Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom
Archive for November, 2007
Innovator’s Engine Dec 5th
Nov 29th
I’m going to be participating in the next Innovator’s Engine event at Carr and Ferrell: Ads2Go: What’s Working, Where and Why with Mobile 2.0?. It’s in the morning on December 5th. Very much in the morning, the discussion starts at 8am. I hear your senses are sharpest in the morning though, so we’ll see how that goes.
I had a conference call with the participants today, it should be an interesting discussion. We spoke about some interesting stuff, like how does the mobile advertising market in evolving areas like the US and Europe compare to the setup we see in more mature markets like Japan, are there any particular technical hurdles that need to be tackled before the advertising market can advance, and who’s really using mobile advertising currently as part of their media plan. Should be fantastic. Just don’t believe all the hype you read online, I don’t have all the answers. Only about 80 percent of them ;-) The other 20 percent I’m hoping will fall out during the conversation. Come down and join in, hope to see you there.
December Mobile Monday is a Go!
Nov 28th
I just posted the details for the December 2007 Silicon Valley Mobile Monday. The topic is SMS messaging:
- What: December 2007 Mobile Monday (SMS Messaging)
- When: December 3rd, 2007 7:00pm
- Where: Hands-On Mobile, 580 California St, 7th Floor, SF, CA 94104
- Who: Anyone interested in mobility
- Cost: Nothing!
Thanks to Hands-On for providing the space. We’ve taken a few months off while there were so many mobile conferences and gatherings that everyone seemed to be overloaded. It’ll be good to get back into the swing. See you there!
Leaving the Mob
Nov 28th
My time at AdMob is coming to an end. It feels like it was yesterday that it was just Omar, Russell, and I listening to people say over and over that “the established ad networks are going to crush you before you can make a difference.” Now we’ve grown to gradually take over almost the whole floor of the building we’re in (a room at a time, taking large chunks of dividing walls out in the process) and I can’t read more than two mobile stories from my feed reader without at least one of them being about mobile advertising. How’s that for a staggering success?
But now that we’ve succeeded in the initial battle, life at AdMob is changing. It’s no longer the kind of place where the fast and loose brand of programmerizing I practice should be the norm. And the challenges in front of the company are no longer related to proving that the model works and the ecosystem can support it, but rather that they can hold onto and grow their lead as the number one mobile advertising network. A great challenge to be placed in front of, but not really one that exactly matches up with my disposition and role in the world of mobility overall. So it’s time for me to step aside and let the AdMob engineering crew evolve. I wish the folks at AdMob the best of luck! It’s a fantastic service backed by a great team, and when the monetization question comes up during my next adventure AdMob is going to be the first place I turn.
So now comes the question of which way to turn to find the raggedy edge of mobile? I like somewhat unique work environments. Three parts programming, two parts white knuckled thrill ride, two parts scaling issues. Seems like there’s still a ton of stuff that could be done in consumer mobile services. As far as mobile data services have come in the last year, we’re still really at just the start. The interest is out there, but people need to provide the right services via the right channels to keep the growth going. Seems like that would be really difficult to do right, so it’s got my attention. The hunt is officially on!
Ruby for Maemo
Nov 27th
Russ pointed out a different version of Ruby for Maemo than I had tried before. This one has a hildon library and GTK support, w00t! I tried out a few of the examples but haven’t dug into it too much. Requiring the hildon module throws a bunch of warnings, but the module works perfectly once it’s in.
Future of Mobile Slides
Nov 26th
There are a bunch of great decks posted from the Future of Mobile event. Andrea’s slides on The Truth about Mobile Web Development Standards in particular caught my attention. These two points from slide 8 I really like:
- Standards should provide a direction, tools help build applications
- Standards should provide interoperability, fragmentation is not good for anyone
One of the problems that keeps cropping up in developing for mobile devices, particularly web development for mobile devices, is how to provide for different levels of device capability. The first layer of tools needed is a repository of information about which devices support what capabilities and exhibit which quirks. It’s hard to get there at times though, because the average developer isn’t really interested in what the details of mobile devices are. They’re interested in seeing their application work across a variety of handsets.
That’s where stuff like abstraction libraries come in, such as the WALL library that Luca has been working on. It changes the level of abstraction that the developer works at and covers over rendering details. There’s also effort being put into this at the W3C, through the Device Description Working Group in particular.
The mobile arena hasn’t really hit the right stride yet however. If I take a look at AJAX on the wired web as an example, I think there are some strong parallels. The idea of using asynchronous calls and DHTML within a web browser to create applications certainly wasn’t new. But once some common libraries like prototype.js, Dojo, and YUI came in to provide the right kinds of abstractions and cover over cross-browser issues the technique really gained a lot of momentum.
I haven’t really seen the same kind of thing happen on the mobile end however. Is it because there isn’t as much of a standard base to build on? Are there too many mobile browsers and platform differences to be able to come up with a common set? Are the intentions of developers and users just too varied at this point to be able to come up with a common abstraction?
I’ve seen very few mobile applications that really adapt to different degrees of browser capability very well. Generally the ones that adapt do so in a distinct high capability/low capability versions of the site, instead of feature by feature adaptation. And even more frequently I find folks developing to the lowest common denominator, which from a user interaction standpoint tends to make better situated apps anyway.
If I could magic up any one particular library/tool for mobile developers to use it would be something that helps deliver the lowest common denominator and provide some real base level functions that work across all devices and carrier networks. Stuff like making sure you send back a content type that is going to be understood by the device, how to probe to see if cookies are supported (which is not a device specific thing, it’s a device and carrier network/gateway together issue), how to render a form that will actually work on all phones, etc.
The points from Andrea’s slides help somewhat to define the line between what should be part of a standard, and what should be part of the toolset. It’s a part of the discussion that I think is particularly relevant right now in the evolution of mobile web development. Right now I think standards across mobile are pretty atrocious, so we have to leave a lot up to the tools. But that doesn’t have to be the case going forward if someone can get a hold of the standards (defacto or formal, I don’t really care) across the board.
Location Requestor Module for Python
Nov 21st
Does anyone know if the location requestor module for Python is going to be built into the base Python set of modules at any point? I took the time today to try to figure out the twisty set of pages that Nokia make developers navigate in order to do anything with their devices, only to find that even after finding an open source tool for manipulating sis files and certificates, and signing up for symbiansigned.com, and installing Wine on my Linux system so that I could run their .EXE only certificate signing request program, that for some reason it doesn’t seem to run under Wine? Why? Seriously, at this point I don’t give a fuck any more. I’m just curious when I can get Python on my phone to do what I would like it to do.
But since I’m here and I’ve bothered to go through this stuff, here’s some free advice for Nokia that they can feel free to use should they decide to extract their heads from their asses any time soon: When you generate a random key for developer use and package it up for developer use, the “secret key” isn’t really all that important. Just generate the damn thing on the symbiansigned site and send it back to the developer so they can use it. It’s supposed to be tied to the IMEI, right? So who cares about the private key? Come on folks, I just want to write software for your hardware. Why do you keep making is so hard for me?
Blast From the Past
Nov 21st
I worked at Feedster a few years ago. Now apparently it has sunk below the waves. It was an interesting idea with some great people, and a spectacular example of where having a bunch of smart people doesn’t necessarily mean you’re built for success. In responses to Richard’s question though, I use Technorati. Just about the only thing I do is subscribe to link searches though. Check to see who’s linking to my blog, or linking to AdMob. I rarely use the site itself or do keyword searches.
Mobile Advertising Salon Discussion
Nov 20th
Kelly posted a fantastic summary of a discussion we had up at the loft last week about mobile advertising. Longer term I’m particularly interested in the web app vs downloaded application questions, and the question of the mobile web as a distinct area from the fixed web.
The questions of web app vs downloaded application might actually get somewhat obscured by the likes of Android and Ovi. A focus on services instead of applications tends to blur the line somewhat. Jaiku is an excellent example there. They have an S60 app, you can use it via IM or SMS, there’s a widget for Widsets, and a mobile friendly web version. Still, I think there will be some consolidation over time where some preferred way exists for covering the maximum number of handsets without having to develop a half dozen different versions.
Personally I think that’s going to be based on the mobile web instead of downloaded applications. However that means that the mobile browser really needs to mature a lot to make it as viable of a delivery platform as desktop browsers are now. And I don’t necessarily mean mobile AJAX here, I mean that development for mobile browsers needs to be a deterministic process. It can’t be this crapshoot with standards support and capabilities all over the map.
Which leads in to the issue of will the mobile web continue to exist as devices get better. There are at least two different issues in there: there’s the technical issue of coming up with markup that will render on a mobile device and an application level issue of delivering information tailored for a more limited device. There’s a lot of attention going into the technical side of the equation. Stuff like transcoders meant to strip out extraneous data, clean up tagging, and format the info in a more usable layout for a mobile device. And there are W3C efforts to define markups that can be supported across a wide range of devices.
However, even if the markup ends up being the same, assume that my phone was able to render any web page just well as my desktop browser could, does that mean the “death of the mobile web”? Would it still make sense to do two versions of the web application based on the user’s modality? Not based on if they’re accessing from their phone or their desktop, but based on if they’re using from their phone will seated on the train or using on their phone while wandering around a strange city looking for their friends.
I think the distinction will always remain, but there are definitely questions about where that “other version” comes from. Does it get produced entirely by the application provider? Or do they provide some extra tags (like the fb:mobile tag in FBML) that give hinting to other services which still provide a degree of adaptation? Right now the only realistic method is to make the two versions yourself. The problem of adapting a web user interface just isn’t well understood enough for someone to be able to factor out common parts and expose a meaningful set of hooks and capabilities. That’s still up for grabs really. There’s still a lot of blank space and potential in the market. Plenty of room for great ideas and plenty of unpopulated areas.
Kindle Pr0n
Nov 20th
Some undressing pics of the Kindle from Dr. Doval. Knows your name right out of the box… I kinda like that. But it leaves me a bit curious. What happens if I order one for my sister. There must be an option in there to say it’s a gift. Also amusing, his take on Russ’s commentary on the Kindle:
Russ continues in his vein of reviewing products that he hasn’t used based on reviews that others have done and photos from the web :-)), and explains that eink-based ebook readers like the Sony PRS-500 series haven’t taken off because they’re not pure black text on white background.
Well.
As it happens, I own -and use although less than I want to, for reasons I’ll explain later- a PRS-500 (the first generation, the photo that Russ has in his post is of the PRS-505).
Heheheheh! The whole e-book thing I find pretty amusing in general. I’ve used various forms of electronic readers since the Palm III. Hell, I even wrote two on contract back in the day while I was festering away in Rochester. And I’ve been using FBReader on the N800 a decent amount as well. So it’s really amusing to see Amazon come out with something of the sort.
So it makes me think, well, why? It’s not like the whole model of distributing books in electronic form hasn’t been around for a while. And it’s not like we don’t all know that DRM sucks and always kills the effort. And it’s not like Amazon is going to start distributing major works DRM free on a large scale (I don’t think at least, but it would totally rock if they did!).
And the whole EVDO thing, slick. Very slick. Don’t need your PC to sync up stuff…. hmm. Kinda sounds like the perfect setup you would need for a digital newspaper doesn’t it? Subscribe to a feed of data, it’s always there on the device no matter if you remember to sync it or not. Just pull out your Kindle and you can read todays news. I’m sure in a few months someone will be lamenting the lost art of New York subway paper folding. But still, should be interesting. The books side of things though, I don’t have as much of an opinion there. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do it, but I also don’t see too much to swing the normal arguments either.
How Do I Get an N810?
Nov 20th
Apparently the N810 is on shelves somewhere. I’m not going to frusterate myself by trying to order it from NokiaUSA however, that would just be stupid. But it’s supposed to be in Best Buy and CompUSA. Neither of the online systems for those stores know what an N810 is. No one I’ve managed to reach in the corporate office or at any of the branch locations in the Bay Area for either of those stores know what an N810 is, and when asked to check everyone comes back saying it’s not in stock. They don’t know when it will be in stock. Call back later. Anyone sighted the thing in the wild? I really want one now, like right-now-this-very-second now!
