Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

The mobile feed reader from Feedburner I mentioned the other day is uninstallable on an E61 if you use the JAD with the certificate attached, and usable if you go directly to the JAR. Sounds like a whole bunch of technical mumbo jumbo that you really shouldn’t have to care about right? It is. There’s a technical note from Nokia about the issue:

Signing MIDlets with a certificate for Java Verified applications should not be done for the above-mentioned devices because of the missing root certificate. If a MIDlet is signed, steps described in the Solution / Workaround section help you to install the MIDlet.

Odd that something called a Unified Testing Initiative would result in needing a signed version for some devices and an unsigned version for other devices. Or am I the only one that finds that odd? To say nothing about the fact that the security mechanism is attached to a metadata file that isn’t needed at all. At least there’s some conceptual consistency with the Symbian signed initiative in this case. They would both make good subjects for Dilbert cartoons, that’s a kind of consistency.

When I mention TextMarks to people and say something like “so you can build applications that communicate via SMS”, the general response seems to be “why would you want to do that?” And I normally use the bookmarking example that Russell gave, or a group messaging example. But today while I was in the car I heard the Live105 folks encouraging people to text in their votes for different styles of music in a head to head faceoff. Looks like punk won, cool. Perfect example I thought. Doing a promotion also, something like “the 30th person to text in gets to punch me!”

But screw the whole example thing, that’s booring, and people never believe things are easy to do till after you actually show them a working example. So I setup an SMS voting backend on Ning during Robot Chicken. The parts are pretty simple:

• http://smsvoting.ning.com/?vote=something - records a vote for “something” and returns a message for the voter formated with some text to make pulling the message out at TextMarks easy.
• http://smsvoting.ning.com/results.php?choices=thing1,thing2 - returns the current vote count for thing1 and thing2 in a very minimal html page. You could format the different and tag it up so that the vote tally can be queried via SMS also. Takes multiple names seperated by commas, so you can do more than 2 way voting if you want.
• The setup at TextMarks. Create a keyword for each option you want to be able to vote on and set the “text from a webpage” in the respond with dropdown, set the URL to the ?vote=something from the first bullet point above, the to left field to “msgbegin:” and the to right field to “:msgend”

Don’t get it? I setup voting keywords where you can vote either in favor of or against me so you can try it out. The results so far are here, and you can vote for me by texting “miker” to 41411, and against me by texting “nomiker” to 41411. You should get a message back on your mobile telling you the vote number for your submission, and if you go and reload the webpage you should see a different count. The Ning app creates new entries when it sees new votes, so you can use it for your own toys, or you can clone it and make it better. I vote you clone it. Go ahead, you know you want to.

The release of a low end inexpensive Treo device is certainly more interesting in light of the possible interpretation of the Nokia E62 release also being a response to price pressure. Especially if it’s the leading edge of a general downturn in smartphone prices in the states. Wikipedia does say that mobile phones and airtime costs are a razors and blades style business model. And Wikipedia does tend to know all.

Good, it means the expansive search for more customers at the top end of the market is finally slowing down and we’ll hit a market optimization phase soon. Maybe we’ll finally see some Linux phones show up once everyone realizes that Symbian vs. RIM vs. Palm vs. Windows Mobile really only matters to people working inside the industry and none of the consumers really give a crap as long as it works.

I went up to the Enabling Mobile Communities SF Tech Session a few nights ago, it was a great set of presentations. Thanks to Niall and Eric from Phone Scoop for pulling together a fantastic event.

wapTags

Paul had given a wapTags presentation at the MoMo demo night on Monday, so I had seen a basic overview of what they’re up to. So of course I spent a decent amount of time playing around with it Tuesday. I like the ideas in general - community “moderation” of a sort by bubbling up popular links, profiles, search by clicking instead of typing. That all fits very well with mobile. There’s definitely a bent toward mature content up at the top of the ranking right now, but I refuse to call it spam at this point. People like porn, it’s a big industry. Someone must be looking at it.

There’s also the typical content quality and compatibility issues, I do tend to get a bunch of failures on the different devices I tried it with. I thought this could be a pretty cool site for wifi connected handheld devices in particular. But the PSP threw errors on lots of the pages, and the 770 doesn’t understand WML. I’m still looking around a lot to see how people are using the service (my profile is at http://mp.waptags.com/miker if you want to see what I’ve been checking and marking) and I’m still getting a feel for that. Given the growth rate they’re seeing it’s worth learning how that community works I think.

Twitter

Twitter is a free mobile service for publishing and subscribing to friend’s status info via SMS. Biz explained it as extending that little status area from IM into a more general and functional system, and mobile messaging is pretty key. It reminds me a lot of Dodgeball, with the stuff that pisses me off about Dodgeball taken out. It’s not tied to geographic region, which is cool. My friends aren’t all in Palo Alto, they’re not even all in the Bay Area. Of course I have to convince them to actually sign up for Twitter in order to try it out, we’ll see how that one flies. My friends are already pretty jaded when it comes to me trying to convince them to sign up for another mobile social tool.

Twitter does include mechanisms publishing your status info out to your blog or other webpage, and they have all the main functionality such as managing your friends list available through the SMS API. I like that a lot. Even more I like the API they apparently just released this week. That’s definitely an interesting candidate for some hackery.

TextMarks

Russell had already written up TextMarks so I was familiar with the service. I went to the TextMarks website and created an AdMob shortcode to return the total number of ad views so far. In some senses it’s a lot like 411Sync, but with a much lower barrier to experimentation. And of course having the 41411 shortcode is pretty sweet. It really makes the usage that Russell talks about of linking through a shortcode effective (much like Mozes does with their shortcodes).

I really like the subscription and group messaging options in there as well (I’ve mentioned that in a post before). An SMS “publishing platform” only really takes it half way until you include subscriptions. Sure, getting to info via SMS query is sometimes more convenient than pulling it up in a mobile browser. But some of the SMS toys I’ve been seeing popping up use SMS to send a link that really does little more than introduce what would be an unnecessary step if URLs were just a little bit more manageable. However, if you can subscribe to something interesting and keep getting updates directly to your handset, now that’s actually using the strength of the medium. I’ll have to fool around with that subscription end of the service.
AdMob total ads served TextMark

Most of us techies who are fans of the E61, or own one, have been lamenting the E62 model that will actually grace the honest to goodness shelves at Cingular. The 6680 is just about the only Nokia model running Symbian out on the US market, so we’re happy to see Nokia making some progress. However most, myself included, were disappointed that the version available in the US was going to be “gutted”. Missing most of the features that made it interesting in the first place, like 802.11. But Carlo provides an excellent explanation of what’s going on, reaction to price sensitivity. Nice, thanks Carlo, excellent points, makes total sense what they’re going for.

Now, is it realistic? Can the gutted version of the device go head to head with a Treo or a Blackberry? Take the wifi out of the E61 and I think I would still take it over the alternatives. I actually do use the applications on my smartphone, I’m just one of those freaks like that. But as Carlo points out the price tag on the E62 actually undercuts the Treo and Blackberry. Does it make for a good device for the non-corporate road warrior? Guess we’ll find out pretty soon.

It’s late already, but there was a lot of great stuff at the MoMo demo night this evening that I want to at least get down somewhere. So here’s the raw dump.

Zypsy has a text messaging service overlaid with location based and social network filters, with the goal of providing “classified” style listings and facilitating responses. You can use it for unstructured messages, but the key seems to be using structured messages for particular goals which get filtered through a matching engine to try to introduce the right listers to the right responders. I’m registered as mikerowehl at gmail dot com, add me if you’re signed up for the service too.

The folks from Mozes showed off their wisdom of the crowd style question answering service. Text a message with a question to MOZES (66937) and it goes out to a bunch of folks to get an answer. You get 3 responses back to your handset, but no more so that you don’t get swamped. However all the other responses go to the website so you can still get them. Looks like they have a nice little community of answers going already.

Omar did a live demo of AdMob, showing what’s become one of our standard short demo setups. Run ten dollars of money across the network directing clicks to a very simple landing page asking people for their email address. The ten dollars turn into 200 clicks in a matter of just a few seconds, and there are between 20 and 30 emails sitting on the site after just a minute or two. People don’t respond the same way on mobile as they do on the web. Everyone thinks we’re faking the demo when we show it, so sign up using this promo link and you get twenty dollars to test it out with for yourself.

Paul from wapTags showed off the social bookmarking site for mobile content they put up. They give you links to the popular terms and tags to make it easy to just surf around and find new stuff, give you a search box to enter what you want, directly in case you’re into that whole text entry thing, and provide navigation between related concepts. You can find other folks who have searched on the same terms, find related terms, and bookmark your favorite stuff.

Jordy from Digital Chocolate showed off Tower Bloxx, one of their “one button” games. The whole casual gaming area as a whole is pretty interesting, and DChoc seems to be pulling up some interesting stuff.

Lee from 4Info showed off some of the SMS based query services they run, described some of the notification services they’ve been working on, and clued us in to a super secret “text me” widet you can add to your webpages. They have a bunch of existing alert styles - sports, weather, package tracking, and your own customer reminders you can schedule to get delivered to your phone. Cool deal.

This week is a busy one for mobile related events in the Bay Area:

• Mobile Monday Demo Night - Sept 18th, a free-for-all mobile demo extravaganza!
• Television Breaks out of the Box - The Mad Rush to go Mobile - a VLAB event on Sept 19th
• Enabling mobile communities - the SF Tech Session this month is focused on mobile, that happens Wed Sept 20th up in SF

Fantastic! Here’s part of the lineup for our demo night tonight:

• AOL is demoing their Mobile RSS Reader
• Zypsy is a system for text based mobile classified
• Mozes is showing off a new feature for their messaging platform
• AdMob, we’re demoing how to use the mobile advertising system
• wapTags is a site for bookmarking mobile sites
• BuzzeeBee is showing off the PocketPC version of their messaging service for wireless devices
• MobilEyes have apps from enterprize to media, and will be showing a sampling of them
• Umundo is a service for sharing cell phone videos and posing them online

Working at AdMob I’ve started paying more attention to the mobile content and application side of things than I had previously. I guess that comes along with the territory when running an advertising network. One of the parts of my job that keeps giving me a warm fuzzy feeling is knowing that we’re helping people who are building mobile websites who might not otherwise have a realistic method for making the money necessary to keep their project going. I think that rocks. People are able to try out new sites, experiment with developing a mobile service or a mobile side to their existing service and make money over the short term while proving the validity of their idea.

It’s already happening - the writing is all the wall, mobile advertising is driving an explosion in mobile services that wouldn’t or couldn’t exist under the models provided before. Of course I hope AdMob (my employer) continues to play a principal role in driving that forward. But even if we don’t for some reason, I think the trends we’re seeing now are only going to continue. So now that the arrow is good and sharp, how do we make sure that it’s got some wood behind it? Now that we’ve got a way to get some scratch into the hands of publishers and an open market where advertisers can drive traffic to their site/service/application, the next area that becomes a bottleneck is getting that mobile content up and online.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday and today with my bag o’ devices, a set of links to existing mobile content, and as many tools as I could get through. Here’s a rundown of what I was able to hit and some of the more interesting stuff that I wasn’t able to, hopefully just a small part of what’s out there. There’s everything from point solutions for mobilizing a blog through frameworks for writing adaptive webpages tuned to specific device capabilities.

Programming Libraries and Platforms - if you’re already “developing”, here are a few tools that you might be able to hook in to speed things along. By no means a complete list, let me know if there’s something I missed you think should be in here.

• WURFL - WURFL (the Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) is one of the first things that pops to mind for folks inside the industry when you talk about mobile site creation and supporting tools. Currently the project consists of a large XML database of device descriptions for all sorts of wireless devices and libraries in a number of different programming languages that can be used to access those descriptions. As a programmer you download the XML file, download the libraries for the language you’re developing in, and insert calls into your pages to query the capability of the device you’re talking to. The device detection is based mostly on the User Agent passed in by the browser on the device, and the kinds of attributes you can ask WURFL for once you know what device you’re dealing with are things like “does this device support WAP push?” and “can this device play streamed video?” WURFL is a fantastic tool, and I’ve made use of it for a bunch of different projects. However it’s really meant to be used by folks with a knowledge of wireless and who know what kinds of questions they should be asking and what to do in response. In terms of the overall ecosystem of web content for mobile devices, WURFL is like one of the first amino acids. It’s an essential building block for what’s to come, but it’s very far from a living breathing being who you would enjoy interacting with.
• WALL - WALL is the next step up the ladder in terms of abstraction from WURFL. When using WALL pages are written in a generic tag set that the WALL system turns into different dialects of WML/CHTML/XHTML depending on the device it’s currently talking to. Very nice, it abstracts away all the domain specific knowledge about the hundreds of variants of systems out in the market and reduces the task faced by a mobile developer down to learning the WALL tag set. It is a new tag set however, so those of you hoping that you can just plonk down WALL on your site and all will be magically mobile enabled - that just isn’t the case. Also, the system is available for Java only right now. It would rock if the knowledge within WALL were abstracted out into a description file like WURFL has so that the tags could be implemented in other languages. The stuff is open source though, so there’s nothing stopping someone with the right mix of time and motivation from going in there and hacking it up.
• Emoveo UAP - This one I just ran across while at CTIA last week. It’s a commercial platform, no open source here, doing much the same thing as WALL it seems. Creating pages on the platform requires some use of specialized markup, however they support all kinds of things like AJAX, Flash, video transcoding, and payment handling. Anyone who’s used this care to chime in on how it went and what your impressions were?
• Stuff I haven’t had any time to look at:
  • Mobile Portal Toolkit for Websphere - I’m assuming has more of an enterprise bent, but you never know till you try.
  • Apache Cocoon - has much of the groundwork needed to take an existing set of content and transform it into a format that a handset could understand

Site Creation - If you have an idea for a mobile site, you’re starting from ground zero, and you’re not really a programmer or looking to become one. These are tools that let you put stuff up online accessible from mobile devices.

• Winksite - Winksite lets you build a mobile site by pulling together a set of available mobiles you can turn on and off for your individual site and configure to your liking. There’s a blog module, syndicated news feeds, chat, guestbook, surveys, links, and a bunch of other stuff. Folks who hit you’re site from a mobile get a version delivered optimized for their device, and folks who hit it from the web get a small emulator window popped up that they can use to interact with. I have a ThisIsMobility Winksite for this blog. Most of the services available on a Winksite site are available in syndicated format so you can pull them out and expose them elsewhere also.
• SocialText Miki - I always make the mistake of calling SocialText a wiki company until I go to their homepage and get reminded there’s a bunch of other stuff they’re working on. The wiki is pretty central however, a wiki being a site which allows visitors to easily change and amend the content of the site they’re visiting (using a wiki to define a wiki, how’s that for meta?). The wikis at SocialText include an interface for mobile devices that allows you to browse and modify that content from a handset. So if whatever you have to put up online is supposed to encourage a lot of community interaction and feedback, this might be the easiest way to get it together.
• TagTag and dotMP - TagTag is much like Winksite, and dotMP is a top level domain name (.mp) tied together with tools for making a mobile enabled site. I had fooled around with dotMP a while ago and liked it, but I’ve never tried TagTag. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get either working this weekend to play around with them. TagTag allowed me to create accounts, I think, but I was never able to log in with them. Attempting to have it send me my password to see if I had mistyped it told me an email was sent, but I never got one. And trying to create the account again resulted in an error message saying that the account already existed. Not sure what’s up there. And dotMP is a commercial offering now, about $50 a year for rowehl.mp, which I figured I could deal with to try out the tools again. Unfortunately I can’t get the credit card transaction to process there. Their press page has stuff from 2004, so maybe they’re inactive now but the servers are still up and running till the users with existing registrations run through their registration periods. Anyone know?

Blogging, RSS, and Transcoding - Plugins to make your existing blog mobile directly, mobilizing the RSS version, or trancoding from full HTML.

• Wordpress Mobile - a plugin for Wordpress by Alex King that redirects users of mobile devices to a slimmed down XHTML version of the blog. It determines if a request is for a mobile device by using some simple substring matches against the User Agent, or you can direct folks to the mobile version directly once you have it up (I have it installed on my blog here, check it out). An excellent way to mobilize a blog and have it “just work”. Of course this assumes you have or want to use Wordpress for whatever you’re doing. And this is XHTML only, it doesn’t create a WML1.x version of your site. What’s the difference and why should you care? It depends on your audience. Out here in Silicon Valley where all the phones are relatively new you find a lot of XHTML support. But out there on the wild wild web at large, support for XHTML can be spotty at best, and definitely tends toward the “quirky” side.
• Wordpress WAP - there’s also a plugin for Wordpress that does WML format output. It doesn’t pick up visitors and automatically redirect them, and definitely doesn’t seem as mature as the XHTML version. But it’s there and has been working pretty well for me (yep, I’m running this one as well). It would be great to merge these two plugins and redirect the user according to what their browser can display. Maybe a project for another weekend.
• RSS tools - another option if you’re outputting RSS is to get your readers to view the content through a feed reader. Great if your audience is already reading feeds, but it can be quite a cliff to overcome for a casual audience. There are a bunch of different ways to read feeds on mobile devices:
  • FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader
  • FreeNews
  • Bloglines Mobile
• Transcoders are sites that take existing web content and try to bash it into a readable form on a mobile device. Generally by stripping out most of the stuff known to be problematic to mobiles (most CSS and javascript, sometimes transforming of eliminating frames, resizing images, etc). The result tends to be kinda fugly most of the time, but if you’re putting some content together knowing that it might go through a transcoder you may end up with decent results. And then you can put up static content and leave the transformation up to an external service (or component if you choose to run a transcoder for your own content). Here are a few transcoders up online that you can fool around with:
  • Skweezer - mixes in some extra features for registered users like email and favorites.
  • Phonifier - Phonifier is available open source. If you like what it does but just wished it did X, you can download it, hack it, and run your own copy. I’ve fooled around with it some, it’s a great project.
  • IYHY - if you create a free account and login, saves your mobile browsing history for you.

I was actually going to go through some “On device portal” style application tools as well. Some folks who do widget sets really hate that term (on device portal), but I think it explains things fairly well for people familiar with component based development and mobile portals. All both of us, we understood it perfectly the first time we heard it. I’m going to have to save that one for another time, but the basic idea is taking your content and wrapping it in a simple mostly prebuilt application that runs on the platforms you would like to reach. The idea holds pretty strong parallels with the CDROM industry that existed for PCs when CD drives were all the rage and networks were still slow. Except the limiting factor in this case isn’t always the network, it’s more the UI of the device. That’s a discussion for another time though.

These two posts at Little Springs Design are great:

• What’s wrong with the mobile web (part 1)
• multiple windows versus multiple layers

Long term I’m a One Web person, but I’m also aware of the fact that The One Web is a long ways off. Perhaps a very long ways. And there are definitely problems that need to be fixed sooner than can be done by the major conceptual shift from distinct fixed and mobile websites to a single web environment. Those two articles do a great job of laying down at least one area, multitasking within the browser:

High-end phones (variously called “smart phones” and “PDA phones”, usually with an operating system like Symbian, Windows, or Palm) have rudimentary multi-tasking - but on an application level. Multiple browser tasks must become easy; switching between pages must become easy; split-window viewing must become possible.

Interesting point, and I think it really gets to the heart of why there’s a bunch of interest recently in widget sets for mobile devices. They’re one way to deal with the need to multitask on the small screen. Are they the right way? That remains to be seen. But some of the points laid down there might be good yardsticks for the capability of a widget interface. Some test like “does this help me with email processing” or “does this make following a tutorial easier” (both examples given in the second article) may be excellent metrics for determining if a widget set is starting to really push the edge of mobile interface out further or just adding a bit of chrome to the personal homepage.

Great stuff, definitely looking forward to more acticles in the series.

The good folks at Orange are holding MarCamp up in South San Francisco on Sept 26th. I’m going to be leading one of the sessions on mobile marketing, talking in particular about what we’ve been up to at AdMob and the kinds of trends and usages we’re seeing. I put up a page on the wiki to gather some thoughts about areas to cover. Throw some comments in here or on the wiki if you think there’s something else I should cover.