Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility
Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom
Silicon Valley MoMo – Feb 8, 2010
Feb 2nd
The Feb 8th Mobile Monday is all about increasing app store sales, a topic that I’ve been personally paying a lot of attention to given the position that Chomp currently occupies in the environment. And guess what, I should actually be able to make it to the event this time! Woohoo! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get out to one, but thankfully getting Kate and Mario to help out has meant the events continue even when I’m plowed under. So drop by and thank the two of them if you come out to the event, and say thanks to our sponsors AdMob and Flurry. Should be a great conversation, hope to see you all there!
Starting up a Posse
Jan 13th
The wraps are off the latest project I’ve been working on: Chomp, a social iPhone application recommendation service. I actually started consulting with them to fill in some time, but liked the app and the people so much that I couldn’t resist jumping in full time. Now that the app is out and I can talk a bit more publicly it’s time to start building up a team. Obviously, about the app itself, the reception has been great and folks seem to love it:
- Geek.com – the one I’m most proud of
- Techcrunch – obTechCrunchShoutout
- ABC News – on the TV!! Not really, they’re talking about us, but the guy is just randomly poking around on an iPhone. Poor TV, you just don’t get it do you?
The goals of the business don’t stop at an iPhone app, we have plans to move into other areas over time. But the iPhone app market is the biggest juiciest lowestest hanging piece of fruit in the mobile arena right now. It would be crazy not to take a bite. Ben can answer a lot more of those style questions than I can however. I’m just here to keep the lights on and the servers running.
We have a jobs page up, but there isn’t too much color to them yet. In particular, I need some folks to join me on backend engineering and operations tasks, so I figured I would shout out here. Right now the team is only 5 people, so it’s a chance to get in at the very start for the right folks. We haven’t yet figured out exactly how the jobs break down, but at a startup job titles don’t really mean that much anyway. Here’s a rundown of the kinds of things I’ve been doing for the last two months, to give you a feel for what we have going on:
- Picked up and finished off a spin of the server side software. Standard LAMP stack with the PHP side built on top of CodeIgniter. There was some general cleanup work like reformatting the server responses to be more consistent across all the API calls, some new features like adding in bookmarking and avatar uploads, and generally operationalizing the code with stats logging, database migrations, processes for background tasks and cleanup.
- Prepping the production deployment systems. Which in this case meant getting Puppet up and going, setting up the modules for the bits of software we were planning to use, bits of custom config for things like the database systems (we’ve tried to set them up to be sharding-friendly right off the bat), and generally setting up the parts of the system we didn’t need till we went live (like load balancing and spreading out the front end web systems, and syslog-ng to pull together all the logs to a central system)
- Setting up system and application monitoring and metrics, so that we have alerts that fire if something seems to be going wrong and pretty graphs to show us where that wrong thing might be.
- Doing a few spins of designing a custom crawler that pulls info out of iTunes so that we can make it available in our app. With the number of apps, the number of regions, the number of languages, and the general lack of any kind of off-the-shelf solution for this, it’s been a pretty complex problem to work out. Our data is pretty timely right now, but this is one area in particular where there’s a lot of room for improvement.
- Adding in some very simple strategies for caching and load shedding if we ever hit the kind of load where we were in danger of degrading performance. Fortunately we’ve yet to have to pull any of the escape valve levers (fingers crossed), but with the system growing as quickly as it’s been growing I’m sure that’s only a matter of time.
Generally, it feels great to be back at the controls of a set of servers experiencing the kind of explosive growth we saw during the early days at AdMob. But there’s definitely more to do than I can handle all by myself. And I know there are plenty of folks out there who are better at the bits and pieces of this than I am, so I would love to be able to peel some of this stuff off to the right people and start scaling the human side before scaling the machine side gets out of control. Plus, when the weather gets nicer, I spend way too much time at the track to be the only person available to respond to ops issues :-)
So if you’re interested, particularly you folks who I’ve worked on projects with before, ping me. mike at chompapps dot com. Yes, this means I’m going to start reading my email again now.
Long Running Background Scripts with CodeIgniter
Nov 3rd
I’ve been working on a project using CodeIgniter recently, and have been trying to clean some stuff up so that long running background scripts use the same code as the live system. Sane, every framework has some way of wiring it up so you can run command line tasks using the same framework as you’re running for web requests, and CodeIgniter is no exception. For some reason stuff that used to run find as bare mysql scripts kept running out of memory when I ran it within CI. Turns out the DB wrapper actually stores all the queries it runs in a big array. Not an issue when processing web requests I’m sure, but definitely an issue when you’re running big background tasks. If you want to keep your scripts from running out of memory it’s easy enough to do:
$this->db->save_queries = false;
Zend Server Community Edition vs Snow Leopard
Sep 2nd
After upgrading to Snow Leopard we’ve had only one real issue so far, Zend Server Community Edition didn’t want to start up. Well, technically, parts of it. The apache instance was running, by mysql and the admin interface were dead. I found this post about watchdog errors, but even after putting in the fix for lighthttpd I still wasn’t getting the services starting up. Same deal for Tony. Poking around in the startup files it looked like mysql data was owned by user 103, and the mysql scripts were trying to start as user ‘zend’, however I have no zend user on my system. I wasn’t able to find anything about it, but I figured hell, let me give it a try and create a user Zend. This is the command to run from the terminal (funky huh?):
sudo dscl . -create /Users/zend UniqueID 103
Which creates a zend user.. somewhere.. I’m not familiar with that bit of OS X magic yet. It’s not in /etc/passwd, but if you ‘ls -l /usr/local/zend/mysql’ you should see the data directory owned by zend again. Now just restart and you should be peachy:
sudo /usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart
Works for Tony and I at least, so we figured we would share. голова болит ÑÐµÐºÑ Ð³Ð¾Ð»Ð¾Ð²Ð° болит ÑекÑ
Mobile Monday Discount Codes for Mobilize
Aug 20th
I already posted this to the MoMo blog, and sent an email out to the mailing list. But for those of you not subscribed to either of those (and I know you’re out there, cause you keep yelling at me for not posting the MoMo events here too), here it is again:
Surj from GigaOm pinged me to pass along some discount codes for the upcoming Mobilize conference on Sept. 10th. The normal cost for the event $545. If you get a ticket before midnight on Sunday here’s a link you can use to register for just $399:
http://mobilize09.eventbrite.com/?discount=MOMOSF399
that code will stop working at midnight on Sunday however, in just a few days. After Sunday you can register with this link to get in for $445:
http://mobilize09.eventbrite.com/?discount=MOMOSF100
Here’s their info about the conference:
——–
You are in the middle of the mobile data boom. Now make it work for you!
In 2007, mobile data sales in the U.S were $23 billion. In 2009, they’re on target to reach $45 billion. Keep in mind that growth has occurred in just two years — and in the midst of a tough economy. Now imagine if we turn up connection speeds to 100Mbps, then 1Gbps. We believe increased speeds will further expand existing markets.
The much-lauded success of the iPhone, with its 1 billion downloaded apps, is just the tip of an immense iceberg. We believe netbooks and new consumer demand for a wireless web will kindle growth in services, technologies and devices for the communications industry.
Keynotes from Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha and also T-Mobile CTO, Cole Brodman
At Mobilize 09, you will learn about:
- New insights into a future marketplace with gigabit wireless
- Innovating mobile products for your customers
- Strategies for monetization of apps
- Making the most of mobile analytics for mining new profits
- The netbook boom and market needs
- Understanding the future of app delivery stores and distribution
- How social media like Facebook and Twitter are becoming a core service for mobile consumers
- The ideas investors are funding and what they are avoiding
See full speaker lineup and topics on our website at: http://mobilizeconf.com/
——–
The folks at GigaOm put together fantastic events, I’ve been to quite a few of them. When it comes to mobile stuff in particular they have a fantastic set of knowledge between all the folks there. Check out the schedule:
http://events.gigaom.com/mobilize/09/schedule/
Should be a fantastic event, definitely worth checking out!
Silicon Valley Mobile Investment Report
Aug 3rd
Kate pulled together a great set of numbers to put together an Investment in the Silicon Valley Mobile Industry report. Interesting stuff in there. The bump in social media investment was obvious to anyone working in the industry, so seeing that reflected in the category investment over time chart is a good sanity check. One interesting bit from the report: less money than expected is going into apps and software. I find that a bit disturbing. Money going into platforms and services, but people still hesitant about the apps themselves. Could be for a whole bunch of reasons – folks just need less money to try out app ideas, so they’re no longer as frequently venture based for instance. However, it’s also possible that everyone sees the potential of mobile, but once again, the rubber just isn’t quite hitting the road.
There are a bunch of success stories within the app stores. And the app stores are changing behaviors, making mobile a more hospitable environment than it was. For the most part. The overall question is how much of this is evolution and how much is revolution. The tectonic shift is still going on, and it’s hard to say if what we’re looking at in a year is going to resemble what we have in any way at all. Blowback from the policies related app store approval have some folks thinking about web distribution for mobile devices again. And from the looks of things maybe web distribution is what was really planned for from the start. We certainly have a much more hospitable web based mobile environment, at least on the platforms where app development is also an option.
Depending on how you’re looking at the market, there are very different monetization models and potential market sizes. See the iFund presentation from iPhoneDevCamp for one particular take on where the app market is headed. Other say they think there’s little money in app sales cause the overall volume of the app store sales is estimated to be about $500M for the year, Apple takes 30% of that, leaving about $350M for developers, divided up by market share – and for some folks that’s just not a healthy environment to build in. For instance if you want to build a billion dollar company, you can’t do it inside a market with a volume of $500M. Me, I don’t want to build a billion dollar company, I would be happy to trade lower overall value for a higher chance of success. So for me, building for the app store right now is just fine.
Looking forward to discussing more at the Silicon Valley MoMo meeting tonight. школа ÑротичеÑкого танца владивоÑток
MobileBeat2009 Top Startup Competition
Jun 27th
Matt just posted that the MobileBeat 2009 Startup Competition has extended their deadline for submissions to July 1st. I caught up with Matthaus out at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona to chat about some of the stuff they have planned for the event. For instance they have Michael Abbott from Palm speaking. Although I’ve seen a bunch of Palm folks out at events these days, it’s the first time I’ve seen someone from their crew speaking since the Pre release. And there’ll be a bunch of folks from the funding side too : Redpoint, Qualcomm Ventures, Blackberry Partners, Kleiner Perkins iFund, T-Mobile Ventures, and others.
Lately lots of VCs have been pinging me actually trying to get a handle on the mobile market. Things have radically shifted over the last two years. The current global economic crisis, major new platforms popping up, existing entrenched players making serious drives to keep relevance, and the redistribution of power and money from a few large players out to a larger number of smaller players has made the market really difficult to decode. Meanwhile, mobile is hot and everyone sees that there’s interesting activity going on. Venture folks still have money to put into the right startups, but finding the right startups is even harder than it used to be.
It’s definitely a unique time in mobile with respect to being able to launch a disruptive startup that carves out it’s own niche in the restructured market. People are open to ideas now that would have seemed ridiculous last year. And the partners and money are readily available if you can make a strong case for what you’re doing. So if you’ve got something that fits the bill, sign up to pitch your startup on July 16th and hopefully I’ll see you at the event!
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Not Sure I Buy the Android Fragmentation Argument
Jun 3rd
There seems to be a lot of “take it for granted” style discussion around the possibility of Android fragmentation. Without strong top down control of the platform, folks seem to think that we’re going to end up with hundreds of versions of Android, all slightly different. This was the nightmare that mobile Java became. There were large engineering teams dedicated to and specialized in taking your write-once-run-anywhere app and actually getting it to work on the volume of handsets you wanted to hit.
It’s true that technically anyone who wants to build a slightly different version of Android can, so in that sense there CAN be fragmentation. However, the ecosystem has also fundamentally changed. Before we had the carriers tightly controlling the channel, dictating what was in and out in terms of hardware, enforcing strict standards on the software they pushed to users, and doing everything they could to keep anyone else from pushing software to users. In that world the burden of dealing with fragmentation was with the developers, and the benefit went to the carriers. The carriers controlled the channel, so fragmentation continued.
The one lesson that everyone in mobile seems to have learned over the last year was that the carriers were really bad at determining the right hardware and managing that application and content catalog. It’s why everyone is jumping on the App Store Bandwagon. One of the side-effects of that is that it breaks the strongly controlled content and application channel. If ATT decides that their Android version is going to do Bluetooth slightly different, sure, go ahead. But how can they strongarm Android developers who produce Bluetooth apps into making an ATT specific version? The control isn’t really there any more. Developers might do it, but only if ATT is offering up enough incremental sales revenue to make the port worthwhile. Right now developers frequently do it cause they’re contractually obligated to if they want ATT to promote their app.
Anyone who’s worked in open source knows that forks are technically possible, but practically uncommon. When the “market” is completely open folks tend to follow a path that serves them best. And it’s a reinforcing path. Even when someone with vested interest tries to keep a fork distinct, normally the burden ends up being more on the controller than anyone else. Forks tend to get folded back or die off pretty quickly. I think the same thing should happen with Android. Sure, people might try at the start to get a leg up by including proprietary features and customizations. But in the long run if Android as a whole works, the only person they’re hurting with a fork is themselves (to the tune of a decreased application catalog). And although it’s possible for them to create a custom application catalog with some differentiation in the short term and attempt to keep that differentiation going, there’s no difference between that and the strongly controlled channel that we currently see failing today. The cost of trying to do so will outweigh the benefit of joining the mainline. толÑтые проÑтитутки
Android 1.5 Update (Cupcake)
May 22nd
Looks like the official cupcake release is delayed a bit I was able to do a manual install of cupcake on my dev phone (Thanks Debajit for the pointers!). Top feature I was looking forward to is the onscreen keyboard. Especially somewhere like the browser, it was always a pain before to have to flip open to type something, flip closed to view, flip, flip, flip. The onscreen keyboard has been working great. Few mistyped letters here and there, but I still do that on my iPod touch as well, so I’m not faulting it that.
Probably the most interesting point from converting over (I’m going to try carrying my Android phone instead of the E71 for the next two weeks and see how that goes) was actually more service than phone. The contacts app has an option to copy contacts off the SIM, but I always have too many phonebook entries for that to work. I run out of storage space on the SIM trying to copy my contacts over.
So what I had done last time was use Funambol to upload my contacts from my S60 phone, and then downloaded the connector app to my G1 to pull down contacts. It worked okay, but some of the data was somewhat munged (most contacts ended up in “last name, first name” format when they came over to the G1, and it just looked ugly). I was going to do that again to sync over the new contacts I have on my Nokia. But then I remembered that Nokia Sync supports S60 now, and decided to give that a try instead. It ended up working out quite well! Once I had my contacts all cleaned up (and now they live in gmail, where I get a lot more use out of them) syncing back to the Nokia seems to work almost as well as syncing from the G1. Have to see how it works over time, but it looks good. Getting S60 supported in Google Sync is a pretty slick move in terms of being able to entice over new users to Android.
One thing that still doesn’t work out quite perfectly for me is the account support. I have a main Gmail address I use for all sorts of personal stuff, and collects a half-dozen of my other email forward currently. It’s where I’m connected to folks on Latitude. Then I have a Google for domains setup for work, and that’s where I store my work emails and my actual calendar. Problem is I can’t get this mix of accounts to work quite the way I want them to. I would like to use email with both inboxes (and default to personal email when other apps are sending by default), I would like calendar to use my apps for domains account, and I would like maps to use my gmail account (I put a little Latitude badge in the sidebar of this blog with a happy little motorcycle zooming around wherever I happen to have last been, I love it!).
So what I’ve ended up with is my main gmail account embedded as the base setting in the phone, and using the browser to access my work email and calendar. Not horribly slick cause I don’t get notifications. However, the browser uses local storage for both calendar and email, so they’re available offline. Unexpected and very welcome! Still, I would love to see multiple account support in the native apps. But I’m going to have to fool around with the browser capabilities in this release. The mobile mail app in the browser is making me drool. Great stuff.
I also downloaded the 1.5 update of the SDK to poke around still. Seems like from the application developer side Android is getting little love. The number of devices in market along with the demographic skew of the audience just don’t make for a compelling target. I’m pretty anxious to see how the upcoming devices shift that however. I’m hearing lots of the old hands from mobile saying that the lack of a formal program to facilitate OEM integrations is a limiting factor in how fast Android can spread. Lots of manufacturers might be interested in it, but they tend to flail around when trying to get projects done with it and have no one to turn to. I’m definitely still rooted in the “cautiously optimistic” camp. The way that should work out with Android is that someone will put together a professional services firm disassociated from Google to help those folks plan and implement their efforts. And I think there’s still plenty of room and time for that to happen.
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June Silicon Valley Mobile Monday
May 18th
After being offline for a while, the Mobile Monday events in the Bay Area have spun back up. We had a fantastic event up in San Francisco in May. Now we’re going to have an event down in Palo Alto on June 1st
. I like the format Kate has put together for these demo events. They’re slide presentations instead of on-device demos. But because the slide decks are merged into one and done from a single laptop it keeps things flowing. A lot fewer of the AV hiccups and no downtime while presenters swap around.
Ewan was at the May event recording and interviewing for Mobile Industry Review , hopefully he’ll be able to make it out for the June event as well. The turnout in general was fantastic, lots of great energy from everyone, tons of folks working on new ideas. Thanks to Skyhook we’re able to have free booze and some swank locations as well, which always makes folks happy. Feels good to be back!
