Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom
Archive for January, 2006
Zero Bars
Jan 31st
Yoz just setup an application for noting cellular dead areas. I’m kinda curious to see who else out there has some known dead zones they want to rant about. My first two were Diego’s house and Fry’s in Palo Alto. Both of which are supposed to have good or great signal strength according to the T-Mobile Coverage Check. How Fry’s in PA can be a deadspot for T-Mobile I have no idea. The TMobile folks MUST go to Fry’s. No matter how twisted they might be in other regards there still have to be some gadget geeks over there. And no gadget geek can come to the Bay Area without stopping in at least some Fry’s location.
February Mobile Monday – Location Based Services
Jan 31st
The February meeting of Silicon Valley Mobile Monday is going to be focused on Location Based Services:
- What: February 2006 Mobile Monday (Location Based Services)
- When: February 6th, 2006 7:00pm
- Where: Dogpatch Studios, 991 Tennessee Street, San Francisco, CA
- Who: Anyone interested in mobility
- Cost: Nothing!
I’ve been running into a lot of companies either with location based services already out or looking to add some kind of location based component to their offerings. Normally the first question is “what method of getting location information should I be looking at?” In some systems the device itself has a GPS unit built in and is capable of determining it’s own location, in others it relies on the network to deliver information about the location of the unit.
Part of the reason we’re seeing such a surge of location based activity in the US right now is because the targeted date for phase 2 of the enhanced 911 service for wireless was the end of 2005. The second phase required “far more precise location information, within 50 to 300 meters in most cases.” However, for the carriers that’s only half of the equation. Even if they have the ability to deliver location information to emergency services, they want to put some kind of billing around the service in order to provide it to subscribers.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty with respect to what that business model looks like. Is it a charge per use model where the user pays for each and every request their handset makes for location information? Is it an add-on service the user adds for a flat fee independent of the usage patterns? Is it something that gets charged on an application by application basis? The questions there are mostly undecided even on a carrier by carrier basis, forget about the industry as a whole.
So even though the deadline has passed already for the E911 technology being in place, it hasn’t delivered anywhere near the nationwide standard location service that I think some people were hoping for. What should developers count on then when developing location based applications? That’s one of the questions I hope to get answered by fantastic lineup of presenters Greg Isetta from AutoDesk pulled together for the event.
PyS60
Jan 29th
That’s the name of the Python for Series60 project up at SourceForge, and the source code is available as a package now! I missed it when it went up cause I kept checking CVS. Thanks to cyke64 for pointing me over there. I haven’t tried compiling the source yet (I don’t have a windows machine any more, so I might never get to compile the source from the looks of it), but at least I can see what’s done in there and maybe pick up bits for my own hacks. Great job, I think getting this released in source form is fantastic.
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
Jan 28th
I took a quick spin through Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 today. Here are a few bits and pieces that caught my eye:
1.3.3 One Web
The recommendations in this document are intended to improve mobile experience of the Web on mobile devices. While the recommendations are not specifically addressed at the desktop browsing experience it must be understood that they are made in the context of wishing to work towards ‘One Web’.
As discussed in [Scope] One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However it does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same way across all devices. Some services and information are more suitable for and targeted at particular user contexts.
w00t!! Happy to see that explicitly in there. I still hear people talk a lot about there being different technologies for mobile and desktop delivery as if that’s just a fact of life that will never change. I don’t agree at all.
2.5 Advertising
Developers of commercial web sites should note that different commercial models are often at work when the Web is accessed from Mobile devices as compared with desktop devices. For example, some mechanisms that are commonly used for presentation of advertising material do not work well on small devices and are therefore contrary to the Best Practice Recommendations.
It is not the intention of the MWI to limit or to restrict advertising; rather it is the intention that the user experience of the site as a whole, including advertising, if any, is as effective as possible.
Lots of talk about mobile advertising recently, I think this is going to be a hot area coming up. Hopefully someone solves it well without requiring everyone to sign over control of mobile advertising to some consolidated service. I would love to see a generic mechanism that provides for delivery, and a few networks serving it. I wouldn’t like to see carriers controlling inserting of ads into content using proprietary systems.
3.1 Adaptation Implementation Model
There is quite a wide spectrum of implementation models for content adaptation. On the one hand adaptation may be quite simple, and consist of determining the device type and choosing the most appropriate set of previously prepared content to match the device characteristics. At the other extreme it may be carried out in a completely dynamic way, with content formatted at the time of retrieval, taking into account not only statically determined properties, such as screen dimension, but also dynamically determined properties, such as the temporary attachment of a fully featured keyboard.
Slippery slope, device adaptation. It can lead to a kind of arms race, where site implementations over-assume the capability of a device and degrade the site mistakenly. So then the device manufacturer lies about the device in the request headers or identifiers to work around that mistake. Which the site implementors eventually have to work around to get back at the functionality being lied about. It doesn’t have to go this way, but so often it does.
I’m not saying that device adaption is a bad idea, but that implementation of those adaptations being in the hands of every implementor leads to a lot of burden on the site creator and lots of room for error. This is where server side tools that accept site descriptions at a higher level of semantic markup and map to concrete elements based on the inbound request could do a lot to help. Unfortunately those systems tend to be large, cumbersome, expensive setups themselves. Would be great if there was some good open source out there implementing those adaptations that everyone could pull from.
Mobile Music Money
Jan 26th
Great post from Carlo at MobHappy following up on a post about mobile music at MocoNews. Besides the hysterical quote about peeing your pants to keep warm, I think Carlo also adds some great commentary:
Full-track downloading really is a pretty boring mobile music application, when the platform’s capable of delivering much more interactivity, and services could build on the core communications functionality of the mobile platform. If there’s no money in downloads, leave that market to online providers, or find a cheaper alternative to setting up your own shop, and offer better services. And if you insist on trying to sell downloads, don’t hamstring them with copy protection so they’re locked to a phone, or worse yet, to a particular service.
Very nice, I agree. Figuring out what those alternative applications are should be what folks are working on, but for the most part that doesn’t seem to be the case. So what kinds of applications could those possibly be? I personally think that discovery services could work out pretty well, although of course I have no data to back that up. Think something like PhoneTags and I think that starts off in the right direction.
Think of the phone as a recepticle for music that you can keep with you and I think you’re missing much of the point of the mobile phone. Pure convergence without adding anything. The phone has a network interface, if you just pump the music down over it that’s not very inventive. Allow it to pull information from the world around me, a-la PhoneTags, and that’s starting to get better. Deliver me some info about what friends are listening to, or popular chart toppers I can sample from, also not bad.
This is really building off the whole “mobile as the remote control for your life” idea, which has a very natural evolution into integration with home media systems. Full track downloads into a mobile in some proprietary format is a dead end.. unless you see the mobile as the persistent core processing and storage unit as that next step of evolution. And I think even Nokia has decided now that just isn’t going to be the case. It’s better to start thinking about how to access all that media information out there and integrate with it rather than trying to force yourself unnaturally into the center.
New GPS Satellites Live
Jan 26th
News from Engadget that new satellites transmitting higher power for GPS are now live. Anyone know what devices out on the market can take advantage of this? Anyone tried it out? How much of a difference is there compared to the older system?
Long Range Wireless Links
Jan 25th
There’s a great post at wireless.gumph.org explaining how long range wireless links can be made without exceeding power limitations (hat tip RootPrompt.org):
Some wireless devices however, let you reduce the transmit power, which allows us to use a more powerful antenna. This does not increase the overall strength of the signal , but does increase the receive sensitivity. If we do this at both ends of the link, we can increase the range, while staying within legal limits.
Source Code for Python for Series60?
Jan 25th
I saw in the developer newsletter from Nokia that they’ve released the source code to Python. No download link in the newsletter though, so I did a search and ended up at Andrew Lampert’s post:
A quick search of SourceForge suggests that the PyS60 project seems to be this announced project. Unfortunately, it currently has no sourcecode, or indeed any files, available for download. The Nokia Open Source site similarly has a Python for S60 page setup, but no source code available yet. I’ll be keeping an eye out for the software to match Nokia’s release though – if anyone else has already located it, please leave a comment!
Hmm. A closer reading of the newsletter reveals that Nokia has “agreed to release” the source code. Which, by the way, would make the title for the entry inaccurate. The title says that Nokia has released the source code. Cmon, just release the stuff, then put out announcements.
So, that out of the way, I think this is fantastic news. I would love to see how the port was done, I’m curious how deep the changes are. And I’m sure it’ll provide a great base for others to build on.
Opera Mini
Jan 24th
Opera Mini was released today, with a decent amount of info on the entry on the Opera Watch blog:
Opera Mini is a new kind of web browser for virtually all mobile phones and devices. Opera Mini was designed to enable the web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a Web browser. Instead of requiring the phone to process Web pages, Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone, which makes it perfect for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections.
Now, I wouldn’t be too hasty to call server heavy proxy browsing a “new kind of web browser”, but Opera Mini does work out well from what I’ve seen. I got my mits on it a while ago and have generally been pretty impressed with the capability. Most websites look pretty decent, load quickly, and the small font kicks ass. One aspect that I was hoping for was memory savings on my 6680, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. With mini open I can’t really open anything else. But I’ll blame Nokia for that and not Opera. I was also expecting to see AdSense ads rendered in the mobile version, but they seemed to be stripped out all together. It seems like the proxy is executing some javascript based on the sites I’ve seen (granted though I haven’t run an explicit test), and given the Google placement on the default Opera homepage I would have expected to see ads on the results pages. My understanding that the Google setup with Opera was a rev share on ad income. So where’s the ad revenue on a browser that doesn’t display ads?
Russ just pointed me toward his post also, check that out for some additional commentary.
Let There Be Wi-Fi
Jan 24th
Excellent article over at Washington Monthly called Let There Be Wi-Fi (hat tip to The Wireless Weblog):
The dispute over municipal broadband bears a striking similarity to the development of the electric power industry a century ago. As James Baller—an attorney who represents local governments and public utilities—first warned in a 1994 paper written for the American Public Power Association: “The history of the electric power industry casts substantial doubt on the notion that our nation can depend on competition among cable and telephone companies alone… to ensure not only prompt and affordable, but also universal, access to the benefits of the information superhighway.â€
One common source of frustration for me is seeing municipal wireless projects shot down because cellular carriers claim it’s “unfair competition”. This just doesn’t hold water, the reasoning is completely backward. The carriers bid on spectrum because supposedly they have a business model which will make them money with that spectrum. Once they win the spectrum they’re supposed to execute on that business plan. If something operating on completely unlicensed spectrum is able to undercut whatever they’re operating on that licensed and private spectrum guess what the problem is….. Wait for it….. the business plan.
So what if the carrier paid insanely huge amounts of money for the spectrum they own? They’re the ones who decided to purchase it, and they’re the ones responsible for making money off of it. Let’s change the players a little bit to draw a parallel to what the carriers are trying to do through legislation.
Let’s say I purchase a software package from a company to use in my business. That software comes with license terms from my provider and restrictions on what I can do with it, and I sign a contract with the software provider governing the usage of the software and our relationship. So I build the costs for that software into my own pricing models and build my business around that. Now lets say that someone else comes along, a competitor of mine, and they find a way to do the same thing that I do but without using the software that I licensed. So they cost less and I start losing customers to them.
Now does the government step in and prevent my competitor from competing with me? Do I expect them to legislate that the business that I’m in can only be provided by using the same software that I was a sucker enough to license? No, of course not. I made a mistaken decision to build my business on top of a base that cost too much and I got undercut. Welcome to the market based economy. So my question once again is: Who’s problem is it that carriers who paid millions in license fees for spectrum are getting customers stolen by Wi-Fi networks?
