Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

The dotMobi folks are up for an emerging technology award at CTIA for Instant Mobilizer. Instant Mobilizer is the evolution of Mowser, so of course it’s got a special place in my heart. The dotMobi folks have done an awesome job bringing it to market and adding some innovative mobile-specific features. Check out the info at the CTIA site and click “Mark as Favorite” if you like what they’ve done. I’m pulling for you folks, good luck!

I’m seeing more and more mobile payments systems getting used in actual products. Stuff like Zong, Paymo and Mobillcash. Surprisingly enough, the places I’m hearing about systems like this being used are in social games (for example social applications using Offerpal) instead of in mobile applications. One of the criticisms leveled at mobile advertising pretty frequently is that it doesn’t make much sense to have an advertising system built somewhere that commerce isn’t flowing. Why advertise on mobile phones if few people are buying through mobile phones?

I still hear pretty regularly that trying to deliver a paid application globally on mobile phones (note, I’m talking about systems outside of the app store models that have cropped up recently, they’re definitely an exception to just about everything) is at best a pain. Often it involves enough cost, revenue share, and engineering that the economics frequently don’t work out. So you’re stuck going through an existing channel even if you would technically have a route directly to consumers. I was expecting that to eventually get sorted out, that someone would crack the global mobile payments problem, allow unbanked users to pay using premium SMS, and deliver the platform in a package that developers could integrate without having to bend over backwards. And that has happened. But the unexpected part is that the uptake seems to be on the wired web, as an alternative payment form alongside credit cards. I was expecting the evolution to be that the systems would be used to back transactions originated on the mobile first, and then eventually start creeping onto the web as well.

For anyone who hasn’t poked around with the systems yet, the flow goes something like this when I pay with a mobile payments system on the web:

1. I decide to purchase a weeks supply of heroin for my virtual junkie for $5 in real world money (my virtual junkie is trying to make it to Rock Star status, adding heroin is the fastest way)
2. When asked how I want to pay I select “by mobile phone” and enter in my phone number
3. I get an SMS saying “Do you want to pay Virtual Junkie $5? Reply with Y to pay”
4. I send an SMS response, replying with Y
5. I get a confirmation back saying that I’ve paid the $5
6. My junkie gets his fix in the game. No more bugs crawling under his skin, excellent, everyone is happy

Actually a pretty nice system compared to paying by credit card. With most credit card systems I have a bunch of info to enter in, if I even have the card I want to use on me. And for folks who don’t have credit cards, like those using prepaid accounts where they charge up with cash each month (or kids who have their parents paying their phone bill), it opens them up to online purchases. Cool, nice, makes sense, I’m happy it happened, lots of good going on there.

So why didn’t this end up opening up mobile commerce more? Or did it, and I’m just not hearing about it? Why does Zong list all online properties and no mobile-specific properties in their list of partners? Did the new commerce line just follow the existing line of purchases? Are folks still hesitant to kick off a transaction from a phone, whereas they just “trust” the web more? They’re paying with their phone, so it’s not an aversion to using the mobile itself as a payment mechanism. But maybe an aversion to starting the transaction on the mobile. Or is it a technical/user experience glitch? Does punching out to reply to an SMS often kill the interaction going on in the mobile browser? Leading to a large dropoff or user disappointment when they can’t find their way back to their purchase? Or is it simply that social and online services are performing so much better than mobile services that the incremental gain of opening up unbanked transactions for existing online purchases way outweighs the benefits of opening up commerce completely tied to the mobile?

I’m pretty sure this is indicative of an opportunity of some kind. For instance, Apple is supposedly adding in-application payments options so that users can pay for goods or service updates within an app after purchase. So there’s probably a decent amount of demand for a system of the kind. I would assume that existing developers could probably use something like Zong or Paymo with some pretty minimal infrastructure to provide a system of their own to get in-app payments working today. We’ll have to see how granular Apple gets with their payment system, and what the terms end up being. Having a bunch of options popping up at the same time should lead to a nice healthy market. And help to keep the Apple based system in check should they start using their position as channel controller to try to squeeze developers. порно фото скачать

I posted yesterday about wanting to use my phone to publish my location in realtime, and I got a bunch of fantastic responses both in the comments and as emails (thanks folks!) I fooled around with some of them with varying degrees of success. Nokia Sport Tracker seems like it would be great! However, I can’t figure out how to make the phone app do it’s job. Maybe my fault, I have an E71 and it’s not listed as a supported model. I’ll have to dig out my N95 and try that one. However, on the Android side, I put FirePin on my phone and was able to upload and share out info about my route (course, it only has to points, cause I have the phone on wifi only right now). FirePin supposedly also works with FireEagle based on the comments I got. But I can’t figure out how that’s supposed to work.

Generally I’ve been hearing frequently about how location based services are really starting to happen this time around. Yea, yea, I know. That’s what we’ve said every year for the last decade. Don’t even bother, I’ve heard it all before. However, this time we have some open platforms with GPS built into the handset, which means there’s a way to work around most of the problems inherent in the carrier based system we had before. Any by “problems” I mean “crippling cost structure”. I can kinda understand how that seems like a more mature market for location based services. Because end users can grant permission to an application for it to directly grab location info, there are all kinds of services out there.

However, I would hardly count that as platform maturity. That’s a degree of market maturity, but not platform maturity. Sure, it’s easier to build a location based app. Just plop your application into any one of the silos that folks have built to control the deployment of your application and management of your data, and blammo! New app. Yea, not the way I normally think about these things. Which is not to belittle the efforts like FireEagle, I just think there are a few missing bits.

Here’s the kinds of stuff I was expecting to see:

• A somewhat generic app that records location information. Recording information to a local file seems to be pretty decent, I guess there are standards floating around for that. However, there doesn’t seem to be much of a standardized interface/protocol for streaming location information up to a server. GPSGate has a protocol that seems to operate over UDP and TCP, but that doesn’t seem to be an accepted public format.
• Some server component that I can chuck on one of my machines to accept samples sent up by that little client shim.
• Basic tools to display those samples on a map. Google has provided most of the backbone and made it pretty simple to use. But there’s also Openstreetmap for those who are Google alergic.

That basic set of functionality is a write-once bit of infrastructure. It gets us out of the “Oh yea, FirePin is great!! Wait, no, you can’t use it on your Nokia”. Not that the tools won’t evolve. But there should be an open set of base clients for all the different mobile platforms, and then anyone who wants to build a web app that pulls in location info can just say “Okay, add local.rowehl.com:9900 to your location client to start updating the Mike-o-matic pile of gold finder app with your current location” Instead we have all these different point solution client applications, frequently hardcoded to send location to a given server. Dumb.

I’m planning to go on an extended motorcycle trip in May. Whenever I leave to go somewhere for more than a few hours and my friends know about it I tend to get a lot of calls. They get very concerned and call to make sure I’m not lying on the side of the road somewhere bleeding. Can’t blame them, the precedent has been set. And hey, it feels good to know that next time I actually am lying on the side of the road bleeding there should be someone looking for me pretty quick even if I don’t have a sweeper following me. However, it also means that there are a bunch of worried people out there if I don’t answer my phone for some reason, for which I feel guilty. “I should be able to solve this with technology!” says Mike the geek.

Immediate thought, Google Latitude. I can keep recording info about where I am in the background with both the Android and Symbian phones I have. That way folks can see where I’m going as I’m going, and if I don’t answer the phone they at least know I’m moving. Which should mean I’m okay, unless I’m wedged under a truck getting dragged down the road. I haven’t figured out a technical solution to detecting that, so I’m leaving that corner case off the table for now.

However, the only way I can see to get info out of Latitude is through the iGoogle widget. Not a bad way for it to work, but I want to just post my location to my blog. Seriously, I don’t give a crap about privacy. I wanna publish where I am for everyone. And I’m not going to get my mom and my sisters to sign up for Google accounts, just not gonna happen. Is there a way to do a background update of location info and publish it your own website for example? Or a system where I can suck it back out easily and map the results?

Another option is to geotag photos and publish them on Flickr. That works, but requires that I’m taking photos in order to update folks about where I am. Perhaps a cool addition, but doesn’t get to the root problem I’m trying to solve, which effectively comes down to passively instrumenting myself using my cell phone and publishing that info as realtime as possible online publicly. I’m sure I could knock together an Android app to do it pretty quickly, but I have to assume there’s something out there already.