Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Here’s a quick rundown of the demos we saw at the Demo Night we had at the Silicon Valley Mobile Monday during February 2007.

Boopsie is a mobile search platform that uses a small client application to drive an autocomplete style search on the mobile device, and then punches out to a browser displaying a mobile optimized version of the content for display. They have a bunch of supported platforms already, I’m waiting for a Symbian or Java version that I can use on my E61 before I really dig into it. Tim says they’re planning to pull from additional datasources by allowing information providers to publish the keywords that pair up with the different pages they have, and optionally some geocoding info if you want to hook into that. Not sure how they’re planning to expose the transcoding of results they do to publishers, or if publishers will have to point to mobile specific version if they want to tie into that, but the information sources they have so far work fantastic.

Trolltech was the host for the evening, Benoit spoke briefly about the Greenphone, a phone platform based top to bottom on open source. I have one of course, so I think you know where my loyalties lie. I’ve been particularly impressed by the developer kit that comes with the phone, it’s a great setup based on vmware that gives you a consistent Linux based interface to the development tools and emulation environment (as well as hookups to the physical phone to download apps and debug). The phone as it exists now is meant to provide a base upon which others build their custom extensions and applications and then licensed for mass production, it’s not meant to be a direct to consumer device.

A fantastic example of the development that could be done on top of the Trolltech Greenphone base was presented by Dilip from Fonav. He showed off a wifi phone based on a Netgear Skype phone but with their own custom interface and applications on it. Their phone integrated IM and email in a way that reminded me a lot of the Nokia 770 tablet, which in recent versions has presence and messaging baked right into the base UI. Very nice model, it fits the way I would like my communications managed. Fonav is working on a few point implementations for SIP based communications systems on top of the platform, one example he gave was using the phones on a cruise ship for voice and to send special offers and notifications to passengers. Slick. Sounds like they had a great development cycle time for the initial version as well, even slicker.

Mark Jacobstein gave a demo of Loopt, a location based service that shows you a map with the location of your friends. A lot of time was spent talking about the privacy and security side of the application. It’s unfortunate that so much time has to go into stuff like that, but I suppose this is just one of those cultural shift things that society needs to work through. There’s just some unfortunately large percentage of people for whom a change in the status quo is a scary thing to be prevented if all all possible. Thank god we have teenagers, otherwise interesting things like Loopt might never happen. Loopt is an attempt to short circuit messaging to find location and drive messaging based on location. It makes it immediately apparent to me which of my friends is within a few blocks of where I am so that I can hook up with them if I’m in a social mood. If I could find a crooked doctor to implant a geolocation transmitter in my body somewhere so that I could stream my location up to my server all the time you know I would do it, so of course I dig Loopt. Just wish I could get it on my carrier instead of Boost.

The folks from Mobio showed off their portal style application that pulls together a bunch of information sources and contextualizes searches and actions based on the profile the user matches up to.

Mobile Content Networks provides a search service for content that embeds business rules that determine relative weighting for the index. Not a big deal to end users, but a big deal to folks who have content to sell, which carriers do. The business rules allow you to weight your own content (stuff you make money off of) higher than other content (stuff you don’t directly make money off of). Normally anything of the sort just rubs me the wrong way cause it all smacks of walled garden. However in the walled garden world the other stuff doesn’t show up at all. So MCN turns the walled garden into a semi-permeable garden. The operator stuff is higher ranked, certainly. But now there’s an intrinsic comparison in terms of relative value. If the user doesn’t think the carrier content is worth it they can keep just trawling down the list of results. So this should also keep the carriers and content providers honest in the sense that the value of what they provide has to be above the the free stuff plus a click or two. It opens up the environment and flattens the network while giving the content provider the illusion of preferential treatment. Sneaky, I like it!

Adam Tolnay showed a demo of one of the games he’s been working on with students from East Palo Alto. The games themselves are meant to teach principles such as finance, but they’re also developed in collaboration with students and the returns from the games are shared with the students who helped develop them. The concept is currently being incubated at Stanford, but the plan is to expand the program and make it self supporting.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Community, ThisIsMobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.