Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Very happy to see Mozilla talking about mobile browsing at Web 2.0 Expo. W00t! Progress is being made, makes me all tingly happy.

I was fooling around a bit with the screen rotation support for Maemo this morning on my N800 (didn’t want to risk mucking with the N810 yet). I would put up some screenshots, but for some reason the screenshot applet is messing up in my version and trying to still take a landscape image. Not sure how those screenshots on the sse2 page were taken, looks like they’re running the same load applet with integrated screenshot that I am. The instructions on that page worked great for me, booted the kernel without flashing, install the xomap package and use the installer for the rotate applet.

There’s still a bunch of funkiness for me: onscreen keyboard on the N800 works, but is really smushed, orientation of the dpad doesn’t change so you have to take that into account, can’t really use the home menu rotated cause it goes straight off the screen. Some of this stuff could be hacked around if the base packages of the OS2008 user environment were also open source. Hint. Hint.

Generally though the rotation itself works fantastic. I installed the Firefox release to muck around with that, but forgot that it doesn’t have an onscreen keyboard. Have to dig out the bluetooth keyboard to poke at it. IUI applications look much slicker on the rotated browser for example, with the screen format being much closer to the expected.

I was mulling some of the geo hacks for the N810 that are out there now. Maemo Mapper is a great open source mapping application, there’s a little app that geocodes photos as well. Then there’s Maemo WordPy for posting to Wordpress, and I was wondering if that allowed for geocoding posts. And I was pondering the user of the N810 as a geocontent production device. As well as wondering if the geoaware primitives we could use in mobile browsers would at all be helped by the evolving state of mobile Firefox.

All the little hacks on the N810 could really be solved more easily on the web if there were a way to hook the stuff together. What I started thinking about was hacking around with the new firefox release and see if I could get it to shove geoinfo into the outgoing headers. But then I realized most of the stuff I wanted to fool around with wouldn’t take the headers in anyway. So for now instead I made just a simple little python launcher app that pulls your current location from the GPS and launches a browser with Google Maps pointed at your current location. Very simple, but I imagine with some basic URL crafting you can use it to create geocoded Wordpress posts or geotag images uploaded to flickr. Maybe I can make it a little homescreen applet to display your location and launch one of a number of sites with your location fed in.

Thinking about the way the web facing geographic services have worked out, passing a URL with the location filled in seems to make more sense right now. There was a geo-headers ietf draft floating around at one point.. but I can’t find that as an official version. Are there services out there that use it? Or something else that’s common across services?

Inspired by some screenshots that came through my feed reader the other day, I updated the firmware on my N810 and installed a few new bits of hackery:

Those are transparent homescreen apps, and more important than looking slick (if that’s possible) they’re written in python! Homescreen hackery here I come!

Getting the packages installed is a bit of a pain. They don’t one click install unless you install two packages by hand. I had to download python-hildondesktop and hildon-desktop-python loader from this site in order to be able to install and use them. And yes, download and install manually, the app installer doesn’t like them. Download them to your tablet somewhere, become root (I do that with an ssh to localhost myself), and run dpkg -i for both of them. Then you’ll be able to install the actual applets and enable them. w00t!

The second part of a series of mobile payments posts I’m making to get ready for BarCampBankSF later on this month. The first part was a problem overview for the issues. This part is about the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) that stand in the way of trying to get a global system going for moving money around.

I was going to hold off on this topic for a while, but then I ran across this gem of a report from our beloved US government explaining why mobile payments could destroy the world. The whole topic area right here just strikes me as backward, small minded, and at it’s base just really stupid. Here we have the potential for a fantastic system, uncoupling the concept of money from bits of paper and metal. Making it easy for people to do what they want with their money when they want. Being able to reach out and help friends and relatives in far away places instantly.

But instead of seeing the potential upside (not, potential upside, most of us don’t have the ability to do the things discussed in that report under the current set of services), instead what’s called out is the potential for abuse by a very small percentage of the population. I just don’t get that mentality at all. It’s like not allowing cars because people could get drunk and drive around in them. Or declaring that everyone has to walk around naked cause someone could hide weapons under their clothes. It’s just absurd. Why cripple everyone because you’re concerned about the behavior of a few? Apparently all you have to do is include the word “terrorism” and you can propose just about anything you want.

I personally don’t buy it at all. If you want to cut off the potential use of a system by terrorism, sure, by all means! I’m not going to stand in your way. But if you want to cripple a system that dictates what I can do with my money, how I can do it, and when I can do it, well then we have a bit of an issue. If you want to cut off terrorism do things that affect terrorists and money launderers. Inconveniencing everyone in order to do so is just lazy thinking. Unfortunately people have strong and irrational feelings about things like this cause they feel their safety is threatened (Surprise! You never really had safety, you’ve just become more aware of not having it), and any bit of absolutist thinking they can hold on to in order to make them feel better. Well darnit, that’s just going to have to do. Cutting off terrorism by cutting off their funding is one of those areas (Surprise! That’s not going to work either, probably won’t even slow it down).

Unfortunately what we’re working at here, at heart, is a fundamental change in the way people think about money. And like any major change, that really makes people nervous. Especially people who have a vested interest in the particular limitations, controls, and structures brought about by the incidental effects of the current system. People like governments and banks, who unfortunately are holding most of the cards in this game. In order to figure out a workable system we either need to work around the folks who would normally stand in our way, or convert them to our side. Most of the efforts that have come before are based around a third option of giving incentive to the existing folks and caving in to their restrictions. I don’t consider that option to be on the table, limiting a new system to make the players in the old system happy isn’t a path to progress in my opinion.

Converting the existing folks to our side seems like it could be pretty difficult. Hard to say though with the setup the way it is in mobile payments. With the carrier sitting in the middle of every significant transaction we might be able to play the banks against the carriers to come up with a system that works at scale to break open that market for the banks. But the banks have their own sets of issues. Working completely around the existing system might be the real option we have. Direct user to user payments with something only vaguely resembling a bank in the middle. Using alternative “payment” methods like trading prepaid minutes or prepaid messages. That gives us a bit of a foothold, but how does the regulation and legal arena look for schemes like that? For instance can I take $25 from someone in CA and at their request provide it to someone in NY for withdrawl? What needs to be reported and recorded in that case, and what base restrictions are there? If someone has good pointers please share them.

A few of the things I’ve been playing around with on the side lately have the common theme of inversion of control. Making one side of an interaction consume something that it normally emits or emits something that it normally consumes. Take the PAMP stack post at dev.mobi for example, a handset running Apache, PHP, and Mysql. On my own I’ve been working on HTTP controlling the Mac mini hooked up to my TV. I want a generalize HTTP interface to the stuff I normally do on my television so that I can control it with my N810 or iPhone.

The whole theme of “your mobile as your remote control of the world” has been floating around for a long time. And I’m kinda curious how easy it would be to get there at this point. For instance if I sit in front of my TV I normally do so with at least one of my devices in my hand. Admit it, you do the same. We’re all ADD now, so better to just embrace it and figure out how to feed the demons rather than spending naval gazing time figuring out if we should be doing it or not. What I would actually like to be able to do is to “switch channels” to something from my device. I’m watching Scrubs for instance, but I run across a video that someone linked to while I’m dicking around reading feeds on my N810. I want to be able to use the N810 to send that video to my TV, switch channels to youTube so to speak.

There’s MythTV stuff out there for controlling your DVR from the N810 (there’s a dedicated package actually). But they’re all point solutions. I want raw exposed APIs for this stuff. Today I want to send videos to my television, but who knows what I might want to display there next. Maybe a dynamic web page that I want to toss up on the big screen while I dig through the details about something else on my device. Although videocasting and the like have really increased the unbundling of media, and DVRs and related technologies given people much more control over reintegrating their own channels, the viewport itself still remains somewhat under external control.

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.

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.

Looking at the recent updates on maemo.org I noticed a utility for putting the USB controller into host mode. I had seen Kate’s post about modifying a standard cable or getting a USB On the Go cable to take advantage of host mode. So I didn’t expect it to work when I just hooked up my USB flash drive with the shipped cable and an adapter, but it did:

Here’s a shot of the df output:

Sexy huh? So of course the next thing I was wondering was if my 250 gig travel USB hard drive would work. No dice though. Even with a powered hub. With the native compiler, thats a great little standalone system.

It looks like the world at large is starting to take up the challenge of understanding what it means to base an effort around the economics of abundance instead of scarcity. It’s already a pretty common thread with folks who geek out about things like nanotech, but didn’t really seem to be getting wide attention till just the last few days. It’s something I’ve struggled with explaining for a long time. I’ve been working on and with Linux for more than a decade, been running a free event for mobile enthusiasts for almost 4 years, helped out with barcamps and other community events, and most recently started working on a free service aimed at making every web page mobile.

Over the years, every step of the way, there’s always been someone saying “you know, people value something based on how much they pay for it, not how much it’s worth.” Which really sounds like it gets at a core truth, if for no other reason than because everyone seems to say it. But Linux has succeeded despite all the insistence by all the experts that it would never be able to compete “in the real world”, open source in general continues to roll along and gain more and more steam all the time, open community events are becoming more popular and more accepted (especially within tech). I’m hoping that this thread works itself out and that Chris can do for the economics of abundance what he did for the long tail - turn it into such an accepted and obvious model that folks start to laugh about how often it’s mentioned. It would really save me a lot of time in explaining the things I do. So please, read the Wired article, and some of the follow on conversations and earlier posts:

• http://ventureblog.com/articles/2006/10/chris_anderson_1.php
• http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061026/102329.shtml
• http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml
• http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/10/the_economics_o.html
• http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/the_freemium_bu.html
• http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html

Hopefully they’ll do a better job of explaining why you can’t dismiss free stuff than I’ve been able to.