Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I was flipping through radio stations the other day and heard a competition where they were giving away some kind of promotional item. I do think it was something big, but I forget what. What caught my attention was that they were looking for the 10 thousandth text messenger as the winner. That’s a pretty big number overall. I wonder how long it took for them to get to 10K. I didn’t think about it till later otherwise I might have actually left the radio on to find out. I got the impression though that it was something pretty short.

I know there are services out there that run this stuff, manage the offer on behalf of the radio stations and deal with all the technical setup. Not that I can find one right now to link to, but I know I’ve run across them before. I wonder what the cost is though. In only a few instances have I found SMS services where the provider has negotated free messaging out of the carriers in return for driving traffic. The operators here in the US make money every time a subscriber gets or sends a message, so I would think that driving 10k revenue generating messages through their networks would be something that carriers would be happy about. But there’s all sorts of issues to deal with, not least of all that the networks over the air interface doesn’t deal with burts traffic very well.

Anyone have any idea what the overall cost is to run a campaign of about this size in the US?

At AdMob we’re ending up the month of August with a quarter of a billion pageviews per month in inventory in the advertising network. That’s a lot of mobile activity no matter how you slice it. What really gets my juices flowing is that these are all independent application and service providers looking to make some money off what they’re doing directly. In particular some of the advertisers we have simply had no other options for getting info about their offering out in the market. In some cases they were hoping to get carrier deals or establish a relationship with a publisher. But now they can throw a few dollars in an AdMob account and get the word out directly. It’s definitely a new way to promote within mobile, and it seems to be working out very well.

Sign up for an account using our 250million promotion and you’ll get 20 dollars of free money to play around with. Free money, how can you beat that? Give it a shot and see what your response rate is like, most people are pleasantly surprized. It’s not that there’s no mobile market out there, it’s just kinda hard to reach with the tools we had a few months ago. That’s starting to change for the better however.

After taking a look at TextMarks yesterday, I poked around 3Jam a bit today. They’ve definitely gone after the adhoc group messaging end of things. The basic usage is pretty simple: send a message to a group of friends to start a “conversation” and the folks who you send to can reply to the whole group by replying to the message. Simple, intuitive, the way SMS should work anway. Kinda funny it requires a third party service. Kinda.

One interesting point of difference here is the degree of integration with the underlying SMS system and how intuitively a user can take advantage of the service. I think it all contributes pretty effectively to how viral a service can be. 3Jam seems like it would provide for a much more viral distribution. Because someone can be introduced to 3Jam by getting a message sent to them by a friend, and they can pretty intuitively use the service and discover what it does. The same thing isn’t really true about the way TextMarks is setup, unless there’s a usage in there I haven’t hit yet. Subscribing to a textmark seems to be the way to get users into a group, and that’s much more of an explicit than an implicit action.

A few services like 3Jam are out there now, I think the first I saw was the AIM via SMS setup that I first tried out on TMobile. They seem to be services implemented at the SMSC level in terms of carrier hookups. So that services get some block of shortcodes assigned to them to manage, and they can do things like assign particular shortcodes (or particular shortcode + originating handset combo it seems like) to a context so that it can be reused from one message to the next. A complex thing to have to manage just in order to get a message sent to a group of people to send a message to that same group when it’s replied to. Plus on top of that, I’m assuming getting hooked into carrier networks as an SMSC (or do you get hooked into an aggie?) is something that rivals getting a new module hooked into the space station in terms of cost and complexity. So building on top of services that provide these kinds of functions in a necessity for us mere mortals.

A lot of this stuff I’ve picked up bit by bit by trawling through the 3GPP “go ahead, just try to find something, I dare you!” specifications area (the same people who brought you the “why the fuck should I be reading source code if all I want to do is create a 3gp video?” codec source distribution) and crawling through Wikipedia. The whole situation is starting to remind me of what I’m told the early days of phreaking were like. Increasingly complex switching protocols piling up all over and getting hooked to each other. Deemed “secure” because few people knew that they existed, let alone how they worked. But all it takes is a few lucky and/or motivated individuals to discover basic flaws that require an overhaul of the whole system to correct.

On a completely unrelated note it’s amazing what you can find on the downstream side of a carrier firewall just sitting around for anyone to download if they can just guess the right URL. Kinda makes one wonder the interesting bits of info that are floating around there in other protocols. Certainly helps to explain why there was so much resistence to bluetooth tethering despite the fact that it would just increase the amount of high value data traffic flowing across carrier networks. Releasing uncontrolled devices like laptops on a network with a security model tuned for carrier controlled endpoint devices probably caused a few sleepless nights down in IT. Wonder if there’s a way to stack SMSCs.

Russell pointed out TextMarks in a recent post, and I poked around with a bit during the week. But it was just this evening that I had really dug in. The TextMark thing is interesting on it’s own, being able to generate a keyword assocated with an SMS request is interesting stuff. Be it shortcode + keyword + content management as delivered by Mozes or keyword to web query as delivered by 411sync. We actually find aspects of both in the TextMark setup.

You really need to take a spin through the help page and read the random points there in order to understand what they’re up to. At least that’s what it took for me to realize the extent of what they have there. Taking a look at that set of commands a whole different mode of interaction becomes apparent. There’s also subscribe to keywords and send alerts to keywords, enabling conversations with adhoc groups over SMS, something like what PartySync has been up to for a while. Interesting, very interesting.

All told, I think TextMarks is getting a lot further toward the general SMS services API that I’ve been looking for out of Google and Yahoo. Yahoo has the RSS to SMS they released a while ago, Google has the Dodgeball team locked away in a basement somewhere apparently never to see the light of day again, but neither has pulled the whole set together and made the necessary generic magic pudding of SMS goodness we can spread all over. This is a decent step in that direction, and I think the groups are going to be the key that makes this interesting long term.

There’s been some info floating around about an e61 firmware update, a whole revision number even: 2.618.06.05. Everyone has been watchiing the phone software update page to see if the E61 appears on the list. Which I find vaguely amusing, it very much has the feel of seers searching the entrails of a sacrifice for a sign from the gods. “Oh great Nokia, will the firmware fairy visit us this year?”

Does anyone know if this is going to be release as an OTA update, and can I do the update over wifi from here in the US? Or should I just bite the bullet and send in my unit? I’m pretty tired of the constant unresponsiveness, and I’m hoping the firmware update makes the system a little more usable. I would expect this would be the kind of info Nokia would be interested in providing to customers…. Anyone seen a definitive release about it from Nokia?

John Kern and I met up last weekend to talk about some of the overall ideas that keep popping up in terms of mobile and how to help folks (ourselves included) navigate some of the upcoming issues. The open source thing, that I’ve been tracking for a long time. A long long time. And it’s still a long time in coming because it means a real overhaul of some tried and true processes. The network convergence part though, and the continued proliferation of VOIP stuff, there’s some stuff in there that I didn’t expect to happen quite the way it’s been rolling out.

VOIP isn’t new. For years and years we’ve been hearing about pouring voice traffic into IP packets and the wonders that abound when a thing like that happens. Most of the wonder has been constrained to purchasing relatively pricey IP based PBXs instead of telecom card laden PBXs, and besides that nothing really happened. And I was all set for nothing to keep happening for years to come. Then one day suddenly everything changed, and these normal people were talking about being able to make phonecalls from wifi hotspots. They were actually using IP based voice applications for something besides the usages that equipment vendors had dreamed up for them.

That part of the equation is going to provide for some interesting activity, a bumpy ride I’m sure, and probably plenty of blood sweat and legal attrocities. I’m going to be paying attention to the open source stuff, and tackling anyone vaguely associated with Qtopia and torturing them until they promise to get me a Greenphone. But I expect the UMA and VOIP and SIP and associated battles are going to steal the public stage for a while.

I’m probably going to skip out on much of CTIA itself, but I am going to be down in LA for the party! Well, the pre-party at least. Mario from Mobile Monday LA is throwing a mixer the night before along with the Finnish Consul General. We’re AdMobbing the MECCA Billboard event the day before CTIA, and it sounds like there are going to be some fantastic folks at the mixer so I get to hang out for that. Then it’s straight back to mind the fort however, so I won’t be around for much of CTIA itself. Omar and some of the rest of the crew are going to be there for the whole shindig though, so send them an email if you want to setup a time to talk.

I used to live down in LA for about a year and a half, but it’s been a good five years or so since I set foot in the town. Of course, I’ve lost touch with just about everyone down there. The mixer should be a great party. AdMob is giving a presentation, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be ;-)

If you’re going to be in town for the conference the night before, come by and check it out. RSVP! Otherwise apparently security will bounce you, bum’s rush I’m assuming. Always looks like fun when they do it on the Simpson’s, but I’m betting that’s one of the things that just looks like fun when it’s not happening to you. If you make it out there come grab me for a chat, especially if we’ve never met. I’ll probably be wearing a “Mobile Geeks Rule” shirt or something equivalently geeky. Unless we get our official AdMob schwag before then, in which case I will be representin’.

Slashdot had a pointer to an
article at BusinessWeek about some recent cell phone prototypes. They involve some interesting stuff like gesture recognition and flexible displays. Some of the stuff looks like it could be interesting. I’m not sure I completely agree with the points about fashion that the article makes. Or maybe I just don’t agree with some of the details.

People are getting new phones more often, and the image that those phones present is increasingly important to people. I really picked up that vibe with the Motorola RAZR. It was apparent that a phone with a limited number of features and a slick look could move some amazing numbers. Does that mean that “fashion” is significant though? Nokia has been working on what they call “fashion” phones for quite a while, and those haven’t been successful. Certainly not on the same scale as the RAZR.

Ultimately I think the mobile phone industries needs to take a few hints from the fashion industry, but throwing the whole issue into that domain is just an easy out. The reason the RAZR does well is good design. Calling it a “fashion acessory” makes it easy to deny the fact that most existing phones are crap when it comes to design, so it takes the sting out of the huge numbers of RAZR units that are out in the field. Does the phone industry need to take some cues from fashion on the whole? Sure maybe. But that’s really just a very small part of the overall lesson we should be taking away.

Now that it’s possible to connect a device over Wifi instead of cellular (or TCP/IP over Bluetooth) the Apache on S60 effort is a bit more interesting. When I first heard about it one of my initial thoughts was to create an iCal export of my calendar via Apache and include that in my Evolution calendar setup. But that turns out to be just as much of a hack as any of the other methods. Still, I think there’s something interesting there, so I’ve got Apache on my E61 and I’ve been going through the demos in little fits and starts between the real work I’m doing and trying to get all my equipment back up online and talking to the interweb without blowing circuit breakers. I’ve been pretty impressed with using the server locally and how quick it is using it through the proxy when running over wifi instead of cellular.

Unfortunately file manipulation and editing on the E61 is still a pain. I used obexftp under Linux to poke around at the files that make up the htdocs and config for the Apache server. I have no idea where these files are that the Apache folks expect users to find. The docs say “check out the files installed on the phone to see how the python modules hook up,” but there’s no easy way to do that using just the phone that I’ve found. So of course I started wondering about maybe a python based editor to just generally take care of this “file access and editing on the device” problem once and for all. I always install the source for the apps and run them from the scripts menu, and none of them were working on the E61 when I did that. The import statement didn’t seem to be working at all for things in the python/lib directory. A quick search turned up info about the lib directory not working on the current version at all. That’s annoying. Some quick hacks to import sys and sys.path.append(’e:\\python\\lib’) as necessary got things working though.

Here’s some general tips I’ve taken away:

• Getting python scripts onto 3rd edition devices seem to be a huge pain in the ass. Transfering just a .py file over generates an error in the messenger when you click on it. Why, I’m not sure. .zip files still work with the zip manager… why don’t .py files work?
• Speaking of the zip manager, transfering over .py files inside zips sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately the zip manager won’t let you extract to c:\\python for some reason. You can use e:\\python however, which is decent. But very oddly asymetric. One of those instances of getting something working despite the technology instead of getting something working because of it. The more time I spend doing mobile stuff the more accustomed to that mode I seem to get.
• Ditto for obexftp, you can put into the E: drive python folder, but not C:. Consistent at least.
• PyEdit has been working out fantastic for poking around with files on the device. Haven’t used it for editing too much, but it works great for viewing. Make sure you don’t accidentally click the wrong button when navigating the files list cause that throws an error and pops you out of the file selection dialogs, and no scrollbars in the file nav screens can make that a bit frusterating. There are newer versions I see, maybe these are fixed/updated now.
• The Apache server does listen on all interfaces when you start it up in cellular mode. What that means is that you can start a “cellular” session with the app, choose a wifi access point to connect to, and access the service both through the at.openlaboratory.net address you get with your Raccoon account and the IP address assigned to your phone by your router (or whatever you’re connected to). Cool. Looking at the setup screens I didn’t think that would work as I had hoped it out. I expected the server to be listening on loopback only when the connector was started, but that isn’t the case.

I’ve been living for the last week with a Verizon EV-DO card as my primary access mechanism at home. And of course I’ve been plopping myself down in random places and trying it out on the go as well. I have to say I’m not as blown away as I was expecting to be when I first picked the thing up and got online. Given the price as a whole, and the required 2 year contract (2 years!!!! Who the hell came up with that? That’s like 4 lifetimes in technology time) this thing is going back to Verizon once I have my Comcast install done.

First a few things about the service itself. When I installed the wireless card management software it also installed something called Venturi which does compression and puts an annoying little spinning icon down in the system tray under Windows. Now, first off, I’m already kinda seething about having to use Windows to begin with, on top of casting a critical eye towards this given the cost and commitment level. Turns out this Venturi thing isn’t a lossless compression low level driver kinda thing. I noticed that many of the images on web pages just looked like junk, and poking around found that the default settings in the wireless manager actually run my traffic through a proxy. At least one of the things the proxy does is transcode images.

All this talk about the insane bandwidth of these 3G networks and already we’ve resorted to proxies? Why do I bother bitching about them using a proxy? Cause the other night my web pages were taking FOREVER to load, but my ssh session was zipping along no problem. Turn off Venturi and sure enough the web pages are loading quick as well. Probably just as quick as they ever did with Venturi on as a matter of fact. So Venturi has mostly stayed off for me:

• Too much latency.
• It’s annoying having to roll over all the buttons on some website cause Venturi has transcoded the images into unreadable sludge.
• Dealing with the network bandwidth problem is Verizon’s task.

If I were keeping the service I would have to pay them $80 a month for the next two years. If that doesn’t buy a stellar experience all the time I don’t know what would. This network is supposed to deliver audio and video and be my primary conduit to the Internet, and it can’t pull me a few simple images without downsampling them? Dubious at best.

It’s also dropped out on me a bunch of times. Normally not much of an issue when I’m browsing the web. The little notification comes up that the connection has dropped, I click connect again, no problem. However.. say I’m in the middle of a transfer. Say I have some command running in an SSH session that I actually care about. It’s actually happened to me just about once a day so far, and that’s a bit much. Frequently when I’m sitting at my desk working too, not moving the computer around or anything. It just drops out. Which makes me think that my longer term use for this, as a backhaul for my car system, might be problematic.

Finally, Cingular HSDPA is up, and I can move my cell phone over to Cingular and pay the lesser price for their HSDPA. Still expensive, but a savings of $20 a month for two years is significant enough that I can bother caring about that. And then there’s the possibility of getting a direct HSDPA phone also, which I’m very unlikely to do on the Verizon network.

What timing too, the Comcast tech just left my house and I’m finishing up this post across my Wifi network attached to a cable router. And let me tell you, the difference between the EV-DO card and the cable modem is amazing if you’ve just pulled out one and swapped in the other. So I’m off to Verizon to do some returnin’.