring the right people. And slide 29 says it all. That's an acid test, more or less, for picking the best people. This to me, says that Netflix are fanatical about getting real with talent.

In a company where the existing culture has ossified somewhat, or is falling behind where it needs to be in order to move the company into new era of growth, attracting good people is difficult. Or, keeping them is difficult. But this is because the people aren't given the freedom to have an impact. So, slide 12 is a great value to make explicit in the company culture: IMPACT.

The problem is that too many companies are using the current credit malaise as an excuse to push in the wrong direction. Every single pen and paper clip has to be budgeted and signed off by finance. Big projects are business as usual, but new projects - especially the more experimental innovation stuff - are bottom of the list. This is back to front.

Moreover, it's no good adding the "innovation" buzzword to the corporate smorgasbord of slogans when their clearly ain't any resources being devoted to it. It ends up coming across like the tired mantra of 80s process re-engineers, who essentially demanded "more for less."

As everyone knows, short of finding the magical formula for cold fusion, you can only do less with less, not more.

Web 2.0, innovation and four types of chef

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:11:00 GMT

In a recent discussion with David Del Val, one of the many talented individuals who have joined Telefonica R&D labs, he mentioned an anecdote from one of Barcelona's top chefs. He said that there are four types of cook.

The first can follow a recipe. The second can vary the recipe a little to add something extra. The third can create a new recipe from scratch. And the fourth, a rare breed, can create a whole "new language" of cooking, by which we can think of a new cuisine.

Many projects in industry are run along the lines of the first two - i.e. mostly me-too products and services with little variation. Without doubt, this is the dominant capability of the telecoms industry. If I walk into a high-street mobile shop today, of course the devices are more advanced (e.g. music phones, iPhone), but the product is essentially the same as 10 years ago - buy a tariff.

In fact, it's still a remarkably crummy experience overall. The customer is made to feel like just another anonymous consumer off the street, even if he or she has been a customer of the store owner for years. Very little attempt to match the service/product to the customer. Then again, with hundreds of tariff/product variants, this is hardly surprising, although maybe that's a vector for innovation in itself. Is it possible to use recommendation technology in a store?

This is stunning complacency in such a competitive industry. It's not as if it can't be done better. Walk into any Apple store. Try using the genius bar, as I have. Short of offering coffee and biscuits, which I think they should, it's hard to imagine a better experience. And what audacity, calling it a genius bar. But these guys really are experts. Interestingly, a similar experience is now to be had in B&Q where they have strived to put experts in the aisles. Walk down the plumbing aisle and you're likely to bump into a member of staff who was a plumber for 30 years and can tell a sprigget from a sprocket, or whatever. No surprise that B&Q dominates the DIY market.

How can the telco industry, with its massive resources and revenues, fail to innovate, except, perhaps, in their marketing? The explanation is simple. It's all about mindset, or closed mindset. Whilst the walls may have been lifted from the Internet garden, they remain firmly erected inside of most operators, inside the heads of the employees.

This is not a criticism, simply an observation. And it isn't particularly insightful either. Any group, or even individual, who operates in a particular way for a prolonged period of time, and within a fixed environment, will eventually lack the critical reference points against which to validate their thinking, or to evaluate and discover alternatives. Paradigms are hard to shake once they become firmly rooted into culture.

The thinking becomes embedded in the inane corporate-speak of the organisation, which in turn affects the thinking. For a fascinating insight into this process, read Richard Mitchell's Less Than Words Can Say.

Which brings me back to the cook who can create a new language of cooking. This is the level of innovation required to take a telco into a new realm of services possibilities. And this is also why they fail to grasp fully the significance of Web 2.0, because it actually represents a new language of doing business.

Now that sounds like the fuzzy nonsense spoken by ad agencies when they talk about things being "edgy," and talk about "getting it." But, let me make it simpler. Web 2.0 is more than just technology. There's a whole bunch of people behind that technology and their reference points are quite different to more traditional industries, like telco. They too have their own "corporate speak," (often start-up speak) and various assumptions that perhaps were never written down, but just exchanged by osmosis in the numerous conferences, barcamps and coffee-shop meetings that dominate the industry.

In other words, Web 2.0 has its own culture and sub-cultures. Now, as any cultural studies expert will tell us, you can go study a culture as much as you like, even learn the language. But until you go try to live that culture, it's nearly impossible to gain insights into how it really works.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to happen as much as it should. Most of the relationships between telco and Web 2.0 are at the "let's use some of that Web 2.0 sauce," (e.g. we'll open a twitter account) or the more mundane "show me the money," level of discussion, as if that's the only insight necessary.

Of course, no one is suggesting that telcos suddenly adopt the so-called Freemium business model, or simply give their stuff away for free regardless. That's actually not the point. My concern is that an increasing number of people are adopting Web 2.0 habits into their lifestyle simply by dedicating so much of their time and energy to web-based services, such that eventually they will be speaking this "Web 2.0 language." In cuisine terms, the danger is in spending too much time and energy in providing every innovation possible inside a fish-and-chip shop without noticing that the customers prefer to eat Indian, whether its free or not.

Innovation Management an Oxymoron

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:25:00 GMT

Beware of books and articles that profess to give insights into the management of innovation. The further I dig into the field of innovation, the more I become convinced that innovation management is an oxymoron.

The term management is all pervasive in industry. We have managers everywhere. We see management as an integral part of doing business, as if it were the very oxygen we breathe.

Yet it is a very poor metaphor in the field of innovation. Whilst we can bore ourselves silly debating the definition of innovation, there's no denying that a large part of innovation relates to hope. We can set up all manner of initiatives and processes to facilitate innovation and to create an innovation capability, but we still hope that something good emerges from the innovation resources deployed. This is so evident in so many corporate vision statements and top-down management signals that are, when stripped of their jargon, empty slogans begging for meaning, waiting for some brave imaginative soul to fill the void.

And if our future boils down to hope, then we need to do everything possible to feel hopeful. If we feel hopeless, as many employees do in their jobs - or at least resigned to an outcome beyond their control - then how can we expect anything much to emerge from our resources?

Hope is connected to enthusiasm and optimism. These are two ingredients of innovation that cannot be managed. The word manage has that awful industrial-age feeling of "to cope with," which is hardly a mindset that applies to innovation and creativity.

When I get requests for "sync up" and "co-ordination" and " alignment" and all those other management "control" phrases, I know that the plot has wandered far from where it needs to be, far away from innovation as a force of creation, dragging it back towards the stronger force, tendency and habit of "management." BIG MISTAKE.

Innovation should be allowed to flourish wherever it can find oxygen to breathe. It should be nourished, nurtured, encouraged and given legs of hope. Above all else, innovation requires enthusiasm - trucks loads of enthusiasm.

Do whatever you can do to muster every last grain of enthusiasm from yourself and those around you. Turn yourself into an enthusiasm virus and go infect everyone with it. Go one step further! In a recent whiteboard session with my associate Lars Stalling, ex-Ideo designer and all round interesting person, he suggested that we go further than virus, creating an innovation/enthusiasm retro-virus.

So forget innovation management. It's the wrong starting point. We need to let innovation emerge. We need to spread the virus of enthusiasm. This human dimension is so often missing from the theory books of innovation, all of which seem to start with an industrial-age view of the organisation. Meanwhile, young start-ups out there, totally fuelled by enthusiasm, grow up into large organisations with the enthusiasm virus baked in, but in a way where mutation (innovation) is welcomed, not managed. That's the future of competition. We're not competing with organisations, or even organisms - we're competing with viruses, or retro viruses. The competition is more likely to look like swine flu than bricks and mortar.

So, thrown out the innovation management books! Issue all employees with iPods and a subscription to the most upbeat music they can get their hands on. ENTHUSIASM!

The Design Imperative

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:27:00 GMT

Some of us know the importance of design. There are many who claim to understand design, yet clearly don't. I come across this a lot. For example, there are those who think it only applies to physical objects, like lampshades and vacuum cleaners. So, if I talk about the design of a job, or the design of a project, I just get frowns.

We live in the natural world, but we have filled it with myriad man-made things, creating new environments into which we introduce myriad processes governed, or not, by rules. It seldom occurs to us that all this stuff - everything man-made - is subject to design. We fail to recognise the design element of what we do, or what we use, because we take it for granted, or simply follow a template. In the latter case, what we are doing is copying the previous design, hence we skip the design step. This happens often in much of what we create and use - we fail to recognise the opportunity for design because it's already been done for us, or we just level it out by following convention.

Or, we just don't think about design at all. We create something to fulfill a purpose, which might be just to tick a task off on a long list of tasks in our lives. So, if we need to log patients into a hospital department, we list out all the steps - fill a form, log the form, notify someone etc, and then cobble them together without thinking consciously about design.

Design clearly matters. And what better example than the iPhone, especially with its brilliant 3.0 software upgrade. At last, we have some of the features that we felt were missing, including MMS. Now, this is something I thought that I wasn't going to miss, yet within days of getting my upgrade, I've used it several times already - and received MMS from friends with iPhones. Why? We didn't send each other MMS before (iPhone). It's because it's so damn easy and such a compelling user experience. Why? Because of the beautiful interface design.

And for heaven's sake, weren't some of us banging this message (forgive the pun) many years ago? How mobile phones could be so much better if someone actually took the time to design them properly. And this is my point, coming back to those who claim to understand design, which I think I do - although I'm not necessarily a good designer (except several patents in chip design I guess might count).

I've met countless companies who will tell me that they don't need help with design. "We've got designers," they say, or "We've got our own usability experts," blah, blah, blah - and then they release a crappy product that has some nice design features perhaps, but overall isn't up to the job. It's usually because they too are simply following templates, albeit based on "modern" approaches.

What's missing from the equation is something about quality and insights. And I can't believe how often this issue crops up in life. It's a bit like saying "Oh yeah - we know how to cook," as if merely mixing ingredients and putting them through various cooking processes is what makes a good cook. Clearly, when I do all that stuff, it isn't the same as Gordon Ramsey or Raymond Blanc doing it, is it?

"Oh, we have UI designers," they say, and, as Motorola did for years, give us the worse user experience possible, bordering on offensive.

Design, like innovation and all its components (of which design is one of them) needs to be taught in schools from the earliest age possible, yet I think (in the UK) we would struggle to figure out how to teach it, assuming the education departments think its useful, which I very much doubt.

When I recently met some kids and reminded them that alphabets are human inventions, they were surprised. And when I asked how they might better design alphabets, there were clearly confused by the proposition. "What the hell do you mean?" was the common response.

If we now live in the era of right-brain thinking, we better get real about teaching it.

Innovation and User Experience (and app stores)

Sat, 30 May 2009 14:51:00 GMT

Whilst working as interim Chief Applications Architect for Motorola mobile services, I pushed hard with the theme of user experience. In my view, it should remain high on the agenda and remains painfully misunderstood.

User experience is closely related to insights into the customer. However, these are real insights based on problems they face, not blanket categories or market segment behaviours. We all know that there's probably a group of users with a name like "Millenials" or whatever, and then we can reel off a list of consumer research generalities about the group: impetuous, ambitious, attention-seeking, gadget lovers, blah de blah.

But, will such archetypal insights lead to break-through innovation in products and services? I seriously doubt it. It tends to server marketing departments best, who will understand well how to create various marketing innovations to appeal to the target audience generally. But, and this is the challenge, most of the generic consumer insights data is similarly available to the competition.

In following a vector of marketing innovation based on such themes, the result is often a constant stick-slip motion of successes and failures in the market based on an increasing "fractalization" of product offerings, to use Geoffrey Moore's description of the life-cycle in a maturing market.

A Ford engineer is supposed to have once said that when prospects examine a car in the showroom, one of the first things they do is open and close the doors. Whether they realise it or not, a lot of the prospects are influenced by the sound of the door.

That is real customer insight and leads to a perspective about the user experience. Who, in product planning, would have considered the sound of the doors as a design criterion? A new vector of innovation is opened up.

Turning to mobiles then, as you're probably not in the car design business, the concept of experience is clearly high on the agenda in Apple. Where else would we hear of such design criteria as "icons so nice that you want to lick them?"

Lack of insight into user experience is why many of the forthcoming application store efforts will fail, especially those run by operators. To copy only the app store part of the "iPhone experience," displays a probable lack of insight. The iPhone experience is a collection of parts, all well executed, that when combined produce a compelling user experience. The device, the device OS, the app store, the app store widget (icon), the ability to update the platform, the iTunes store, the developer community, plus other less tangible factors - the excitement of developing iPhone apps, the fun factor of using the accelerometers, touch screen etc.

All of these produce an "ecosystem" that is necessary to deliver a compelling user experience. Returning to the Ford engineer's insight, I am sure that merely putting sound-reduction tape around the doors would not have been enough to sell the car. We see time and again where companies attempt to copy the success of another, such as Honda's attempt to mimic Toyota's Lexus spin-off, and then failing, probably because they lacked some of the other vital ingredients in the innovation sauce. Whole products, whole experiences are what matter. Innovation, or part of it, needs to be intimately linked to the insights into the user experience. And, as if often the case, a compelling user experience is a complex collection of things done well. After all, if it wasn't, then it would be easy for the competition to copy.

And here we are often blind-sided by another generalism in product and service innovation, which is that simple is often far better than complex. The real thing to be sure of is that you have the right set of simple ideas well executed. Doing the right thing in totality is often very difficult indeed. Don't confuse simple with easy.

Mobile Widgets - what are they good for?

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:11:00 GMT

Mobile Widgets

To coincide with an essay that I wrote for Vodafone's Receiver ("Riding the timeline with widgets") about widgets from a user perspective, I thought to post a few thoughts about widgets from the tech perspective.

Widgets are not new, but they are rapidly evolving to offer an attractive user experience and a convenient means for developers to reach users in ways not entirely available via the native or web route.

There is no universal definition of a widget, but most widget technology sponsors tend to refer to them as "mini standalone web applications," or words to that effect. By 'mini,' proponents often mean single function. Even this is problematic. After all, most web apps and native apps really only perform one function, it just depends on the scope of your definition (e.g. "Word-processing" versus "Spell checker")

From a user perspective - not forgetting that the mobile masses don't really know a widget from a wingbat - this "web heritage" tends to set the expectation that widgets, like most web sites, are probably going to be free. Indeed, in all of the various widget vending sites out there, they are free.

Technically, there is no reason why a widget has to be confined to a "mini web app" but part of the problem here is that by calling something a 'widget,' as opposed to an 'application,' we are left with trying to explain, or categorize, what they are. And so, rather unimaginatively, we end up with the stock favourite demos of clocks and weather forecasts. Users will eventually catch-on to the wider potential of widgets, simply by visiting a widget store and seeing the hundreds and eventually thousands of widgets on offer. It will be interesting to see if Apple introduces widgets for the iPhone and supports their distribution via the app store. Technically, there is no reason why a widget can't be signed and DRM-protected. This is just packaging.

The technology underlying widgets is not universal either. So, we have the proprietary widget scripting languages, as offered by Nokia Widsets and Yahoo Blueprint. We have web standards approaches, like Nokia WRT Widgets and Access Netfront Widgets. And we have the Java-bound approach of the new Sun Java ODP.

The overwhelming advantage of the web standards approach is that all those millions of web developers can produce apps for mobiles that load faster than websites because the widget is stored locally. Of course, it has to go fetch data and be quite carefully designed to run efficiently. In fact, there are lots of 'tricks' to designing efficient widgets, but nothing that seasoned mobile web developers wouldn't know. Moreover, the great advantage of the web standards approach, apart from familiarity, is the possibility of sticking with current web-design tools. Apart from the issue of emulation on a mobile device, there isn't really the need for an SDK, as such - just stick to the tools you already know and love. There's some widget packaging to take care of, but this is mostly just zipping of files anyway.

Overall, the web standards approach supports a richer UI with fine control over the look and feel supported by CSS and various Javascript libraries. In theory, there's no limit to the use of existing libraries, such as Prototype and so on, notwithstanding all kinds of very real performance constraints. This is where some skill is required in efficient coding and design. Some vendors, such as Opera, provide 'widget friendly' libraries, such as an animation API.

There are two significant advances that increase the usefulness of widgets. Firstly, on some platforms, widgets can run standalone without requiring the user to first invoke a container application. These standalone solutions mostly involve the widget invoking the web browser 'inside' the widget as a means to display web-standards content. This is the web runtime (WRT) approach, an idea introduced by Microsoft long ago. The key here is that on many new mobile platforms, such as S60 5th Edition, Android and others, the web runtime approach is available without needing to download a 'widgets' upgrade to support running widgets. In other words, many new phones are widget-ready.

What is still missing from the current WRT approach is the ability to support persistence in terms of allowing widgets to consume data whilst 'running' in the background. This is the obvious next step and we keenly await more details of the Palm WebOS to see how they solve this problem. I believe that it is essential to the longer term success of widgets. I recently discussed persistence methods in a previous posting.

With persistent widgets - always active - we can support new modes of ambient communications, such as Twitter or many others that I'm sure will emerge. I recently wrote an essay about 'riding the timeline of moments' via widgets, to be published soon by Vodafone, who are promoting widgets heavily via their Betavine Widget Zone.

The second important evolution is the ability for 2nd generation widgets to access platform services via device APIs that are exposed as Javascript APIs. These give widgets access to underlying phone functions and data, such as the contact book, messaging features, location and so on.

The use cases for widgets are propelled by the possibilities of mixing web-bound services with local phone services. Moreover, unlike standard web-browser models, the AJAX capabilities of widgets permit interacting with websites outside of the origin server(s) for the widget (which is a misnomer anyway because the widget exists as a local XHTML page, not served by an origin server). This enables mash-ups at the client (as opposed to server-side) although operators seem to want to restrict this (e.g. Vodafone Widgets are confined to one host that is pre-defined in the config file) for security reasons.

With device APIs and the increasingly rich capabilities of widget containers (including embedded Flash Lite), the main limitation on use cases is the imagination and having to code within the performance confines of the widget container (e.g. keeping XHTML and libraries local as much as possible, judicious use of CSS techniques and so on). As I hinted above, I foresee that the best and most compelling user experiences will arise from ambient applications that provide the user with a constant drip-feed of data and almost visceral connection with their digital web-bound lives. This is what widgets will be good for. But, there are other opportunities....

There are also potentially new ways for operators to expose their services "over the top" of the underlying handset UI capabilities, which are difficult to update. For example, one can imagine better ways of packaging videophony or self-help. That said, there is no reason stopping operators doing this today and it is surprising how O2 has not offered their own set of iPhone apps to improve the iPhone user's O2 experience, as opposed to Apple experience. The only O2 app that I saw was something to do with Christmas.

This is not a new idea either. Indeed, when I was Chief Architect at Motorola, I tried to get Opera interested in this idea within their browser platform, mostly to expose IMS capabilities to local web apps. These weren't called widgets back then, but Opera had launched something called Opera Platform (discontinued) which essentially did the same thing ahead of the recent advances in browser and underlying platform technologies. Despite being suspended, I still wrote about Opera Platform in my book.

Clearly, WebOS from Palm has taken a similar technological approach, but baked right into the OS, which Opera might have considered (and perhaps still could).

Of course, I'm not sure I would be that keen anymore to support SIP/SIMPLE and its cohorts within the web/widget runtime, but the idea is still interesting nonetheless and could be extended to other use cases. I only suggested it back then (and see it again as a possibility in my slides about real-time mobile web) because it seemed that we would have to wait forever for "IMS phones" and then be stuck with devising an easily accessible and universal programming model to speed up the proliferation of IMS apps. I thought that just as the browser was the universal client for HTTP/Web, why not make it the universal client for SIP/IMS and all the network services behind it. Just another pipe dream! Smart pipe? No. Smart client? Yes.

M-Learning, Classroom 2.0 and Surrogate Brains

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:23:00 GMT

For the next few weeks, I intend to make only one or two longer posts on my blog, rather than the almost daily updates that I've been posting recently (except last week). This is because I'm finding that there is a lot more attention being given to Twitter within the mobile community, not to blogs. That said, Twitter has a lot of issues in terms of attention, fettered as it is by a poor signal-to-noise ratio and too many meta posts. But, that's where the action is, so let's ride with it, for now.

Recently I was involved in one of those modern-versus-traditional debates in which drawing by pencil was being argued for as a superior pursuit to drawing by computer. Of course, the argument is what you make of it. Let's not forget that a pencil wasn't invented to make pencil drawings. It was invented to enable humans to make representations, whether we call that process recording, art, communication, or whatever. Thou shalt draw using a pencil was not one of the commandments that came with it.

Classroom 1.0

Nowhere is the tradition-versus-modern debate more provocative than within the realms of education and learning. At some point in history it was decided that we should all go to school to get an education. Mass schooling in the US was set up by industrialists who needed useful factory workers. Meanwhile, the very idea of "worker" and "citizen" has undergone and is still undergoing transformation in this apparently pivotal age that we live in.

Not surprisingly, the current education methods and choices are quite possibly at odds with current, never mind future, societal needs. Let's face it, we all struggle to predict what things will be like five years from now, so how do we intend to educate ourselves for so uncertain a future? This has caused various thinkers in education to coin the unoriginal phrase Classroom 2.0 (see one example here) as yet another coverall phrase to capture key paradigm shifts that, unlike the web 2.0 memes, are still ideas rather than actual trends in the way things are done.

At the recent OpenMIC barcamp, I pitched in one of the sessions about m-learning, trying to figure out how the mobile might allow new modes of education that extend existing school structures. This is perhaps more Mobile 2.0 than Classroom 2.0 - the idea that our mobiles can move beyond their origins to become something else. Just like with the pencil, thou shalt make calls and send texts was not a commandment that came with the mobile, just a big design and commercial incentive. Interestingly, I know of various iPhone users who simply don't make mobile calls - they email, surf and use apps. They might average about one call per day, if that. That's hardly a mobile phone, is it.

We are missing a huge opportunity with mobile technology. It is m-Learning - the use of mobiles to learn new and interesting things. Not only that, but the use of mobiles to augment our thinking processes. This is a future of mobile. Some say that this is the future of mobile. Call it m-Thinking perhaps.

The current obession with mobile is still with the mundane. It is with communication. No doubt, the future of mobile has a lot to do with communication - one of the five Cs that I wrote about in a thought piece for the future of mobile, as printed in Stefan Bertschi's interesting anthology - Thumb Culture.

But communication is the mere transfer of ideas, thoughts and stuff. It says nothing about what we are trying to achieve. And, it is in thinking about the objectives of communication that we shall uncover the next set of advances, innovations and services in mobile.

At the same time, we are only beginning as a species to understand ourselves. In particular, with the help of various techniques, we are beginning to understand better how we think, although the brain is still very much a mystery and one of the great unconquered frontiers of science. Recent experiments show that when thinking to perform an action (throw a switch), our subconcious appears to prompt the concious mind into doing it. Go figure that one!

What we do know is that by various measures, that we won't discuss here, many of us are poor thinkers much of the time (although there is a well known principle - see Lake Wobegon anecdote - that most of us assume we are good, or above average, thinkers). We might apply faulty logic and reasoning or, more likely, be overly influenced by underlying emotional currents. Goleman was on to something with Emotional Intelligence as a more revealing, or perhaps useful, measure of intelligence, debates about defining intelligence aside (and there are many).

It is clear that it ought to be possible to augment our thinking processes with the use of computer power. Put crudely, we can think of computers as an extension of our brain's computing power, but one that can be entirely controlled, structured and driven in a direction that we can control. That is, by running an explicit program, unencumbered by faulty logic and emotional influence. At least that's the theory, although we should always remember that old computer aphorism - "garbage in, garbage out."

Clearly, augmented thinking is still very much in its infancy. After all, how many of our current uses of computer would you categorise as aids to thinking. I don't mean the event of thinking. Of course, reading a blog - perhaps this one - will fuel your thinking. What I mean is the process of thinking. The use of technology to assist in how we think about a blog post, a project, an opportunity, a risk, even a piece of art. Can you name any thinking tools at all?

Take email, for example. It is still an incredibly crude tool. Having used all our big brains to invent it, all we really have is a faster version of letter writing. Yes, habits have changed and formed around email, but let's not pretend that it's anything that stupendous in terms of augmenting human communication. How many of us struggle to find an appropriate subject for the message? (Why do we need a subject?)

Indeed, how many man-years are wasted in corporations by inappropriate messages, inappropriate emails and other inefficiencies of email. We can send letters faster, but we have multiplied the number we receive by an order of magnitude. If there's one thing you get from this blog post, it should be to go read Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero collection of writings. If I can point you to something that might save you at least the time reading this blog post (times one hundred), then I'll feel less guilty than I do already.

Where is the intelligent email program? Where are the education programs to teach us how to use these tools better - to understand their essential characteristics, pros, cons, limitations and so on? Never mind that. We are told by endless numbers of university teachers that many of our school leavers are unable to write. Add that to the email magnifier effect!

Now imagine taking that mass of communications confusion and squeezing it into the mobile? No wonder that mobile email has had such a slow adoption rate. Let's hope that the chasm is never crossed, that we invent a better means of communication for mobiles before it's too late. And by better, I don't mean more popular and pithy, like text . Of course it's far more successful than email in terms of number of users globally. But trying reading those Novels written by texting on Mobiage. (Hint: don't try! DOUBLE HINT: especially don't try writing one!)

The march of the Internet towards the so-called Semantic Web, or the more marketeer friendly Web 3.0, is clearly a move in the right direction, although to be clear, the semantics we are talking about with Web 3.0 are all about ways of enabling computers to label context and, by implication, derive meaning. We are not talking about a Web connected with the mind, although that is possibly the next step. The Europeans talk of Web 3.0 as the internet of things. Why shouldn't our brain be one of them?

If we can use computers to augment our thinking in some favourable direction, then what better opportunity than to use the mobile. It's a tiny computer that we always have on our person. It could easily become a surrogate brain. Most likely, the 'real' surrogate brain will be in the Cloud somewhere and the mobile will provide the interface, or be the brain's proxy - what we might called an agent in old-school artificial intelligence lingo.

Putting mobile brains aside for a moment, I'd like to turn our attention to a related mystery and controversy, which is education. The thing about education is that everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory. This is good for education and that is good for education. Fads galore!

Whatever the flavour of the month in education, there is a growing consensus that our current ideas of education are not equipped to deal with various global trends, including the dramatic shift of knowledge working to an artisan activity easily outsourced to low cost brains or scalable IT systems. Many of our educational systems are basically funnels into the world of knowledge-based industry. What's the use of a funnel when the thing we're funneling into is no longer relevant.

As I mentioned earlier, this has led various educationalists, both professional and amateur, to posit the idea of Classroom 2.0. It is another 2.0 smorgasbord of ideas, but not surprisingly characterised by common 2.0 attributes: accessible technology, open systems, social-power, asynchronicity, relevancy. A kind of Darwinian education system.

It is scary stuff of course. Education, no matter its flavour, has been underpinned since the Industrial age by the idea of measurement and grading. In a world where the education system becomes organic and more real-time in terms of achieving contextually relevant results, the idea of abstract measurement and grading begins to break down. No sooner have we defined the metrics of measurement than the thing we're trying measure becomes irrelevant.

Somewhere in all this mix of ideas about thinking and education, there is undoubtedly a role for technology and, possibly more significantly, mobile technology. Classroom 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 seem on paths destined to intersect at some point in the very near future. There are many challenges ahead of us, but also many opportunities. Ironically, it is the next generation - the ones that we struggle to educate - that are going to have to figure this all out.

Good luck children!

Ambient communications - from openMIC Barcamp

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:23:00 GMT

Yesterday I attended the openMIC barcamp at the Bath Innovation Centre, along with such luminaries at Dan Applequist (VF) and Tim Raby (OMTP), to name but a few. It was a great gathering with some top mobilists from industry and academia, pulled together by Chris Book.

There was a good mix of topics and levels of interest. Continuing with a recent theme on this blog, I ran a session about Ambient Communications, which is another way of saying "always on" applications. Where possible, we also tried to incorporate the theme of widgets because of the attention they received in the earlier session by Dan, and because I have recently conducted an analysis of the major competing mobile widget systems (from a developer perspective).

I captured some of the ideas in order to post them here. So here goes (in loosely structured note-form):

-- Theme #1 -- Ambient Photostreams

We discussed how frustrating it can be to share photos among friends and family in a "it just works" fashion that is "mum proof" (i.e. mostly disconnected from Internet and probably still a regular TV viewer).

Thoughts/ideas:

1. Ambient photo-streaming widget on the homescreen of "mum's" mobile

2. Family and friends join into a photo timeline (stream) via the widget on their mobiles

3. Photos taken on camera phones are automatically store in the cloud (e.g. flickr)

4. Widget can be displayed as "TV widget" on the TV display, including ambient (picture-in-picture) mode - also known as "stackable" media

5. Remote control for TV widget (expand, collapse, advance etc.) all via the mobile widget

6. Possible use of Femtocells to accelerate the photo uploading process when in the home cell

7. Stream also displayed on widget in kitchen - fridge magnet, O2 Joggler or Chumby

8. Geo-tagging of pictures - mash-up with maps and Google street-view for animated "timeline" slide show

9. "Follow Me" geo-tagging for live update of friend and family locations - merged somehow into the timeline

-- Theme #2 -- Ambient "Thought Streams"

Thoughts/ideas:

1. Twitter for ideas - constant ambient stream of ideas, thoughts, "notes to self" had in the past

2. Notes to self and Getting Things Done (someday, somehow)

3. Notes via mobile - SMS, widget, voice

4. Voice memos converted to text in the cloud - "Google Voice API?"

5. Ability to merge thought streams with friends, family, followers

6. Voice notes can also be distributed to groups as means of "outloud thinking" and instant crowd-sourcing

7. Voice input is instant - no dialling

8. Could also display stream on TV and fridge magnet widgets - also stream to in-car widgets

-- Theme #3 -- Ambient Voice - Another "Voice 2.0" service?

Thoughts/ideas:

1. Use Twitter as "messaging/collaboration bus"

2. Enable many-to-many voice channels ("conference calls") to form around trending topics and tweets

3. INSTANT voice connectivity - no dialing and no answering (optional)

4. Voice streams are public - "public by default"

5. Multiple streams of voice are audible to listener as ambient "murmur"

6. Keywords/tag cloud sensor "highlights" key words in the murmur

7. Listeners can tune/de-tune from the murmur by use of keywords

8. Instant "barge-in" to any stream

9. Re-packaged push-to-talk on handsets

Thanks to fellow collaborators who came up with the ideas while I drank (crap) coffee - @andresteder @mjbdreamer @spugamola

Thanks to all those who attended openMIC and to Chris for organizing - great job!

Been there, done that - GOT THE T-SHIRT......

Design at the speed of thought...

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:05:00 GMT

Screenshot from Protoshare

One of my favourite film directors is Robert Rodriguez. You'll probably either know him through his El Mariachi films, or the Spy Kids movies. What you may not know about RR is his film-making technique, which is essentially to "go digital" as early as possible. It's a lot more than just shooting digitally, but you'll have to go rent one of his DVDs to watch the "making of" shorts, which are often more entertaining than the features.

His style led him to coin the phrase "creativity at the speed of thought." In other words, as quickly as he thinks of a scene, an effect, a musical motif, he will try to capture it live using a digital tool.

This is a style that I try hard to emulate, constantly on the look out for interesting tools to help me go from ideas to outputs a lot lot faster, skipping downstream steps if I can.

A recent tool that I found to be very effective is Protoshare for building website wireframes. A start-up client of mine in mobile advertising needed a set of wireframes and a reference architecture for the underlying platform. Besides the CEO, there were a team of 3 other stakeholders who needed to review the design.

Using Protoshare, I managed to create the initial design rapidly (3 days) whilst embedding documentation and annotations to describe most of the other functional aspects of the design - I kept the design in one place. The stakeholders were sent invitations to review the project and they were able to enter their comments directly into the tool, pinning annotations to various parts of the wireframes. Mini threaded conversations took place in the comments panel.

For the review, I walked through each of the comment threads and made the resolutions directly into the tool, changing the design to meet the exact requirements of the review group. I was then able to add one extra set of frames for a new feature and submit the design for another review the same day. This allowed me to crack on with documenting the reference architecture and meet the tight constraints of the project.

Protoshare allows dynamic wireframes to be created that allow the reviewers to click on buttons and menus to get a basic feel for the site operation without a line of code or a minute spent in a web design environment. The design elements in the frames can all be labelled and carried through as classes in the CSS. A major new release (see video demo) is happening this weekend to improve the speed of the design UI and allow for even greater interactivity support in the design (e.g. tabbed interfaces, fail/success responses to form submissions etc.)

In short, Protoshare is a fantastic productivity tool and I thoroughly recommend it.

Webkit was just for 'fun'

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:10:00 GMT

Having ideas is fun

I'm currently planning a book about mobile web technologies and have been doing some historical research. I really enjoyed watching this YUI video of a presentation by Lars Knoll and George Staikos about the origins of KHTML, which became Webkit. I'm sure that most of my readers will know that Webkit is the browser core engine that sits beneath Safari on the iPhone and beneath the S60 browser, among many other mobile browsers.

There are many interesting technical aspects to the KHTML/Webkit story, but what caught my attention in the presentation was Lars justification for coding the KHTML engine from scratch in the first place instead of using Mozilla. He said that it would be more fun to do it themselves - a more interesting project.

This is the fun factor of developing software. There is another version called the fame factor, which I heard discussed by the Oracle rep during the OneAPI seminar at MWC 09.

Sometimes the fun factor is in opposition to the commercial interests, or at least the perceived commercial interests of an organization. I recently worked for someone who warned staff not to engage in 'science projects,' which was another way of saying fun projects that don't have commercial value.

Of course, I totally agree that in industry we are here to make a profit, but the path to profit isn't always obvious and needn't preclude having fun. However, there are still a good number of commercial managers who don't yet seem to understand how innovation, particularly in technology and software, sometimes (often?) works. Essentially, the fun factor has to be embraced as a genuine and valid part of the commercial process. Google allows employees one day a week to work on their own ideas, which seems a smart move. Do you want thousands of people coming up with the ideas, or just a few high priests in marketing?

In my experience, the source of the problem is usually related to control. Managers want to do what they do best, which is to manage. This includes controlling the business processes under their care. Things can only be controlled, at least in one way of thinking, by definition and measurement. Doing something 'for the hell of it,' or because it's fun, can't be defined or measured, so it is often resisted.

In all the chatter recently about app stores, it is always assumed that the developers want to make money. This certainly attracts developers to the iPhone app store - including the gold rush effect. However, the fun factor is still very much present. Many of the apps are free and many brands and sites have produced an iPhone app when they don't really need one - just for 'the fun of it' (translated into other feelings, like 'coolness'). Interestingly, some of the underlying technology - e.g. Webkit - we now know was developed just for the fun of it.

What's your fun strategy? (Sounds like a book title.)

Widgets and ambient computing...

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:44:00 GMT

Mobile Widgets

Many of us are getting accustomed to riding the timeline of Twitter, a form of ambient communication. Other ambient experiences will soon emerge on the mobile, courtesy of widgets. Vodafone (Receiver) are due to publish my essay about ‘seizing the moment’ with widgets, which is an examination of the user experience and the potential impact upon our daily mobile habits, and, by implication, our digital lives. I thought that I would briefly mention some of the technical aspects related to the piece, focussing on the key technical challenges, as I see them.

The key to the usefulness of widgets will be persistence, or ambience, which is the ability for widgets to run all of the time. Widgets need to run in some kind of container, such as a web runtime. There are various ways to manage persistence, and we eagerly await more details of Palm's WebOS. Technologically speaking, it seems that WebOS apps are akin to web runtime widgets, but with an underlying platform designed from the ground up to handle such apps. What an exciting project that must have been.

Thus far, there are no ways to support ‘background’ processing or push notifications within widget environments. We see that iPhone OS 3.0 now has a push mechanism and it will be fascinating to see how this gets exploited and how if affects our mobile habits.

It isn’t just persistence that matters. It would also be useful to create triggers on the device and then to spawn an appropriate widget in response to a registered event, such as a call or text. Thus far, this method of invocation has not been included in any of the widget environments that I have looked at. Of course, a means to manage triggers and responses to them is required, as is a model to do so. The means are easy to imagine, but the model is slightly more challenging.

The other key to adoption is discoverability. We have seen the success of putting the app store button at the finger tips of the iPhone user and then providing access to apps in a relatively easy fashion. The same needs to happen for widgets generally, across all platforms. It seems that all stake holders are getting involved with promoting widget markets, from platform providers (e.g. Access) and handset manufacturers (e.g. Nokia) through to operators (e.g. Vodafone).

The richness of the widget APIs is also important. For those based on web standards, it is possible to reference all the usual Javascript API candidates, such as Prototype, notwithstanding that widgets do impose a variety of performance and design constraints that the designer needs to be aware of. It isn’t quite ‘everything goes’ in terms of Javascript, DOM and CSS flexibility.

Access to platform APIs is also important, allowing widgets to combine web services with device services. This ‘mash-up’ potential is truly exciting. Moreover, the programming model for widgets supporting AJAX is usually to allow the AJAX calls to any host, which allows for client-side web-services mash-ups. However, operators, it seems, are keen to prevent this. Vodafone, for example, only allows access to a single host from a widget.

The richness of these APIs should be extended further by the operator. I have written many times about possible real-time extensions of mobile web, including the early work I did to combine SIP/IMS with HTTP/Web in a single browser, trying to support a new breed of telco mash-ups with a web front end, easily programmed by webheads. Ignoring the wider IMS concerns, or question marks, there are ways to access IMS services from widgets or web runtimes. I initiated a proof-of-concept project around this theme whilst Chief Architect for Motorola, calling upon Opera to collaborate because of their emergent Opera Platform solution, now defunct. The lack of commercial interesting in IMS apps killed the project back then, but the idea remains valid, but perhaps with other network services.

I’m not sure that I would be that interested in the IMS potential anymore, but any service can be exposed via Javascript APIs, such as videophony, or even a video conferencing platform, allowing developers to innovate with these grossly underused resources. Someone like O2 Litmus should consider offering a set of client-side Javascript APIs to expose the Litmus APIs, or at least some of them, including O2-specific services, like Bluebook (e.g. phonebook and SMS storage).

In summary, widgets have a lot of potential because they allow vast numbers of web developers to innovate on mobiles in new ways. What's needed is a richer environment, as outlined above, to facilitate new kinds of user experience based on ambient services. For further reading on this topic from a user experience perspective, I look forward to posting the URL for the essay I wrote for Vodafone, which will also be available as a podcast. Please check back for more on the publication, or simply follow @pgolding on Twitter to get blog announcements.

I am a mobilist - follow the mobilists Twitter group

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:16:00 GMT

For those of you interested in networking with fellow mobilists, you might already know about the Mobilists Group on LinkedIn. It has over 3400 members and the discussions have just started to pick-up, despite LinkedIn's immature discussion tools. There are some really clever, experienced and fanatical folks in the group!

In order to share Twitter IDs between members, we created a Twitter account @i_am_a_mobilist which members can follow and thereby allow others to follow them. It's a way of grouping together Twitter IDs for members of the mobilists group, but any other mobilist is free to follow of course - no one will use the account to spam followers.

See you on Twitter (@pgolding)

Joggler or Chumby? Product or Platform?

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:32:00 GMT

O2 Joggler

Continuing with the theme of ambient communications and ambient products, I'd like to compare two ambient products on the market - the O2 Joggler and the Chumby.

In 1998, my mobile design company designed and built one of the first wireless portals ever seen (Zingo portal for Lucent). It was way ahead of its time, as were many of its features, one of which was a messaging service that interacted with a messaging panel on a fridge. Back then, we got a little excited about Internet connected fridges, so we felt that such ambient products were the future.

The fridge wasn't really important, but the concept of interacting with the "home hub" was. The ability to send messages in and out of the home from various mobile family members seemed useful and an obvious thing to do.

Roll on a few years - about 10 - and digital picture frames have become prevalent. I suggested in an old blog entry back in 2006 that it would be useful to pop a calendar into the frame, especially one used to keep track of family events. My family, for example, have a shared calendar on Google Calendar, but there are about 1001 calendar services out there, perhaps more popular than GC.

In my household, we have a plethora of computers that alway seem switched on, so it's easy to access shared calendars, except ... we don't. I even mounted a laptop right in the heart of the kitchen. It still didn't work.

As those of us well versed in mobile product design know, there's often a HUGE gulf between the ability to run an application and actually running the application. That's what early detractors of the Blackberry didn't understand. Truly always-on email - ie push - is a very different experience to on-demand email - ie pull. That is, when the app is always running, it gets used by virtue of the "bumped-into effect," which I have blogged about many times.

When the app needs to be invoked, it often doesn't get used. Obvious, yes, but subtly important.

There is a common objection here, which is to do with the notion of need. Many will say that if you don't have a "i need to access my email every second" problem, then you don't need always-on email. That's not the point. Once exposed to an always-on experience, it can easily become imbibed into the user's daily habits - new habits are formed. Twitter users will have experience this. Migrating from the web presentation to a Twitter client creates a much greater attachment to Twitter. Soon, the Twitter habit is formed and one can't imagine daily digital life without it.

Now the question is whether or not the same experience could occur with an ambient device in the kitchen. Is there a device, that once connected, once fired up, once used by its family owners, will become incorporated into the daily habits of digital home living?

I believe that there is, although the exact formula has yet to be uncovered. Amstrad tried it not so long ago with their Internet phone. I even tried one of those in an attempt to get my wife more habitually plumbed into email - she had a tendency not to check email for long periods of time, which caused various problems (at least in my view). It didn't solve the problem for a number of reasons. Upping the budget a bit, I eventually got her a Blackberry. Problem solved. (And now she has an iPhone.)

BUT! Family calendaring still remains an issue.

Enter the O2 Joggler and the Chumby. They are both ambient devices intended to be switch on and accessible all of the time, which, we can imagine, means somewhere in the kitchen if it is to be a family-centric experience. This is certainly O2's positioning for the product, which is advertised under the rubric of "O2 Family."

The devices are similar in concept. Notionally, one could describe them as digital picture frames with the addition of a calendar. HOWEVER, that is where the similarity ends. And, I believe, there is an important lesson here in what we have been talking and blogging about for some time in the mobile 2.0 world, which is the difference between a product and a platform.

As far as can be gleaned from the O2 website, the Joggler's main feature is its shared calendar function, which has various bells and whistles, such as text message reminders and text-message submission of new entries. There are features to import photos, get traffic info, weather etc, as described on the media release for the device.

On the other hand, the Chumby offers something that the Joggler doesn't, which is support for a developer community via its widgets technology (based on Flash Lite). There are already some 1000 widgets in the catalogue, including 17 (when I checked) calendar widgets and 32 photo widgets (including Flickr and all the popular gallery sites). I can certainly use it to access our shared family Google calendar, which already has text or email alerts built in.

In other words, the Chumby guys have created a content platform, not just a device. In the words of Stephen Tomlin, their CEO: "Chumby brings new capabilities to connected devices by streaming always-on, always-fresh personalized Internet content to consumers."

They have created a developer commnuity by leveraging a well-known development environment - Flash Lite - and an emergent delivery mechanism - i.e. widgets. You can even create virtual Chumbys just for fun (because Flash widgets will play in the browser). Here's mine, showing real-time search of "mobile" in the Twitter timeline, upcoming events from Yahoo Upcoming, and random pictures from Flickr public RSS, but these could obviously be from my pics.

iPhone OS 3.0 and Ambient Communication

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:52:00 GMT

No need to rattle on about the iPhone OS 3.0 news. What can one say about 1000 new APIs - that's ONE THOUSAND! I think they're being a little artistic with how an API is delimited, but nonetheless, it seems that the OS is headed to a whole new level.

Having recently written a piece called "Riding the timeline with widgets" for Vodafone's Receiver, I'm excited by the push-notification model in the new OS release. AT LAST, this means that we can approach the always-on applications experience.

Twitter is an obvious, and interesting example. I don't want to know about Tweets (especially with @pgolding or some hash tag I'm tracking) the next time I run Tweetie, or whatever my latest iPhone Twitter client is. I WANT THEM THAT SECOND!

WAIT A MINUTE! ....

I can hear something.....

Yes, those familiar reverberations of the "don't get it" gang.

They say - "But, you don't NEED your tweets that second, do you?"

Boy oh boy, have we been round this loop a few dozen times. Just like those who used to tell me when I was designing push email systems (BEFORE Blackberry did it - and their 'obvious' patent stung like a kick in the backside) - "Yeah, but you don't NEED push email - you can just check it whenever you want (i.e. using POP3)."

Now, I'm not going to bore most of my mobile-savvy readers with Moore's "Whole Product" story, which is to say that PHONE + POP3 CLIENT does NOT equal useful mobile email experience, which DOES NOT equal whole product. Similarly, Twitter client SWITCHED OFF + iPhone does NOT equal satisfactory Twitter experience.

Twitter is a seizing-the-moment application that works best on a seizing-the-moment machine - i.e. a mobile - when it is ALWAYS ON. Therefore, a push notification service is a MINIMUM level of platform support to achieve the level of ambient communication that Twitter brings.

Now, I am convinced that before long we shall see a whole raft of innovation around the ambient comms theme, what I call communication at the speed of thought. I can think of several apps right now and how sorely I'd love to build them and wished that I still ran a mobile software company with a few developers at my disposal.

I predict that the iPhone OS will soon support widgets that have a fully-fledged "push" mechanism (and programming model) more akin to background processing - as far as that can go on current mobiles without the battery and comms drainage problem. For more on that story, see my slide deck about the real-time future of mobile web.

Presentation to O2 about Virtual Worlds

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:04:00 GMT

Yesterday I was at the O2 Innovation Day and gave a presentation about virtual worlds. It was somewhat contrived because I was asked to present a quick pitch as though I were asking for funding, Dragon's Den style. The session was designed to provoke discussion and thought. I was 'competing' against 3 other panelists, who presented about mHealth, portable display technologies and embedded video advertising.

The use cases for 'mobilizing' virtual worlds are endless, but the focus of the judges was on the business models and harmonisation with the existing O2 brand. There was a feeling that virtual worlds and augmented reality value chains are forming anyway and that O2 had nothing to add to those value chains. However, two of the judges thought that some limited investment was worthwhile in order to 'test the water' with virtual worlds, given how important they might become, especially for the "Net Generation."

The Dragon's Den style didn't really work as a means to explore emerging technologies and business opportunities. As you probably know, the DD format focusses heavily on the short-term financial returns, which is in tension with a longer term emerging idea. I felt that it would have been better to divide the audience in half and for each topic ask one side of the room to advocate the idea and the other half to reject it. This would have livened the debate and opened the mind a little.

In a quick straw poll during my pitch, I asked how many of the audience had kids who were members of virtual worlds. Many hands went up. I asked how many of the audience were in virtual worlds and only two hands were raised. Given the age of the audience, this was not surprising (and see the wonderful radar chart from K Zero about virtual world demographics).

Anyhow, here are my slides. Feel free to comment. The actual topic, the use cases and the business models are quite vast, so this is just a tiny snapshot to provoke the audience. I plan to add voice later this week.

(p.s. - Telefonica were showing Second Life and avatar projects last year at MWC and have done some VR research in Barcelona. It is worth noting that the interest in SL has declined after last year's hype. Indeed, SL subs are supposedly flattening out. However, SL is really a distraction from what's been happening with the tween/teen interest in virtual worlds, which has exploded, even in this past year.)

O2 Innovation Day - Virtual Worlds Mash-Ups

View more presentations from Paul Golding.

Is that my virtual room in your hand?

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:33:00 GMT

Continuing the virtual and augmented reality theme for this week, take a look at this demo of real-time graphics overlay with position tracking. Now, imagine that you're given a card by a friend - and that card is a room in Small Worlds, or some other virtual world.

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

There are numerous demos like this around, and even developer kits to get you started (like Papervision 3D). And, where's all the attention now being focussed for these interactive AR apps? Yep. You've guessed it - the mobile phone. Take a look at Kweekies running on an Asus Windows Mobile device.

Does it run on an iPhone? Yes - and no. The current issue with the iPhone SDK is that there's no (official) API into the video. But, things are still possible:

Google Voice - another step towards Operator 2.0

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:03:00 GMT

So, Google finally went somewhere interesting with their Grand Central service and have re-launched it as Google Voice, another step towards Google offering all the Operator 2.0 services that operators are mostly still only thinking about.

As I've said to so many of my operator and OEM clients, it's much easier for Google - a platform player - to become an 'operator' than it is for an operator to become a platform player, although BT are obviously headed in the right direction. They were headed there already, but will probably do better now that they've hired Telco 2.0 brainiac Martin Geddes.

Google Voice includes voicemail-to-text transcript. I still expect Google to launch a voice-services API in The Cloud, but let's see. When, and if, they do, it will enable a whole range of interesting voice mash-ups. It will also be a serious threat to various niche players like Spinvox and others building their wares on voice recognition technologies.

Virtual world ATM on my phone (Zong)

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:35:00 GMT

One of the coolest integrations of a mobile payment system inside a virtual world is the Zong ATM machine shown in Small Worlds. Here I am standing next to the ATM. Clicking on the ATM takes me to a payment screen where I can get a PIN sent to me phone via P-SMS. I enter the PIN to claim my gold! Virtual world, virtual currency, paid for by real money via my mobile. Augmented reality or augmented virtuality?

The size of the virtual world population

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:36:00 GMT

In my research into virtual worlds, I needed to confirm the anecdotal evidence I already had that virtual worlds are an increasingly important meeting place for tweeners and the iGeneration. I had overheard so many kids in the local family gym planning their liaisons in one virtual world or another.

"Meet me on Snow Globe at 2pm," says one child to another. And I'm guessing they're talking icebergs in Club Penguin.

For more detailed research about the population of virtual worlds, I turned to virtual worlds expert Nic Mitham of K Zero. Nic and his cohorts have to produce one of the coolest charts I've ever seen, which is their radar charts of the virtual worlds metaverse.

As you might expect, the growth in virtual worlds is quite impressive. This is what I expected. I recently designed my own virtual world concept (aided by my 3 kids) and contacted my old friend Fawad Akram from Bigwig Media (of Scruffs fame). He told me that virtual worlds are all the talk at any games conference and that there must be 'hundreds, if not thousands, in production.'

What's fascinating about all these virtual worlds is how they pose all the same problems and opportunities that we have in the real world. There are boundaries to be crossed (i.e. moving from one world to another), goods to be sold and exchanged, even currencies to be handled! God forbid that we ever end up with banks in these places. It seems they did a good (bad) enough job already of handling virtual products.

All of these problems present opportunities - platform 2.0 opportunities that span web and mobile. For sure, it won't be long before virtual worlds drive a new flurry of interest in mobile applications, just as social networks have recently done, pushing demand for mobile data services and related applications.

Today we have Facebook phones (e.g. INQ1) and Facebook tariffs. Tomorrow we will have mobilizations of Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel and Star Doll, I'm certain of it.

But this is no passing fad, no sideshow. The virtualization of the web as an idea is a no-brainer. Who will do it and how it will happen remains to be seen. It's an open frontier on the web.

There is a large opportunity for aggregation and virtual world services. Can operators cease the opportunity? Virtual worlds are places to meet, places to connect. Connectivity is the business that operators are supposedly in.

The rapidly expanding metaverse of virtual worlds...

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Unless talking to those familiar with virtual worlds and MMOGs, it is almost always impossible to be taken seriously about the importance of virtual worlds and virtual reality (VR). Perhaps it was all those blocky graphics in the late 80s and early 90s that permanently stained the reputation of VR.

Maybe it's the rather underwhelming experience typical of first encounters with SecondLife, for those who have dared to enter - or perhaps that it only seems attractive to older males of the apparently 'geek' variety, reminiscent of the view that many had of the web in its early days.

As I posted recently, the future of mobile is VR!

AND I MEANT IT!

But it's just as William Gibson said - "The future's already here - it just isn't evenly distributed yet."

Or, as Gladwell might have us say - "..it hasn't reached it's tipping point yet."

Next week, I shall be participating in a mock competition at the O2 Innovation Day. The idea is to pitch business ideas based on emerging technology. The subject handed to me is Augmented Reality. Naturally, I shall be focussing on mobile AR, the topic of some of my research with Motorola back in the early 90s before I got excited (distracted) by fuzzy logic.

All this week, and possible part of next, I shall therefore be posting on the theme of VR, AR and all things virtual.

I'll begin with a philosophical point that serves to underline the importance of the topic. I was told that from a metaphysical point of view, "there is no such thing as augmented reality. There is only reality."

Well, we could get bogged down fairly rapidly in the metaphysics, but I prefer a more pragmatic point of view. When I asked my 11-year old daughter what she called these various places, like Stardoll and Habbo Hotel, she told me that she didn't have a name for them - "they're just where I meet friends."

Sounds very real to me.

Stay tuned for more postings all this week as I lead up to my pitch to O2, which I'll post on slideshare next week.

Be convinced that the future of Platform 2.0 really is virtual!

(Find out what other mobilists have already been saying about mobile AR on the mobilists.org custom search engine.)

Web 2.0 can fail too

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:04:00 GMT

To my intense frustration, my feed for this blog has not worked for some time and I'm getting a lot less traffic as a result. The native feed (feel free to switch to it if you want) is being published via Feedburner.

Ever since I transitioned my account with them to my Google account (as Google bought FB), things have not worked properly. Lots of other users make the same complaint in the 'help' forum, which seems to go largely unanswered by anyone who actually knows what's going on - or going wrong.

According to FB, my feed is invalid. According to the validator that FB sends me to to check things out, the feed validates.

When you rely on free services in the web and they stop working, there's not much you can do about it!

Ditto the same story with the now defunct social bookmarking site Magnolia. What an incredible farce that story is.

Why did it fail?

Lack of cash? No, at least not directly.

Lack of entrepreneurial motivation to keep going? No, not that we can see.

Lack of traction? No, the community was pretty large.

Lack of business model? No, not that we are told.

Why did it fail?

THEY LOST OUR FRIKKING DATA!

Here's what their homepage now says:

"Unfortunately, database file recovery has been unsuccessful and I won't be able to recover members' bookmarks from the Ma.gnolia database."

"No Paul - surely not!" I hear you cry.

"Data in the cloud, safely tucked away on multiple-back-up NAS!" I hear you exclaim - "Elementary, my dear Paul."

Not so folks. These loonies were doing their own flaky back-ups and NEVER checked that the back-ups were actually working!

And so, they database corrupted. Not a problem - get the high-frequency backup. Whoops! The backup was corrupted too. No problem - get the low-frequency backup. Whoops! There wasn't one, or it was corrupted. Who can really tell? Oh yes - these guys can - the idiot who did it - watch him explain it here...

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

But, can't complain, can we? Can't get satisfaction either. It's all covered in the terms and conditions, as it is on ALL these 'beta = we don't take responsibility for your data' sites.

Wait a minute? Is that an opportunity for an operator 2.0 platform? Cloud storage with an SLA - 'WE NEVER LOSE YOUR PRECIOUS DATA!'

Beware what you put in the cloud!

5 ideas for Operator 2.0 platforms

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:18:00 GMT

We don't want NaaS - we don't want smart pipes - we want platforms on which to build apps and make money! The operator has to extend its network and assets out into the web 2.0 and extend way beyond the reach of its mobile customers. Here are five ideas for mobilized platforms.

1. Cloud storage - back-up ALL my data, voice, images, video from my mobile and mobile broadband connection. Provide APIs into the data sets.

2. CRM (e.g. Salesforce.com) - turn the network into a customer relationship manager platform - this is what business users really WANT - mobiles are BUSINESS tools, not COMMUNICATION tools - biz users want to achieve business goals.

3. Social connectivity - NOT another social network - too late for that. More like Google Friends Connect. Move the address book into the network, provide open APIs, provide social graph APIs - track connectivity in the network and push this out as web events to the cloud. Don't worry how this will get used - let the developers at the edge do this - just focus on attracting more people to your network/platform.

4. Spatial tagging/tracking - we all know that operators have the location asset - but do too does Google. What do you really have that no one else does - it's real-time tracking. What we really need is a platform for event-based location.

5. Safety/Trust platform - build a safety platform that allows users, groups, families and businesses to feel safe - emergency contacts, 'expert nearby', people I can trust - the list is endless - we all want to feel safe, secure and in the hands of competent, trustworthy and able people - someone you trust always a click away - some to talk to in an 'emergency' always a click away

Charging 2.0 - Premium URL redux and Munny

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:37:00 GMT

Not that long ago I blogged about the idea of the premium URL, which was a re-hash of several previous blogs about this topic. It is interesting to note that mBlox are now offering the ability to support such a model - in other words, the owner of the content at the URL pays for the data charges, not the recipient of the content. You can watch Andrew Bud's pitch about reverse-charging.

It's a great example of how to take something mundane like charging and turn it into a platform on which to allow innovation at the edges.

I missed out charging in my 5 Operator 2.0 Platforms post, as there's just so much to say about it and I want to run a series of posts about this topic alone. As someone who is now working in the games industry, I have a careful eye on the micro-transaction model and the myriad ways of charging, especially through the use of virtual currencies platforms offered by the likes of Peanut Labs Media (e.g. used for Munny for Fluff friends in Facebook). There's surely a huge opportunity for a platform play here.

If operators were careful to observe what is happening in the tween online experience, they will notice the tremendous growth in MMOGs and spending an increasing amount of time in what I call Virtual Worlds and my kids simply call 'a place to meet friends.'

I will be talking about the strategic importance of virtual worlds and associated virtual economies in my forthcoming pitch at the O2 Innovation Day. I shall post the slides after the event.

10 ideas to inculcate Operator 2.0 mindset

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:57:00 GMT

1. Read "What would Google Do?" AND make EVERYONE in the entire company read the book.

2. Hold competitions internally for ALL employees to think of how to "Googlify" the business. Offer HUGE prizes for the winners. Don't stop this process until AT LEAST most of the employees get it! That is, they understand what the new Google economy is all about AND how it's different to today's telco model. Understand the impact, don't look for answers (yet).

3. Use step 2 above as the starting point to creating an open, agile culture based heavily on the use of social enterprise applications - Yammer, blogs, wikis etc.

4. EAT YOUR OWN DOG FOOD! - Get ALL of your employees using mobile browsers, apps, smartphones, widgets, building their own microblogs, mobile apps.

5. Hold another internal competition to design the best mobile app and then get the top 10 ideas built! Let the staff touch, see and feel the entire mobile apps experience.

6. Create an 'open analytics' culture! Create a dashboard of real-time stats about what's going on with your network, retail outlets and on the web. Try to figure out what people are really doing and why? How often do users open their mobile browsers - where, when and why? What do they do next? Do you know? You should!

7. What's the platform (PaaS) play? Take each element in your business and network and figure out how it could become a platform - in other words, how could it be extended into the web, made open and provide a means for innovators, businesses and outliers to build apps?

8. Start an internal VC fund - take step 5 above and turn it into a business! Not core business - but who knows? Gmail started as a 'hobby'.

9. Crowdsource - go beyond the staff and into the customer base - get them involved in the ideas process.

10. Affiliation - figure out how to get your users to do the selling for you. Share the revenue - share the goodness!

Search engine for mobilists (Mobilists.org)

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:59:00 GMT

Trying to find out what fellow mobilists and developers had to say, I found that it was too cumbersome following blog feeds and using generic search with its low signal to noise ratio. So I created this custom web search (Mobilists.org) that only indexes leading sites by fellow mobilists and their peers.

It also includes sites related to mobile tech, but you can filter the mobilists blogs out using the blog refinements label in the search results. The tech sites are mostly developer sites and some news sites. Currently, I have not included mobile start-ups as these could be about any application (e.g. pet tracking) and not about the technology and industry per se. Mobile products and services are also excluded, other than those inextricably linked to the blogs and developer sites.

Mobilists are experts in mobile, such as:

Thought leaders
Analysts
Developers
Bloggers
Technologists
Entrepreneurs
Consultants

Mostly the site indexes mobilist blogs and key developer resource sites (corporate and 'independent'), all of which are carefully selected from the leading mobilists and developer sites in the world. It tries to avoid corporate blogs that are more ‘product ware’ then genuine expert opinion or useful developer resource. It also does not include too many generic mobile news sites, as these tend to create too much ‘noise’ in the search.

You are welcome to have your site included in the index and link to the site, use it as you wish and suggest links. Go to the site first and see if you can find your site. If not, submit it (via link at bottom of site).

We need Platform as a Service (Paas), not Network as a Service (NaaS)

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:28:00 GMT

One of my moments at MWC 09 was the One API seminar. It seems that a lot of progress has been made by the GSMA in getting operators to sign up to a single set of APIs to access their networks. This is one step closer to what consultants like the respected Andreas Constantinou refer to as Network as a Service, or NaaS, as discussed when I interviewed Andreas in a recent podcast.

However, the question one has to ask is ... what's the service, exactly?

Referring back to my earlier post about Zuckerberg's maxim of elegant organization, does NaaS bring us any closer to that goal?

I think not.

What we really need is a platform and Platform as a Service. We need Paas, not NaaS.

For a more or less textbook example of this, operators would do well to look at CRM specialists Salesforce.com and their force.com platform model - a brilliant example of building a business around an open scalable web platform - facilitating services for customers, not owning them!

What is a mobile phone for in the business world, if not facilitating customer and business relationships. In other words, as far as businesses are concerned, the network should be functioning as a 'business relationship platform' not a 'voice/text network.'

And think of all the services that could be run on such a platform, as in the 80,000 custom apps built on force.com. Now, apart from the usual 10s of services (voicemail, conference calling, group texting, etc.) - how many CRM apps run on the MNO network? How is the network acting as an elegant organization machine?

Like I say - what network as a service? There is no such thing.

We need platforms and PaaS. The MNO needs to become a PaaS, not a 'smart pipe' (oxymoron).

Operator 2.0 and Elegant Organization

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:57:00 GMT

Apparently, when asked about the essence of Facebook, Zuckerberg said 'Elegant organization,' as reported by Jeff Jarvis in The Guardian.

The point?

Communities already existed before Facebook, but they just didn't have the tools to organize themselves. Now they do, with Facebook.

So, what should an operator make of that? First, you can't build a community. Second, your tools have to allow users to communicate with elegant organization.

On this latter point, as I blogged many times before, we are miles away from the goal due to old models (dogma?) about exactly what telephony is all about. Mobile telephony is plain old telephony (POTS) without the wires. The experience is archaic - at least 100 years old - and frustrating. Bell solved the problem of getting voice from one place to another over long distances, but that's only part of the problem. You have to get their attention first, so Bell added ... well, a bell! Ring ring!

People want to talk to each other, not merely ring each other. No use in ringing someone if there's a low chance of getting through, yet how many calls still go answered? Lots! How often do we play telephone tag? Often.

Therefore, we still haven't solved the problem. We don't have elegant organization - we have best efforts. But don't the operators see it as their goal to connect people? Perhaps not, despite all the brand rhetoric about 'connecting people everywhere,' or whatever the latest marketing mantra is.

What does elegant organization mean in the context of mobile? The answer's probably worth a few billion dollars. From ring ring to ca-ching, ca-ching!

Operator 2.0, Public Conversations and Generation-O

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:12:00 GMT

Twitter, Facebook and Flickr have shown the increasing willingness of users to conduct their conversations in public. Indeed, this is now the norm for the new breed of open tweeners, teens and millenials. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some hip marketing name for the 'open' generation - Generation-O perhaps. (Sounds a bit clunky - that's why I'm not in marketing.)

How could an operator embrace the public platform ethos?

A number of ideas spring to mind. We could open the call records as a public timeline - allow users to see who's calling who and when. We could copy them entire texting stream out into the public domain - text streams, filterable on various P2P and location parameters. Just these two timelines alone would have all kind of mashable potential with numerous social applications.

What? You cry. All this stuff in the public domain. What about privacy? What about security?

Sure, it needs to be permission based, but this is the new age of 'public by default.' Get used to it - your customers are already doing it.

Pipes, Platforms and Smart Pipes...

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:23:00 GMT

Pipe = something that value flows through.

Platform = something that value can be built on.

Smart Pipe = oxymoron.

Stay tuned - I shall be discussing this topic ALL next week on this blog.

Have a good weekend!

UGC = User Generated Crisps

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:19:00 GMT

Yummy new crisps

In the UK, it is difficult to miss the latest marketing venture by Walkers Crisps, especially if you're a crisp lover, as I am. Walkers held a fantastic competition to get crisp eaters to suggest new flavours. The winner gets his or her flavour on the shelves and a slice of the potato, as in the profits. User generated crisps!

Walkers have selected the final six and now the vote is on. The final six are: Onion Bhaji, Fish & Chips, Cajun Squirrel, Builder's Breakfast, Chillo & Chocolate and Crisp Duck & Hoisin (which is my favourite).

What better way to collect the votes than mobile. Text the flavour to a short code or visit the mobile site m.walkers.co.uk

And yes, there's even a Facebook site to cast your vote.

Great idea - great marketing - great mobile marketing! Well done Walkers.

(p.s. my overall favourite is still Ready Salted. Sorry to be so plain!)

Becoming Operator 2.0 - The Manual?

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:56:00 GMT

If there's ONE book that you need to read to provoke ideas about how an operator might rethink its business, then it's "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis.

Read it, give it out to the board and senior staff and all the quirky outliers in the business. Brainstorm and ask about your MNO business - "What Would Google Do?"

How could an MNO become an open scalable platform - not pipe (even a smart one) - that adds value to as many people trying to connect as possible? This alone is a difficult question to answer, but needs deep thought. Do you have to own the customer? Do you have to own all the customers? Can you make more by sharing the customers? What are the fundamental units of transaction? What should they be? Not minutes and texts, not if you're thinking Googlejuice.

MNOs have already missed many major opportunities, had they thought of being in the 'connecting people' business, not the 'completing circuits' business. I've talked about this very theme for years. What is the Google version of an operator?

You MUST READ this book!

Collaborative Online Web Specification

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:44:00 GMT

Recently I've been consulting for a mobile ads start-up, including requirements and wire-framing for their entire site. As always, I looked for techniques that enabled me to 'go digital early,' This means:

Thinking directly into a tool
Using a tool that can output into the next phase of the process (unlike many 'drawing' tools)
Using a tool that could manage the collaboration/creativity process in an agile fashion

For wire-framing and functional spec, I found all these things in one tool called Protoshare. I thoroughly recommend it.

Operator 2.0 - Switcher or Connector?

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:32:00 GMT

In the old telco model, the switch was everything - the heart of the system. In the current MNO model, it's still the heart of the network, but then there's also the SMSC, although these are gradually being replaced by SMS 'edge' routers for most P2P traffic. That said, the MNO probably places most emphasis on the billing system! It's possibly the real heart of the operation.

However, these are switching models, not connecting models. They are ignorant of the content and any emotional and human value associated with the content and the need to switch in the first place - i.e. to connect. And they are not open systems. They are not platforms.

The future is open distributed platforms - using the network as a means to connect and make transactions, the value being in those connections, not the pipes underneath.

What's your open platform strategy? Should it be something like Alpha One release of ExperiaSphere from CIMI Corp? At the heart of their open system is the Social Framework - SocioPATH. Not a switch, but a socially-aware connection framework in the services layer.

These guys seem to get it.

Looking back at MWC 09 and thinking forward...

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

There's been lots of news coverage about MWC, so I won't repeat what's been widely reported. I'll focus on my favourite moments and picks in terms of people and products.

I wish I could say that there was a certain buzz in the wings, among the crowds, but there wasn't. Nothing shone as the talk of the show, on track or off track. The crowds seemed light to me. Apparently, attendance was down from last year. The recession is taking its toll. Nonetheless, stands and fold were cheery and bright. Optimism was the dominant mood.

Of course, lots of touch screens and smart phones flooded the floors. No Apple of course, but then they turn up by proxy - their influence was felt everywhere. Lots of imitation devices, lots of talk about app stores and barely a presentation that didn't mention iPhone, despite the complaint of one irate member of the audience - "it's only 1% of the world's phones." And I'm sure that Google was once only 1% of the world's search traffic.

And, talking of Google and 1%, there was only one new Android phone, But that doesn't mean a thing - it's just timing. We all know that there are plenty of Android projects in the design rooms. Anyone who doubts the influence Android is having and will have on the market is deluded.

So, what were my moments?

For interesting platform moment - that came from Yahoo...

I had a great chat with my old mobilist friend Alex Linde from Yahoo about Blueprint, which he thoroughly plugged in the Developer Garage track, which was an otherwise moribund affair - but I'll get to that. Blueprint is now out of the Yahoo box, meaning that any developer can use the platform to deliver their own mobile apps across a wide range of devices outside of the Yahoo properties. Blueprint was developed in-house. One Search is written in Blueprint, which is YAML (Yet Another Mark-up Language) built on XForms. Version 2.0 was due for announcement at the show and promises a lot of new features, including iPhone (via static libraries) and Blackberry support.

Yes - we know that we all want open standards, like W3C widgets, BONDI, and so on, but as Alex said on the stage, some of us need a solution that works today on today's handsets. Anyhow, he promised me that I'd get access to the closed 2.0 beta. I hope to report on its features in due course.

I have blogged about the middleware idea as far back as 2001 when I suggested that operators should host middleware for developers, I think at the time I suggested Volantis. This is what Yahoo is now doing and it's worthy of attention because it follows the distributed platform model [e.g. Read Jarvis] that operators need to understand and embrace. And this is coming from Yahoo, considered by many to be an 'old-school' media company in this new-media age.

For interesting mobile-ads moment, that came from Gigafone...

Mobile ad solutions were in abundance at the show. Not much new here - there are only so many ways that ads can be delivered via mobiles, and I've probably written about most of them over the years. In fact, I invented some of them! I did apply for location based ads patent as far back as 1992, dismissed by my then employer Motorola as 'not core to our business.'

The real issue is about the business model and the ongoing debate and uncertainty about the basic unit of advertising monetization. As we know, what matters is conversion and it is here that Gigafone shines, not only because of their solution design but because of their intrepid spokesperson, Andrew Grill, a force in the mobile ads debate. He also talked Trutap into giving away 3 cuddly bears for my kids, so I love him anyway :)

For interesting mobile browser moment, that came from Raj Singh of Skyfire...

Raj Singh is an engine of enthusiasm for mobile, especially browsing. Like myself, he's lived through the entire mobile browsing experience since the days of HDML. As crap as those early browsers were, there's no denying the excitement we felt back then when our mobiles (or more like the UP SDK) could suddenly interact with web servers. How far we've come, including the polished Skyfire browser. With Raj, I love drilling into the analytics that Skyfire has, courtesy of the way Skyfire proxy (Firefox) sits in the cloud. They even track where he user zooms on a page. How cool is that. But the think I love about Skyfire is the business model. Skyfire are attempting to monetize via search, following an Internet model and NOT the more traditional OEM model.

For interesting LTE demo moment, that came from Motorola...

On an otherwise dull and inglorious stand (and the handsets part was a joke), the Motorola LTE demo shone - see BBC coverage. It was a cool demo of live upstreaming of HD video from a test van driving around the streets of Barcelona. The picture quality was superb. It was hard to believe that this was a mobile demo. Motorola, for all their business woes, still has the technological shine that once powered cool products.

For coolest demo of MWC moment, that came from Alcatel Lucent...

Who showed a fully immersive virtual reality demo based on walking the streets of Paris, interacting with digital/real objects, leaving HD video messages in space and lots of augmented reality goodies. Futuristic stuff, perhaps not that far away!

For interesting brainstorm with a mobile consultant moment, that came from Andreas Constantinou (Vision Mobile)...

Andreas is an engaging, enthusiastic and thoroughly knowledgeable chap about the mobile ecosystem. His company do some excellent research and publish very insightful blog articles and reports. I recommend his Open Mobile workshop and hope to collaborate with him on this in the near future. Listen to the podcast interview I did with him about Open Mobile.

For interesting 'Operator 2.0' moment, the One API seminar proved to be quite engaging...

Very slow coming, but the GSMA One API initiative is gathering steam. It's still early days and the current project is entirely technical requirements, whereas the real issue and question is all about the business models. Not surprisingly, the audience were more interested in this topic. After all, an API is an API is an API - and we've seen them all before. My own suggestion was to allow users to enable/pay access to APIs via their favorite sites (e.g. Twitter) rather than waiting for the site owners to partner with the operators. This will speed up adoption, especially for all those smaller start-ups. This needs more discussion in a later blog.

For interesting "Future of..." discussion, that was with Christian Sejersen of Mozilla...

We first met last year on a panel session and I was glad to hook up again with the affable Christian, a long-time mobile browser guru. I teased him with a question about the future of mobile browsing - as in beyond what we already expect with widgets, APIs etc. If you want to know what we concluded, or not, then you'll have to wait for a future blogisode! Hint: the mobile UI needs a radical overhaul. I'm glad that Christian agreed to collaborate on a writing project that I'm planning - more about that soon.

For the ANTI-MOMENT of MWC, that was the let down of the entire Developer Garage track...

Don't use the word garage just for marketing chic, especially when the sessions turn out to be more akin to walking through a giant Ikea warehouse manned by zombie staff. In short, developers DON'T DO corporate messages and sales pitches, they DO CODE and TECH! We need more tech, more code, more buzz! I recommend more investment into the developer track, including finding ways for real developers to turn up on a shoestring budget, enjoy the show, but hack, mash and mosh with the developer community.

For interesting fringe event moment, that was actually the O2/Telefonica bash...

Caught up again with the talented Alan Quayle and the O2 Litmus brainbox James Parton, with whom I discovered all kinds of interesting things in common! But also met some really interesting folks from various partner companies, including a former student of the genius Marshall McLuhan, whom I frequently quote in my slides.

AND, FINALLY...

BIG thanks to everyone I met with there - I don't have time to mention all of you. I enjoyed every single meeting and REALLY having the opportunity to meet with you all. Please stay in touch. And a last BIG thanks to Michael O'Hara, CMO of GSMA. Thanks for your help.

MWC 09 Agenda

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:26:00 GMT

I shall be at MWC from Saturday, leaving Wednesday AM. Looking forward to meeting some of you. For open networking, I shall be popping by the following 'fringe' events:

1. Mobile Sunday event - Sunday evening (Early)

2. Mobile Peer Awards - Monday evening (Most of event)

3. Forum Oxford network - Tuesday (6-7)

3. O2 Cocktail evening - Tuesday evening (7-8)

4. Mocom 2020 Mobile Media Tweet-Up - Tuesday evening (8 onwards)

Key sessions I shall be attending:

Monday - Mobile Innovation + Developer Garage

Tuesday - One API + Business of Mobile 2.0

Will probably visit Wiley stand Monday lunchtime-ish, for any fellow Wiley authors interested in meeting up.

Have fun, make contacts, win business!

Games Programming is Child's Play...

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:29:00 GMT

On a recent course I held - and in my book - I describe the principles of 2D games programming for mobiles using sprite-based graphics, layers, textures and so on. It is a feature of the Games API on MIDP 2.0 and also of OpenGL ES for iPhone.

If you really want to learn the concepts in a hurry - OR, you want your kids to have a go whilst also learning the principles of programming, then check out Scratch, a visual programming tool for kids from MIT.

Within hours, all three of my kids (7,9,11) had some basic game up and running, or at least something that was animated - adding some actual gaming to the animations came later. It's a great tool. Check it out! I hope that something like this becomes available for mobiles.

5 Cool Collaborative Tools for Web Projects...

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:17:00 GMT

As my forthcoming e-book says: "GO DIGITAL EARLY" - this is my motto. It means get as much of your thinking, work and project data into a digital, shareable and collaborative form as early as possible. It actually saves you time and makes you money, especially as an indie worker like myself.

Here are five suggestions for collaborative tools to go digital early in your web projects:

1 - Gliffy - diagramming software 'for the rest of us' - think of this as a low cost (free version available) and easier to use version of Visio - a versatile alround drawing tool. For web projects, it has UI tools for drawing wireframes and all the usual UML constructs for those who want to get deep and dirty with requirements modelling. Thanks Bryan Rieger for the intro to this tool.

2 - Jump Chart - 'nice and tidy website planning' is the promise. This is getting more sophisticated and even more agile than just drawing wireframes (as in Gliffy). It allows a real mock-up to be built allowing clients to actually click-through and navigate the site before you've programmed a lick, or should that be click? It also enables all the content to be uploaded and organised, such as images. Get all the approvals you need and then export the project to clean CSS/XHTML.

3 - Proto Share - This goes one step further than Jumpchart because not only does it provide clickable wireframes, but it supports team collaboration (creative review) within the same environment - discussions, comments and annotations, all supported with email alerts.

4 - Proto Notes - You've done your first real prototype. Now you need to get feedback. Anyone who's reviewed any kind of creative work knows the problem - how to describe what changes are required - and where! "Home page - top left - leading paragraph...." It isn't easy. The obvious solution is to add notes directly to the work. With just a tiny squirt of Javascript goodness, Protonotes provides a comments overlay on any website. Great idea!

5 - Dim Dim - You're still going back and forth with the client, talking about architecture, project ideas, web pages and so on. You want to do this online quickly and easily. Of course, you need web conferencing that works - and this is the promised of Dimdim. Go check it out. Thanks to Celso Pinto for pointing me to this cool tool.

HAVE FUN! Let me know which ones work for you or if you have any similar recommendations.

Simulate 'iPhone Finger' on Mac

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:49:00 GMT

PhoneFinger from Wonderwarp is a useful utility tool for iPhone developers, allowing them to simulate the finger operation, but on the desktop during development.

Whilst there, why not check out the fantastic ShoveBox app - a catch-all dump and organise tool for collecting all those random bits of data and thoughts that persistently interrupt our time in front of the Mac. There's also a nice tool - SimpleChord - for chord sketching, for those of you with a musical bent, like myself. Understanding chord progressions is essential if you want to write music. Go HAVE FUN - let me know how it goes.

3 Fallacies holding back Operator 2.0...

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:01:00 GMT

Three reasons why some operators are having a hard time "getting real" and truly embracing Web 2.0, becoming Operator 2.0:

1. They believe in their own brand hype too much, but act contrarily inside the company.

2. They don't really know their users as well as they think.

3. They still believe that 'strategy', planning and timing are useful tools.

Read on to find out more...

Increasingly we see operators willing to flirt with Web 2.0. There are many examples at many levels, such as:

1. Creating web-friendly APIs to access the operator network

2. Setting up small teams to build Web 2.0 apps

3. Offering services designed to work with Facebook and other social networking sites

4. Using Twitter to engage with customers, developers, bloggers

5. Working with blogs or bloggers to spread PR

6. Considering the business models and co-creation relationships used by Web 2.0 companies

7. Trying to implement 'Agile' business processes

8. Asking users, mostly developers, to co-create products and services

There are more, and they are increasing all the time, though not at 'Web 2.0 speed.'

I give a course, mostly to operators, about how mobile can and is following a similar trend to the evolution of web - indeed, how the two loci of development are increasingly intertwined, merging to form a new breed of mobile possibilities that we broadly called Mobile 2.0, concrete definitions notwithstanding. (The course also tells how Mobile 2.0 works, not just the concepts.)

During the course, I contend, not that controversially, that Web 2.0 is the centre of the digital consumer's universe, or soon will be, and therefore mobile networks are in many ways now an adjunct - at least in the first instance. See the slides below.

The point being made is that Web 2.0 is where all the action is - it's increasingly where we live our digital lives. Therefore, if the future of operating a mobile network is NOT about the saturated voice/text services and is all about applications, then these applications are inevitably going to be tied to Web 2.0 services, not to operator services. Nothing controversial here.

The mistake, however, would be to assume that folk who work in operators don't get this, or can't appreciate this contention, if it is a contention at all. The usual dismissive types aside, more operator folk really do get it!

Clearly, operators worry about this trend simply because they aren't currently in the Web 2.0 world - they don't add value to it, they don't generate value in it and they don't really get value from it. And this is the problem. When you fear something, you can easily ignore it, even if it means the end of your life as you know it - especially if it means the end of your life as your know it.

It is an attribute of the human intellect that we can hold two (or more) contradictory ideas at the same time - cognitive dissonance, the psychologists call it. It's painful enough to keep many a senior executive up at night, cushioned only by their fat bonuses (parallels with banking here?)

We cope with the dissonance by suppressing the ideas that we don't like, or that we don't want to face. We also create support structures to make that suppression easier - we surround ourselves with other head-in the-sand folk and we reward ourselves for sticking with the idea that we really know is rapidly running out of time and steam. We also create our own fallacies. In my experience, here are three that I think are particularly problematic:

1. Belief in the hype of your own brand

2. Belief that you know your users (even based on extensive surveys, focus groups, analytics)

3. Belief that planning and strategizing will actually work and that this will lead to a perfect time for change

Brand as Hype - There isn't an operator whose brand isn't something to do with 'connecting' people in an increasingly connected world, or some such equivalent - various metaphors get used. However, I don't believe it. By and large, how this translates inside the organisation is really 'making end-to-end network connections reliably AND billing for them whilst looking after the customer.' Great resources are poured into this and NOT into actually connecting people in all the various ways they might want to connect digitally.

It is almost getting silly that we often end up comparing everything to Google (see Jeff Jarvis' book called 'What Would Google Do?'). However, let's do that anyway. We all know that they're a search company, so let's think of search here as their core asset, equivalent to the core asset of the MNO - their network. However, Google's mission/brand inside their company is in 100% agreement with their brand hype, which isn't anything to do with search - it's connecting us to all the world's information. That's how a 'search company' ends up producing one of the most kick-ass webmail products around, one of the best online document products around, one of the best and most widely 'franchised' mapping services around - and so on.

Besides making that green call-complete button and 'send text' button work reliably on our mobiles, and mostly getting our bills right, what other service has an operator given us that is even vaguely kick-ass in the business of connecting people?

We know our users - There isn't an operator who doesn't have a model of their users - the usual clutch of segments with snazzy names, like 'Urban Warrior', 'Connected Crazy' or whatever they might be called. This DOES NOT equate to knowing your users. All it means is that you know, perhaps religiously well, how you archetype your users. This is something else entirely.

In the world of Web 2.0 and fine-grained analytics, user participation, social networks and all the other attributes that make us dizzy, there is NO ROOM for archetypes. The segment isn't four groups with reductionist monikers like 'Text Monkey' - the segment is EACH SINGLE USER with his or her habits, predilections and needs KNOWN AND CATERED FOR.

Before I recently switched to the iPhone, I was with another MNO since the BEGINNING of their GSM offering. Not once in that entire time did they show any sign at all that they knew about me, apart from my name appearing on the bill. And, by the way, I once had about 10 SIM cards with that operator. Still nothing. And I know why. In their world view - I was too small fry to count as a 'business user' worth fussing over. Moreover, they didn't have a business capable of being flexible enough to single out users and their needs.

Operators don't know their users at all - what their actual connectivity needs are - in the broader sense of connectivity, if that's the business they proclaim to be in. Sure, they probably know their handset interests, billing preferences, tariff tolerance and so on, but not their actual digital connectivity needs on a per user basis in a digital world. Who wants to connect to their bank - and how? Who wants to connect with their sport's team buddies - and how? They don't know. They don't know their users. How could they? The users don't co-create the services with them - they are politely, albeit efficiently, catered for, not embraced per the Web 2.0 vision (and reality).

Belief in strategy - This applies to many corporations in various industries, but telcos still maintain this fallacy - that planning, strategy (an old military concept that applied to slow-moving armies) and timing are allies and tools that really can deliver the goods. Any senior staff member knows the truth when he or she looks in the mirror and ask the question - 'what should we do about tomorrow?'

The real answer, the one that doesn't get discussed - and therefore never gets addressed - is ... 'we don't know.'

That's the quintessential problem of dealing with social technologies. That's why I've been putting this slide up for years ... it takes a while to fully appreciate McLuhan's idea (and he was talking about TV decades ago).

And don't worry, because you cannot know. And, if it's any comfort - most of your competition are in the same boat - EXCEPT, that is - the NEW COMPETITION - yes, oh dear, Google again - and other Web 2.0 companies that are already in your business - your real business - the business of connecting people.

But let me be clear - they don't know either, although Jeff might tell us differently. Let's see what the book says. Perhaps the clue is in the title - 'What would Google DO?' - And there's the magic word - DO. It's the opposite to the perfect timing mentality, which invariably translates not to DOING, but to WAITING, just like those bankers did who knew inside that their products were defunct, but perhaps not today, not tomorrow, not next week - WHOOPS! Sh*t! Too late.

Cognitive dissonance is strongly related to culture wars. And here's the one essential element missing from all Web 2.0 (and Mobile 2.0) definitions and narratives - that this stuff - DOING and creating in the web world of digital opportunities - is strongly related to culture. One has to have a certain mindset and cultural bias. Web 2.0 is as much a culture as it is a collection of narratives and memes about the essentialised web experience. It is a culture that is far removed from the one seen in the world of running networks. The dominant underlying themes of Web 2.0 culture are 'play' and 'risk.'

That's where the fault line lies - where the dissonance rises to its peak. In an industry predicated on removing risk (99.999%) - the prospect of taking risks is a scary and contradictory thing. But, until the fault line breaks, there is little or no prospect of becoming an Operator 2.0 - the future isn't bright. EXCEPT - it is! In a world where people thirst and crave for connection, more so every day - and perhaps even more so in these 'threatening' times - the future really is bright for those who can deliver the goods.

Podcast Episode 2 - Open Mobile

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:52:00 GMT

A Wireless Wanders podcast hosted by mobile apps expert Paul Golding who interviewed Andreas Constantinou (Vision Mobile) about three aspects of open mobile ecosystems: open network APIs, open handset platforms, open markets (e.g. app stores). Hear what expert mobile services analyst Andreas makes of these important trends in mobile applications.

Listen Now:

Subscribe to future podcasts (in iTunes and other players)!

Two devices are better than one...

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:16:00 GMT

The mobile applications debate continues. How do we arrive at the relatively open, easier to develop for ecosystem of the desktop? There is a constant hankering after a single solution that will do everything on all mobiles, letting us get away from our fragmentation woes.

Surely the answer is that it just isn't possible. Whilst we like to drool about all those billions of phones out there and getting a tiny slice of all that action, it just isn't happening, is it? Apart from the lucky members of the 100-Million Club (thank you Andreas for that interesting piece of analysis). (By the way, plenty of nearly-rans that also ran out of cash chasing that particular dream.)

In all my recent discussions with other developers, such as at the recent O2 Litmus hack, there is always a resentment about the focus given to the iPhone. "Yeah, but it's only like less than 1% of the market isn't it. What about the other ten trillion phones out there?"

Good point, but not quite.

And then there's the other crowd with their "Mobile Web" itch to scratch. "It's the mobile web - that's the answer - zero fragmentation, widest possible reach."

Good point, but not quite.

The elephant in the room is, and always has been, size!

In a market so driven by phones and texting, neither of which require large screens or any real computing capability, the "mobile computing" possibilities remain - and always will - a dim and distant sideline. In fact, more like a wart that has only served to waste countless resources on a pursuit doomed to failure. We might get it right by MIDP 5 perhaps?

I should have listened, back in 1998, when I stood at a trade show trying to flog my clever "Email on your phone" solution (WAP connector for MS Exchange). What did that IT Manager (git!) say? "Who would want to read their mail on that tiny thing?"

Too true, I've been afraid to admit. I should join Mobile Apps Anonymous and cleanse my soul of this addiction for trying to do big things with small things (lots of them).

Yes, we can talk about all the mistakes of the history here, pointing the finger of blame at operators for their myopic vision (deliberate oxymoron) of a mobile data future. Let's not rake over that muck ever again. They all know - we all know - that universal flat-rate tariffs - the number one commercial impediment to today's data usage - are as inevitable as the rising sun.

The solution is large-format devices. And, I don't mean smart phones. I believe that what we currently call smart phones - (phones with a keyboard, let's say, real or virtual) are going to be important, but niche devices. They will be the hybrid, for those that need them, for whatever reasons they need them - and let's not shoehorn everyone into the same mould here.

Just as in the world of PCs, we have desktops and laptops, in the world of mobile we shall end up with phones and Mobile Internet Devices, more like what Intel are touting with their MID platform design, than the iPhone, but expect to see an equivalent from Apple anyway - this is much more my prediction (and not a new one) than the Nano iPhone. If a Nano is more phone than computer, then it's going in the wrong direction for Apple, in my view.

Apple's innovation of late has been in their laptop design and manufacture and they are succeeding in gaining market share in the PC market. A reduced size/function iPhone will take them too close to the very competitive territory with the likes of Nokia, Samsung and all the rest. The challenge for the MID is to give the consumer something that gives outstanding battery/screen/wireless performance at the right price point that doesn't put the device suspiciously close to the laptop price point (like the previous recently failed UMPC market).

Apple's formidable hardware expertise must surely give them a headstart. In the MID field, they could lead the way and make a killing in what could turn out to be the biggest growth market in mobile devices. Of course, I'm no market analyst, so I don't have the numbers - just a hunch.

Getting back to the story. The future is all about having two devices. A phone and a MID (which also has phone capabilities - not the WiFi only stuff we saw from Nokia).

For operators, they will realise that this model has a future and it could well be the "killer application" - more like "killer reason" - for finally migrating to an all IP network (e.g. IMS). Why? Because then they can offer services that deliberately accommodate multiple device ownership, such as a single number. That's just one possibility - there are many others.

The time is right for MIDs because we lead increasingly web-bound lives, for better or for worse. This wasn't the case before when various mid-way form factors have been tried on us before, pretty much all of which I bought, tried and threw away. Remember those Win CE devices with a full keyboard? And various other quirky device families along the way.

Now, will that solve the fragmentation problem that I started out with. Perhaps. Not that this is the problem really. The main problem has always been that users simply aren't interested in using tiny devices (like most consumers have) for running apps. I guess like the desktop world and most other tech markets, we shall end up with more than one (native) programming framework, but a couple that dominate. Mac OS X? Linux Distro Y? MIDP Z (finally the MID gets it's just deserts!)

I think that the fragmentation problem does go away, courtesy of that itch that our mobile internet friends have been dying to scratch. Me too, of course. I expect to see this align with the evolution of the 'mobile' browser to support the real-time Rich Mobile Apps architecture that some of us have been advocating for some time - namely access to device APIs, use of offline storage and so on, all advanced in the meantime by the growing smart phone market and technological developments. Feature phones will benefit from that too, but I don't think so many of us will care any more, despite the billions of them out there.

WebOS and the missing mobile design pattern...

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:32:00 GMT

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have talked about browser APIs for a long time, having done prototype work in this area many years ago and more recently (2005/6) in attempts to unify SIP with HTTP into the browser (originally as means to create "Lite IMS" apps). They will also know they I have been keen on combining messaging with web programming models, as per my updated slide set about real-time mobile web apps.

This is why I am very keen to get my hands on Palm's Mojo SDK and start getting beneath the hood of WebOS, a web standards based framework for mobile apps. We have seen this approach before with Opera Platform, a withdrawn technology that allowed mobile app creation using web standards, modified to allow script access to the underlying APIs, or some of them.

Not only does WebOS allow app creation using web standards, but it also purports to support application concurrency within the user application space (and not just the system apps). Let's see how that works, but there is hint of a JSON messaging bus between apps, which, if true, is a potentially elegant solution.

The real crux of the matter is how to support concurrency on a mobile device whilst supporting a meaningful user experience. For example, if App A does something useful in the background that demands the attention of the user, then how should App A get the user's attention? How should the app be given focus? This should be solved via a judicious mix of application developer control and some kind of UI convention on the device for dealing with concurrency, given that the user focus is very narrow on a mobile at any one time (and typically confined to single-window displays).

From the hints we are getting, then it seems that WebOS supports a design pattern and UI convention that I have long advocated for the support of message handling in a concurrent apps environment. This is the missing design pattern because, apart from the crude MIDP Push Registry, it is not supported on most mobile devices (mostly due to their lack of support for concurrent user applications, which even the iPhone suffers from).

The idea, shown above, is that any application can consume messages at any time. I suspect that the JSON messaging bus might support this in the WebOS (pure speculation on my part), but in the long term it is important to see mobile apps frameworks (and networks) support reliable asynchronous messaging into the device on a per application basis - i.e. the ability to send and address a message to an application on the device, not, as per SMS, to the user. Various transport means are possible (see right), although a single URL namespace convention still needs to emerge (plus reliable underlying transport - no use sending an XMPP message if we can't guarantee it's delivery, including the out-of-band case, whilst this remains problematic in wireless networks).

In the design pattern shown above, we adapt the well-known delegate model to allow each application to have an always-on response to inbound messages, which get handled by a delegate object. These are created by the application developer as part of the application itself and dispatched by the underlying OS. Clearly, there needs to be a response chain to allow higher priority processes to handle the messages and do whatever the system deems as necessary before chaining the event to the delegate object. There is also the issue of how to handle apps that wish to consume the same messages (e.g. Facebook updates)

An important feature here, which WebOS seems to have included (again, from a very outsider perspective) is the ability to bring the interruption to the user's attention in a meaningful way (and here I would defer to a mobile UI designer to suggest the best options), allowing the flow of messages, the flow of processing (via the apps themselves, not the delegates) and the user's current task flow to be managed in the best way possible by the user, given that we are stuck in a mobile with a single-window view most of the time. We could think of an "Application Messaging Console" for the user, or some other option. These options would be programmatically available to the delegate objects, per the Messaging UI Kit API shown in the diagram (sorry to borrow the term UI Kit from Mac OS X).

With this pattern, it is possible, for example, to receive a Facebook status update and bring this to the attention of the user without the need to bring the Facebook app to the foreground, or indeed load it into memory. It is up to the developer to decide how different messages into her application should be handled in terms of notifying the user and subsequently processing the message itself, or not. For example, Facebook updates could be put into a queue for the Facebook application and these then get processed by the application when it is next loaded into memory.

The delegate objects would also be presented with an API (via the Messaging UI Kit API) to determine current user attention. For example, if we know that the user is in a call, or composing an email message, then we could defer any Facebook status update alerts until after the current task has completed.

Any holistic mobile applications framework has to include messaging as an integral part of the architecture. Incredibly, this has not been the case. We have had to rely on SMS to provide a reliable out-of-band messaging transport, but one that is not adequately integrated into applications frameworks. Therefore, there still remains a big question mark (discussed in an earlier post) as to how best to implement the right-hand side of the diagram to allow reliable asynchronous messaging in the application space. It is not clear to me who is solving this problem.

Mobile enterprise opportunities in 2009 (part 2) - recession proof?

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:16:00 GMT

Russel Jones on the DevX blog points out why the current downturn isn't necessarily bad for developers. In summary, pressures on shrinking workforces means more pressure to get better results from IT. Hence, IT solutions that increase automation and productivity are in demand.

I believe that this opportunity also exists for mobile developers, especially in the enterprise sector. I identified this opportunity in my own 2009 predictions, but the point is better made by enterprise mobility expert Philippe Winthrop in his outlook for enterprise mobility in 2009.

With the recent Palm announcement for the Pre, we have entered 2009 with a major boost for smart phones. And these are the devices that are essential for the enterprise mobility market.

When addressing developers at the O2 Litmus Hack Day, I pointed out two areas where I think mobile matters for the workforce. The first is in social enterprise applications, the second is SOHO ('freelancer') apps.

The use of social apps, like blogging, presence (status updates) and social networking within the enterprise. Whilst most people in the enterprise have heard of these tools and already use them personally, they are not so widely used within the enterprise.

For example, I have come across very large companies wishing to implement so-called "Agile" processes into their culture, but have failed to spot the importance of 'thinking aloud' and 'information sharing' via project blogs, Wikis etc.

All too often now, there are times in most projects where a large number of people and deliverables have to come together in a very short space of time, during which real-time availability of information can make a difference. Putting together RFP responses is a key example.

The use of something like Twitter would enhance project communications by allowing a common "hailing" channel to chart progress, ask questions, raise issues, announce documents etc. With virtual teaming, home working and increased pressures for time-critical deliverables, having instant access to data and the ability to deal with that data in real-time becomes more important. Smartphones are ideal platforms to achieve instant-response solutions and I expect that more IT solutions in the enterprise will put mobility as a key requirement.

For SOHO workers, productivity is vitally important, as is management of client communications. Mobiles are essential tools, as most freelancers already know. With smartphones, freelancers can potentially operate their whole business from their pocket. Whilst freelancers will invariably try to find things for free, if they can, there seems a willingness to pay for solutions that just work 'out of the box' and leave the worker free to focus on their core business, which is, most of the time, what they are charging for. No freelancer wants to turn down business in this climate, so the ability to deal with peaks and find more time in the day is important.

In both these areas, the dominant business model is subscription or licensing, so these are key areas for mobile developers to look at who are interested in developing products that generate direct revenue. In the case of iPhone applications, I also believe that there is an opportunity to 'branch out' into Mac desktop solutions to increase revenue. This was discussed in my recent podcast interview with iPhone developer Andrew Ebling.

Podcast Episode 1 - Moving to the iPhone SDK

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:04:00 GMT

A Wireless Wanders podcast hosted by mobile apps expert Paul Golding who interviewed Andrew Ebling (Tenero software) about moving to the iPhone SDK, especially from a J2ME background. Also covers topics such as how to exploit the iTunes app store and the decision about what type of application to create: ‘ringtone apps’ versus ‘fully priced apps.’ Discusses resources and tips for learning the iPhone SDK.

(Note: The audio quality of Paul's voice is sub-optimal for the first part of the interview, but improves later. We apologise for this, but it was due to a problem with the Skype set-up used to record the podcast. However, it is still perfectly listenable.)

Listen Now:

Subscribe to future podcasts (in iTunes and other players)!

Palm Pre - Very Nice, but Too Little Too late?

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:15:00 GMT

There is no doubt, at least from their website and previews, that the Palm Pre promises to be a great device, perhaps stealing the game from iPhone in terms of providing the ultimate personal productivity experience. This probably reflects Palm's longstanding PDA heritage. But, is it too little too late?

It is certainly a fantastic looking device and UI. Some of the features, especially the overall 'unifying' theme, look very appealing. In many ways, this looks like an ultimate productivity device.

But, it's not a game changer. In fact, the game has moved on one step ahead already with the iPhone's coupling of smartphones to app stores?

The smartphone market has taken a turn towards ecosystems where the app store is a tightly coupled part of the WHOLE PRODUCT experience. In other words, a smartphone isn't a smartphone without an app store.

Is Palm therefore stuck in a legacy world of PDA-Phone thinking, rather than "Mobile apps machine" thinking, despite their pioneering support for apps with the Palm Pilot onwards.

For someone about to buy a new smartphone, are they going to go with the iPhone because of all the apps? Are apps the new pull factor for smartphones? Similarly, is a developer, probably already attracted to iPhone, going to work on yet another platform?

Moreover, if Apple decide to make more of the iPhone OS APIs public, I suspect that most of the stuff that the Pre does (like integrated messaging view) becomes do-able on the iPhone via 3rd party apps.

Nonetheless, if the Pre expands the smartphone market overall, that's a good thing. The more that subscribers get a taste of the 'Smartphone 2.0' experience, the better the story looks overall for mobile applications and services.

What happened in 2008 and Mobile Opportunities in 2009 - Part 1

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:07:00 GMT

Happy New Year! I hope that 2009 will be a great year for you and your projects. As ever, I will be on hand to help and assist with various endeavors in the mobile field. I remain one of the longest players in this business, having first started a mobile apps business way back in 1996. I mentioned some of that history in my previous 'futurology' post about mobile virtual worlds, a topic that I remain passionate about. However, here I shall contain myself to a more sober reflection about this year's likely opportunities in mobile.

In 2008, I helped several companies, large and small, old and new, with their mobile product strategy. And it is here that I would like to start. At the launch of O2 Litmus, and in a previous post, I talked about the objective of writing mobile applications by examining the question that is often put to me - 'What should I [mobile developer] build?' One answer, often overlooked, often ignored, is a business.

In 2008, the business of mobile software, as distinct from the technology, took a turn for the better. When asked by my respected associate Martin Smith (Head of Innovation T-Mobile) what my one-word summary was for mobile 2008, I said app stores (it was two words!)

Of course, we all know that an equally valid answer would have been smartphones, but, to me, the rise of app stores, like iTunes, Android Marketplace, and now O2 Litmus, is far more interesting. They present a real opportunity for developers to create mobile software businesses.

Mac programming guru Wil Shipley has an excellent post about the attractions of the iPhone app store. He also makes his position clear about Apple's censoring policy for apps. And, he also reminds us that whilst there are so many apps in the store already, many of them (he says 'most') aren't that good.

So, in 2009, we shall see a lot more attention being paid to app stores. Whenever I look at any mobile technology or device, I always think about its habit-forming or habit-changing potential. For example, when I first adopted a Blackberry, way back when I was developing mobile email solutions for Exchange, my digital habits became dependent upon constant access to email. I emailed more on my Blackberry than the desktop.

When I first adopted the iPhone, I became a lot more used to mobile surfing, though not as much as my wife. She surfs more on her iPhone (in the home) than on any of the numerous laptops and Macs littered around the home. My number one habit-change was listening to podcasts and carrying a large collection of photos and home-made videos, simply because I was now always carrying an iPod with me (which I previously didn't do so habitually).

However, without doubt, the biggest new habit that has swept through my household on every iPhone and iPod Touch, is the frequent downloading and buying of apps.

And it is so obvious why. It's the user experience. It's so damn easy to discover, enjoy, share and play with apps on the iPhone. In the exploration of the question 'What should I develop?' before I suggest a business, I suggested an experience. It is another subtle point, so often overlooked or ignored, even in this era of UX awareness.

Here it will be interesting to see how the iPhone app store matures. There has been a definite gold-rush to get apps into the store. And for good reason. Lots of users have clearly been tempted to experiment. Many of the apps are free and most are low cost. It has been possible to offer apps with almost no functionality at all, such as the famous Flashlight app. Let's face it, if you can develop an app like that (in less than a day) and get a few thousand people to try it out for a dollar, then that's a good return. And this kind of opportunity has already attracted lots of developers with equally pithy app concepts.

With the low pricing, easy access and easy installation, we have seen apps emerge as just another form of content. It's just like downloading a new music track. Now, all the challenges are there, as with any other market, such as getting noticed, converting customers, getting repeat business, and so on. How all this will evolve in app stores generally remains to be seen. I have my own ideas here and discussed some of them at the O2 Litmus launch.

Thinking of compelling UX, I move away from app stores to talk about other opportunities in 2009, in particular video. We have seen the continued rise of video in the online world. Clearly, this is still a massively under exploited area. Most websites make little use of video. I will certainly be using more video in 2009 (see my previous post).

One of the greatest video products on the market is the Flip, now available in HD format. Just turn on, point, shoot and then upload to YouTube via the built-in software. I expect to see devices this easy to use emerge in the mobile market, probably using both circuit-switched video and packet video. The former is still massively under-utilised in 3G networks. It's so simple to open a call to a short code and start delivering video - even without downloading an app! It just seems so crazy that we haven't seen more of this happening, but we can expect the greater rise of video short-codes in 2009.

Video will remain more of a device and platform play in 2009, but this will open up more opportunities for developers in the longer term. I am hoping to do some consulting in the video platform area for a major player in the messaging market. It is possible to tie video content with notification via text, thus allowing mobile to become the most very viral platform possible for video content.

What would be a great way to implement a video-focussed phone experience? Ditto. What would be a great way to implement a mobile virtual world experience (see earlier post about mobile VR)?

Perhaps the answer is Android! What attracts me to Android is that it is completely open source. If I wanted to create a "Club Penguin" phone for kids, say, then I could probably build it on Android and have complete control over the UI experience. The only question with taking Android and building a fork of the code is ... how to maintain compatibility with the marketplace. That remains an interesting question generally for any Android forks. Google's position is that marketplace conformance means conforming with the SDK, so this is the constraint on those who wish to wander too far from the 'standard build.'

Whether or not we see Android forks in 2009, that remains to be seen. It is difficult to predict. However, I am optimistic that we shall see some cool new devices this year built on Android. Because of my former bias towards them, I am hoping that Motorola pulls a miracle out of the hat with their massive Android project(s). If they can somehow combine their iconic RAZR design cool with Android, they might just turn their business around. I'm hoping so.

Meanwhile, I shall be looking into some Android exploits of my own as a platform on which to build the next generation of rich mobile applications. I am hoping to work with a messaging company to combine messaging infrastructure with the mobile web stack. Hopefully this will be part of the important change in the mobile web landscape in 2009 as we begin to see rich mobile applications become a reality. (And, by the way, it is interesting to note that Motorola already has an SDK called WebUI for accessing native APIs from the browser.)

I wrote this before I decided to make the video post about app stores, which I felt was a more interesting way (I hope) to get the app store message across, so I cut short this posting. In part 2, I will talk about social applications, social enterprise apps, SOHO productivity and cloud computing, focussing on real opportunities within these spaces for mobile in 2009.

All the best with your projects in 2009 - do let me know what you're working on!

Mobile 2008/9 all about App Stores

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Happy New Year! Hope that you have a great 2009 with mobile! Here I am explaining the highlight for me of mobile in 2008.

Mobile 2008/9 = App Stores from Paul Golding on Vimeo.

Future of Mobile is VR...

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:10:00 GMT

It is nearly year-end and people start to talk about predictions and so on. I felt in the mood to talk future, although this is NOT my prediction for 2009. More (sensible stuff, perhaps) on that later.

These days, I seldom mention to anyone - it may not even be on my bio, I need to check - that I once researched techniques for mobile virtual reality. This was in the early 90s. If you remember the whole VR thing back then, and the excitement around 3D (e.g. Silicon Graphics on every desk, RISC etc.) then you'd understand my enthusiasm.

I formed a company back in 1995 to exploit the impending wave of Mobile Multimedia. Uh hum.... Yes, how we laugh at the mobile ambitions that we had back then. There are funnier ones. I submitted a patent in 1992 for "Location Based Advertising." It was duly rejected by my then employer - Motorola - as "irrelevant to the mobile industry" and defensively published in a corporate journal, languishing no doubt somewhere in the Library of Congress. I actually wanted to project the ads onto the nearest (electronic) billboard. Of course, Philip K. Dick probably had the idea way before then. I just suggested how to do it. (And now, ironically, I'm writing my first sci-fi novel.)

My interest in mobile VR was actually a commercial one. I believed in the future of networked gaming (which we were doing back then using HP-UX boxes over the LAN). But what I wanted to do was create an app that I dubbed Talking Heads. It would enable two people to communicate using animated avatars and selectable voices. I wanted to sound like Clint Eastwood and say - "Go ahead, make my day."

I know it all sounds crazy doesn't it.

What happened is that the prestigious university department, to whom I was seconded from industry to conduct the research, suggested that I nail it on the head. Not enough prior art to guide me along (so the professors said). So I was talked into researching fuzzy logic for interference cancellation in wireless LANs. Huh?

In recent times, I flirted again with avatars on the phone, involved with various wannabe mobile avatar projects. I was very excited to finally see a demo of an avatar chat application (running over SIP) that used 3D accelerators (from Nvidia) on the phone to achieve a convincing experience. It was my original vision in the (virtual) flesh. As Motorola's Chief Apps Architect in 2007, I desperately tried to find operators interested in commercialising the idea. It didn't go too well. Here's one of my avatars, produced by my friends at Go Figure 3D (as shown on the cover of my latest book).

Virtual Paul Golding

When I wrote the second edition of the book Next Generation Wireless Applications, I was cautioned by my peers not to mention anything to do with the future. "People are still trying to exploit 3G, so don't mention anything beyond that." So I duly took out any futuristic stuff, which wasn't much, and pulled a planned chapter called "Future Trends in Mobile."

I did, however, sneak in under the radar when my peer Stefan Bertschi published his interesting anthology Thumb Culture and asked me to write a chapter about ... guess what ... the future of mobile. I thought that I could get away with it, tucked away in the back (I think that it is the last chapter). In the era of start-up mania and short-term exit strategies, talk of futuristic ideas can be lonely.

Anyhow, I won't bore you with the details, but jump to the bit where I wrote about Perpetual Visualization. We had succeeded with mobile in achieving vocal immediacy, but the next phase, I argued, was to achieve visual immediacy. I couldn't resist my VR tendencies, which led me to write in Stefan's book about wearable displays i.e. 'VR goggles.'

If you've never tried the latest in VR headsets, then you really must. It is an awesome experience. The technology is already available to achieve economic mass production. The issue is demand (i.e. applications), not technology.

However, I know what you're thinking. "We won't be walking around with those things strapped to our head." Perhaps not. But here are two thoughts that relate to the future of mobile:

1. According to Philip Rosedale, SecondLife is on the same growth curve as early Web and will be bigger than the Web (to see what he means, and why, take a look at his TED talk)

2. For many kids today, they already spend most of their online time in virtual worlds using avatars - Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Spine World, Little Big Planet etc.

To me, it's obvious that these two are on a collision course with mobile. I am thinking of another start-up in this area, some 15 years after the initial ideas. Perhaps I should ask my wife to knock me over the head this time, before spending large chunks of time pushing the coins for somebody else's coin-pusher.

O2 Litmus Launch

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:12:00 GMT

Congratulations to O2 on the launch of their developer forum and app store - O2 Litmus - which took place at the swanky O2 Lounge in the O2 Arena. It certainly functions well as a chill-out room and as a great venue for a hack day - lots of power points, free WiFi and beanbags (my back is still sore).

I was invited to give a talk. Here I am, holding up my 'Source O2' badge from the last incarnation of O2's developer forum, just to show that I've been holding out for a long time. It also reveals my age in the industry, given that there was only one other techie in the room who remembered Source O2. Time for me to retire? Not yet. Things are just getting interesting.

O2 Litmus is a completely different proposition to Source O2. Here's why:

That's right. Finally operators are making it easier for end-user developers to earn money. And that's not all. They trying to make it easy to develop apps, test them and build a real business. The latter point was the message of my talk - "The (mobile) Developer's Dilemma" - which answered the question "What should I (the developer) build?"

Mobile Developer's Dilemma

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mobile o2litmus)

The answer was all the usual things: app, open API, community, but more importantly:

A compelling user experience!

A business!

And it is these two aspects of mobile software that O2 Litmus also caters for, at least in part. They cater for user experience in terms of providing access to a comprehensive set of testing services, setting up favourable access to the likes of DeviceAnywhere, Segala and Mob4Hire (don't you love that name). There aren't any resources, that I could see, to help with upstream UX issues - i.e. design - but this should be added and I would like to see community cross-over here with some of the emerging mobile design communities out there. Mr Ribot was there from the Ribot mobile design agency to give a presentation about mobile design issues (and their guy Mark won the hack day). Guys like them in the forum bring quality and the all-important design perspective.

As this is both a developer forum and an app store, I think it offers some unique opportunities to build a strong community around mobile apps development issues, including design and biz dev. It should be made possible, for example, for designers to openly critique apps on the store, with comments only visible from the developer side of the store (not the retail side). I hope we see this kind of activity at O2 Litmus.

The forum also includes access to biz dev resources via 3rd party Caspia Consultancy. This is a clever step on O2's part, underlining the importance of my point about the need to build a software business, not just an app. I hope that business development will be part of the community generally, encouraging entrepreneurial input and exchange. There are plenty of people out there, like myself, who can assist start-ups with their mobile product strategy. By including biz dev resources in O2 Litmus, this begins to add serious weight to the project, akin to what Microsoft has been doing for over a decade with their ample biz dev resources they offer developer partners.

I didn't stick around for the actual hack competition, even though I had brought my 9-year old along - possibly one of the youngest mobile developers around. I want to thank O2 for their kindness in allowing him to attend. Good move, as he represents the next generation of mobile app developer :) !

Zak Golding at the O2 Litmus Hack Day from Paul Golding on Vimeo.

Currently, the beta site is sketchy in terms of content and features, but the essential bare bones are there. Moreover, the main observation I have about the project is that O2 are making a concerted effort to facilitate a "O2 hands-off" site that is for the developers, not for O2. Of course, they get their share - 30% of the apps revenue. However, the point I made on the day was that to build a successful mobile software business, we have to adopt 'social business' models where the services are co-created by the users, developers and entrepreneurs who don't necessarily all work in the same company (see slides above).

This type of approach is essential and why can't O2 Litmus be a place where it happens? I think it could and should! The message here is that it's up to the developer community to cease the opportunity and contribute ideas, code, apps, energy and enthusiasm to build a better beta than the one we have today, which ain't half bad to begin with.

O2 Litmus beta

O2 Litmus twitter feed.

[Will update this post later with some more pics/vid feeds.]

Tipping point for dummies

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:07:00 GMT

In case you're still wandering what a tipping point is all about, or thinking that there are some pearls of (business) wisdom to be found by reading Gladwell's book, then this picture of a coin pusher might save you a lot of time.

Some observations:

1. You never know when it's going to tip.

2. You have to be adding coins to stand a chance.

3. Those are probably somebody else's coins that you're going to tip.

4. But - those might be your coins that somebody else tips.

5. Best make sure that you tip somebody else's coins.

6. But when's it gonna tip? That's the problem. Often, we can't see the bloody coins stacking up!

Make of this what you will.

The untapped $250 Billion opportunity

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:08:00 GMT

I suspect that some of my readers and fellow mobilists are tracking with interest the recent provocations from the Telco 2.0 team. If you don't know about the $250 Billion opportunity that they claim to have uncovered, then watch Simon Torrance describe it.

Now, I don't plan on spending 2K to buy their report. I'm not sure I'd spend that kind of money on a report that promised to make me $250 Billion, but then it isn't aimed at people like me, at least not directly.

Let me be so bold as to sum up their proposition. Today, operators sell 'downstream' to people like you and I - end users. We pay them money and get a service. Contrast that with Google, who give their end-user services away (search, Gmail, docs etc.) and sell 'upstream' to advertisers.

It is interesting at this point to ask whether or not an operator could ever give services away for free with some kind of Google-like model. I can tell you that I have had plenty of entrepreneurs approach me and ask me how to architect various businesses based on such a model, usually some variant of a Blyk-like business, with various innovations on the side.

Often the conversation converges on the requirement to set up an MVNO - though not always - and entrepreneurs, at least most of them, hear the cha-ching of a heavy investment, loud enough to scare them off. The question of whether an MVNO really needs to cost an arm and a leg remains to be answered.

Here's the thing though. I bet that if we asked a Google, say, to create a back-office system for an MNO, they could do it and do it well. If we ask a telco if they can create an ecosystem like Google. Well...

So what's the opportunity for technologists and technology companies in the mobile space? Where's our slice of the $250 Billion? This clearly needs some thought, but there are definitely opportunities here.

Without access to Telco 2.0's set of use cases that demonstrate the upstream biz model, it is difficult to comment on the technological implications. However, we can perhaps offer some general comments.

The successful sale of upstream services will almost certainly require an enterprise that is capable of rich management of meta-data about mobile users, mobile usage, interactivity, relationships, trends and so on. I can attest to the difficulty of the challenge. Whilst working as Chief Apps Architect for Motorola, I frequently pushed the mantra of 'converged' services for N-play networks, which almost always meant a network that put meta-data at the heart of the architecture.

This is not easy and is compounded in many telco environments by a number of factors, including the move towards N-play networks where, generally speaking, the different networks (e.g. IPTV and mobile, say) are like chalk and cheese. Also keep in mind how difficult Yahoo found it to maintain a seamless experience for their upstream customers across the portfolio of Yahoo properties. If a Yahoo struggles with such things, what about a telco?

I don't have all the answers here, nor the time to discuss this problem in any depth in a blog - for the problem space is wide. However, I wouldn't feel shy to say that the future is Web 2.0 at the heart of the network. In the interim, SDPs will play an important role, but here it seems to me that the winner will be the operator most willing to make a radical shift in the way they run their enterprise. This is certainly an area worthy of a lot more attention.

Future of mobile web is real-time mobile web applications

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:29:00 GMT

This is an update of a previous slide deck about trends in mobile web. This one has more pictures and also some updated materials. Comments welcome.

Real Time Mobile Web V0.2

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mobile 2.0)

XMPP or SIP or just presence or just compelling UX?

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:10:00 GMT

Our friend Tsahi from Radvision is asking if XMPP is the new successor to SIP?

A good question from Tsahi, a protocol expert and great blogger on all things SIP related.

A few years back, I did a gap analysis for GSMA to compare all the mobile (and perhaps not so 'mobile') IM and presence protocols and standards. I found that I preferred XMPP by a long way (especially compared to yucky Wireless Village).

Somewhere along the line, the OMA switched tracks from WV to SIP/SIMPLE, also yucky. This got pinned to the mast of IMS where it has been left to dry and whither away. Of course, that particular idea was nailed to the mast with the 'how do we charge for this?' hammer.

All this (mis)alignment of technologies, platforms and biz models is what led me to hit the road, back in my day as Motorola Chief Apps Architect, to preach the message (see diagram above) of putting user experience over technology. Sorry to recycle this diagram for the Nth time this year.

The problem is that the phrase user experience - trendy version 'UX' - has become so commonplace, it's become embarrassing now to mention it, as we're all supposed to live and breath the UX mantra. Of course, the reality is somewhat adrift of our 'we're all UX architects now' pretensions.

User experience was seldom mentioned in the debate about all of this XMPP/ WV, SIP/SIMPLE malarky that has gone round in circles many times. It certainly didn't figure in the gap analysis I did. It was a non question. What operators should have been focussed on was getting phones into the market with an active address book, exactly like the INQ1 of yesterday's blog post - i.e. putting the experience of presence into the user's address book.

Whether it's XDM or whatever server you want to use, Mr Operator, for heaven's sake please get on with launching the following:

1. A bunch of decent web-connected phones with OPEN active address books

2. A presence server (proxy) with open APIs that allow:

a. Users to subscribe to ANY presence/status update streams they want

b. Users to add any 'Buddy' they want

Now they we've finally realised that presence is a lot more than "online" and "away" - meaningless in a mobile context anyway - surely we've also realised that the active address book is potentially one of the most important steps in the evolution of mobile. It is Mobile 2.0.

This is why I keep repeating that a messaging-based architecture is essential for mobile. If it's going to be built on top of XMPP, then so be it. No one really cares. We just want Facebook and Twitter in our address book.

I am pretty sure that a lot of the push-to-X and other converged (IMS-like) services that we've had running in the labs for years will then start to make their way into the hands of users. It will become a natural progression, as will having non-human buddies in our address book, like 'My Bank,' 'My TV' etc.

As I have said many times, the problem with the IMS/SIP world from an applications perspective has been the lack of 'universal client' like the browser has been to HTTP. Perhaps the active address book is the new universal client in the sense that where a browser gives us a sense of 'placeness' (being in some [virtual] place), the active address book will give us a sense of connectedness in our digital lives. It will be the one app that we habitually reach to, look at and spend a lot of time browsing ('connection/status' browsing), albeit often as a launch pad to somewhere else (i.e. the 'web' browser).

Of course, with the future of Rich Mobile Applications (see slides), active address books and web browsers could (should?) be one of the same thing.

Turn a £100 bike into a £1000 bike using an iPhone...

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:38:00 GMT

How many calories?

Yesterday I asked my oldest kids to brainstorm how to design a bike so that it would sell for £1000 to a non biking enthusiast who just wanted to get fit. (You can see I am training them to be marketing gurus!)

They - like kids do - came up with a long list of ideas to increase the perceived value of the bike.

Among them, an iPhone holder and an iPhone app. The app suggested safe routes, tracked progress, monitored calorie burn and so on. Not only that, but the app required joining a club/social-network of other bike owners trying to get fit.

With the app, you could also book a hirable child trailer from the store, which hooked onto a bracket already fitted to the bike. The trailer was low cost to rent because the idea was to find a way to get the owner to keep coming back to the store.

There were a whole bunch of other ideas (my favorite being the rollers for stationary training), but the fact that they included an iPhone app was interesting. It just shows how much kids who grow up with mobile expect it to just be part of their lives. I just checked the iTunes on my machine and see that my son has so far downloaded nearly 35 iPhone apps (onto his parent's phones). That's versus the total of zero on his Samsung slide.

INQ1 - Is this the real killer phone?

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:27:00 GMT

Is this the killer phone?

The INQ1 ("ink one") from 3UK is an exciting attempt to leverage the appeal of Facebook as a reason to go buy a mobile. But, it's more than that. Much more, apparently.

Those of us who got excited about active address books back in the day, the day being the introduction of IM onto mobiles, were preparing ourselves for a new era of mobility. We waited (for operators to pull their finger out) ... and waited ... and it never came. Until now, I hope.

I have blogged, talked and presented endlessly about the virtues of a people-centric UI, namely the hitherto boring and under-utilised address book. And now, finally, it seems we are getting one with the INQ1. All those status updates in our address book, where they belong. A people-centric interface.

In many ways, it is odd that it took Facebook to turn our attention to the idea of using status updates to bring the phonebook alive. The idea is not new of course. Even before Twitter came along, there was a bunch of innovative IM users who discovered the joys of using custom presence messages. I still remember the first time I saw something like 'Is ready to cry' in my buddy list instead of the usual 'offline' and 'away' indicators. When mobile IM first came along, operators had a chance, but, in true form, blew it. The biggest de facto social networks on the planet and they wanted us to stick with address books that were the equivalent of what my Nan used to write in before she had a telephone.

Things have moved along in many ways. Even as recent as two years ago, when I was pushing the active address book in operator workshops - mostly as the central plank for a whole raft of IMS services - the inevitable question was 'how do we charge for these presence updates' and 'what if people use them for messaging?' Duh!

To me, the INQ1 is spot on with its active address book. Finally, the address book becomes an application environment - a platform -fully plumbed into Web 2.0. It is what Mobile 2.0 is all about; driving services other than voice and texting through the right blend of mobile (address book) and the web (Facebook and friends). In other words, through the very real connections that we carve out, cherish and crave - our connections with each other. It is the killer app.

A mobile is all about connecting people and staying in touch, the kinds of phrases we use glibly in marketing, yet seldom truly deliver. The active address book is a new mode of mobile communication.

It will be a turning point for all those who use it, I am sure. There's no going back to a dull old address book after this. We should be overwhelmed with various ways to connect and stay-in-touch with people - that's what mobility should be all about. And, without having to open a MIDlet or iPhone app to do so. Active address book, built right in. Social networks accessible from the home screen. Wow. Can it get any better? I think so, but this is a great start.

Now, which operator is going to be daring enough to give us a Twitter phone? And will 3 give us a presence API into that address book?

(p.s. Presence traffic can get quite chatty indeed. With a large address book, battery life is going to be interesting.)

What mobile app should I build?

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:04:00 GMT

Having been in mobile apps a long time, I frequently get asked the same question. Something like 'What mobile app should I build?'

a. An application?

b. An API?

c. A community?

d. A platform?

e. A widget?

You probably want to do all of the above, if you can, subject to definitions and numerous caveats.

Of course, a good answer is...

f. A business

Which is seldom what happens. Most mobile start-ups are 'idea companies.' We probably have to redefine what we mean by a start-up. The fact that anyone can open a legally registered company and put out a bit of software means that the entry is low. Most of these 'start-ups' will end up producing an 'application' that will never make any money. As I previously mentioned, the mode (i.e. most common) revenue number for small software start-ups is ... zero.

That said, not everyone - perhaps the majority - aren't really interested in building a business. After all, with the barriers to entry so low, creating software can easily be a hobby or even a peripheral activity not directly related to making a profit. A lot of people create a start-up just to be a "CEO" or "Founder," for a number of reasons, including just the idea of having a business. It's an ego thing. Or, they feel that just being in the start-ups club is going to bring them a step nearer to the money pot. Not true. Ninety percent of the time, or more, it's going to push them further from the money because of all that money, time and effort spent on a business that was never going to succeed. That can amount to a lot of opportunity cost too.

Converting mobile software ideas into businesses is a formidable challenge. Nonetheless, there are just so many pitfalls that can be avoided.

Let me offer just one of them, as I see it so often that it's hard to believe that it keeps happening.

Lesson 1 - DON'T BUILD A BUSINESS ON ONE DEVICE (or API)

Marketing 101 says that you need a market big enough to make some money after you take your slice of the action. What so many mobile start-ups do is come up with an interesting idea that only works on one or a few devices, usually because it needs an API or device capability that isn't widespread.

The founders get carried away with the idea and its elegance - and there are a lot of fantastic mobile ideas out there - but don't think about penetration and adoption. They often wave their hands over this with the false belief that the device market will catch up. Sadly, not. For example, the rate at which device APIs have penetrated the J2ME world is woefully slow. There is a constant tendency, especially by those coming to mobile from the web world, to massively overestimate how quickly device APIs and capabilities will penetrate the mass market.

There's no escaping it. If you want a successful mobile business, you will need a strategy for getting users, keeping them, adding value to their lives and then converting their engagement into money. Doing this on one device is a poor strategy.

Google Voice is Tipping Point, says Tim O'Reilly...

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:55:00 GMT

Luminary Tim O'Reilly asks if the Google VR search app on the iPhone is a potential tipping point for mobile web. I would say no, although I'm not sure what a tipping point is (and I've read the book, the one Joel didn't like). Most certainly, a lot will change when the next gen of API-enabled mobile browsers (Rich Mobile Apps) come along, but let's see.

Mobile VRec is interesting, although mostly a sideshow. I agree with some of the comments on the blog about the greater potential for an open API into cloud-based VRec services.

However, we need a much more instantaneous means to push bits of voice around the network. This was the promise - and still is - of push-to-X architectures, meaning push-to-talk and its derivatives. If we can simply click on a "search" buddy in the UI and speak a phrase, the instant gratification and, hopefully, near instant access to results, will change user habits. Ditto, click to speak a phrase into any of the plethora of note-taking (e.g. Evernote) and jotting (e.g. ThumbJot) apps on the web via our "Dictation" buddy. Why oh why is presence taking so long to make it mainstream to mobiles? (Don't write to tell me. Write to your nearest telco.)

This leads me back to an old point I've made countless times for countless years, which is that we ideally need a reliable messaging-centric architecture underpinning mobile services, alongside web. SIP/IMS is an ideal architecture, although under operator control it will lack openness. Surprise, surprise!

From a usability perspective, SIP/IMS lacks a 'universal client' in the way the browser has given life to HTTP. The solution is easy - to combine the two. API-enabled browsers will allow such convergence, although we still don't see much attention being paid to the concept, let alone the implementation. That's because the telco/web 'political' divide has created silo thinking to go alongside the silo business structures that have put the brakes on mobilization for many years.

But, moving back to the iPhone and its sensors. I don't believe that the gesture interface is habit changing, although I welcome being challenged on that point. We still do pretty much the same things through gesture, just more efficiently and with more fun (and fun should never be underrated as a UI design goal, in my view - mark my words here, the future of mobile UIs will come from the gaming world!)

More habit-changing has been the app store. We have masses of mobile users now experimenting with mobile apps in a way that has never taken hold in the J2ME world for 101 reasons, also to do with silo thinking (but of a different sort). I use the word 'experimenting' deliberately, because that is what is really going on. Moreover, it's a good thing. Experimentation provides a fertile ground for discovery. That is a better ingredient for so-called tipping points.

Coming back to sensors, then the future has already arrived. As my good mobilist friend CEO comments on Tim's blog, it is context that really matters. I couldn't agree more and we've been writing and dreaming about it for years. Proximity is a plank of the mobile future. When contact-less technologies (e.g. RFID, QR-codes, video recognition etc.) become commonplace - which they will - well, the mind boggles at the opportunities. This is one of the great frontiers, not just of mobile, but of our digital lives.

Combined with location generally, proximity is the powerhouse of mobile. I wish I could say that it is the Mobile 2.0, but let's not spoil a great here-and-now marketing term with wishy-washy futurism. Hey, I'm often accused of being too future-looking, but someone's got to invent it! (And I'm not claiming that it's me.)

And location is a really interesting observation about the iPhone apps store playhouse. How many apps have added location and camera capabilities just because ... that's right ... they can! And all those arguments I used to have standing up at telco developer forums, shouting till I was red in the face, that anything other than GPS accuracy is just wasting our time. Well, it's finally arrived and ... guess what ... there's no going back to crappy old 1 mile accuracy. Who wants that?

The future's bright. The future's ubiquity, it's proximity and ...

... yes, voice recognition perhaps. But, if you want to be really impressed by recognition-in-the-cloud services, then you simply have to download the Shazam iPhone app and point it at your speakers. The music ID service is impressive. I love it. Still my fave mobile app of all time!!!

Wireless Wanders Digest (#1)

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:37:00 GMT

Previously, I blogged a series of 100+ posts about ideas for mobile ideas and services. This was well received by many of my associates in the mobile community and I've been asked on numerous occasions to 'give us another 100.'

This time around, I thought to do something different. Let's pick some interesting ideas already out there and, where possible, try to build upon them. We shall also try to dialogue with the originators and inventors of some of the featured ideas. As time goes by, we will also attempt to build up a picture of how and why these ideas succeed, or not, in commercial terms. This will prove valuable to various mobilists who continue to struggle with the question - 'What should I develop?' (If you come to the O2 Litmus Hack Day, I shall be attempting to answer that question.)

If you prefer to receive these 'Wireless Wanders' digest posts in your inbox, then opt-in to the monthly newsletter via the form on the home page or at the bottom of this post.

In this edition:

Smart digits with Motorola adaptive handset display (Modeshift)
Staying ahead in business with Skydata mobile CRM and networking
Easy mobile app design and publishing with Cascada Mobile
Dynamic MIDP GUIs with TagsMeT developer suite
Delivering your content using Amazon Cloudfront
Staying healthy with the Pill Phone app from Vocel

Motorola Modeshift Keypad

Modeshift Keypad

As a former Motorolan, I have a curious affection for their products. In true Motorola style, bits and pieces of clever design continue to surface from their product-innovation activities. The latest gizmo is a context-aware handset, which uses what they call Modeshift technology. It appears on their award-winning music phone, the ROKR E8. A cunningly simple idea, the handset illumination changes to highlight the operational keys for the mode that the handset is currently in: music playing (see right), picture reviewing, call making, texting and so on. It's a nice idea, although having a nice idea doesn't make a leading product. The RAZR - 'very thin phone idea' - was the exception that has so far proved the rule for Motorola. Let's hope that their plans for Android make a difference.

I have long had a fascination with keypads and have a few designs of my own. Any mobilist worth his or her salt should get to grips with the various aspects of device design. I got excited when Digit Wireless gave us Fastap, which continues to gather pace in the market and is underrated as a useful technology. I enjoyed exchanging ideas with those guys and was happy when their former President (Chris Hare) endorsed the first edition of my NGWA book.

Meanwhile, as we all know, touch screens are becoming popular, although they are relatively expensive. Steve Jobs commented at his iPhone launch that he disliked real keypads because they took up screen space. Isn't that exactly what the virtual one does when it's on the screen? Why? It would be useful if we could slide it out of the way to quickly review edits using the full screen. And, why not enable transparency? Let us at least see through the keypad.

But why can't a physical keypad display information, even if it's something basic like the number of new messages in my inbox?

My Business in My Pocket with Skydata

Skydata is from a class of applications that I call console apps, or dashboard apps. With Skydata, you can access a variety of social networking (e.g. Facebook) and online communication tools (e.g. Google contacts) in order to access all that valuable contact data you have stored away. You get all this for free and it works on the usual smartphone contenders.

However, the extra mile that Skydata offers is the ability to connect to your online CRM tool of choice. All of the popular and bigger CRM tools are available. And this is where you have to pay to use Skydata. I like the business model. Pay only once you connect to your preferred CRM service. I suggested to CEO/Co-Founder Kevin Nix that connecting to 37signals Highrise might be a good idea, not only because I use it, but because it's a popular tool amongst a certain class of user (i.e. early adopters) who are likely to pass the meme around.

In these difficult times, anything you can do to improve your responsiveness to customers and to leverage your business network in a timely fashion is worth a look. Just one contract or deal secured as a result of being ready there and then with business-critical data will more than pay for tools like Skydata. I intend to discuss this, and other time-saving tips, in a forthcoming ebook.

Rapid J2ME Apps using HTML

I already blogged about this in a whole article dedicated to Cascada Mobile, a company with a great tool (Breeze) that allows the creation of 'device agnostic' MIDlets using HTML, Javascript and CSS. Feature packs provide access to richer APIs on the device and it also comes with Ruby-on-Rails integration code (for RoR fans out there). Breeze is an interesting step towards the web-centric Rich Mobile Applications architecture that various parties are working towards.

Cascada Mobile didn't just create a neat tool, they also created an ecosystem - a means to distribute and virally market your apps across a wide number of networks. Ecosystems is the name of the game these days and it is one of the topics I shall be emphasising in my forthcoming talk at the O2 Litmus Hack Day.

Read my interview with Cascada Mobile founders.

Rapid J2ME Apps using a GUI Toolkit, but where's the Cloud (Front)?

Using an intermediate language to describe an application is not new, and not new to MIDP either. Cascada Mobile's Breeze opens up the world of MIDlets to web designers and also comes with its own ecosystem in the form of an app store with wide network coverage.

There are other ways to create MIDlets without writing in J2ME. Moreover, this isn't just a neat idea to bypass the heady world of coding in Java. With MIDlets, a frequent problem is how to evolve the application and update content without having to keep adding more GUI information and without having to ask the user to download a new version.

The solution is to use some kind of GUI toolkit, which is exactly what TagsMe offers. Essentially, TagsMe is what we sometimes call an On Device Portal (ODP), but unlike most ODP solutions out there, this one is accessible to the wider community of developers without punitive per-device licensing costs.

With its GUI creation tool, the TagsMe team boast rapid development times:

"The Nokia application is a representation of their UK website. The production of the demo, which has 21 pages and 122 images, took less than a working day for our designer - no programming experience is needed with TagsMe™ GUI."

Watch the video demo here.

I would like to see something like this develop towards the Breeze solution, which means towards a fuller ecosystem. What developers want these days - as Alan Quayle's research for O2 Litmus has shown - is not just a set of tools, but a clear pathway towards revenue, such as through an app store.

All this talk of app stores brings me on to Amazon's latest offering in their expanding range of web services - Cloud Front. It's a content distribution platform with edge-based caching (remember when that topic alone attracted millions of VC dollars?)

You have to wonder how long it will be before Amazon make the jump towards mobile content distribution. Imagine all their assets brought to bear on the distribution of mobile content:

Personalised store technology (app stores within app stores?)
Extensive market affiliation schemes
AWS Cloud computing
Powerful search APIs
Support for various mobile-retailing solution (i.e. offering all those other Amazon goodies via mobile apps)

The wireless mind wanders!

Don't Forget to Take Your Pills!

Finally, let's pay tribute to any mobile application that clearly helps people to lead a better life, or a healthier one. The Pill Phone application (from Vocel) is one such example. A nifty app that reminds the user when to take his or her pills. Not only that, but it comes with an extensive online drug reference (The Pill Book) and allows family or friends to set up the pill schedule. It's available in the US on three carriers and is even FDA approved. Go view the demo.

[It's interesting to note here that Vocel found a spin-off service opportunity using their own technology. This is a common occurence. The same goes for TagsMe above, who have their own sports results service (Sports Mate) built using their GUI technology.]

All Vocel needs to do now is to add a facility to de-stress the user, so that we don't need to take so many pills in the first place, especially in these difficult times that we are constantly being reminded of - and I just did it myself! See my various earlier posts about mobiles and stress.

Thank you for reading this edition of the Wireless Wanders newsletter. Stay tuned for more. Subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog, or subscribe to the monthly newsletter edition to get future copies sent to your inbox (spam free and we never ever share your details). Or, read this on your mobile.

O2 Litmus and the Developer's Dilemma

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:05:00 GMT

Like a growing social network (e.g. Mobilists list on LinkedIn), the speed is gathering for O2 Litmus, the latest episode in the growing app store story. James Parton, project brainiac (he doesn't mind me calling him that) has been networking with the mobirati in San Francisco, soaking up the Mobile 2.0 buzz.

Litmus test: Is it cool? Will it sell?

I guess we could call O2 Litmus something like 'O2 Developer 2.0,' except that it's more than their 2nd attempt at a developer forum. Let's not hold that against our friends at O2. Things have moved on considerably and they were smart enough to bring the iPhone to the UK, a device that epitomizes much of the Mobile 2.0 paradigm from a company that has led the way with the apps store buzz.

And if James was out in sunny California on a networking spree, then networking is the name of the game, in all respects. O2 Litmus promises to be a socially-enabled app store with a difference, fully networked in every way. As a developer, you'll get all the networks you need: the mobile network, the social developer network, the early-adopter network, and - most important of all - the O2 customer network. And did I mention the payment network? Oh yes - you can get paid for your apps.

What excuses will there be left to have a crack at flogging your mobile wares to the public?

If it proves to be all that an app store and community could be, then every light will be turned green, leaving only the boot-strapping entrepreneur/developer to figure out how to fly down the mobile highway.

And there's the dilemma. What, then, should the developer develop? How to exploit the network? How to exploit the opportunity?

Gone are the days when there was a good deal of mileage in developing mobile apps technologies that no one else had yet found a way to build. The technologies, the APIs, the SDKs - they're all here, right now.

This developer's dilemma is what I shall be talking about in a brief talk at the O2 launch event and hack day in December at the O2 Arena. Who knows? I might have a hack myself, especially if I can grab some Coldplay tickets (and that's just my guess/rumour folks - nothing official). I might also bring my 9-year old son, who is probably the world's youngest mobilist, and a big Coldplay fan!

Watch this space for dates, agenda and slides. Meanwhile, be sure to express your interest on the still-in-stealth-mode O2 Litmus site or the equally stealthy RSS feed.

Is Cascada Mobile the future of mobile apps?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:09:00 GMT

One web or two? To web or not to web? Native or not? And so on. These are the questions that distract many of us from getting on with the real task at hand, which is the mobilization of useful services.

Fellow mobilists and regular readers of the Wireless Wanders blog (this redesigned one and the old one) will know that we can spend a lot of time going back and forth debating the various pathways to mobilization. As I suggested for newbies to mobilization (see "Tips for Micro-ISVs going mobile") this is often putting the cart before the horse, or pressing send before the message (excuse the metaphor).

There is a new future coming, besides Obama's presidency. It's the Rich Mobile Applications (RMA) future, as featured in my presentation on that topic.

Mobile Web Evolution - Rich Mobile Applications and Real-time Web UX

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mobile 2.0)

Although none of us are sure how that future's going to pan out, we do know that most mobilists are working towards the same goal, which is to provide a mobile software ecosystem that fluidly connects the panoply of mobile APIs (to cameras, messaging, address books, GPS, and so on) with the rich world of Web 2.0, all in an open and socially-enabled manner.

There are a lot of bets riding on the heavy use of web technologies across the whole apps stack, from servers to handsets (and increasingly inside the operator portion, but that's another story for now).

Before we get to the RMA future, there can be no doubt that access to mobile APIs is already available to MIDlets (J2ME apps). The MIDP environment, good or bad, continues to evolve. MIDP 3 promises a whole new level of capabilities. Handset vendors continue to add the extension APIs to converge, albeit slowly, upon a decent core set (MSA and MSA2).

So what if we could combine the two approaches?

Well, some of those ideas are in the presentation, but then recently I discovered that our fellow mobilists at Cascada Mobile are already well down that path. What about being able to create MIDlets using the Web standards of HTML, CSS and Javascript? That's exactly what the clever chaps at Cascada have done with their Breeze application creation solution. You write the app in these familiar web languages and then upload the design to their servers where it gets converted into MIDlets that will run across a wide range of devices.

Don't confuse this with the failed (withdrawn) Opera Mobile platform. There's no new runtime needed here or anything of the sort. We're talking the plain vanilla J2ME container running MIDP 2.0. Using Feature Packs, declared via appropriate (standard) HTML tags in the header, developers can access native APIs from HTML and Javascript.

I caught up with Cascada founders Alan Lysne and Sean Maurik to dig deep into their solution and was impressed by what they had to say. But don't take their word for it - go ahead and download the developer kit and give it a try. What's more, if you're a Ruby on Rails fan, such as I, then they even have a set of code to get you started on AJAX calls back to RoR from a Cascada Mobile app.

1. Who is the primary target user for your service?

"Our target is anyone who would like to turn an idea into a mobile application. We have individual developers using Breeze right up through large enterprises who wish to implement corporate solutions. Similarly, we are seeing applications being developed that are consumer oriented, and ones that are enterprise solutions."

2. What key problem(s) are you solving?

"Anyone who has ever tried to create a mobile application for 'feature phones' or even smart phones has come up against numerous challenges. Picking a platform, learning a new language, porting the app to run on as many phones as possible, figuring out distribution, and then discovery - how does someone even find the app once it is built. With Breeze, we've taken care of all of those issues. Anyone can now download our software, create an app using known Web 2.0 technologies, and have it run on over 150 devices. We have also built in a distribution system whereby apps can be installed simply by entering a mobile number into a web page. Our software will guide the user through the install process, doing device and carrier detection in the background. So even though we've automatically created numerous versions of the actual app, optimized for each phone type, the end user and developer don't have to even worry about it. The right version of the app will be installed on the right phone."

3. Can you explain the business model - how does Cascada make money? How can developers make money?

"Right now, we are promoting a free version of Breeze. To offset the cost of operating the service, we have built in an ad-funded model whereby the mobile apps will display small ads in each application. Users do have the option of paying us a fee to 'turn off the ads' for their applications they create so they can then monetize them as they see fit. We even have some customers who are asking us to help build their mobile apps."

4. How would you describe the service - is it a developer tool, a platform, an ecosystem? Please explain.

"It is probably best to view Breeze as a 'solution'. There is a developer download that enables a user to simulate a mobile phone on their PC, and see how their app is going to work on real phones, and once the app is complete, it gets sent up to our servers where we automatically create many versions that are optimized for each type of device we support. The platform then acts as a hosting system which takes care of discovery and distribution - in part through our www.breezeapps.com portal, where users can choose to list their apps."

5. Can you explain a bit more about CM helps apps to become viral?

"Cascada Mobile started out in the viral distribution space, focusing on the ability to 'send' an app from one phone to the next. We determined that while this was a great feature, there were so many other challenges bringing a mobile application to market, that we'd provide the much broader solution we offer today. Basically, we have a feature with Breeze created applications called "Tell-A-Friend". As an end user of the mobile application, if I wanted to recommend an application to a friend, I could simply enter my mobile number, and theirs into the application and 'send' it to them. The great thing about how we've put this together, is that it doesn't matter if I send the application from my Blackberry Curve on AT&T to a Nokia N95 on Vodaphone in the UK - Breeze handles everything."

6. Any plans for Android/iPhone support? Are these platforms important to your plan/roadmap?

"Our first step was to support Java since it is supported on so many phones - billions by most counts. Our roadmap includes support for other platforms including Android, and we'd like to support iPhone."

7. What level of device mapping are you doing? Is it to families of devices with similar display capabilities (per the simulator), or to individual devices? How extensive if the device mapping database?

"It's a combination of things. The general rule of thumb is that if we need to do something specific for a device or set of devices in order to run on it then that means it's a new device family. Currently we have some families based on device manufacturer (using specific manufacturer API's for example), some based on display sizes (some devices report display properties better than others), some based on feature support (image capture capabilities for example) and some based on a whole slew of properties. Our device mapping database is designed to grow as we add devices and discover new porting criteria, it currently tracks about 80 different properties."

8. Are you using a web run-time in the downloaded apps, or how would you describe the compilation/interpretation process?

"The Breeze compiler creates native applications. That means that we don't package up a JavaScript runtime or web runtime of any sort. Our build process starts by taking the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that the developer used to create their applications and parsing it. We then generate actual J2ME compliant Java source code. This user generated code is then matched with code that's been precompiled and pre-ported code for the various feature packs that the developer requests and the UI engine and together they create a fully independent and device family specific application. This process is repeated for each device family (we don't believe in lowest common denominators - we build directly for each device) resulting in multiple versions of the application which are then fed into our distribution system and made available for download."

9. Who is your competition?

"In a lot of senses, our competition is the native platforms that people might develop on - or even people who opt to build mobile websites instead of applications. So for example, somebody might choose to build a Symbian app only, or even create their application in Java ME (Java Mobile Edition) directly, rather than using Breeze to do that for them. There are also some new platforms out there including Adobe Flash Lite or even Microsoft Silverlight, but they just aren't on as many phones as we are able to reach right now."

Thanks to Alan and Sean for responding to my questions. It's still early days for their solution, but you can check out the developer kit or go take a look at some of the apps already available in their Breeze apps store. Have a play and see what you think. Hopefully I'll follow up with another post once I've had more time to use the developer kit. I have no shortage of ideas for apps!

10 more tips for (Micro-ISVs) going mobile...

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:12:00 GMT

In a previous guest post for Bob Walsh's excellent 47hats.com ("Tips for Micro-ISVs Going Mobile"), I suggested some tips for the Micro ISV wanting to take their wares mobile. These mostly dealt with basic mobilization approaches for existing ISV solutions, including a discussion of the monetization aspects of going mobile.

I now offer 10 more tips, this time more related to the development process. These tips deal with the general product development process, not the mechanics of coding for mobile devices. That's a whole other ball game, widely covered in books and developer forums, and I'm not going to promise a part 3 to this thread to deal with such topics. There's already a lot of good stuff out there, such as Forum Nokia and Sun's J2ME site.

Having been around in this space for so long, and having seen so many mistakes repeated, some of the tips will tell you what not to do - i.e. how to avoid the common pitfalls. This will set you on the right track better than if I elaborated a design methology here.

Remember that your users are mobile and insanely impatient!

Tip #1 - Be kind to your users - remember that they're mobile!

This seems obvious, yet it's a hugely common oversight. What this usually boils down to is design and remembering to design-for-mobile. Think about task-centric design that enables the user to get results fast. Minimize the number of options and the amount of information to the bare minimum. Minimize the number of clicks required to complete tasks. Minimize the amount of inputs on a form. Minimize the complexity of information that you require a user to enter (or keep in their heads). Let the user drill down for more information, if they need it, recognizing that every visit to the server is going to incur a delay, so mimimize trips to the server too.

Are you getting the hint here? Minimization (or optimization) is the name of the game, which is really about economy of effort across the entire mobile experience. Think of the archetypal mobile user as being insanely impatient. Of course, minimization will naturally lead to coding and design styles that enable a sleek experience, such as heavy use of CSS for styling web apps, not graphics, and so on. The methods for optimal design and coding and too many to mention. Again, consult the references above.

In many mobile applications, function has proven to be far more important to the user than the visual appeal, especially superfluous eye-candy and esoteric user interfaces. You might be surprised by the aesthetic crudeness of the UI in some very popular mobile apps, but where the user is still able to get the results they want. Many mobile dating applications are like this. In fact, in many such cases, the app providers have found that the path to monetization was to simplify the experience considerably and widen device compatibility.

Don't be fooled into thinking that things have moved on so far in mobile, thanks to 3G and faster mobile processors, that we can now dispense with design optimization of the sort that characterized early web design strategies. This isn't true. There's a difference between some of those glitzy playful apps in the iPhone app store and the apps that are out there today serving large numbers of users and making some money. Most money-making mobile apps are very crude in design, yet do the job well.

By the way, 3G does not speed up most web transactions! As users of the 3G iPhone have no doubt already discovered, accessing a 'typical' web page over 3G often incurs similar delays to 2.5G. That's because for small chunks of information, the actual transport delay only accounts for a small percentage of the overall transaction. Processing, buffering, parsing, context-switching, network access and a raft of other delay steps dominate the delay budget. Also, a 3G pipe can often be as skinny as a 2.5G pipe, if the cell is loaded.

3G comes into its own for moving large amounts of data. So, on the flip side, don't attempt multimedia apps without it!

Oh yes. Don't forget the cost of data. Despite the availability of various flat-rate tariffs, most mobile subscribers have to pay for their data by the Megabyte. It's your job to minimise the data sent back and forth, not only as a courtesy to the user (and the success of your service) but as part of good design for mobile.

Consult Barbara Ballard's excellent list of Mobile Design resources, including design patterns for once you're ready to design.

Tip #3 - Be good to your users - remember that the device is a mobile!

Exploit the multi-modal capabilities of the mobile device. It's a phone, a PIM, a camera, a video recorder, a games machine, a messaging device, an email device (perhaps), a payment device, a browser, a music player, a GPS device. There's so many ways of engaging the user in the mobile context. For just a sample of the common touch-points for mobile, see my list of mobile touch-points.

Tip #4 - Know your target users for your target geography

Given the need to be pithy with the user experience, it often pays to recognise that there are probably more than one type of user archetype, often called personas (in several theories of UI design). Therefore, you might want to consider variants of the user experience to target each persona separately.

If you're trying to reach a multi-national or regional market, be aware that these personas can vary dramatically from one region to another.

Tip #5 - Know your target devices for your target geography

For all kinds of reasons that we won't go into, you simply can't design a mobile app to work well on all devices. Depending on the complexity of the application, it's difficult to get a mobile app to work well on even a small subset of devices. One approach, often a useful one, is to target the top 10, say, devices for your target audience in your target geography. Recognize that once you cross from onecountry to another, the device preferences in that market can change considerably.

One source of device type penetration is your operator, assuming that they want to share such information. Historically they didn't, but this is changing with the new thirst for applications. Operators are learning to be a lot more developer friendly.

Tip #6 - Test Properly and don't assume device uniformity - provide graceful degradation

Too many mobile apps fail in unintended ways on devices that don't quite fit the vanilla mould for that device. A firmware tweek here, a slight model change there, and an app that works well on the device in your hands doesn't work on the 'same' device in the hands of the users. Poor device targeting can lose you a lot of users from the outset. Don't forget, mobile users are impatient. They won't comeback, they won't try again, they won't seek out help. They will delete the app and leave.

Don't fall into the trap of assuming that certain devices are the same because they have the same basic appearance or belong to the same family. In my experience, it is safer to assume that apparently 'similar' devices are not the same. This is often the case.

Moreover, if you assume some kind of variation in device performance, then you need to think carefully about graceful degradation of function where device performance is lacking or unexpected. Don't forget that graceful degradation also applies to the never-to-be-overlooked problem of losing a connection.

Ultimately, the best way to deliver a high quality experience is to test rigorously on the intended target devices. This is not easy, especially for resource-strapped Micro-ISVs. Consult your operator to see what testing services they offer and if they can recommend any testing houses. There is a recent emergence of community-based device testing, which seems like a useful direction for Micro-ISVs to support.

Tip #7 - Try to implement capability-driven design

Just as with good Javascript coding, if your application needs a certain API for it to work, then you should ideally implement code to test for the existence of that capability on the run-time device. Don't rely on device-type checking and then assuming that APIs exist just by looking them up in a device capabilities database.

That said, it is not easy on many mobiles to test for capability. A good resource is the WURFL project from my good friend Luca Passani, or its more commercialized cousin, Device Atlas (which is really a WURFL that you pay for).

Tip #8 - Develop a mobile solution, not just an application

This has two dimensions. It is a major issue if you intend to sell your mobile application to an operator. It comes as a rude awakening to many application designers that operators expect all kinds of other nuts and bolts when they license an application, such as alarm generation, billing hooks, provisioning hooks and so on. These requirements take many inexperienced ISVs by surprise. See Chapter 3 in Next Generation Wireless Applications for tips on selling/presenting apps to operators.

It is also important generally to think of a solution, which goes hand in hand with tip 1 about being kind to your user. For example, as I have been pointing out since the early days of mobile apps, a POP3 email client is not a complete solution for the 'mobile email problem.' A mobile email user needs easy data entry, easy access to the address book, effective filtering or searching, and so on. Hence, a complete mobile email solution, for example, would include a number of other support functions besides composing and reading messages in a POP3 mailbox. RIM understood this from the outset with their elegant and successful Blackberry email solution.

Tip #9 - Do some kind of usability testing

This is so important, especially for mobile, given the mobile user's relative intolerance of any shortcomings in the experience. Don't forget that any awkwardness in the UI will lose you customers very quickly.

It is incredibly easy to conduct some basic usability testing of the design. Simply put it in the hands of some users and watch them use it. In the first instance, it really is that easy.

I am a relative expert in mobile technology, yet I am repeatedly defeated by various mobile applications because I can't figure out how to get to the next step. If I can't figure out, then think about those poor souls who don't know a bit from a byte.

What you will find very quickly - I almost guarantee it - is a disconnect between what you think is obvious in your UI and what the uninitiated users think is obvious. They will, for sure, hit the wrong button, make the wrong assumptions and so on. These disconnects can be very frustrating to developers because their design just seems so 'obvious' to them. The reason for that is that the developer is the one who has used it several hundred times during development and testing. There is a difference between obvious and intuitive.

If the mobile application is critical to your business plan, then consider hiring someone else to do the design, or at least to write the copy for you (i.e. the wording). So many coders end up doing the design and insisting on their own quirky view of the task in hand. I find this to be a frequent issue with many mobile apps. Don't forget that on a very small screen, there is often very little context to provide additional visual cues to usage, so the user can get lost very easily indeed.

There are all kinds of design considerations, but consistency is important. This has a number of dimensions. Self-consistency within the application, which usually means that the navigation and persistent visual widgets (i.e. menus, breadcrumbs) are in the same place and act in the same way across all screens.

There is consistency with the conventions of a theme or worldview. So, if your application is mobile note-taking, then don't start calling notes 'Memes' or something unusual. Stick to fairly conventional names for things like address books, contacts, and for actions, like uploads, downloads, etc. However, avoid generic terms ('Submit message') where a specific one is more meaningful ("Send text message") and lets the user know more about what is going on.

Be consistent with your own conventions and desktop worldviews. If your mobile application works alongside a desktop application (installed or online), make sure that the mobile version is consistent in naming and operational conventions used on the desktop. That does not mean that you copy the desktop app and try to squeeze it into the mobile. Don't forget, you need an economical mobile solution that is kind to the mobile user.

By the way, be careful about assuming that your user will know how to use the mobile version of a desktop app because they are familiar with the desktop app. If it is possible to sign up to your service via mobile, then it has to work 'out of the box' from the mobile. Increasingly, many users might find your mobile app first, so be prepared for this.

Tip #10 - Be transparent with any pricing/transactions

Although users are becoming more familiar with using mobile applications, there is still resistance due to costs and various perceived 'risks' of using mobile apps. Users want to know how much they expect to pay for using an application. If you're charging the user, such as through the use of a charging gateway or premium text message, then make sure that the user knows how much, how often and how to opt out.

If you're accessing data local to the device, make sure that the user knows what's going on. This is inevitable on many devices because of permission-locks on sensitive APIs, requiring the user to grant permission (such as to the PIM or to location information). You should honor such conventions where possible. Don't try to work around them. Give the user the choice.

Finally, be aware of any local codes of conduct or laws applicable to mobile applications in your region, such as anti-spamming conventions, age-checking, opt-in clauses and so on.

Best of luck with your mobile application.

Mobile marketing touch-points (and Snow Patrol)...

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:11:00 GMT

Who would have thought that the humble text message would have proven so popular and ubiquitous in so many marketing campaigns. With the increasing popularity of mobile web surfing, the mobile web is becoming important too, with more brands creating mobile microsites.

What caught my attention recently, as a fan of Snow Patrol, was the release of an iPhone application to go alongside the new album on iTunes. It's a great way to extend involvement with the fans.

Snow Patrol

The Snow Patrol app is an interactive booklet for the album. It's a fairly creative and artistic application. The user interface is novel and requires the user to figure out which of the various iPhone touch gestures are required to reveal the contents. I managed to reveal various lyrics for songs. Putting it in the hands of my six-year old proved a lot more fruitful. He discovered various video clips and interviews. There was I thinking that the 46 MByte download was a bit fat for a bunch of lyrics!

It's a fascinating development of the iPhone app-store story. It's also refreshing for iTunes customers to receive some digital extras with their otherwise boring collection of bits on a hard drive, which are ordinarily very lonely without the glitzy packaging of a CD with its insert booklet.

The use of an iPhone app alongside digital media content is yet another plank in the vast array of mobile marketing goodies available to brand merchants and wizards.

It got me thinking about all the various ways for brands to touch users via mobile, especially after a recent 'contest' on the Mobilists list to name them all, which I think we still didn't manage to finish.

Here's my own attempt at listing the myriad mobile marketing techniques and technologies. It's an editable list, so go ahead and add some more, if you want.

5 Things Wrong with Wireless Industry, Says Inventor of Cellphone

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 13:13:00 GMT

Thanks to Doug Aamoth for reporting about Dr Marty Cooper's keynote given at the Embedded Systems conference. As reported by Doug, Cooper cites five main problems with the wireless industry today. Before getting to the five, something should be said about Dr Cooper's comment, according to Doug, that the wireless industry operates illogically.

Dr Marty Cooper

There is an irony in there somewhere because he goes on to suggest that 'open' platforms are part of the solution, which is to say open markets. I'm not sure if he was a one-time advocate of the 'Open RF networks' myth, which says that any device can do what it likes, which, by the way, has not been proven to work with any RF technology (and we will get to the spatial multiplexing idea in a minute).

Following the credit-crunch fiasco, worshippers at the altar of uncontrolled markets might not be so keen any more on the notion that the market works in our best interests - i.e. logically. In fact, markets, were they a person, would most likely be seen to be quite irrational creatures. Certainly, according to various theories of innovation, irrationality is exactly what it takes to produce seismic shifts in an industry.

The double irony is that the success of the wireless industry is in large part due to the open standard of GSM and the relatively open competition brought about be deregulated telco markets that allowed multiple players to obtain RF licenses. Moreover, it is not a wireless industry. It is very much a wireless-voice industry with the anomaly of texting, although not so anomalous when we consider that texting was really conceived in the image of an ancestral industry called paging.

But let's get to the five, as they make interesting conversation, which is what we're here to engage in.

1. Most cell phone conversations are held indoors, yet all the base stations and towers are located outdoors.

There isn't really an indoor/outdoor decision to be made about base stations. What matters is where the RF waves end up, not where they start. The issue is coverage. Also, what users really want from cellular is ubiquitous coverage, not 'mostly indoor' coverage because they are 'mostly indoors.'

What Dr Cooper is getting at here, as he says, is the use of Femtocells, which are tiny indoor base stations with a cell that nominally covers the house. This is not a new idea. Most GSM infrastructure providers built prototypes like this many years ago, for a number of reasons. Femtocells provide a nice solution for those who don't get any 3G coverage in their homes. In some markets, there is potentially a business case for providing Femtocell base-stations for this reason alone.

Ubiquisys Femtocell

Of course, the added benefit is that with such optimal coverage in the home - your own dedicated cell - you get the bees-knees performance from your mobile and might want to use it all the time instead of a fixed landline. Thus, fixed-mobile convergence becomes attractive. The operator can charge a different rate for access via the Femtocell, exploiting fixed broadband access for the backhaul.

As I have argued before, the availability of Femtocells is potentially very exciting as a catalyst for crossing the chasm of consumer data services on mobiles, notwithstanding the ongoing issue with user interface limitations.

With all that reliable and super-fast 3.5G bandwidth available at low cost, we could do lots of things to encourage users to take advantage of it. We can even think about squirting data into user's phones in the background (caching) and giving an unsurpassed user experience. There are various opportunities here, which is perhaps what made Google excited enough to invest in Femtocells. (the company - Ubiquisys - is just around the corner from me.)

We might then find, as Dr Cooper says about voice, that lots of users end up surfing the net in their homes on their mobiles - what's the betting that kids will do this more than on the desktop? I think that the odds are high. Even my wife does a good deal of her surfing in the home on her iPhone.

And then there's the whole home automation and IPTV-convergence scenarios to think about. Well, I'm getting ahead of myself, as usual. That's more future innovation stuff, but where a lot of the product innovation is right now.

This all hinges on finding a business model to put Femtocells in the home in the first place. The jury is still out.

2. The Internet proved that an open network will invite a myriad of applications to serve the needs of just about everyone, yet the wireless industry still clings to the “walled garden” idea of closed networks and development.

This is an exaggeration, but we all know the problem. It doesn't need regurgitating here. Fellow mobilist Ajit Jaokar came to the fore with the 'open gardens' argument, which is ongoing. I refer you to his Open Gardens blog.

3. The idea behind efficient wireless signal transmission is to deliver radio frequency energy to specific individuals at the time each individual’s device needs to transmit or receive information, yet wireless signals are constantly broadcast every which way, in all directions, which is a really inefficient way to connect.

Ah yes, the spatial multiplexing wotsit. I used to work in Motorola R&D, so I know the thirst for this type of solution because it is one of those technologies that is so alluring because of its promise to deliver close to the theoretical maximum capacity for an RF network.

Squirting the RF to where it needs to go - the mobiles.

You see, the fundamental limitation with wireless is interference. RF is messy stuff. Once you let the magic out of the antenna, it tends to whizz off in all directions, not unlike a game of Quidditch (spelling?) in Harry Potter.

Interference is what limits the capacity of a cellular network, where all the available frequencies get reused by other mobiles (otherwise the capacity would be very small indeed). Put simply, if you want to stop a signal from one mobile interfering with another, then one way is to point the RF beam at that mobile only and not anywhere else. This is the basic idea of spatial multiplexing. We all have out pet solutions. Mine used to be Fuzzy Logic (read my paper, if you dare - not even I understand it now and I think that merely mentioning Fuzzy Logic seems taboo these days!)

Anyhow, good luck to Dr Cooper with SM. I worked alongside brilliant minds for years who also pursued this idea, to no avail. Like many technologies, the most elegant solution is seldom the one that succeeds in the market, for a number of reasons. No one foresaw how much the ongoing march of Moore's Law was going to allow us to build denser and denser cells that solved the capacity problem in another way. And now we're talking about a cell in every home! (Isn't there a contradiction here with SM?)

Most likely, SM will turn up in some future generation, but, as I discussed my book, talk of anything beyond 3G became very upsetting to a lot of people, so best not talk about 4G (or any G) and beyond. (By the way, when I first wrote the book, 'Next Generation...' was an acceptable and meaningful term. This time around (recent 2nd edition) it is more problematic, but my publisher didn't allow the title to be changed.)

4. Phones are primarily used (70% of the time) to talk and listen, secondarily for text messages (which use small bandwidth), and tertiary for e-mail (which uses small to medium bandwidth), yet we, as consumers, get constantly bombarded with marketing for expensive high speed data services that people don’t use all that often.

I'm not quite sure why this is a problem, unless you're a consumer who is fooled by some kind of hype. I'm not sure that anyone still believes in the 'high speed' experience on the mobile. Consumers are more informed than those early farcical days of WAP 1.0 - 'surf the internet.' There is still a tendency to hype the 'One Web' view that says that we can mimic the desktop experience on the web, but that's just another marketing fad.

5. When purchasing devices, consumers are persuaded that they are getting something for nothing and then urged to throw their old devices away.

I really need to hear the explanation for this one because it doesn't seem like a problem in the same vein as the others.

Interestingly, the bulk of the problems identified here are technological, or presented within that light. They are also heavily biased towards suggesting solutions that Dr Cooper wants to sell us. Good for him.

As I've recently commented, if we basically assume that the mobile telcos are the bottleneck to a new era of successful mobile services - let's call it the 'data revolution' for now, then the problems are not technological. Becoming an 'Operator 2.0,' let's say (see Chapter 3 of my book for discussion), is technologically possible and economically possible. However, it seems, at least for now, politically impossible, by which I mean the general institutions within the industry, such as mindset, staffing structures, reward schemes, financial-reporting structures, are not geared towards change.

In other words, the way people in the industry value the industry is not aligned to the values that would allow many of the new technological and business possibilities seen on the Web to flourish in the wireless markets. Sooner or later, everyone realises how much they value survival and things are forced upon us that we don't want to do.

The solution is still innovation. However, we have to figure out what type of innovation is needed and where to apply it. We don't know where it's going to come from. Perhaps the emergence of low-cost netbooks (like Asus) is going to trigger a different type of wireless data revolution.

We await the next illogical flight of fancy by some hitherto unknown renegade(s) to open our eyes to the right type of innovation. I have my own ideas, of course.

Please sell to me on my mobile, if I'm nearby...

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:47:00 GMT

A recent post on the Mobilists group discussion board was from Lasse Larsen. He wrote to tell us about bipbip.com, which is an interesting mobile service where users sign up for ads, or, perhaps more accurately, tailored product offers. Users enter their product interests, price willingness and location. Advertisers respond accordingly, whenever they can match a user's interest.

If you stay in the mobile game long enough, as I have, then you will see many ideas come and go. You will see many return. How many times have we been through the location-based services loop? They came, they went, they worked, they didn't, they promised, they let us down. Once upon a time, LBS was even the next great idea in mobile. That might still turn out to be true, eventually.

Permission based location ads?

Whatever they are and wherever we are in the LBS market and innovation cycle, everyone agrees that location is a unique aspect of the mobile experience. Indeed, this has always been so. By the very nature of using cells in a cellular network, location is inherent in the network. The technical term is mobility management.

Now I kid you not that I believe to be one of the first people to talk about location-based advertising, but perhaps not in the way you expect. I submitted a raft of LBS techniques and architectures for patent filing back in the early 90s, in my days as a chip designer for the insides of GSM systems for Motorola.

One idea, rejected as 'not core business' by the Motorola patent attorneys, but supposedly defensively published in the library of congress, was to attach electronic billboards to base stations (especially microcells that pepper our town centres) and then feeding the right sorts of ads to the billboards depending on who was 'camped on' (i.e. using) that base station.

Many years later I proposed a similar idea, but this time giving each and every billboard a short code to dial so that the advertising companies could gain a direct location-based response to adverts. See an ad, like it, dial the number, get connected. Actually, what I was also proposing at the time was to use short codes to access websites, in order to avoid all that URL-typing nonsense. At the time, I proposed a 'services key' on mobiles so that users knew they were 'dialing an application' rather than a voice number. It seemed a good idea at the time and might have taken off. Who knows where the tipping point lay in any idea?

These days, we could do this, if we wanted to, using SIP-based calling or some other intelligent IP-based connection management scheme. More likely, if SIP never takes off, we will end up using web-based 'dialing' from a link via some kind of landing-page. Perhaps a standard will emerge for this. There have been plenty of proprietary attempts.

One of the unsolved problems with LBS is how to connect users with location opportunities. A user moves around and will have various interests. Opportunities will cover the map, some of which might coincide with user interests. Wherever there is an overlap of interest with opportunity, then this indicates a potential transaction event.

Triggering LBS events

The diagram shows the problem. When I drew it, back in the late 90s, I was CTO for MetroWalker, one of the first LBS start-ups in Asia (Hong Kong). As has been my typical experience with mobile technology, I was far too early in the market. In Geoffrey Moore's parlance, I seem to spend my life on the left (wrong?) side of the chasm.

I have always contended that we need hyper-accurate location finding as a precursor to crossing the chasm of consumer-based LBS. It has been interesting, and somewhat tiring, over the years to see how many times various advocates of relatively inaccurate location-finding techniques have argued using 'in the ball park is good enough.'

In some ways, it reminds me of those who have spent years arguing dogmatically that mobile web is better than any native solution, come what may. What they really mean is 'theoretically better,' in the same way that coarse-grain LBS is better, if only it worked as promised, which it often doesn't.

Moving a few years on, our great location-marketing pioneer, Russell Buckley, once posted the question: "what would it take to get users to sign-up for location-based ads?" With his current position at AdMob, I'm guessing that he's still interested in that question. It has caused various debates and controversies along the way, frequently raising a post or two from yours truly.

When Russell first raised the question, my initial response ("Cheap Milk on my Mobile") was to think of the potentially huge long-tail of geo-advertising. I thought of my local shops that invariably through away food if they don't manage to sell it off. I'm not going to take a trip to see what's on the sell-off racks, but what if I could browser the rack on my mobile? Architecturally, I proposed the use of RSS feeds, although there are various other architectural issues to consider, not least of which is still the idea of how (and where) to manage the interest/opportunity filtering.

(By the way, if we could use mobiles like this to reduce waste, I would be happy. It was incredibly inspiring to watching the late Paul MacReady talk about his philosophy of 'do more with less' as a guiding principle for his mission as a plane designer.)

It seems that the use of geo-coded RSS feeds and a means to aggregate them is still emerging. No doubt, Google have their eyes on this potentially lucrative channel of advertising.

Russell's question is what came to mind when I found out about bipbip.com. They will surely have an answer for him before long. But will it be the right one? Will it be good enough to cross the chasm of location-based ads, a nascent industry that has been a long time in the making.

Telco adoption (juggling) of Web 2.0 principles - free webinar...

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:13:00 GMT

Those of us who have worked in both the fields of Internet development and the MNO environment will know that there is a lingering question, still unanswered, about how to inject some of the Web 2.0 goodness into Telco businesses.

Operators continue to juggle with the lead balls of evolving as an MNO in their own right - legacy processes mostly - the fuzzy, sexy balls of this 'Web 2.0' thing and the crystal balls of innovation.

Juggling 2.0 with 1.0

There are a range of thoughts. Some businesses, such as Orange (notably in France) have deployed isolated pockets of Web 2.0 applications. Some businesses, such as O2 with their forthcoming Litmus site, are going to experiment with socially-enabled community sites, taking things a step further than Vodafone's Betavine (see my other posts about O2 Litmus). Other companies, and I have worked with some of them, want to exploit the possibilities for working in an 'agile' fashion at seemingly low cost, perhaps by working with web frameworks, open source and open APIs.

Whilst working as a Chief Apps Architect for Motorola, I instigated the 'Mashing Room.' This was mostly a skunk-works project. Its aim was to see how far Web 2.0 techniques could be applied to mobile - an early and real exploration of the so-called Mobile Web 2.0 approach to the evolving mobile ecosystem.

How far can we go with these ideas? The answer is that we don't know yet and that we have a long way to go. The gulf between what operators claim they are doing, or could do, with 'going 2.0' usually falls far short of reality. For the most part, 2.0 is a pet project in someone's in-tray rather than a systematic attempt to revamp the business. Words like 'agile' and '2.0' get added to job titles, projects and processes as if they were magic dust. Real changes are seldom made.

My own conclusion, after many workshops with various operators globally, is that a fundamental re-adjustment of the operator operational and business model is technically possible and financially possible, but politically unlikely (never say never). By which I mean that the institutionalized thought processes, staffing structures and values in MNOs are mostly counter to 2.0 and unlikely to evolve quickly enough to keep up with the evolution of the market and value chain as it marches on away from them.

That does not mean that operators can't adopt 2.0. They can and they must. However, as a breakthrough, or paradigm shift, as in the astronomic progression of the web from 1.0 to 2.0, I don't see 2.0 as a being backwards compatible with some of the fundamental paradigms that operators seemingly want to abide by. The true 'Operator 2.0' will surely emerge from unexpected quarters - and I don't think from Google either, by the way.

This is a very spartan assessment of the road to Damascus 2.0, but I suggest that interested parties take a trip to Alan Quayles forthcoming webinar ("Telco adoption of Web 2.0 principles") on the topic. He may well paint a different picture and I look forward to hearing his views. I encourage our friends in the developer community to sign up as there will be a large contingent from the MNO world, this being a good opportunity to ask them pointed questions about developer frustrations with mobile, which are many.

Alan Quayle is a notable contributor to thinking about the future of telecoms and Internet convergence, taking mobile into account. He has been an active participant in shaping the strategy for the forthcoming O2 Litmus developer community, which I blogged about recently.

He has clearly put a lot of thought into these topics, most notably from the business perspective, by which I mean the business of developing applications and services. If you work in a telco or media company and would like to know more about the technological and architectural potentials, then you might want to look at the course Mobile Internet 2.0.

Meme-based architectures for mobiles...

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:55:00 GMT

The idea spreads...

Last night I watched Seth Godin giving a TED talk. He talked about the importance of spreading ideas. It got me thinking about mobiles and when was the last time that I came across an interesting idea by using my mobile. I don't really recall.

How useful are mobiles for spreading ideas?

You're going to tell me about texting and text marketing and swarming and all that stuff. Of course, I understand that mobiles can be put to good use as part of viral campaigns, but of themselves, they are not very good idea-spreading machines. Mobiles are incredibly inert. Most of the time they just sit there, waiting for a call or message to arrive. This has bugged me for some time. Battery-life aside, it seems obvious to exploit more fully and continually the computing power of a device that we carry around all day.

Look at the UI for the ground-breaking iPhone. Yes, it's a fantastic phone + iPod + browser, streaks ahead of the competition, but when I look at the screen, it doesn't tell me anything! (Apart from I have a new message.) There are 101 ways of doing something more interesting with the UI, which I shall get into in other posts. The whole mobile UI paradigm is due for a change.

Even those precious apps from the app store. What are they doing when they're not running? They just sit there, deaf, dumb and blind, lonely behind a 'gorgeous' eye-candy icon. Nothing's happening.

This is possibly an architectural problem or something more systemic. It comes about because our idea - or frame - of what a mobile phone should become, as in a shrunk version of a computer, is informed by an outdated and ill-fitting concept of software that comes from the desktop. We still obsess with these things that we call applications. We also get excited about mobile operating systems - Linux this and Android that. We get all fired up whenever anyone talks about native versus web, or the Java fragmentation problem.

All of these things continue to inform how we think of mobiles and it is my view that we are severely limiting the future potential for mobiles. I mean, what exactly is an application anyway? Apps are things that are invoked. We still invoke applications and we still quit them. Why?

Software could live forever, if we want it to, perhaps running up in The Cloud, or perhaps across the sea of powerful processors that we carry between us in our mobiles. This brings me back to ideas, or, more precisely, memes - the external existence of ideas outside of our heads.

Taking the notion of a messaging-based architecture a step further, I envisage that we think more of messages as a type of meme. I'm going to call them Memelets, because I envisage that, unlike ideas, they will have some kind of executional capabilities, not just inert pieces of information. We can figure out exactly how this execution is described and where it runs later on.

Because a Memelet is a message that lies in a messaging-oriented architecture (call it the 'operating system' for now) it can travel around. And, because a Memelet has intelligence, it can travel around all by itself. It isn't dumb. It doesn't necessarily need a sender or a receiver, just an initiator(s) and an attractor(s). And, our Memelets can find fragments of software (objects, if you like) that they find interesting and go interrupt them, mate with them, update them, or whatever the appropriate verbs are for Memelet activities.

For example, why should a game just sit on a mobile doing nothing until such time as it is invoked? Why can't another piece of software (Memelet) come along and ask the game - 'what are you?' 'what do you do?' 'what's your user's high score?' The next time I play the game, it might tell me that my friend has a copy and reached a high score of x.

I'm probably confusing you. I'm confusing myself :)

This is one of those 'thinking out loud' posts for now, but I am working on the architectural ideas in the background.

The key ideas for now are:

1. We introduce a new type of 'application' that is 'always on,' thus more suited to the mobile computing paradigm - just taking this step is a major change in our current mobile computing paradigm. If we ask the question what does an 'always on' application mean, it can lead to some very interesting answers, very different to how we think of apps today.

2. We think not of messaging between 'applications' but of 'associations' and 'connections' that are themselves 'applications' able to move around the distributed mobile computing platform ('Cloud'). Associations and connections are not necessarily precise, unlike emails with distinct and intentional to: and from: relationships. Like memes in the real world, they are organic. Those that find reinforcement and a place to reside will survive. Those that don't, die off.

3. Memelets exist in domains and these domains, unlike applications, are always active. The domains extend across the cloud. We can define the domains as a way of confining and controlling Memelet activity. For example, I create a domain about gaming and start to tag and put objects into that domain. Activity will occur in the domain by two means. First, by the user adding objects to it. Second, by the Memelets that enter and leave it.

4. If we are going to move towards context-aware computing on mobiles, then surely we need a paradigm that more readily allows 'ideas' to bump into each other between mobiles and our external world. We need a meme-messaging paradigm in the sense that just as memes are ideas outside or our brains, Memelets are ideas outside of our mobile computer.

I have probably confused you - and myself - by mixing several paradigms here into one framework - memes, messaging and applications. However, it is food for thought. My instinct, which has often been right, is that the 'on demand' web paradigm and 'on-off' apps paradigm (e.g. MIDlets) are blinding us to other possibilities that are more useful for mobile computing. There is little evidence that we are rethinking the mobile computing paradigm. We are simply re-purposing the existing desktop paradigm, which is itself based on out-dated metaphors about how we think of 'computing machines.' Somewhere out there, there is a new 'Web' waiting to be invented that will take mobiles to the next level.

Mobile is the 7th Mass Media says Ahonen

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:25:00 GMT

"There were 6.6 billion people on the planet in October 2007"

"There were 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers in October 2007"

"60% take it to bed every night"

"A study by Unisys revealed that if we lose our wallet we report it in 26 hours. If we lose our cellphone, we report it in 68 minutes."

When a book hits you with these kinds of statistics about mobiles - and a lot more - within the first two pages, you know that you must surely be reading a book by the formidable Tomi Ahonen. And, if it's stats and market insights you want, then Tomi won't let you down. He has never let us down. I've been reading Tomi's books from the start, having been in the mobile game for so long, and it is nice to see that he hasn't lost his touch. The touch being his finger on the pulse of our great industry.

Tomi goes on to bombard us with fact after fact after fact about mobile usage, a method familiar to those who have attended any of his lectures. "Trust me," he implores in the opening pages, "The 'Crackberry' is a mild drug compared with SMS text messaging." And away he goes with another dizzying battery of usage stats and insights.

What, then, is Tomi's thesis this time? The title reveals all, as do the stats above. For so long now, people with things to sell, stories to tell and points to make, usually political, have been muscling in on our busy lives via various broadcast technologies. To be clear, the seven mass media are: print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, Internet and now, of course, mobile.

Mobile has become the latest in a long line of mass media technologies. As Tomi says:

"The cellphone is certainly the most widely spread technology. There are 20 times more cellphones than Playstations; 30 times more cellphones than iPods. It is the only universal gadget, and it has now become the newest media channel."

It's a simple point to grasp. Given the above stats and the pervasiveness of the mobile in our lives, there is clearly a sea of tiny screens roaming the planet, always within a second or two of our reach. What more could advertisers and oracles ask for?

Understand that he doesn't just mean Mobile TV here. He means New Media, as in Rich Media, as in what we used to call Multimedia. Of course, 'New Media' is an old term, as Tomi points out. All of the seven were once new.

Tomi proceeds to explain the significance of this opportunity and, perhaps more usefully, the unique nature of the opportunity and how to exploit it. This kicks of in Chapter 1 with Tomi's 6 Ms, a deceptively simple, yet powerful, tool for thinking about mobile service development.

Tomi first introduced the 5 Ms back when he was telling us how to market 3G services whilst most networks were still scrabbling to get 2.5G working. The five M's are Me, Money, Moment, Movement and Machines. Think of these as vectors along which mobile services can travel in order to exploit the unique attributes of mobile. I have successfully used the 5M approach in numerous workshops and training courses, which led me to include it in the first edition of my book. You can see the reference here.

It was during these sessions that I realised that we needed a sixth M - Multi-user and relayed my thinking back to Tomi. I was happy that he included it in his framework and that we now have 6 Ms.

Tomi has a gift for numbers, so it is not surprising to find that he manages to identify seven unique benefits of the 7th mass media, as follows:

1. Cellphone is first personal mass media channel
2. Cellphone is permanently carried
3. Cellphone is always on
4. Only cellphone provides a built-in payment channel
5. Cellphone is available at point of creative impulse, enabling user-generated content
6. Cellphone is first media with near-perfect audience data
7. Only cellphone captures social context of media consumption

If you want to know more details about these benefits, then I suggest that you buy the book. It won't disappoint. It is another valuable addition to the Ahonen catalogue of books that have provided much of our industry with great insights for so long. As usual, it is liberally sprinkled with Tomi's insights, statistics and numerous references to real services throughout the world, including detailed case studies.

I don't think that anyone else on this planet knows as much as Tomi does about what's going on with mobile services in nearly every single marketplace. This is yet another great title from Tomi and I thoroughly recommend it. Available from FutureText publishing.

Messaging versus Browsing...

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:38:00 GMT

Messaging and browsing are two distinct modes of the mobile applications experience. The current emphasis is on improving the browsing experience, trying to bring all the benefits of Web 2.0 to the mobile. This is a worthy objective and is progressing well on a number of fronts, including new browsers, new devices and new API activities, like Mobile AJAX.

A lot of the emphasis is on trying to make browser-based applications a viable alternative to native applications. This is also underway and I have a set of slides that summarise some of the trends. We are trying to solve two problems. The first is how to make the user interface richer and more responsive. The second is how to give web applications better access to mobile device APIs and local data sets. Data locality is a real problem with mobile web applications.

However, it is my view that the web alone is not the best architecture for mobile applications and mobile computing generally. If we scrutinise the mobile experience, it is still overwhelmingly based on the idea of messaging. I don't mean texting, although that is a very literal and obvious example, definitely a major part of today's mobile data experience (if we can still talk in terms of 'mobile data' in any meaningful way).

To avoid a lengthy blog article about various messaging architectures and ideas, I intend to publish a short paper on this topic in the near future. For now, consider the diagram below.

Any addressable software object on a mobile device should be able to send and receive a message asynchronously. This is stunningly simple to say, but simply isn't available today. What I mean is that there is no universal architecture, API set, messaging format - or protocol - to support this mode of operation reliably across the mobile ecosystem. You might think there is, but there isn't.

In fact, the only guaranteed way to get a message to and from a mobile is a text message. This has a reliable transport mechanism and universal method of handling messages on the device (i.e. the messaging user interface - write message, read message etc.) but that's all. What's more, as we all know, it is hampered by a severely limited payload size and a non-universal charging and billing mechanism (at the application level).

When you think about it, much of what we do with mobiles is essentially messaging oriented. Obviously, we send texts, but we do lots of of other things that are messaging like. We upload pictures. We post to blogs (or microblogs). We exchange contacts. We update contacts. We update our Facebook entries. We post on walls. We chat. All of these can fit within a messaging paradigm.

If you're a mobile developer, you might just want to dwell for a moment on the types of things you could do if you could send a message to and from any application on a mobile device, including other mobiles and the Web 2.0 ecosystem. And just think about what you could do if you could tag any software object anywhere with a unique address. An email, a note, a contact, a cell in a spreadsheet - all of these could be addressable objects capable of sending and consuming messages.

What's more, think about what happens if the messages themselves are more than just text or binary fields, but capable of carrying internal logic and even their own user interface.

Watch out for the forthcoming publication on this topic. Sign up to get it emailed to you (no spam).