Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

We had some great discussions at the metrics and analytics focused Mobile Monday earlier this week. The turnout was fantastic:

We had a much more representation on the business side of the house, I think mostly due to the help in promoting the event by VentureBeat (who also helped to organize the evening, thanks folks!).

The discussion around understanding the overall market layout and how people are using their phones tilted in the direction that people want to use the same sites and services on their handset as they use on their desktop. A very PC-centric view of the world, but there’s some weight behind the argument that it’s the way to drive adaption anyway so I just let it roll. Folks of course want versions of those sites that respect the restrictions and allow the optimizations enabled by being mobile. But at core people are doing the same things with their handset browsers as they do with their desktop systems - they’re searching a lot, they’re using social networks, they’re checking financial and sports updates, etc.

So my question was are there any holes in the usage patterns? If people are tending to do the same things mobile as they do desktop, what are the places where there isn’t an equivalent amount of mobile activity for a corresponding slice of desktop usage. And the main answer there was commerce. People aren’t buying things with their handset the same way they buy things from their desktop. Mobile payments and commerce is a topic I’ve been paying attention to for a while.

It’s an interesting area, cause the folks selling ringtones and wallpapers are doing it. That area has been a major cash cow for a while. So because there’s a counter-example most folks don’t see there being a “lack of mobile commerce”. What I’m talking about however is off-deck sites, and for the most part they have a lot of trouble completing a transaction. If something doesn’t happen to allow sites to sell “stuff” (whatever that stuff might be) in a more streamlined and self-service way there’s a large chunk of the ecosystem missing, and it needs to get filled in if mobile as a whole is going to keep progressing the way we want it to.

There’s a thread at Internet Tablet Talk with amazingly simple instructions. I was up and running in just a few minutes:

Wifi networking worked, as long as you were already associated with access point under Maemo before you run the launcher to start up Android:

It is kinda sluggish on this hardware, there are some keyboard quirks, and I’ve had a few different apps (including the apps launcher app) crash away for seemingly no reason. But it’s a fantastic first effort, amazing they got it working at all. Kudos to the whole team!

Posted the meeting details for the July Silicon Valley Mobile Monday this morning:

• What: July 2008 Mobile Monday (Metrics and Analytics)
• When: July 7th, 2008 7:00pm
• Where: Microsoft SF Campus, 835 Market St, 7th floor, San Francisco, CA 94103
• Who: Anyone interested in mobility
• Cost: Nothing!

Hope to see you there!

The news is out and public now that I’ve joined Skyfire in full. I’ve had to dance around the subject for a while. Luckily I was already doing some consulting with them before I joined, so I was able to hide behind that (sorry to the folks who asked me nice simple direct questions and got convoluted answers back). We wanted to make something of a PR push around me coming on board. I just started to get the point of doing PR around hiring this past winter, when I began recognizing some of the names in the releases and realizing I thought about the companies differently after I knew some of the folks there. In the case of Skyfire however we have another goal, we need people. Engineers in particular.

My official title is Scalability Architect, but my cards say Deliverator:

Both are very accurate. We’re standing at the intersection of a bunch of tough problems both within mobile and in the context of building large online systems in general. We have the normal challenges of building and delivering a native application for multiple mobile platforms, running and scaling an internet service meant to be used by large numbers of users concurrently, accommodating partnerships and other specialized business deals, and developing our own content meant for mobile devices.

As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also got to figure it out in a way that’s best for the existing mobile set of services as well. We don’t want to steamroller all of the efforts that are out there already to provide customized content to mobile devices. However that system has always been very difficult to navigate. It’s a relatively fragile mix of technologies and standards based as much on heuristics and best practices as on any cohesive standard or platform. Even if you figure out how to make things work technically there’s no unified set of expectations from the user point of view. Look at some of the discussions around Opera Mini for example. Sites that have both mobile and desktop versions can go either way on Opera Mini. If they deliver the desktop version there’s always something screaming that it’s stupid to give the full desktop version when there’s a mobile optimized alternative. If they deliver the mobile version there’s always someone screaming that “of course they want the desktop version, that’s why they use Opera Mini.” Frustrating and confusing, but we’re also working to find a way to navigate those dangerous waters.

So if that’s the kind of stuff that tickles your fancy, or if you love the hard problems that go along with implementing systems that are meant to handle hundreds of thousands of active users and tens of millions of requests a day, or if you’re into how to design mobile optimized content in rich functionality browsers - check out the positions we have open and let us know if there’s something that pushes your buttons. We’ve got a great team working on a fantastic product, and it’s certainly the right time to hop on board if you love hitting things at the early stages.

I don’t really have time to write anything proper, but I just wanted to weigh in quick on the whole Nokia-buying-Symbian-and-open-sourcing-it discussion. It’s stupid, Nokia should have gone with the Maemo platform as the future. Here’s why:

• Symbian is THE MOST developer hostile system I have ever worked with. I’ve done plenty of embedded systems development, down to 8051 firmware work when the need called for it. And nothing has ever made me more frustrated and confounded than trying to develop for Symbian. When compared to systems like the iPhone and now Android, doing “mobile development” by programming for Symbian feels like doing “web development” by programming CGI scripts in OS/360 assembly. Symbian is an old clunker of a platform compared to what’s out there now, and like it or not, having sexy tools and a cool image attracts developers. Open sourcing Symbian will help out a bit in terms of the image, but not nearly enough.
• They’re already helping out Google by validating the whole “open source mobile platform” idea (and in the process turning themselves from market leader into follower by the way, nice job there!), why not benefit from an open source platform that already exists? The reason open source rocks is that you have tons of developers spending lots of time combing through the code and fixing things, making them better, grokking and sharing. Symbian has what? A bunch of existing developers, many of whom have already thrown up their hands in disgust and fled the platform. And…. nothing. Linux brings a whole set of good tools. Compilers and code analysis tools (compilers that might actually support using exceptions in C++ even!), emulators (some that you might actually be able to use to access the internet from an emulated session with, and not even need a loopback serial cable to do it), existing libraries, developers familiar with the internals, etc.
• They already have a great developer base behind Maemo, especially considering the fact that they haven’t put the hardware that everyone keeps asking for in it (cellular interface), developers keep churning out great stuff for the platform. If they were just to ignite the existing interest and open up the possibilities for the existing developers by bringing Maemo to more devices they would be way further ahead the curve than opening up Symbian puts them.

Rich pointed me at the MobileBeat2008 conference happening in Sunnyvale on July 24th. I would have seen it anyway, I’m subscribed to VentureBeat. But just in case there are others out there who aren’t for some reason I figured I would pass it along.

One of the principal complaints I keep hearing from people working in mobile now is that it’s always the same people at conferences and events focused on mobile. With all this interesting stuff going on the community needs to open up some and start to include folks working on things that aren’t really “mobile”, just applications which happen to have mobile components. Making it easy for those folks to build what they need has been one of the areas I try to focus on. Otherwise mobile just turns into a tidepool, not very interesting. So I’m really happy when I see conferences and events like these, folks working outside of mobile taking an interest and drawing in some new blood. Exciting!

The folks at Opera have started publishing aggregate numbers for the user behavior they see through their proxy browser, Opera Mini. Interesting to see that their overall growth numbers and pageviews metrics are keeping their symmetric relationship with the numbers from AdMob. When you have just one independent source publishing numbers it’s easy to dismiss them as providing skewed data. When two sources operating very different products publish numbers that indicate the same overall trends it’s much more difficult to dismiss.

The part of the report that has me most interested is the list of top sites per region. In particular the list for the United States:

1. www.myspace.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.mocospace.com
4. www.yahoo.com
5. www.facebook.com
6. www.live.com
7. www.hi5.com
8. www.wikipedia.org
9. www.itsmy.com
10. www.ebay.com

Most of them not too much of a problem explaining. Social networking is huge, people create their profile, check back as often as they can to see if they have messages. No problem. Makes sense that widget providers ride on that traffic. Google is the default search on the Opera start page, Yahoo continues to have a great consumer brand presence.

How about Mocospace and Itsmy however? Really mobile-specific social networks. Assume that the users of Opera Mini are regular consumers, Yahoo and Facebook should be well ahead of Mocospace. Assume that they’re early adopter mobile geeks and it makes sense to have Mocospace and mobile specific services.

And what’s the deal with Wikipedia in there? Do folks actually use the search options from the start page and do Wikipedia specific searches? Is the “trivia night at the local pub” use-case popular enough that it makes Wikipedia #8 top site even when looking at such a large sample? Or are “mobile searches” no matter what the purpose tending toward Wikipedia entries in organic search results just because of the way mobile searches structure their queries?

Great to see data corroborating other stats. Can’t wait till the next month of stats comes out. My gut feeling here is that Opera Mini “went mainstream” during the final quarter of last year. Assuming the steady growth in users but jagged increase in pageviews was due to a shift going on in the userbase being catered to. So what we see in the top 10 is actually a blend of the existing early adopter user behavior and the new creamy middle consumer.

In the next few months those normal users should vastly outnumber the early users and we should see the brands from online filling up those top 10 lists and the niche behavior sites like Wikipedia falling out. There’s always going to be skew toward those who deliver info usable by folks on the go I would assume. The Yahoo portal has always hit those targets well, timely info about rapidly changing data of interest to large groups of readers. Will EBay remain in there? Does rapidly changing data trump relatively niche usage?

The word is out now that dotMobi is picking up the Mowser assets. Like I said in my post about planning to shut down Mowser, the problem wasn’t with Mowser itself or the technique of content adaption or the mobile web as a whole. We just weren’t able to run Mowser as a media site and make the kind of money we needed from advertising. The folks at dotMobi however have a much different position in the market.

They’re already hooked up with folks looking to go mobile and in a unique position to offer the service without the hurdles Russ and I had in reaching motivated site owners. Like we discussed at the last Mobile Monday in Silicon Valley, one of the most important aspects of planning out a mobile business is to have the right partnerships in place to give you a strong market channel. Working independently Russ and I didn’t have that. dotMobi is in an excellent position to be able to try out some different models with the technology that made up Mowser - and has an existing audience and constant stream of new users to try it out on.

I’m actually out in Dublin right now working with the dotMobi team to figure out where to integrate Mowser and what products and services would benefit the most:

It’s an excellent chance to explore some of the ideas that Russ and I knew we would find it difficult to put into practice, as well as a chance to work with some folks I hold in high regard. I had already been talking to James about Mowser when Russ decided to shut it down, so shifting the conversation to purchasing the Mowser assets was natural. I’m pretty proud of the way things turned out. Not the part where we failed and had to give up, but all the stuff that’s happened since then. There’s a real strategic fit with the Mowser code at dotMobi, it’s going to a great team with a genuine goal of making the mobile web better, and instead of just shutting the thing down and dropping it we managed to dig Russ out of some of that infamous debt as well.

I’m going to remain in Dublin for the next week or so (returning to San Fran on May 16th). In the meantime we’ll be figuring out how to integrate the parts of Mowser and working up some roadmaps. Most likely the Mowser site will not keep operating as such, though I’m not sure what the timeline is for migrating the services. Once we do have a plan we’ll post it to the Mowser blog to give the folks who are currently using Mowser time to switch off or change services if they choose to.

The news is starting to make it out about the analytics product AdMob has in beta. Like mentioned before, analytics on mobile is one of those things it’s easy to do poorly and very difficult to do well. Even the folks who have been paying attention to the environment for a long time don’t have clear cut answers about how to deal with thorny issues like carrier identification and user counting. I was hoping that the MMA would get out in front of the crowd on this one and drive some consensus, but that wasn’t to be. So of course I’m happy to see AdMob attempting to bring some sanity to the field. They’re certainly some of the most well positioned to deal with the global issues off-deck publishers have in understanding their mobile audience.

I haven’t been using the service actively for my sites (the main one I would think about using it on would be Mowser, which is ummm.. headed in a different direction these days), but I have sat down with the system and poked through it using other folks data. In my opinion one of the most important set of stats is around number of users over time and how long they stay. How many users do I have in a day? How many of them are returning users vs. new users? What are the “front door” areas of my site that drive new users, and how often do those users visit other areas? Stuff that AdMob has thought through both from the publisher and advertiser perspective and is well represented.

The area I’m most curious about is the device capability breakdown. Custom iPhone sites are relatively common because of the marketing and discussion that goes around that particular device. But I’m not sure that anyone has ever really exposed the additional device segmentation for the off-deck folks. Of the folks that are looking at device breakdown many that I talk to see Nokia N-series devices as the extreme front runners in terms of their total number of pageviews. While the browsers in those devices don’t have the same emotional impact that using Safari on the iPhone does the first time, I do think the devices are successfully driving mobile web usage. Will exposing some of the additional info about devices drive additional middle web style site development? It’s a question not just of device penetration and capability, but of developer mind-share and impact of user interface. There’s a real ecosystem around the iPhone, go to developer events and people are “dabbling in iPhone development”. No one is “dabbling in N-series development.” This is why I’m still an engineer by trade, I just don’t understand how Apple manages to do these things. Much respect.

Stepping up a level however, I would have really liked there to be some public consensus around how to count users and identify uniques - with compliant products following on. But one of the principles I’ve come to understand recently is that it’s easier to build something that works and let standardization form around existing practice than it is to try to drive unity from diverse groups through committee discussion. I’m hoping that what happens is that the practices that AdMob has put into place will drive behavior like the content adaption manifesto Luca put together helped to identify destructive behavior across the environment and correct it. There’s certainly the mass there to make an impact.

Very happy to see Mozilla talking about mobile browsing at Web 2.0 Expo. W00t! Progress is being made, makes me all tingly happy.