Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom
Archive for September, 2005
ACM Event : The Future of Mobile & Wireless
Sep 23rd
John Kern posted about an upcoming event at the ACM titled The Future of Mobile & Wireless. The event page is here :The Future of Mobile & Wireless. For some background info on J. Gerry Purdy check out these:
- The Next 50 Years in Mobile and Wireless
- Online Bio
- Mobile Letter blog (seems like this isn’t used any more)
Software Defined Radio
Sep 18th
The Future Salon had a session on software defined radio which I unfortunately missed. I just watched the video they put up on the Internet Archive though, definitely worth the wait for the huge download. The presentation goes into some detail about the GNUradio project, very interesting stuff. The cellular end of it is an obvious and immediately interesting aspect, but there’s also the proliferation of protocols within consumer electronics in general. Devices these days speak the range of cellular protocols, and 802.11, and Bluetooth, and RFID, and Zigbee, and Ultrawideband, and Wireless USB. And there’s location technologies that range from GPS to triangulation using cellular towers or 802.11 base stations or television or radio signals. Even if SDR doesn’t make sense to cellular carriers because it would potentially undermine the lockin they have for their investment in old technologies, I think it still makes sense for consumer electronics even if you take that part out. If you don’t have time to watch the video, at least check out the Software Defined Radio page on Wikipedia.
Mapping Mobile Usage
Sep 16th
A story about mapping mobile phone usage on a city level appeared on Slashdot recently. It looks like a great project. I would expect information about cell phone usage linked to location to be of interest not only to city planners, but mobile operators and application developers as well. I think my PDF renderers are choking and not displaying all the data they should from those documents they have linked off the project page. When I think about location based services I think about getting lat and long info out of a phone to feed into some system. But this is an interesting twist on that which looks at context and not just abstract location. In some cases the abstract info is interesting, in other cases it’s much more interesting to know that the person was in the mall at the time. When we talk about “situated software” the context of the operation comes up very frequently, there’s an assumption that at some point the devices might be able to know something about where they are. There are a few different techniques:
- Near field wireless technologies that might be able to pick up information about the environment
- Mappings of general geolocation info into contexts via a database either on the device or an online service
- Using the image sensor in a cameraphone to pick up the info via occasional samples
Projects like this, which collect the data for the purpose of city planning and could concievably be underwritten as a public work, might actually end up in the public domain. I would love to see basic bits of infrastructure end up freely accessable by the developers who need it. So projects like this that address a current need of city planning while producing as a by-product information that can help innovation down the line, it makes me happy. I just hope that’s the way this turns out.
September Symbian SIG
Sep 14th
John Kern has a post up about the Symbian Programming SIG for September. What a lineup!!! Unfortunately I’m going to be out in New York so I have to miss it. Please please if you’re going to this blog it!
Date: September: 29th
7-7:30 Meet and Greet
7:30-8 Mobile Media with Python for Series 60 – Jürgen Scheible
8-8:30 David Wood
8:30-9 informal discussion.
David is a founder of Symbian by the way, so he should have some very interesting insights into the platform. Great job John!
More Photos
Sep 13th
This is some more info about the mobile photos Mobile Monday event last night. Chris Dury from ScanR presented an information capture application, much different than the previous two presentations which focused mostly on the social aspects. The application focuses on using cameraphones as scanners for capturing whiteboard content and printed information. Cool idea. I’ve used my cameraphone to snap pics of whiteboards for sharing quite a few times. Their software helps clean up common problems with the images like blurring from movement while taking the picture and reflection from the flash. The image can be sent to multiple recipients and trasferred to a fax machine. You can sign up for a free trial account on their site. I’ll have to give it a try next time I swap my SIM back into my 6680. It reminded me a lot of the “cameraphone as network enabled image sensor” ideas that were floating around a year or two ago. Most of that discussion has skewed toward the social side, but this seems like a nice practical application I bet would appeal to a bunch of people.
Rich Gossweiller from HP Labs showed off PLOG. The idea behind PLOG was making it simple to share a story using a cameraphone as the authoring device. It covers not only the creation of the story, but dealing with multiple display points when viewing the story (PC, digital picture frame, another mobile device). The creator of the story uses a very simple interface on the phone. It intercepts the incoming image and asks if you want to upload it, and then it’s just one click to say yes or no. It transparently captures geolocation info to upload with the image so that the image can be presented on a map. The images are stored on the server and the author of the story can come back and annotate them as necessary. The story can then be distributed via RSS to others sitting at a PC or using a digital picture frame or using another mobile device. The reader of the story can choose to further share, which can mean either fowarding along the digital story or printing out a hardcopy to send or show. Rich is actually leaving HP Labs soon and is looking for what to do next.
Mike Prynce showed off a demo of Mobido, a photosharing app focused on capturing and persisting a community. The demo he showed was creating an email address (momo@mobido.com) and allowing people to join up by sending an MMS message with a picture to that address. The members of that group, the people who send the email, can then find each other through that group and keep in contact. The communication stays abstracted throught the Mobido service, so you never have to give up your contact info if you don’t want to. I’ve signed up for it and played around some. I’m miker on the system, send me a message if you sign up.
Photos
Sep 13th
We had a Mobile Monday focused on photos this evening. The presentations were great, and I just wanted to get down some of the thoughts here. Both to share and so that I don’t forget them myself. Erik from Shutterfly led off the presentations, and put up some great info about camera phone vs. normal digital camera numbers. Standard digital cameras have hit a plateau in the US, they’re not being sold in ever greater numbers. However camera phones certainly are, and this year they’re set to pass the normal camera sales numbers here in the US. Interesting statistic. I think that the overall conclusion from an event like this would certainly be the right one, but that the numbers for camera phone sales need to be skewed. People “get a camera” with their phone as an instance of bundling, versus people who buy digital cameras who have purchased that single purpose device explicitly for that purpose. There is a certain percentage of phonecam users who don’t use the camera in their phone at all. So the trend is undenyable, but it does need to be pulled down a bit because there is a disparity in what’s being compared. Although the number of units shipped for phonecams crosses the digital camera line this year, I think the usage lines cross some time next year or perhaps even the year after.
Heather from Flickr was supposed to present, but was sick so Stuart presented instead. Stuart mentioned that the number of photos uploaded to Flickr from phonecams is right about at the 30% mark. There were some reasons given for that, like people with digital cams who take their camera out and snap 200 pics at an event and then dump them all online. And prices for data plans or uploads via MMS are still pretty steep. But for some reason I have this gut feeling that Flickr is actually a good proxy for camera usage overall. That would also support my theory that the usage lines cross some time 2006 or 2007. Stuart spoke in general about the transformation that’s happened in photography due to cameraphones. Photography has moved from something that a small group of people did at special events into something that everyone does as part of their everyday life. My overall takeaway from what he said was that photography in this environment has become pedestrian. The kinds of photos showing up on services like Flickr aren’t necessarily about art at all. They’re not trying to be art, they’re just a new part of the overall vocabulary of expression that we have available now for everyday use. Which of course some people would then argue is the only real purpose of art anyway, but lets not open that whole can of worms and just pretend that everyone can recontextualize that statement in a way that it makes some kind of sense.
I really need to go through the other three presentations. But that’ll have to wait till tomorrow, I need to get some sleep.
Mobile Web
Sep 10th
As Anil points out, there’s a bunch of interesting stuff coming down the road for web development. I always skew these things somewhat however. I’m apparently a “non-standard platform user”, so I don’t really get all the excited about new and exciting things until I see them actually working on my preferred systems. I use Linux and I use mobile devices. They’re certainly not majority stakeholders yet if you look at your server logs today, but in general the numbers tend to be moving up for both. The last few months have been a rollercoaster ride, especially from the mobile end. There was a lot going on that I thought signalled great things for the interface between the general web and the mobile web. First and foremost is AJAX.
When I first heard about the use of AJAX for websites I was happy. I thought to myself, “Nice. Monolithic site designs based around layout for desktop systems tend to suck when you try to view them on mobiles. If the website interface is decomposed into smaller structured requests mixed together in the client browser then it should provide an opportunity for creating a mobile version that just mixes that data together in a different way.” I was thinking the effect would be something like a web service opening up an API in general. The information locked in HTML pages could now be requested in bits, and every site that used AJAX would become almost “automatically” a provider of a rich API into it’s data. This hasn’t been the case however. I’m going to leave alone the part where somehow “and XML” turned into “and JSON“, cause I don’t want to start a fight about S-expressions. Ahh, another format to parse. If it weren’t for formats explosions and parser writing I would almost never get to use the stuff I learned during computer science classes, so of course JSON is good. The problem is that in order to get AJAX based applications to perform well they tend to be written to implementations and not specifications, and JSON is a symptom of that. That’s just the reality of writing applications, if they don’t work well they don’t get used. And writing an application which is both based in specification and works around problems with implementations tends to require more depth than the normal implementor has (or wants).
That’s a problem for us mobile folks really. We’re the underdogs so far, and we need to prove that this whole mobile thing is going to kick ass. No one’s going to take our word for it until we can show it to them, or they can discover it on their own. What really concerns me is that reading the seemingly well received and accurate list that Anil has for desktop web work and the scope document that the W3C has drafted for their mobile web working group it doesn’t seem like these lists were prepared by people from the same planet, let alone people working in the same technological area. The question should not be “how can we properly tell people how to make content for mobile devices?” That’s a loosing question right off the bat. It didn’t work with WAP, it ain’t gonna work now. What we need to be doing is figuring out how we can get mobile devices to interact with the same services that the desktop systems interact with. The mobile web is a living system, it’s evolving. The desktop web is also evolving, probably more rapidly than the mobile web because of the sheer volume there. The question is not how do we provide cut points of functionality and additional restrictions and guidelines for usage. The question is how do we get the both of them to evolve in the same direction so that at some point there is no difference? That’s the real endgame. Not cross-compatability, but the elimination of the need for there to be a crossover at all. And that requires a longer term view. Aiming at the target as it exists today only ensures that it will have moved by the time you complete the task. This will not work.
Christian Lindholm
Sep 9th
I know everyone has already seen the news from Russ about Christian joining Yahoo, but there’s also a post from Christian on his own blog explaining motivation and his hopes at Yahoo. Hearing that Christian Lindholm was talking to Yahoo actually gave me pause when I was looking for my new job. Christian is a fantastic person with a great mix of vision and practical execution knowledge. I didn’t consider Yahoo a real contender until I heard about Christian being there. If Yahoo lets him and Russ carry through on what they want to do I think Yahoo really will be able to transform the landscape of both mobility and the Internet. This could be really huge. Christian isn’t moving out to the US right away cause he’s having visa problems (both Diego Doval and Christian held out of the US because of visa problems, I have to wonder how these rules are really a benefit). I’m personally really looking forward to the time when he’s out here, helping to spread the mobile religion in the valley :-)
Scott Rafer Chairman of Wireless Ink
Sep 7th
Scott Rafer posted on his blog today that he’s stepping down as CEO of Feedster and taking over as Chairman of Wireless Ink. Congrats to the folks at Wireless Ink! I’ve known Dave Harper over there for a long time. He’s a passionate supporter of mobile services with some fantastic ideas. And I worked with Scott over at Feedster, where I got to witness his ability to champion ideas and pull them together into concrete deals. I think this is going to be a fantastic matchup. Scott has a new blog at WirelessInk, definitely keep an eye on it. I’ve added it to my subscriptions already.
Mobile Linux
Sep 6th
Russ has a post about his take on mobile Linux. He’s right, of course. I’ve been on the lookout for mobile Linux devices and harping on the mobile open source issue for a long time (unfortunately you can’t read the original Mobile and Open article, The Feature is gone now). I’ve been an embedded Linux developer for a long time, and I’m always amazed at how well the system works. And when I say “The System” I don’t mean just my desktop or my laptop, I mean the whole system supporting open source as a movement. How problems get solved, how the code is managed, how communities come together to create new projects. The whole shebang. I used to get scared when people told me that I was “wasting my time with Linux”. They were older than me and much wiser. I really was concerned when they told me that Linux would never make inroads against the likes of Solaris and Ultrix and Windows NT. I’ve gotten over that completely now. Now I just laugh when people try to explain away the success of open source. Most of them are obviously just afraid of change, some are just stupid. So that out of the way, lets just assume that Linux is going to succeed and figure out how to get there the fastest.
The first thing to realize is that users don’t care at all if their device is Linux. Developers care, and users care about the second order effects of the developers caring. The second order effects are things like an increased rate of platform innovation and a deeper software catalog. So the initial stages call for making the platform appealing to developers. All the activity indicates that Nokia has nailed this with the 770. There are a bunch of different ways to make developers happy. Some like squishy easy interfaces with knobs to twiddle and levers to pull, with everything abstracted and covered over. Those aren’t the developers you want to appeal to at this stage. The developers you want to appeal to want access to everything. Even if you put a nice clean interface over everything they would just rip it apart and reconfigure it for what they want to do. So give them information and examples at every level of the system. To steal a term from the media side, make it easy for them to rip and remix what you’ve provided. Give them packages to make things easy, but also make it easy to pull those packages apart and figure out what they do. Make it easy to put them back together in new forms and share.
Second, transparency of the product vision and technology plan. There are a bunch of resources already out there for the 770, but where’s the blog for the device from Nokia? In order to keep the community thriving and growing it would be best to have the folks from Nokia out there mixing with the hackers and helping out. Think about the early stages of open source Palm development. When the gcc port and prc tools open source projects launched there was a bit influx of developers into the Palm community. When you went to forums or news groups back then there were folks from Palm all over the place. There was a real sense that Palm was watching directly what was going on and trying to help. What happened during those early years is responsible for the early success of Palm I think. On a related note, the later focus on the “more lucrative” corporate market and alienation of the open source developers is the cause of the later problems at Palm. Their efforts to pull in the open source projects and control the discussion forums is an excellent example of what not to do. Fostering the community without smothering it. Too bad Nokia has lost one of the best people I can think of to manage that effort. The communication needs to start soon and it needs to be constant. More transparency, and ignore and abandon the arguments against it.
