Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I haven’t had very much time to weigh in on much lately, actually barely had time to skim news twice a week. But I definitely want to give props to Google for stirring the hornets nest around the 700 MHz spectrum auction. I love the reaction by the telcos, fantastic. “No seriously, everything is fine here, competition is rocking out”. James nails it overall:

All in all a very spirited defence of the status quo in the US marketplace, which does a good job of showing that the US is not really so far behind Europe in terms of mobile services, but completely fails to address the point that there are many players in the US mobile content and services market who are unhappy with the way the industry is currently run. Comparisons with other parts of the world aside, that needs to be addressed.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I did get a chance to stop by the Mobile Monday Mumbai meeting last night and it was fantastic! First of all thanks to Veer and Rajesh for inviting me to participate in the panel, I’m always happy to share what info I can with an audience so hungry for information. I was really impressed with the folks attending the event. A highly entrepreneurial crowd who weren’t afraid to stand up and ask questions and challenge the responses they got back. In many ways it reminded me of the Silicon Valley crew …. Interesting huh? They even had an SMS backchannel setup during the panel! I was already paying a decent amount of attention to this environment because the numbers that AdMob sees say this is one to watch. After seeing it first hand my geek gut sense also says it’s one to watch. If you get the chance to check it out firsthand I can’t recommend it highly enough. I took some pictures of the event as well, I think they give a great feel for what the audience was like.

I was hoping that the carriers in a rapidly developing area like this would be more supportive of their local entrepreneurs and businesses. But unfortunately the general guideline that carriers are bullies who somehow feel they’re entitled to own a user because they paid for some spectrum holds true here. They talk at one time about knowing a user and being able to deliver them highly targeted and personal results because of their intimate relationship, and then say they would cut off advertising services and kill off anything that competes with their own revenue stream. I’m not sure about you, but that’s not the kind of company I want to have an intimate relationship with! They obviously don’t really have the well being of their users at heart. They have the well being of their users at heart when it allows them to stifle competitive innovation. But when it comes to things that make their users happy but that the carrier doesn’t profit from, well then of course it’s their right to regulate what goes across their network and the user be damned! Unfortunate that this keeps playing out all over the place, it’s really limiting what mobile could be to have these folks as the gatekeepers.

The carriers are also unaware of a lot of the activity going on with the local users. They think they’re filtering free content. Maybe they just don’t understand how the interweb works? I could see them manging to filter out anything from the outside web with a content type audio/mp3 to kill off MP3 ringtones. But could they filter out images as a whole? Sounds a little far fetched, even for them. So at least wallpapers and backgrounds, to some degree, could be available for free out there. I know lots of people can attest to the size of the India mobile web market, Paul Smith I know saw the size of the traffic when he was running his own test of a public version of wapTags. It’s out there, I know it’s not just AdMob seeing these kinds of numbers.

There were a bunch of questions about what people seem to be doing when they browse mobile from India. I don’t have an exhaustive breakdown, but I have at least a few examples that I know popped up at some points. Much of the traffic is to community sites and chat/forum areas. Why would people in India be hitting sites like that so heavily? Many of them seem to be related to Bollywood. Gossip sites, fan sites, photo sites, forums, etc. Apparently people are hungry for more than what the established media channels provide them for their stars. Hardly surprising, that happens all over the place. Also very popular are the mobile versions of news outlets in English speaking areas like the US and the UK. At one point during the World Cup we were seeing enough cricket related activity on mobile that I actually setup my own cricket news aggregation site (cricketfan.mobi) specifically to make some of the less mobile friendly content more accessible.

The common question across the panel was what will it take to make the mobile advertising industry experience explosive growth during the next 12 months. My answer is that from where I’m sitting, the mobile advertising industry is already experiencing explosive growth. Its been happening for 12 months already, and it’s going to keep going for many more I think. But what could accelerate it to an even greater pace? I think everyone had pretty much the same take on that, standardization and metrics. The online advertising market really took off when there were standard ways to make buys across multiple advertising providers and standardized ways to collect those results across all and measure benefits. And advertisers want to be able to understand what their expected results can be going in and feel assured that they’re not being duped into wasting money. So you need compelling success stories that map neatly to what incoming advertisers are expecting to do.

Which is somewhat at odds with the other major message from the panel, that mobile advertising is a new medium that allows for mass customization and rifleshot accuracy in your messaging. While that’s a fantastic idealistic outcome, I would definitely caution against putting all your eggs in that basket. Every medium thinks it’s new and ultimately completely different than what came before. And it is, but only to a degree. It’s a beautiful and unique snowflake, just like everything else. The advertising market will only bear so much infrastructure cost before it’s just not worth their money to put a message out. Sure, it’s technically possible to figure out where someone is down to the square meter and have a message that’s targeted to their income level and browsing habits and that particular 9 foot square section of the earth they’re standing on. But somewhere well before we get there we hit the point of diminishing returns with respect to what most advertisers want and how much it will cost them to get it.

In the US an ISP has almost the same set of info that a carrier does, but we don’t see ISPs participating in the online advertising ecosystem because so far it just hasn’t made any sense. No one can make it work at scale profitably. Yet the carriers think they are the key to advertising in mobile, and I just don’t see that on the mobile web side. Perhaps when it comes to marketing through messaging like SMS. But overall they need to stop thinking about marketing to their user base as their right and start thinking about it as their privilege. Do it right and everyone benefits, them included. Do it wrong and everyone suffers, and people get angry, and they lose users, and advertisers lose audience.

A little realism in that respect would go a long way, and I think the scientific method applies here as well. We can sit around all day and debate what the mobile advertising market wants, but without empirical evidence to back it up we’re just spouting philosophy. The best way to know what works and what doesn’t in mobile advertising is to try it. You’ll probably be surprised. I know I definitely was.

You know I’m going to be getting this book as soon as it comes out. I’m pretty vocal about my dislike for patents, but because other companies use them I always end up working on some kind of protective patent umbrella or at least some blocking patents where ever I go. I refuse to put my name on them, cause they’re a vestige of an absurd concept gone horribly wrong. I begrudgingly accept their utility in certain cases, but almost all of those cases are where someone else attacks you with some patent issue (and the other ones are all legal issues as well). It’s one of those closed loop feedback systems. Why do you get patents? Well cause everyone else has patents of course! And why do they all have patents? Cause everyone they’re competing with has patents. Oh yes, I would love to see the day where we can just do away with the broken system as a whole. Unfortunately the book is not yet available for pre-order through Amazon, otherwise I would have already done so.

W00t!! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Definitely going to be “interesting times.”

I don’t agree with what Russ has to say about our odds, though I do agree with everything else he says to say about the whole end to end vision that Google has for mobile services. Some damn smart folks over there. But I still think we can take them. Interested in joining the fight? Email me at mike at admob dot com. We’re still hiring engineers in particular. Come on, you know you want to do it.

While I’m in a timezone that’s rotated 12.5 hours from my home timezone most of my communication is by necessity asynchronous. Not a problem, I have email magic all over the place. Emails on my phone, run my own imap server, server side filtering, a beautiful little bot to sit there and filter it all. Email in general is an archaic and aging beast hopefully not long for this world, but people use it. So I’ve used it. And used it enough that generally I can deal with the issues, and have a few different ways to deal with them.

However I’m in the middle of a situation that’s pretty taxing as far as infrastructure goes. Cellular networks are actually kinda spotty here, and 802.11 networks are both few and far between, and basically treated like demilitarized zones. The number of ports you can assume you can communicate over approaches 1 as you increase the number of base stations you sample from. Generally, you can use port 80. Sometimes I can manage to get imap outbound, not always. Almost never get smtp outbound, and frequently don’t even get SSL smtp outbound.

But that’s okay, right? We got the cellular networks. The good ‘ole wild wild west cellular networks. They’ll let you send just about anything just about anywhere on just about any port. Guess it’s the confidence that comes with having your credit card number, they figure they can trust you with their network. So I want to send something on port 25 outbound from my phone, you betcha I can. Or can I?

This morning I was trying to catch up on a bit of email before diving into the rest of the day. The hotel network is, well, interesting to say the least. So I was lying on the bed using my E61 to get the job done. Or trying to. The network was particularly spotty this morning. It should have been annoying, but it ended up being crippling. I went to load one of the messages (I’m using the built in messenger app from the E61) and suddenly got dumped back to the start screen. Odd, cause the messenger app was still running. I went back into the messenger app and it was frozen. Couldn’t exit it, couldn’t get it to respond to anything, a friend I was IMing with asked if I got the SMS they just sent. Apparently SMS wasn’t working either. Hold down the red hangup key to kill all active connections (good tip for you Nokia addicts out there) and nothing happens. That’s usually the last resort, so things must be pretty well screwed. Annoying, but I’ve come to expect it. So I reboot my phone and keep going.

A few minutes later, it happens again. This time I decide I have to be insane. The application can’t hard hang like this and just never come back, not an application that controls a base phone function like SMS. There’s gotta be some watchdog or something in the OS that would figure out things have gone sideways and kick over the thing. I’m just impatient, right? So I leave the phone like that as I go down to get some breakfast, it’ll be fine by the time I get back. 45 minutes later I walk back into the room and the things is still crapped out. What the hell!?!?

So I SSH into my server, setup a few forward rules, and check to make sure that the GMail App doesn’t crap out when it’s got an intermittent network connection. Guess what? It doesn’t. What’s amazing is that after all these years I can still laugh about the fact that the supposedly vastly superior experience offered by the built in app, as opposed to the obviously inferior experience of the limited sandboxed java app that is GMail, is still something I’m going to have to listen to some fuckwit “industry expert” drone on about at some point.

There’s a lot going on right now in mobile. And it’s easy if you’re working in the environment to feel like this is a golden time when everyone is finally getting their paycheck for having put in the years of effort. Because the environment is doing well it’s going to attract a hell of a lot of competition from people who you didn’t have to compete with before. People who aren’t going to listen to all the reasons you have that explain why things can’t be done. People who are just going to run out there and get them done anyway. Frequently while you’re still laughing about how horribly they’re going to fail when they realize how difficult your industry is. Next thing you know you’re living in a van down by the river.

Russell Beattie is back at it again with a new blog. Which he used almost immediately to call me crazy. Fair enough.

And Diego Doval has started up the much more aptly named blog.diegodoval.com.

I suggest subscribing to both immediately. I’ll wait.

Seriously, go do it.

I’m about to take off for Mumbai in a few hours. My trip was supposed to start this weekend, but it was delayed because of paperwork problems. Because my departure date has been delayed, instead of heading home on the 17th like I was originally going to I’m going to be staying till the 20th. So I shouldn’t be in a rush when the Mumbai July Mobile Monday happens on the 16th. And what’s the topic? Mobile Advertising. Small world, huh? Always interesting to meet folks from a completely different environment.

I was waiting for Luca to start talking about it publicly before I said something, so now that he’s put public word out that he’s working with us at AdMob I get my chance to talk about it a little as well. First I would like to just get this one thing out of the way: W00T!!

Like Luca said in his note, a big part of what we’re doing is just funding a necessary piece of infrastructure that lots of mobile publishers use. It’s in our best interest. Whenever I talk to people at the MoMo events, and frequently when I talk to publishers at AdMob, they’re using WURFL to do their device detection. In many cases, if it weren’t for WURFL they would have to seriously degrade the functionality of their site or stop running it completely. And we ourselves use WURFL at AdMob for parts of our targeting. Sometimes it’s hard to see why a company would fund an open source project. This is one of those cases where everything is aligned however. WURFL directly makes my life easier, and indirectly makes my life easier by making publishers lives easier. Simple.

But also it’s because Luca has been around the block quite a few times when it comes to working on the mobile web. He has a bunch of knowledge kicking around related not just to current practice, but all the legacy that goes into what has become current practice. So we get to pick his brain when we need to understand problems that seem to be environment specific. And while he was out here visiting last I got him to sign my copy of Professional WAP for me, how’s that for geek cred? We’re proud to be supporting Luca and the WURFL project, and I’m personally excited to have him as part of the team.

We had a great MoMo meeting last night. Fantastic turnout (somewhere between 80 and 90 people) even though we have a holiday right in the middle of the week and lots of people were out of town. I assume that means that the people who were still in town felt they had more free time to check out events.

Blair gave a fantastic overview of the location based services ecosystem in general. One of the things he brought up was the difference between the European environment and the US environment bringing out a lot of disparity. Europe doesn’t have their equivalent to e911 mandated yet, so the carriers have yet to build out the infrastructure for location the same way that US carriers have. They do have something of the kind (called e112 apparently, check this out for some additional info) which could mean that carriers over there will hop into the environment the same way they have out here.

However it’s also the case that users in Europe tend to have much more loyalty to their handset manufacturer than they do to their carrier. Thus devices with standalone GPS are much more prevalent over there, cause it keeps the carrier out of the mix. Certainly helps to explain Nokia’s big push to get GPS handsets out there. Great stuff. Blair just needs to clean up his slides a bit (or get permission to share the stuff that he’s used from other sources) and we should be able to get them up online soon.

Mor gave a presentation on Yahoo Fire Eagle, which was something I hadn’t heard about until I was emailing with him about the event. It’s currently in closed alpha (due to be opened up to a wider audience within a few weeks he says) so there’s not too much info online, but you can find some stuff through the Yahoo Research blog. Some of the best info is in the Privacy Policy for Fire Eagle however. Fire Eagle is a way to aggregate and share your location information via a web services style API. Meaning that if you authorize one application that’s capable of determining your location (say a mapping app) it will be able to update Fire Eagle with your location behind the scenes. Then if you use another application that you have authorized to read your location, say a widget for your blog, it shows your location based on Fire Eagle (instead of having to update your blog widget explicitly).

The eventual view is that there will be many different producers of location info updates operating completely independently of a number of applications that use your location info. If the updates are frequent and automatic enough other applications can be context aware without the burden being placed on the user to either setup a location enabled device to send updates or to explicitly push location updates. The whole thing could operate over the web for instance without using mobile devices at all. You do a search for movies in San Francisco on Fandango, and then when you go to Yelp to look for a restaurant the default location is San Fran. If both applications produced and consumed Fire Eagle, and you had authorized them, the system as a whole would seem to be more aware of context. Of course it’s more interesting when you toss mobile devices into the mix. I like the fact that it can operate completely on the web however, cause that’s an indicator that it’s not tied to carriers or handset providers at all. I would love to play with it, but given my time constraints recently I’m probably just going to have to watch from the sidelines.

The July SV Mobile Monday is tomorrow:

• What: July 2007 Mobile Monday (Location Based Services)
• When: July 2nd, 2007 7:00pm
• Where: TellMe Networks Inc., 1310 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041
• Who: Anyone interested in mobility
• Cost: Nothing!