Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Rudy has a great post about Mobile 2.0 at Read/WriteWeb. Great to see that Richard MacManus has joined the conversation as well, normally great stuff going on at R/WW and I’m happy to see more mobile in the mix. The post is a nice complete overview of what some of us are calling Mobile 2.0, and it might even be comprehensible by someone outside of mobile. Go Rudy!

He lists a few Mobile 2.0 companies and encourages others to add to the list so that we can start categorizing them. Consider using the Mobitopia.com tagging site that Russ Beattie setup recently (but only if the site is actually good, the thing is pretty actively trawled for crappy links and you’ll end up getting bounced if you add junk). Ah tagging, the online world’s solution to just about everything. On the other side of the spectrum there’s Waptags.com, which is much more expansive and inclusive (and occasionally risque) in the links it includes.

Here’s my list of sites:

• Mojeo
• Itsmy.com
• Jajah
• SayNow
• ScanR
• TextMarks
• Twitter

I’ve been seeing more and more mentions of Twitter recently. I joined up a few months ago after the SF Tech Session on mobile communities, but I just put the badge up on my page today after seeing it pop up a few other places. Also at the tech session was TextMarks, who have a widget interface to their SMS keyword service. I like the remixability of the whole thing. I wonder if services like these are going to be able to keep going given the intentions of the carriers to try to determine what the boundaries between one service and another are, but I certainly hope they will.

In particular I like the Twitter feature where I can get updates via IM when I’m logged in, and switch to the phone when I’m away. I haven’t actually used it yet mind you, but I like the idea. I’ve been fooling around with some messaging services on my own, setting up my server so that it sends me an IM when I get emails and streaming other significant events to me. And if I’m not on IM it picks an important subset of that stuff and sends me an SMS instead.

Some people recoil in horror as soon as I mention anything of the sort, equating notifications to the ultimate evolution of the “always on” shackle where you can’t escape work no matter how hard you try. Like the crackberry addiction, but pulling from more than just email. That’s not what I’m talking about however. The Blackberry issue is normally a constant interruption and manual filtering by a real live human.

I want intelligence amplification (IA). And yes, you can think of IA as pretty much the inverse of artificial intelligence (AI). It’s just an application of the same ideas as machines in general (taking rote repetitive tasks and automating them) and applying it to some level of event handling. In order to keep on top of my daily job I have a bunch of stuff I need to pay attention to - there are machines that need to be up and running and responding to requests quickly, network connections that need to be in order, customer support requests, questions from other developers, trouble tickets, subversion checkins, emails from partners and service providers, and actual person to person emails from the folks I work with. And while all that is going on I need to figure out how to interview potential recruits, design new features, code them up, and test them.

The design/code/test stuff is particularly hard to deal with, cause interruptions have a much greater effect than simply the direct loss of time. Once you get pulled off track it takes you a while to get back to where you were. However I can’t ignore the servers just cause I have a feature to get out. Fortunately the rules about what to send to me while I’m coding and what to keep quiet about are pretty simple (anything from Nagios, the local monitoring service, or our hosting provider let through, everything else leave in the queue but don’t alert me about). I just want to be able to migrate the filtering thread from my head to my server, where it gets a much more fair share of resources anyway.

Right now “the system” just a mishmash of maildrop scripts, regular expressions, XMPP requests, a few HTTP request loops, some RSS, and modest gobs of Ruby to pull it all together. I’m sure there’s a better way to represent all the stuff, a way that might actually benefit and make some sense to someone besides myself. I’ve been meaning to setup a SVN repository for exactly this kind of hackery, which tends to move around from one system to another faster than I can remember where I put it. Is there existing stuff out there that I should be looking at before I dump a bunch of time into my own monstrosity?

Russ pinged me yesterday about the oft rumoured iPhone, it’s also come across #mobitopia in a few forms. The hot issue Russ has been tracking is “will the iPhone include a standards compliant mobile web browser?” Which if the device sells in big numbers could have a significant impact on the regrowing mobile web.

I’m not as overall concerned about it. Sure, if the iPhone does arrive, and it doesn’t have a mobile web browser that groks “standard mobile web markup” (whatever that means) it will definitely set the mobile web back some. However I think the mobile web is going to happen no matter what, so I’m not really all that concerned about the blow to the current effort that Apple could provide. They might shift the market away from the standards that are out there now, but meh, I’m not all that concerned about that part. So we use some new standards and technologies, mobile life goes on.

I think it is important to pay attention overall to what it means to build an ecosystem like that of the wired web. There were efforts all along the evolution of the web to try to turn it from an open platform into an environment more tightly controlled by one vendor or technology. The ISPs have tried to take it over, the browser makers tried to embrace and extend it, tools and technology vendors attempted to get themselves declared the de-facto next generation standard.

Why did none of those things work? Because people were building compelling and complete applications with the technology that was already there, and it wasn’t worth the pain of tying yourself to a proprietary standard (or for some people it was impossible to access) in order to access any of the other stuff. Build good applications on the open stuff and it’s not going to get subverted. Try to defend the open stuff because of some moral or theoretical ideology and the market will blow right past you. The customers will flow to the folks who are delivering them what they want. Period.

So if you want the mobile web to continue to roll on the way it is, find and build those compelling and necessary applications. The applications that Kelly Goto would call addictive. The applications and services that keep people pulling their phones out of their pockets over and over because they want to.

If Apple manages to change the direction of the mobile web by not including a decent browser on their phone that is the market speaking. The phone would not sell well without a browser if that’s what people cared about. I’ve been ignoring the issue pretty much as a whole so that I can concentrate on trying to help people who are trying to build those apps. If you’re working on one of those apps hopefully you’re doing the same thing.

I recently switched over to Cingular from TMobile, and rebooted my phone for the first time last night while swapping around memory cards. I didn’t notice till this morning that the time on my phone was way way off. Figuring I must have fumbled with it while half asleep I rebooted it again. I always set my phone to grab the time from the network, so whenever I have problems I just reboot so that it’ll grab the time immediately.

Much to my surprize the time was still way way off. I was lying in bed still, and it was pretty dark out, and I was fairly certain it was thursday today, and my phone was telling me it was 3pm. As a testament to exactly how much I rely on technology, I questioned myself more than the phone and pulled out my laptop just to make sure it wasn’t really 3pm the day before and dark for some mysterious reason. Indeed, the end was not at hand, but my phone was getting odd times from the network.

Later on in the day I told Russ about it and asked him to try out the time autoupdate on his, just to make sure I wasn’t being a dumbass in some novel way. Sure enough his did the same thing. Not that it makes me feel any better, but good to know still.

So what? So getting the time from the network doesn’t work, what’s the big deal? It happens to be just about the most basic and braindead example of an added service on the cellular networks outside of voice and SMS. You don’t even need bidirectional communication, you can just broadcast time every once in a while for people to sync off of. You would think that with the years of development of cellular technology and the somewhat mature operators in the US that something like getting the time for your handset from the network would just work, right?

A lot of the issue stems from the fact that I’m using a phone I purchased on my own and brought to the Cingular network myself. And I think this makes for a great example of point that Paddy makes about the openness of the ecosystem. The Cingular network carries time, my Nokia handset understands how to get time from the network, but apparently they aren’t agreeing on the details. The networks and devices just weren’t put out with particular attention paid to providing generic services and support. If the handsets that Cingular sells it’s customers understand the way that Cingular sends out time, that’s just fine by them. When even something simple like this doesn’t work it makes me question what hope we can hold out for the current guard to be able to ever correct the issues.

Update: I was chatting with the #Mobitopians about this this morning. Matt and Carlo both said they were getting the right time from Cingular, so I gave it another try today. And wouldn’t you know, it’s working now. Not sure if this was a temporary issue out here in the Bay Area, or if the post made someone realize that the time sync across the network hadn’t been checked in a while. I like to think the latter, cause it makes me feel big and important.
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I think location based services are a fantastic idea, in theory. However the cost structures the carriers generally want to provide, and the cartel of cartography data keeps most of the interesting stuff that could happen with LBS from really making it out to the public. The map stuff is really a sore point for me, because innovation is being stiffled in order to protect entrenched business models.

Most people tell me to grow up and just deal with it. The only real option is to get a whole bunch of vans with GPS in them and make up your own maps, and no one is going to bother doing that at this point. It’s too expensive. No one except maybe Microsoft it would seem. They’ve had vans spotted in a number of places apparently building up their own cartography information. Interesting move on the part of Microsoft, especially together with their Windows Live Search beta being available for Java in addition to Windows Mobile. Microsoft normally shys away from Java. Looks like they might be genuinely interested in opening up the market here, that’s not normally their way.

Even more interesting however is that this could break the cartel. There were very few sources of US map data, and they gaurded their position agressively. The supposedly “open” Google and Yahoo maps offerings carried heavy restrictions on what kinds of data you could use to drive your web applications. Using GPS info to drive the mapping app was specifically prohibited by the terms of service for both. This was done to protect the revenue model baked into providing mapping info to manufacturers of offline GPS hardware, and crippled the more expansive market to protect the smaller established one.

The Microsoft version of the data won’t bear any such restrictions. If Microsoft wants to bake location stuff into upcoming releases of Windows Mobile in a way that allows developers to access cartography and point of interest info directly from their app they would be in a pretty unique position to be able to do so. It would potentially force the other providers to update their thinking and allow their info to be used in networked applications by third parties, or get gradually squeezed to death. Either way works for me as it turns out. I end up with a smile on my face in both cases.

Last night was the December Silicon Valley Mobile Monday at Tellme (thanks Tellme folks!). They provided an excellent overview of voice based services - output, input, and multimodal. Here are a few things that stuck out for me:

• Hearing a side by side of that standard broken up computer voice (the one you normally hear reading back things like payment amounts) with a generated voice that’s been smoothed is really pretty drastic with respect to your ability to recall what you just heard.
• The Tellme folks kept saying “voice services allow you to whisper in your customer’s ear”, good way to think about things. I think that general way of thinking about providing a service applies outside voice services and generally summarizes the intimate mobile experience that everyone should be thinking about.
• There was a lot of talk about trying to turn the web experience into “linear” audio. Meaning that on the web it’s generally easy to skip around. Scan a page quickly for some info, and hop back to the top to check out things in more detail. When you’re driving a voice interface that’s not really an option. You need to think about how to do customer education while continually progressing in the right direction. This is another one that maps well outside voice too. The mobile web experience is nothing like the fixed web experience, and I would say that one of the major reasons is that the interface tends to be a lot more linear. You can skim around on a mobile, but it’s certainly not nearly as convenient.
• In running their own portal they found that matching up the voice to the expected norms for whatever information was being delivered made a pretty big difference in the user experience (ie. someone who really sounds like a sportscaster while they deliver the sports info), and selecting the right voice is a pretty important branding decision.

Last night was also the kickoff meeting for Mobile Monday in Germany! Russell has a post up about it, looks like it went fantastic. Congratulations to everyone involved over there!

The Homebrew Mobile Phone club meeting on December 13th has a fantastic lineup, including Benoit Schillings talking about some TrollTech efforts like GreenPhone and a discussion of the Open Source Java effort when it comes to ME. Thanks to John Kern for posting it, otherwise I might have missed it. Now I’m subscribed to the calendar though, so that won’t happen any more. John’s own Symbian Programming SIG is the day before and will feature Ravi Belwal talking about mobile TV. Definitely not going to be a slow month.

I really liked the post that Paddy put up recently at OpenGardens, particularly this bit:

In our open garden, the service provider is the garden designer and horticulturist, who will be creative in order to captivate his audience. He doesn’t just hand over his wares at the gate. These open gardens will be enabled not just by openness in platform technology, but openness of ecosystem for service providers.

“openness of ecosystem for service providers” really sums up a whole set of issues quite succinctly. It also got me thinking about open standards and mobile development. Paddy is definitely correct about the advantages of applications in mobile that don’t follow the traditional breakdown of the role of the client and the role of the server in online interaction. The GMail java app certainly doesn’t feel like other applications that talk IMAP or POP back to the server, and Opera Mini also has a very different feel than most web browsers, even on a smartphone.

Of course this is just the reason that operators have always used for not cleaving to open standards for stuff like messaging and until recently web access. I’m wondering if the way to tip the scales is to develop some open infrastructure to begin with, outside the carrier domain but structured in a way that it should be easy for the operators to adopt when the time comes. Essentially additional instances of efforts like Funambol, a company building open tools around the public SyncML standard. The kinds of things that work without a carrier cooperating, but work better when woven into the ecosystem.

What other areas would fit well into something like that? XMPP for messaging obviously, VOIP services, direct support for SIP. Perhaps identity and profile info, LID, OpenID, something of the sort. Just thinking out loud here, I think it would be interesting to put together a vision of what a future mobile network operator could look like. It’s something that we’ve spoken about a lot, but never really laid out in full as far as I know. Anyone know of a pre-existing instance I can take a look at?

I swapped my mobile phone number (MINE!! thank you number portability) to Cingular yesterday. It took nearly 14 hours for my new handset to start ringing instead of my old one when I call my number, but eventually it did happen. T-Mobile was just pissing me off too much. US carriers are not about customer satisfaction, they’re about how much you can tolerate. I was with T-Mobile because of the wifi that came with my Internet account for a while. But recently I had been seeing more and more issues with their SMTP to SMS gateways, dropped inter-carrier SMS messages, their generally poor coverage, had gotten multiple reports recently from people who say they can’t call my number at all (at all, they get a “number out of service message”, T-Mobile never managed to fix it for at least 3 people), and most recently the discovery that I can’t send messages to my own handset on T-Mobile.

So I’m up officially on Cingular, and already I can send myself messages using that Clickatell account I setup. A miracle!!! Of course, I expect Cingular to join ranks at some point as well and this will cease to function. One thing I was kinda surprised by is that there’s no real appreciable difference between my E61 with a T-Mobile SIM in it and the E61 with a Cingular SIM in terms of network speed. I’ve heard a lot of folks say that they can really tell the difference. But I’ve tried both decent size downloads and interactive sessions like SSH, and they seem to be just about the same. Would be nice to see some blind taste tests of different carriers with the same device. I’m sure most people are just projecting device differences out into differences in the underlying network.