Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Our next Silicon Valley Mobile Monday is going to be at AOL in Mountain View. Topic is funding and investment, and we’re still looking for some speakers. Let me know (miker at bitsplitter dot net) if you have a topic you would like to present on.

There’s a post on Slashdot about the failure of PDAs in the iPod era. I don’t have any time to blog it proper today, but here’s the simple answer : The PDA is a grabbag of features, the iPod is a platform for music delivery.

The PDA can do everything that the iPod can and more, but if you’re thinking features you’ve already lost. The iPod makes is simple for most folks to get the music they want and funnel it straight into a device. Integrated delivery chain from server in the sky to device in your pocket. That’s what makes it a success, not features.

I managed to get my hands on one of the devices I’ve been lusting after, the Linux based Nokia 770 tablet. I uploaded a few images to go along with the story. First things first. The screen is beautiful. Simply fantastic. That’s the first thing that really hit me about it, and it makes a great first impression. I just wanted to say that up front because I couldn’t get a good image with my 6680. Guess I have to get a normal digital camera for the pictures if the 6680 just isn’t gonna cut it. Guess we know the reason for the Zeiss goodness in the N90. Here’s a rundown of stuff that stuck out to me in playing around:

• Wifi - it rocks, gimme more. Oh if only I could have an E70. If the only way I could connect this little beastie to the network was through a cellular connection I would have had a lot less fun with it. The wireless is a bit odd still, but no more odd than the PSP. Sometimes it takes a few tries to connect to a network. But once it’s connected things seem to work quite well.
• Opera - I was pretty impressed by the implementation. What really blew me away was that the Google Maps stuff worked. You couldn’t grab and drag the map, but if you had a map with embedded controls they worked. And selecting the markers brought up the details bubbles and all that. Very cool. The flash player worked pretty well also, I tried it out with the defacto Strongbad visit.
• Bluetooth - It has bluetooth too, so I set it up to connect via my 6680 also. That’s pretty handy actually. However the other Bluetooth stuff was flaky at best. It took me a little while to figure out that the filemanager was the way to interface with most of the bluetooth features. The device doesn’t seem to be discoverable, and I have no idea how to make it so. However if you setup your phone in the connection manager it also shows up in the file manager, and you can browse it from there. However the connection kept going stale for some reason. Even though I was using it between two very recent Nokia devices. That’s Bluetooth for ya.
• Video - There seems to be a good focus on multimedia capability with the device. One of the reasons why Wifi rocks vs. cellular for this. The video player worked decently well. The support for 3gp seemed a bit spotty though. It would play 3gp from the 6680 well, but 3gp from the treo and other sources on the net didn’t always work. All the videos play just fine on the 6680 however, so I’m sure they’re good. I couldn’t get videos in other formats to work at all. All the videos I tried out work in TCPMP on my Treo, I would expect the player in the 770 to support at least the same level of capability.
• MMC - I was happy to find that my non-DV reduced size MMC from my Palm worked in the 770 just fine. Dual Voltage MMC is a pain in the ass to come by.
• Application Installer - Doesn’t. Not sure exactly what was going on here. I tried downloading the Python packages, I tried the INdT apps, and I installed the Maemo SDK and compiled the sample apps for ARM and packaged them. None of that worked. The only packages that installed were from http://770.fs-security.com/. Not sure what the deal with that is. Everything else kicked back with a “the module is already included” error message. And I used the XTerm package from fs-security to make sure, python is not on there. Nor was the package I compiled myself.

So, definitely some hitches here and there, but even as it is the device is a lot of fun to use. I’m sure by the time it’s actually out in the market much of this still will be taken care of. I’m definitely planning to get one myself.

The mobile social software site Gahbunga is apparently up for auction on EBay. Looks like the auction is very new as of this writing. Starting bid is set at $2,500 and there are no offers yet.

So how much do we think it’s going to end up going for? Jeff Clavier had a pretty kick ass bit of commentary in his first ZDNet article about companies reaching escape velocity by attracting millions of users with an effectively zero acquisition cost. That lays down the model we’ve seen so far pretty well. Gahbunga definitely isn’t at that stage, but it might be in a position to grow that way in the right hands. The folks selling it are starting out pretty cheap, and they seem to be really flexible. I like the idea (I’ve written about it before), but the problems faced in taking the service on could be pretty drastic. The website is up, the technology problems seem to have been solved. However there are the ongoing issues of dealing with carrier networks, messaging, and trying to monetize in the mobile arena. Tough problems, but for the person who’s able to crack them mobile is currently a goldmine. Hot or Not is a cash cow online, raking in money. If Gahbunga could pull together something even vaguely like that it could be quite a profitable site. I’m gonna be keeping my eye on this one. Good luck to the Weblogs Work team, I hope this goes well for you!

I think it’s at least as important to look at failures as it is to look at success. In that spirit I think it’s essential that everyone not avert their eyes when witnessing the ongoing flaming wreckage which is Bluetooth. So what is Bluetooth? I think it was summed up quite well in this post on Engadget:

Having a Bluetooth logo right on front is usually a good sign, and Stormblue’s just announced the A9, a brand new portable media player with built-in Bluetooth so you can rock wireless headphones (at least that’s what we’re assuming, so far we can’t find anything confirming that it supports A2DP or any other stereo Bluetooth profile).

No one really knows what something does when it says it has Bluetooth support. Maybe it’ll accept files pushed over from other devices, or exchange of contact info, or support Bluetooth accessories. Or some classes of Bluetooth accessories, depending on the version of Bluetooth and which profiles are supported. I’ve tried about half a dozen headsets with 4 different models of phone from 4 different manufacturers. All technically worked, after some fiddling I was able to get each headset to connect to each phone. But in no case was I able to get things working consistently enough to make it worthwhile to use. The situation is a little better for device to device communication. For things like sending contacts it works great. Sending photos works great when it works, but is sometimes crippled by carriers so that they drive more traffic over their network. Binding a laptop to a phone to be used for data communication is really convenient when the laptop has built in Bluetooth, but sometimes phones aren’t setup to allow use as a dialup sync so that carriers can restrict traffic over their network.

The end result is that the little Bluetooth symbol has actually ended up meaning nothing at all. The technology isn’t the best in the world, but it’s the kind of thing that should be within reach of most implementors. There are some really crappy parts of the Bluetooth spec that make interoperability difficult at best, and the whole profiles concept sounded like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t… but it sounded good at the time. But the real failure hasn’t been technical however, I think it’s a failure in marketing and branding. When I pick up two devices with Bluetooth logos on them they should work together, period. With all the stuff in Bluetooth one would expect that basic interop would be the standard. But apparently those are all technologies for technologists, making device manufacturers lives easier but having nothing to do with what end users should expect. If you’re deep into technology and have the means, I recommend setting up Bluetooth and fooling around with it. I fooled around with a Linux system, a Windows system, and a few phones and PDAs when I was first playing with Bluetooth. It’s really quite interesting the kinds of stuff you might be able to get working. But then take a step back and try to figure out if you would be able to determine if a given device combination and setup would work before making a purchase and trying it. It’s kinda sad and kinda funny. Sorta like a monkey with a big ripe orange in it’s hand trying to pull it’s fist back through a small hole in a board. There’s so much there, unfortunately no one is really getting anything out of it.

I think this offering of both mobile and desktop versions bundled is pretty interesting. Not the pricing model at all, but the idea of a purchase/offer spanning multiple environments. I’m hoping we see a lot more of this. It shouldn’t matter from which device you make a purchase, what you get should be available everywhere all the time. Music, movies, wallpapers, applications, whatever. All. The. Time. Same thing for the stuff you produce, your own data. Everywhere all the time.

Charlie has a great post titled Mobile Computing vs. Mobile living, although I might have called it “Mobile devices vs Mobile platform”. It calls out the distinction again of background vs foreground devices. There are definitely infrastructure differences required for each class of use. For instance what would it take for a device like a PDA to act more like a mobile living device than a mobile computing device. The first thing that comes to mind for me is asynchronous notification. Otherwise of course it’s a foreground only device, and the notification mechanisms we currently think about are all tied to carrier networks. So how do we come up with a messaging system outside of SMS that allows for background operation by a device?

We’ve seen some efforts at defining standards for messaging and presence, but I think it’s safe to say they haven’t gotten nearly as far as some of us had hoped for. I laughed, I cried, I yelled, I tried to deny the failure. But I’ve come to accept it. The best thing to do is figure out why and try to move on. Lets assume that somehow we’re able to come up with a mobile device that can connect to the data network every once in a while (802.11 or cellular, whatever, but lets stick to IP based network functionality) and interact with some kind of messaging system. One of the major gating factors there is that data exchange at the IP level is relatively expensive operation. It takes a long time to do, draws a lot of power, etc. If you have a smartphone try setting up the email client on it (not push email) to poll your mailbox every 30 minutes. Even if you get no mail, the extra power draw required to pop onto the network and check a simple status is enough to seriously impact battery consumption. If you’re actually using your phone to talk on it you’ll probably end up with a dead phone before the end of the day. That’s the first roadblock obviously.

The second is the spam problem. If anything anywhere on the internet were able to deliver messages to this messaging system tied to devices in pockets all over the world - of course there would be people out there sending spam. The proper way to deal with this one is always really hard to identify. Personally I side with making the infrastructure as transparent and simple as possible and leaving intelligence in the endpoints. I favor filtering done on mailboxes over the blocking lists applied at the server level. This means that whatever this messaging system is it would have to have some kind of filtering built into the client/handset software. I think that might be the only real way to deal with it. There are more elaborate systems, but I’m pretty sure the complex solutions would never work out. Stuff like giving a signing key to anyone allowed to message to you and checking sigs on inbound messages. There are problems like using that messaging service from another system where an identical set of keys doesn’t exist. In the default form the filtering software could just be a whitelist applied on the handset. Ugly, but maybe enough for the average user.

There are other issues to work in there, but with those two solved we could at least get started figuring out how to move from mobile devices to mobile living.

Charlie Schick posted about some of the stuff going on at Winksite. I’ve posted about tying together the mobile and desktop versions, and I think the embeddable widget is a great move. There are some quirks still, like all the chatrooms in California appear to be in Los Angeles if you drill down on the Metro tab. But the idea here is really solid. It pulls together horizontal slices through all the sites, which lets you find an active chat room without having to go through all the different individual areas. Definitely a good thing. I’ll have to spend some more time playing around with it. I like the map they have there. Winksite was way out in front in terms of location services. Ever since I first spoke with Dave almost 2 years ago every Winksite has had location info and every post has options for geo info. With the Google maps interfaces allowing people to shove their own info into a rich interface there’s a lot more info in consuming geoannotated info. Hopefully that’ll force through the demand for annoted content, and we’ll see some actual location services from carriers.

Great job Dave and Jason! This looks like a fantastic bit of work.

I moderated a panel on social software last week and got to talk to a bunch of interesting people, both on the panel and in the audience. I just want to get down a bunch of the stuff we spoke about, so here’s a random sampling of the ideas:

• We started out saying that social software represents a fundamental shift in the way people communicate, and that most folks over 25 just don’t understand the ways that the next generation of users are putting together their set of tools. I don’t think that people over 25 “can’t get it”, but I can agree that most aren’t in sync with the way that those under 25 think about organizing their lives online. This is an important point though, and we’re gonna come back to it
• There was also some discussion about the role of social software in the overall industry. Facebook for example is a media site in the mind of Kevin Efrusy, who was involved in funding their investment. “Media site” in this context means a service that makes money primarily off of advertisements or referral partnerships. This obviously isn’t always the case however. Craig Callé from COMMON.net sells social software to enterprises, and obviously there no ad revenue there. There was some discussion of premium services, would people pay for social networking features ever? Or would the public sites always be forced to pursue advertising as a primary source of revenue? Pursuing a revue model based entirely in advertising can be very dangerous. Most investors won’t fund an idea with that kind of model. If something happens to spook users and scare them off your site can tank pretty quick.
• There was also plenty of talk about APIs, and the unbundling of data and service that’s becoming more and more popular. Everyone was pretty happy about an increased number of APIs available from all kinds of services. Not everyone was convinced that the mashups really are all that interesting, but I think there was pretty much universal applause of the proliferation of APIs. Everyone was pretty supportive of grassroots formats as well, stuff like microformats.
• There was also universal disapproval for carriers and the US cellular market in general. Everyone thought there was huge potential, but the environment just isn’t right yet to be able to deliver applications to users without getting crippled somewhere along the line. And even if you end up getting your application out you end up losing most of your revenue to the carriers (or someone else in the delivery chain). Anu from PartySync was following the model of keeping the mobile end of their service unmonetized and making money off their affiliated sites.

I’m a mobile booster definitely, so I always pay attention when people say that there’s potential in mobile but the environment isn’t setup to deliver on it yet. We’ve been hearing it for years, and it’s always sad to hear. Cause it’s true, the mobile environment sucks right now. But one persons roadblock is another persons opportunity. So of course I always try to think of the ways to deliver applications without getting fucked over. You could just grit your teeth and pay the horrendous fees to carriers and take your tiny paycheck hoping that your service gets big enough that you can make a living off of it. However the problem there is that it just contributes to the funding that the carrier has for later on when they decide they want to fight you for those profits.

For a long time I’ve been hoping that WiFi would provide the forcing function that would finally get the carriers to treat their networks like the data networks that they are. I’m still waiting for that however, and although I know something will force the carriers to accept reality I’m not sure we can count on WiFi to do it. By the way, some carriers are planning already for what happens in 3 years, when they assume that voice and data will merge and they no longer get to base payment on their split price model for traffic. I wonder why they haven’t come to terms with data services. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make data transmission as a whole viral. It seems to be one of the few ways to get around the restrictions to what you can do to your service - figure out how to give so much control to your users that restrictions on your service no longer matter. So what are some of the ways to do that:

• When you send a message to a user, especially one with a link or some actionable item, they should be able to forward that along to whoever they want and assume that the message with remain actionable.
• As much as possible allow for changing modes of interaction. If you allow SMS interaction, and email, and website, and IM, and whatever else - the user should be able to switch back and forth between those modes easily. The “send to phone” stuff from Yahoo is a great example. It’s a continuation sent into another platform. Horribly geeky, but your users don’t have to know that. They just see it as relatively seamless switching, which is good. It would be great to see the inverse too. After you’ve sent to phone you could say something like “mark this spot” from your handset, and return to the location when desktop browsing.
• Expose APIs, for everything. The most definite way to make sure that all the value that can be delivered is getting delivered is to make sure that all the content is available to anyone who would want to deliver it. That’s why I think mashups are a good thing, they’re an example of incremental increases in value by a third party. Not necessarily innovative in and of themselves, the model is inline with what we want to see. Make sure that your terms of service allow people to do interesting things without fear of retribution. If someone ships a web tablet that hooks up to WiFi in order to get around the carriers, I want them to be able to bake my service right into their ROM. Damn right I do. They’re welcome to take just about anything they want too, as long as they’re driving more incremental montizable revenue to me than they’re consuming in resources to process their requests.
• Look to the under 25 year old crowd to find out how their form their adhoc collectives. Not that folks over 25 won’t be into it also, but the under 25 crowd tends to use their mobile in a different way and they have some good patterns to replicate. Allow them to share something that’s personal on your site and you might find the kind of grassroots uptake that allows your application or service to spread without carrier support. But first you have to figure out what it is that they really want to do. Not what they say when you ask them, that’s something different. Complement and support their desired mode of interaction and you won’t be able to keep from spreading.

The OSDL is supposed to be launching an initiative to bring Linux to mobile phones on Monday. Fantastic news! The article does a good job of outlining some of the technical challenges. Power management under Linux has been something that could be improved on for a long time, and combining the need for power management with the need to show realtime OS response times could present some tough challenges. The Linux kernel group is also an idealistic bunch. They tend to hold out for something that satisfies all the requirements instead of tossing any old feature into the mainline kernel. Sometimes that forces the evolution of some really unique solutions. I think there’s room for a ton of improvement in terms of mobile OSes, and having the Linux kernel evolve in that direction would spark the kind of innovation I think we need.