What Am I Missing About Bluepulse?
Oliver seems to be really into Bluepulse. After I saw the posting at MobileCrunch I signed up for a Bluepulse developer kit. I’m one of those propeller-headed folks, being of the general mind that knowing how things work out under the covers normally helps understand how the system as a whole functions. But I’m left blinking at a mostly empty screen when I take a look under the covers of Bluepulse. Then I saw the post at MobHappy and decided I needed to figure out what I was missing.
I was expecting something along the lines of the Opera widget toolkit, there were a couple of comments to that effect, and the talk about the platform making applications work on a wide variety of devices. Inside the Bluepulse developer kit I find a description of a stripped down set of XHTML, a set of static stylesheets that the “platform” includes, some extra HTTP headers, and very minimal handling of multimedia types (mostly by just downloading them to the phone). “This can’t be all of it” I thought to myself. So I dug around for a while longer in the docs and examples looking for what I could be missing from the tech end. I’m just not seeing anything. No Javascript or other scripting languages, no real extension of the display language on the client side and no support for the interesting aspects of the existing spec, PNG images only! Overall a long step backwards and at least a short step to the side.
I can’t bring myself to think that this method of delivering applications to mobile devices is the future of the mobile web. So what am I missing here? It’s not like we haven’t seen attempts to mobilize application using a subset of standard web markup and some client side shim to display it. The argument against it last time around was that no one wanted to develop a crippled version of their service specifically for mobile devices. There was also the problem of install base, which I don’t see Bluepulse being able to address. Though maybe they have an in somewhere that’ll get them on all the decks. Whoring themselves out to carriers would certainly do it, but based on the answers from their VP of Answering Questions that doesn’t seem like the route they’re interested in.
So maybe there’s an evolution in the business model that I’m not getting. The little applets seem to be pay-per-day usage charges using a credit system. The kinds of content in there - restaurant and bar info, TV listings, movie locations and times. Nothing that isn’t getting delivered via the likes of Yahoo or Google mobile at this point. The only real differentiator there is detection of phone types so you can do ringtone and wallpaper downloads. So of course promoters and advertisers should be very happy to have a channel like this. But they aren’t going to drive the channel in terms of adoption of an application that folks have to install on their handset. And the use as a promotional tool is out of line with the credit system which seems to be one of the major points that Bluepulse is pushing.
So what else is there? Is this a tool for MVNOs to use in a way that I’m not picturing? They have the reach to get this installed a the kinds of numbers of handsets that would make it a compelling development platform, and the right kind of demographic segmentation to make it worth the publishers while. If that’s it then what’s the prototypical app for this and what’s the cost model? Any propeller-heads out there who picked up something I missed? Or is this not a tech play at all?
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:46 am
[...] That’s why this BluePulse announce seemed to me quite interesting. The ideas seems to download “widget”, on your mobile, and get revenu from this. But after trying it, I’ve been a little bit disapointed. The so called widget seems to like more as Web pages. I did not take a look at the SDK yet, but seems to me more an attempt to surf on the Widget wave than a real innovative product. Yes, just like other said, I might be missing something but this is definitevly not Konfabulator for mobile phones. [...]
January 23rd, 2006 at 7:03 am
Hi Mike,
Of course I’m stoked that Oliver and Michael are excited about bluepulse - so are we - but in its current iteration think of bluepulse as we describe it on our homepage - “the easiest way to access the internet services you need from an ordinary mobile phone” - please read that through again, with more emphasis on “easiest”, “services you need” and “ordinary mobile phone” please!
In the future, everybody will carry handsets at least as powerful as Tom’s N70…
http://bluepulseblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/bluepulse-strongly-polarises-mobile.html
January 24th, 2006 at 4:53 am
Mike,
First of all, my thanks for reading both blogs. I love comments and opinion, even those that differ from my own. because you commented on the bluepulse posts I at both sites I’ll respond there but wanted to thank you and let you know that I was doing so.
Oliver
http://mobilecrunch.com
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:16 pm
I think the exciting thing about Blue Pulse is the ability to create your own widgets, including ones that will generate revenue for it. If that idea can catch on the sky is the limit. You or I could develp that must have widget that creates a form of income for us, and we haven’t had to create any of the technology behind it.