As part of investigating SMS applications and non-standard usage I’ve been playing around with the Vodafone Betavine APIs. However I can’t get them to deliver messages to my handset. I had a thread going in the discussion forums, but haven’t seen a response in almost a week. Anyone out there using the Betavine APIs in the US? I have the full command I’m using the send my request in there, is there something I’m doing incorrectly?
I made a change to the Mowser Wordpress plugin to add a sidebar widget to promote the mobile version from the desktop version. It’s just a little Mowser badge and a link to the mobile URL for the current page. I have it running on my blog (which is probably where you’re reading this, but if not check it out here), up on the top of the sidebar. One of the problems with publishing a proper mobile version these days is that best practice says things should just automatically be mobile when you hit them with a mobile device. The problem is, years of stuff not working on mobile devices have conditioned people not to just type in a site and expect it to work. So how do people find out about your mobile version? Portals are one way, and search is increasingly driving traffic. But directly promoting your site can also drive users, and also just reminds people that more sites are coming online every day that they can use from their phone.
Sidebar widgets are a relatively recent addition to Wordpress, just becoming part of the default core features during 2.2. If you’re using 2.0 or 2.1 you need to download a plugin to allow sidebar widgets. You’ll also need a widget enabled theme, not a problem if you have a recent install, but I have a theme that I had been hacking over and over again. I decided to scrap it and use a new theme and the widgets to make the customizations I had. Which actually worked out quite well.
If you have a system that supports it you can configure sidebar widgets in the Presentation area or your dashboard, the subsection is simply called “Widgets”. Drag the Mowser Plugin widget from the Available Widgets tray up to the sidebar and save the changes. If you haven’t been using widget at all, adding the Mowser widget will replace the default sidebar for your theme and you’ll have to also add whatever used to be there before. Not really a part of the system I like, but I think I understand why things ended up that way. After you save the changes you should be all set, the badge linking to your mobile version should appear in the sidebar of your pages.
One of the things I liked about the Wordpress sidebar widgets is that they’re rendered server-side. So now my twitters and del.icio.us bookmarks appear in the Mowser version of my blog, which I like quite a bit.
The March 2008 Silicon Valley Mobile Monday announcement is up:
Presentations from BMW about their connected car work, something that I’ve heard of but seen little about online. And the folks from Dash are going to be there to show off the APIs for their internet connected navigation system. See you there!
I kept seeing commercials on TV saying Vehix has a mobile version. I went and poked at it however and had some issues. First off was that my N95 brought up the full web version. I’ve seen a bunch of discussions online saying things like “if the user is on a device with a full browser or using Opera Mini of course they want the full version.” From expert users sometimes even. That’s just stupid. I’m pretty sure the problem was just that the platform Vehix used just didn’t recognize the N95 But in case someone made the explicit decision to return the full version to Webkit on the N series, you were wrong. Definitely in the state it’s in now.
One of the major problems is that there’s no actual link over to the mobile version if you end up on the desktop version by mistake. I searched around on the web and didn’t find any mention of it. So I pulled on Firefox on my desktop where I have a bunch of mobile user agents saved in modify headers. The first two user agents I tried resulted in an “unsupported browser” error page. Well, that also is just dumb when you’re dealing with mobile. Seriously, if you’re going to do things all half-assed, at least allow your users to pick the right version manually if they should happen to understand what’s going on. Throwing up an error page and suggesting a bunch of desktop browsers to be using instead, that’s just poor form.
Turns out the mobile version is at http://mobile.usablenet.com/mt/www.vehix.com/ if you want to check it out. Once you can get there it really is a pretty nice mobile site. The layout is clean, selection options were a bit funky at times but workable, and it seemed like a perfectly practical site. My car is holding its resale value very nicely, that’s always great to see. Can’t really thank Vehix for that, but it put me in a good mood at least.
I had heard about Everyblock.com in the context of it being the continuation of the chicagocrime.org by Adrian Holovaty. I had never really poked at it though, mostly because it didn’t yet have info for my area yet. But then yesterday I was listening to the Udell interview with Holovaty and picked up some interesting threads.
The first is the applicability of the project to something like augmenting reality. As it is right now Everyblock is sucking in info from all over the place, scraping information out of it and unifying where it can, and presenting all the data together for a location. There’s definitely usefulness for finding out what’s going on in your neighborhood as a direct consumer. And for journalists it helps with trend spotting and information correlation. However if you reorganize the info around rates of change or concentration instead of events you could make some great mobile apps. Like an overlay for a Google maps style app that would alert you if you’re headed into a high crime area. The plan it to emit structured data back out of Everyblock in addition to offering the site directly on top of the data. When that happens it might allow some interesting apps that would otherwise be impractical or impossible right now.
The other bit that I found interesting was Jon’s comment that the evolving role of librarians in local libraries could include organizing and cataloging sources of local information such as the crime data or building permit info that Everyblock is currently doing. That’s an interesting angle on the role of the librarian and the library in our current information rich environment.
There’s an event called BarCamp Bank coming up in Berkeley in a few weeks. I saw that a few people signed up for the event were already listed as interested in digital cash or mobile payment systems. I figure it’ll be a good chance to gather some folks and discuss what options we have available, and I want to kick the conversation off so that we can get to the real meat of the discussion while we’re there.
The first thing I want to say is that existing mobile payments do not work. I’ve heard it said a number of times that mobile “comes with a built in payment system”, but that’s really a load of shit. Allow me to elaborate.
First of all theres the structure and revenue share of the existing payment infrastructure. In the cases where it’s possible to bill back to the customer bill the functionality is backdoored in frequently through premium SMS messaging. The carrier generally takes a large share of the transaction (I hear numbers like 50 percent here in the US, and I’ve been told it’s even worse in India). And of course the transaction isn’t directly from merchant to carrier to customer. Oh no, of course not. Theres the premium SMS provider in the middle as well also wanting their cut. It’s a hostile environment for merchants with way too much lockin for existing players. The base costs to use these systems are so high, and the overhead so steep, that it really discourages lots of potentially interesting usages.
Second is the off-deck payment systems. Stuff like Google Checkout for mobile, PayPal Mobile, and Obopay. First is of course that there are some user interface or user perception issues around the services. They also assume a credit based economy. No problem in the US and Europe, but a horrible problem in Africa, India, and China. “Who cares about people in China” you say? (particularly if you live in the Bay Area, people around here just love to dismiss the rest of the world) Well, ask anyone who watches construction and commodity markets where they think interesting stuff is happening. I bet those folks are interested in China at the very least. For all the nastiness of carrier billing, at least it handles the cash based economy and prepaid cell plans relatively well.
And finally, say we had a magic system that everyone could use with minimal setup and a great experience, every user had access to it, and every online merchant accepted it. Now you start having to worry about some pretty heavy regulation. There are banking and financial regulations meant to insure the basic level of trust. But recently there are also more regulations meant to curb money laundering and nefarious activities. How many people are familiar with those regulations on a global level? Even if we crack the technical problems and solve the user interface issues and gain user trust there’s still some potential issues with the G-men, whoever those shadowy puppetmasters might be.
So thats what we’re looking at. Tough, but things worth tackling normally are. Next post on this topic is a bit of background on whats been tried in the past and what technologies exist. The hat will be tipped to David Chaum I’m sure, but I need to read up a bit before I’m ready for that.
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