Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

We’re having a Demo Night for the February Silicon Valley Mobile Monday. C’mon out and see what everyone has been up to!

People always ask me what kind of numbers we see across the AdMob network, what regions are popular, what handsets we see. Great stuff, that I have access to, but unfortunately I don’t have those numbers off the top of my head. The kinds of numbers I have off the top of my head are the average response time of the publisher facing servers, requests per second and memory usage. Not the stuff most people are interested in. However we put out a release recently with those interesting businessy numbers. Have at.

I’ve been pretty insanely busy lately, but that didn’t keep me from borrowing an N800 to play around with. There are little things that make the device a lot nicer, but the price of the thing is way way higher than the 770 as well. I haven’t formed a full opinion of it yet. My major takeaway so far is that usability still really needs some help. All I wanted to do was connect to GTalk an check out how the IM app works, but I was having a hell of a time with it. Grrr!!!

Comments from the mobile content industry can tend to be pretty amusing. Check this out:

Questioning the effectiveness of digital rights management standards, Winterbottom added: “I don’t know how much sense it makes to charge people twice to listen to something on two different devices.”

/me jumps up and down. Ooooh, oooooh, I actually know that one! No sense, it makes no sense at all to charge people twice to listen to something on two different devices. And to head off the obvious follow on question, they also don’t like involuntarily having body organs removed and sold on the black market to finance media purchases.

By now of course I’m not surprised that these questions are getting asked by the content industry, especially when tied to mobile. Everyone seems to be at least a little bit insane. Something did sound pretty good there however:

Presenting figures from Informa Telecoms & Media, the research firm’s Daniel Winterbottom told MidemNet attendees: “There’s a wide gap there - something is missing. Whether it’s the ease of use in downloading or the perceived value, it’s important we try to identify where the gap is stemming from.”

Do my ears deceive me, or did that sound like an acknowledgment of the existence of the possibility that the problem might be that the perceived value of the product being delivered is below the price being asked? That would be a fantastic step in the right direction! Of course, if so we still have to go through the tremendous marketing effort meant to convince people that the problem is the perception of value, and not the actual value. And then the big effort to make DRM usable even though it’s way too late. But a few years down the line it sounds like we might have a ringtone industry that’s aligned with reality. What a proud and happy day that would be. Lets all take a moment to bask in the glory of that vision before returning the current state of affairs.

Looks like March 11th is going to be the developer release of the OpenMoko phone. Fantastic, good to see some real mobile Linux efforts finally coming out public (the other one I’m following is the Greenphone). The OpenMoko folks seem to be doing a lot right. Take a look at the Greenphone forums compared to the OpenMoko discussion list. Way more activity on the OpenMoko side and they haven’t even shipped hardware yet. I need to take a read through those messages and find out why that might be.

I’ve had a bunch of S60 phones in the past, and my current day to day phone is an E61. I like the platform, I like the multitasking interface, recent phones I even like the design. But I’ve had to start moving away from S60 just because it isn’t a viable platform any more. While that probably sounds sensationalist, this is what I mean:

I’ve had three conversations with entrepreneurs over the last month where they’ve said their application works on BREW, Windows Mobile, Palm, and they even had a J2ME client that does some stuff if all else fails. My normal question is “No Symbian?” And they always say something like “We’re working on it, we just haven’t quite gotten the application to behave correctly yet” or “We still have a few things we’re trying to figure out to get it working”. And so far it hasn’t been because it was started last, it’s because their talented developers (who many times are just picking up mobile for the first time) just can not get applications working on Symbian.

And it’s really starting to show in terms of the applications available. I was bitching yesterday about Ruby already, and I tried out VNC for S60 yesterday and had a hard time with that as well (it installed, just didn’t really work). It used to be that I was constantly surprised by the stuff I could do with my S60: “Wow, there’s a bluetooth LAN bridge that works with Linux for the S60, that’s insane!” Now I get surprised more often by what I can’t do than what I can. Applications that I expect to work that for some reason won’t install, or have subtle bugs with my device and go months before they get fixed.

The environment as a whole is stagnating because the barrier to entry is so high, and new hurdles are being placed there all the time. Meanwhile it seems like Windows development and BREW development get easier and easier all the time. It’s just obviously bad news for the S60 platform long term, yet no one seems to really notice or care. Or when they do they explain it away by saying that mobile is hard so of course developing for it is hard. Nice try, but others are making it easier. Someone needs to wake up there and do something or they’re gonna end up under the bus. I can only hope that their lack of visible activity is due to a massive secret internal effort to get an S60 interface up and running on Linux instead of Symbian. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

I went to snag the Ruby for S60 app today cause I keep forgetting to do so. Yet I can’t download and install it:

Please note that the above .sis files need to be Symbian Signed. A DevCert (no capabilities are required at this stage) would be enough. A new version of DevCert Request can be found here.

Scuse me? I need to go get a certificate and figure out a signing process so that I can install a scripting language on my phone? Which I want to install because the existing development systems for Symbian are so backwards as to be nearly completely useless to me? And the signing process uses the tools from the development environments? How does this stuff happen? Guess I just have to step up the pace of my migration to the Greenphone. Nokia apparently doesn’t want the business of people in my particular segment.

There’s an article about us (AdMob) front page in the Wall Street Journal (the online edition includes a video interview with Omar). Pretty exciting. Advertisers are coming on, the publishers are starting to make some really respectable money, and the ads served counter is slowly creeping up toward one billion. Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of AdMob, counting from the message that Omar sent to the Silicon Valley MoMo list. Yet not everyone thinks mobile advertising is worth attention. I’m curious what else needs to happen?

I’m assuming that the criticism is from the publisher side. That building an advertising supported business in mobile is still something that’s a relatively big risk when compared to building something built on top of web advertising. Sure, but that would make it an opportunity, right? There’s risk and there’s potential reward. Guess I just don’t understand what the hangup is. I suppose there’s always resistance from the existing models, maybe it’s just that. As long as we can keep the money flowing to people with interesting mobile businesses I don’t really care though.

Couple of quick tips for creating content meant for mobile devices using Ruby on Rails:

• You’ll probably want to setup a new default layout for all templates. You can do that by creating app/views/layouts/application.rhtml and populating it with whatever you want your default layout to be. For instance here’s an unstyled version of the mostest simplest template that Luca posted with GAP as a default rhtml layout:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
  "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">
  <html
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xml:lang="en">
    <head>
      <title>Valentine</title>
    </head>
    <body>
      <%= @content_for_layout %>
    </body>
  </html>
  

• Adaptation of the content type based on the mime types the device claims to accept is also pretty much a necessity. I’m going off the MIME types post pointed to from GAP for this also in creating an ApplicationController that sets content type based on the accept header sent by the browser:

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    before_filter :set_content_type
    def set_content_type
      if @request.accepts.include?( Mime::Type.parse( 'application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml' ) )
        type = 'application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml'
      elsif @request.accepts.include?( Mime::Type.parse( 'application/xhtml+xml' ) )
        type = 'application/xhtml+xml'
      else
        type = 'text/html'
      end
      @headers["Content-Type"] = type + “; charset=utf-8″
    end
  end
  

  The order for the checks I’m sure is something that just about everyone will have their own opinion about, so I stuck with what that post had.

Wendong tagged me first, and then Enrique retagged me. I should do this thing, here goes, Five things about me you might not have known:

• I got interested in computers when I was really young. I started out programming cause there was no other option at the time (my first computer was actually the same as Enrique, a Sinclair), but it’s suited me quite well. Most people assume I’ve floated out of engineering, but it’s still what I do daily.
• Unlike most of the mobile folks I run into, I’m not much of an international traveler. I’ve only been outside of the US a few times, and it’s always been for something work related.
• I go to Defcon and other hacker conferences as often as I can. Understanding how things break is just an important as understanding how things work if you plan to build new systems.
• I think software patents are not just useless, but harmful to the progress of technology as a whole. Sometimes a person will tell me about the patents they’ve had granted as if that validates what they’re telling me. Usually I don’t stop them to give them my take on it, but at that point I’ve already decided not to listen to them and switched to looking for a way out of the conversation quickly.
• I read a lot about stuff like the Singularity. I don’t think it’s inevitable, but I do think it would be fun. I’m rooting for it all the way, and hope at least some of the stuff hits within my lifetime.

I’ll tag:

• Charlie Schick - Charlie is working on a bunch of interesting projects at Nokia, a US native living in Finland. He always has an interesting take on changes in mobile.
• Dave Harper - Dave has been running the mobile community site Winksite for longer than most people have known that the mobile web existed.
• John Kern - Organizer of the Symbian Programming SIG in the Bay Area.
• Whoever runs E-Series - I know nothing about them, and it’s one of the sites in my short list when my feed reader is too full for me to read everything.
• Ewan Spence - Because every time I talk to Ewan I find out a few dozen things about him I didn’t know, with varying degrees of astonishment and amusement attached. Five random things I assume would be pretty amusing. No pressure of course.