Archive for August, 2006

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?

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.

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?

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.