Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Quick post, I’m about to run out. I was playing around with Google Trends, and awesome tool that I keep forgetting about. I was actually poking around using mobile terms and seeing if anything interesting stood out. Check these two out in particular though:

• WAP
• mobile web
• J2ME (I didn’t have this in originally, just thought it was amusing)

The WAP search line goes down, but the news mentions go up. Interesting. Together with the fact that I know the mobile web is on the rise, but searches for mobile web are just barely starting to tick up, it seems like there’s a disjoin between user expectation and how these things are being presented in the media. What I’m trying to do is figure out what’s driving the growth of the mobile web.. and failing miserably. But, I guess that’s part of sharing, making public your failures as well as successes. “How are people getting into mobile sites?” is my question. Is it driven by carrier decks and portals? Search? Messaging? Word of mouth? How does a “new mobile web user” come into being?

I’m heading out tonight to watch the Geminids meteor shower. Fortunately a friend reminded me of it this year, and we’re taking off to the desert to find a good spot to view from. I figured I would pay it forward and remind all of you out there on the internets. I was going to try to make this related to mobile at least a little bit by installing something like a star map application on one of my Maemo devices, but none of those debs want to work. So it’s going to have to be just the meteor shower. Hope you like flaming fragments of cosmic debris, cause that’s what you’re getting.

I updated the Mowser WordPress Mobile plugin that Russ posted a while ago and added in an admin page where you can configure your AdMob site ID without having to go in and poke at the code. I was considering going back and updating the Wordpress Mobile with Style version that I had as well, but there are some other mobile WordPress plugins floating around already. I’m going to have to poke around and see what the state of the others is before I go and hack mine up some more.

One of the things I did while I was over at Russ’s earlier was update the firmware on my N95. I grabbed the Nokia Software Update thing, backed up my phone to the memory card, and let the update do it’s thing. Worked well, even though I was using Vista. Happy day!

However once my phone started back up I wasn’t able to restore from the backup. When I go into the Memory app and choose “restore from card” it kicks out of the application, hangs completely unresponsive for a few seconds, and then reboots. Let me say that again. After doing the firmware update I can no longer restore from backup. Yea, I’m as confused as you.

Fortunately after years and years or having my hopes and dreams dashed by mobile devices it’s no longer possible to disappoint me. So I just used iSync to get my contacts and calendar entries back on the phone. I’ll just manually have to reconfigure the settings and reinstall applications. Just wanted to share this odd experience in case you’re thinking about doing the update. I would highly recommend having a secondary backup for anything you want to actually keep. Wow.

I’ve decided to officially join up with Russ to work on Mowser! We’ve been talking about it for a while. Before I joined up at AdMob I was actually fooling around with a transcoder based on the Phonifier code because it seems like there’s more demand for mobile accessible content than there is content. That situation still exists, people want stuff on their phones. And mobilizing little vertical slivers of stuff here and there without linking them together just isn’t very webbish, let alone Web 2.0ish, or Mobile 2.0ish. So I’m back to trying to take large swaths of web content and making it mobile friendly. Except this time Russ is yelling at me to call it “content adaption” instead of transcoding. Fortunately I’m a pretty flexible person, I think I can deal with it.

We’re going to be working from our respective homes for now, getting more pages coming through the system and increasing the ad revenue before we think about doing anything like getting an office and blowing money on those cool chairs and throwing a launch party. I assume we’re going to have to do that eventually, just not now. If you’re in the San Mateo area and want to catch up, drop me a line. miker at mower dot com. Hell yea.

I was playing around a bit more with the N810 this morning. What I’m aiming to do is not need a laptop when I leave the house. The N810 should be perfect for that. What I was trying to get going was syncing the calendar that I keep on my desktop and N95 to the N810 as well. Seems like it should be easy. I use iSync on my Mac to sync up the laptop and the N95, I was expecting to find something that would allow me to relatively simply pull in some software that would allow the N810 to participate in that. I did find some interesting bits of software that would lead in that direction, but didn’t get it working. Then I was trying to get a read-only version of my calendar on the N810 using the GPE Calendar program. But even though I have ical exports up on my server, the calendar app was failing to subscribe to them. Finally I had to settle for using Google Calendar subscribed to my ical feeds to view them on the device. Google Calendar, also, is not syncable using iSync. There’s some commercial software that provides it… but no thanks. Why is it that calendar and contact management still blow after all these years? Wasn’t the standardization on Bluetooth as the transport supposed to fix this whole data problem?

While playing around with Google Calendar I was also poking at the new Mozilla based browser. Check out the info about it here. I’m happy to see that it supports extensions, which in some case can be simple repackages of desktop extensions. No UI elements for the browsers though, which is kinda restricting. Something I wanted to poke at was support for bookmarklets. Do they work? How do they compare to their desktop equivalents? Questions for another time, need to go run about for a while… with my laptop unfortunately.

You didn’t think that just because I don’t work there any more I’m going to stop posting about it did you? AdMob just announced the availability of the AdMob interface in Japanese. Fantastic job! For months and months Wayne Pan has been working to clean up the mess that we made of the AdMob UI early on. Regular users of the site should already have seen stuff like the cleaned up site stats and advertising management screens. Getting the interface internationalized and localizing it into a language as wildly different as Japanese is a fantastic step. I’m looking forward to seeing the other localized versions popping up.

Japan is already a booming market in terms of mobile advertising, so it’s a logical place to start. What I’m really curious to see however is how enabling advertisers in some of the less mainstream areas where mobile is popular would change the network. In theory you should have a big group of “local advertisers” that should be interested in any chunk of media you put out there. And here I mean “local” in the sense of in the same country, not in the sense of hyperlocal location based services kinds of stuff. I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time in Mumbai, and I was surprised both by how much mobile marketing there was (normally in the form of SMS tie ins for print, outdoor, and television ads) as well as the spirit of the folks I met at the local Mobile Monday.

I’m curious if the potential advertisers in those areas have started looking at the advertising networks to bring in their users. There was a lot of talk at the MoMo I attended about data usage not being high in India. However the AdMob metrics reports place it very high in terms of number of pageviews. I wonder if there’s a perception issue that could be cracked. I wonder if the current marketing providers in the area are working to protect their revenue stream for as long as they can and seeding misinformation. I’m sure all the SMS marketing going on there feeds back into the carrier pockets, and I’m not sure data revenue always would (they have a lot of flat rate data from what I’m told). I wonder, I wonder…

Trying out a posting from MaemoWordPy on the N810. The keyboard certainly is nice. Still a lot of work to be done in porting apps over from previous versions though. I miss my home screen apps.

Calendar and contacts support still doesn’t seem to cross to the phone at all. There is no calendar app built into OS2008 still. Contacts don’t sync from my N95 to the N810 either. In an ideal world I would be able to use the N810 for everything, even voice calls and sending and receiving SMS messages, without having to take my handset out of my backpack.

I’ve been meaning to post a recap of the Mobile Meeting last week about SMS messaging but this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and really pound it out. So this is going to be half recap from that meeting and half stuff I’ve run into since.

The first thing is that the current state of SMS messaging is really at odds with the whole Mobile 2.0 movement, something that I believe in pretty strongly. We’re starting to see more and more ecosystem evolution within mobile. Companies are able to collaborate and cooperate without having to put the formal relationships in place that used to be necessary within mobile. And some interesting mixing and mashing is happening. But being able to add asynchronous messaging support to your application still isn’t something that the average application provider can do. The cost of sending messages is prohibitive, especially if you want to provide services on a global scale.

I think this fundamental problem is one of the reasons there are some many plays aimed at making an API out of SMS in some way and taking care of the monetization for the developer:

• Mozes
• 3Jam
• TextMarks
• 4Info Open Platform

It’s a difficult problem, but one that I hope gets cracked for good. Till there is a general globally available technique for delivering SMS at scale for a low cost I think the idea of the mobile as “an always-on device” from the point of view of a service provider is a pipe dream. If the channel doesn’t open up soon the Internet is going to route around it and replace SMS service with something that does work.

Much of the interesting stuff going on around “messaging” on the mobile actually includes SMS in a relatively small way already, at least for the way that I use it. I’m talking about apps like Jaiku, Twitter, and a feature of Flurry I just learned about today called Flurry Mobs. They’re not SMS applications, they’re communications applications that happen to offer SMS as one potential channel. You can also use dedicated applications, email, mobile web, or IM. And in my case communication is most frequently going over IM or mobile web when I’m on my handset and only occasionally over SMS. Folks like Mig33 seem to be building an install base of applications that would deal with the asymmetry of messaging styles pretty well, plastering over a lot of the differences between styles of interaction.

SMS is still a killer for person to person communication, but increasingly it’s getting cut out of or minimized for application and service usage. That’s too bad, cause it does really seem best suited to a number of notification usages. I’m seeing IM, dedicated applications, and autorefreshing mobile web pages being used more and more to work around the SMS problem though. And of course no one providing SMS services sees it as a problem, cause who cares if some crappy service that can’t even pay an SMS bill isn’t able to get messages out? There are some really major services with large user bases that fall into that bucket however, and they are going to figure out how to get their application built. SMS or not.

I was trying to use my N95 as a bluetooth modem with my Powerbook this weekend and failing miserably. No idea why, it used to work. Connecting my N800 to my N95 as a modem was still working just fine. So when I got home and started poking around I saw this post about other folks having intermittent problems with Nokia phones and bluetooth. Lucky for me, going in and killing the ppp daemon out from under the Internet Connect process (you have to signal it twice though, kill it once and then kill it again, very poetic - but also very annoying) keeps from having to deal with those endless hangs.

I’m using 10.4.11 by the way, haven’t done The Update yet. Once I removed the device and reset everything, installed the latest version of Ross Barkman’s Nokia HSDPA connection scripts, and reconfigured it started working again. But it disconnects after about 8 to 12 minutes. Even when I’m constantly using it, it hangs for a bit, and then an error dialog pops up saying the modem terminated the connection. I turned off TCP header compression and the ping checks, no dice though. It always barfs and needs to be reset after a while. My other devices don’t do that through the N95, so I assume it has to be something on the Mac end. Anyone seeing the same thing? Any ideas for a fix?