Archive for March, 2007

I was down at breakfast this morning and browsing around on my phone (yep, I actually use the mobile web every day, a fact which lots of people find it hard to believe) and noticed that there was a link to a new version of mobile search up at Google. Apparently they put the update live yesterday. There’s some interesting stuff in there, like the ability to personalize and customize. The image search is clean and simple. Nice stuff.

I’ve been using my E61 for a while now, and it’s about time for an update. I’m on Cingular, so I would definitely like something 3G. I see that the N95 has already made it through the FCC, so there’s some hope that maybe I can snag one of those beauties without having to wait too horribly long. The E90 also grabbed my attention but for completely different reasons. But who knows when the E90 will be available in a US form that will work with the HSDPA here? No one that I know at least.
And people have been lusting over the Motorola Z8 as well, which is also HSDPA. So it looks like there might be a decent number of options soon… just not yet. Anything else that should be on that list of phones available in the US that I can use on Cingular HSDPA that I should be looking at?

Some of the folks from Nokia SNAP (Scalable Network Application Package) stopped by Mobile Monday this month to talk about the work they’re doing to support connected mobile gaming. Ever since I saw the way Live works on the XBox 360 I’ve been interested in the community aspects of gaming. Lots of developers talk about getting their users engaged and excited about their applications, but the games folks are the only ones who do it on a regular basis. Imagine if whatever you were working on ended up resulting in hundreds of thousands of people spending hours using your app at a time just because it was interesting. Definitely cool.

People engaged in play are much different beasties. They view the world around them and the tasks in front of them in a much different way than when they’re goal directed. If we want to find those compelling applications that get people to keep taking their phone out of their pocket over and over again throughout the day it seems like encouraging them to play and interact would be a great way to do so. That seems to be what SNAP is aimed at, encouraging people to interact on their mobile both through and around gaming.

So what is it actually? At a very high level it’s an SDK with associated Nokia-hosted servers that allow mobile devices to communicate. The interaction is focused on providing communication from within a game as well as realtime collaborative and interactive gameplay. Home consoles and titles for PCs have been doing this kind of thing for a while, and increasingly games for handheld systems provide some sort of functionality like this (such as SOCOM for the PSP or Mario Kart for the Nintendo DS). The SDK is currently available for Java (both on Nokia devices and on other hardware) but other platforms are probably coming in the future. And the business model is based around a revenue share instead of up front fees. The project seems to be really new still, and a lot of the details are still being ironed out.

For me, the out of game community stuff actually seems really interesting. One of the most popular games in mobile currently is online poker. I’m sure rankings and interpersonal competition over time have a lot to do with that. Sure, people get pretty obsessive about their poker game across the board sometimes. But I doubt the same success would be enjoyed if the game was played simply against an AI opponent offline. I’ve been looking around recently for interesting instances of online play and community (yes, Second Life is on the “research list”) and it seems like this would lower the activation energy for someone working in that direction.

Today, or maybe yesterday, that weird clock funkiness known as Daylight Saving appears to have happened. Normally I don’t care about things of the sort, clocks just magically update around me cause they’re always on phones or computers. But this time apparently someone decided to change the way time works. I hear it was the government. That fits with my understanding of how things work, so I’m going to roll with it.

However today my phone and my computer said different things. Disturbing. Cause if you can’t trust your electronics who can you trust? It appeared that my computers were right, but my phone was wrong. I was pretty sure I had patched up my phone with this Daylight Saving Time patch from Nokia. So why was the time off? I went looking for the patch, but I couldn’t find it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one looking for it. I grabbed the patch from other places, but I was right, it was already installed on my phone. So I canceled the install and just rebooted my phone. And then the time was right.

So… is that good or bad? Do I want the time right, or do I not want a patch installed that Nokia has pulled from their site for some reason? I’m not against living on the edge and all, but I am kinda curious which edge it is that I’m pushing. Odd huh?

I heard about the Nokia Ad Service but didn’t have any concrete details. Does it tie into client software, is it an open publisher network, bidded marketplace, carrier integrated? It’s actually more my mobile geekery side more so than my interest as an employee of a competitor that’s driving it. Cause the initial info I got was pretty conflicted, and I couldn’t put the pieces together in a consistent way. And then I saw the post from Ajit, which added even more inconsistent pieces on top of what already didn’t fit together. I didn’t want to post about it though, cause I assumed everyone would just assume that I was whining about competition. Thankfully Eduardo Cruz has saved me the trouble and given me something to point at.

It’s the two parts about being off-portal and providing access to all Nokia’s customer base. Assuming that the system works like a traditional network of off-portal publishers (like what we do at AdMob) that definitely wouldn’t give access to “all Nokia’s customer base”. However if it operates outside of the publishers control, like the way that Openwave’s “Contextual Merchandising” solution does it can insert content anywhere and that would give a kind of universal access. I put Contextual Merchandising in quotes there cause that seems to be a mobile specific term, if we were doing this online it would be called framing, which is almost always frowned upon and frequently illegal.

I’m pretty concerned in general, and some of the points that James brings up on MoCoNews are some of the primary reasons. I actually don’t like advertising. There, I said it. I was railing against that part of my professional trajectory (I’m ex-”a number of advertising companies” on the technical side, one of them a little startup called Overture that the Yahoo folks in the audience might have heard of) because I considered much of the activity really detached from growing an ecosystem. The beautiful and envious outcome of Google AdSense was that it allowed lots of small publishers and individuals to fund and grow their business on their own terms and without having to compromise what they wanted to do as long as it lined up with a valuable audience out there on the Interwebs.

But it works because both ends of the system are hooked into the right endpoints and the incentives all around are aligned. Publishers bring in people, hopefully of high value, who advertisers pay to reach, and the publishers make money from the advertisers reaching those people. The publisher creates the value, reaps the value, and the network takes a share for facilitating the interchange. But what happens when the publisher creates the value and the facilitator collects the value with no feedback to the publisher? The publisher isn’t incented to create higher value content catering to a better audience, so the quality and value of the content out there goes down. So extracting the same value in advertising from the audience requires more and more intrusive and overbearing tactics. You end up with a Geocities type of problem, where the end results are a noxious mix of advertising and bad content that no one really wants to see. The goal of an advertising network should be to maximize the value being delivered to the publishers participating in the network, which grows the value of the system as a whole and helps to expand industries. That’s why I’m at AdMob, cause we have the chance to play that part in the system.

However I’m seeing more and more “advertising networks” pop up that don’t align incentives the way that the really successful efforts of the past have done. I worry about the users coming into mobile who might have to suffer through technologists figuring out that they don’t understand media. That’s always really painful.