AdMob Japanese

Posted on December 11, 2007 by miker

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…

Posted in AdMob | 2 Comments

OS 2008 Tests

Posted on December 11, 2007 by miker

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.

Posted in Maemo, Open Source, ThisIsMobility | 3 Comments

Mobile Messaging Recap

Posted on December 11, 2007 by miker

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:

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.

Posted in Community, ThisIsMobility | 1 Comment

OS X Disconnects with N95 as Modem

Posted on December 10, 2007 by miker

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?

Posted in Technology, ThisIsMobility | 1 Comment

Hacking N810 After Firmware Update

Posted on December 10, 2007 by miker

The folks at AdMob got me an N810 as a going away present:

N810 from AdMob

Omar took the time to poke around and ask Russ what I was lusting after but didn’t already have, and the N810 was at the top of the list. As if I didn’t already have enough good stuff to say about the folks there, they went and piled even more icing on the cake. Thanks everyone!

I’ve already screwed it up, but then fixed it. So it’s all good. Just want to lay down the order of operations in case anyone else runs across it. My problem was pretty much the same as the one described here, after updating the firmware the internal memory card was getting mounted read-only. I discovered this because I was trying to install apps using the package manager and it was failing. The app manager log viewer showed the errors as /media/mmc2 being read-only. I think this was related to me setting up swap on the internal storage card and it being on when I did the firmware upgrade.

The kicker was that I had yet to install becomeroot or SSH, and I hadn’t reset the passwords. So how do you unmount and reformat the internal card on the N810 pre-hackery? Here it is:

  • Enable RD mode using the flasher. Despite the indication to the contrary on the HowDoIBecomeRoot page, you can enable RD mode on the N810 to enable access to gainroot. Just run ‘flasher-3.0-static –enable-rd-mode’ using the same process described for firmware updates (plug in the N810 with the power off, run command, power on while holding home key).
  • Now you should be able to use ‘sudo gainroot’ from xterm (which is distributed with the base OS, interesting) to get root access to the device.
  • Unmount the internal card using ‘umount /media/mmc2′.
  • Reformat the internal card, which will destroy all the data on there. For me this wasn’t an issue cause I had yet to put anything at all on the device. The command I used was ‘fsck.vfat -a /dev/mmcblk0p1′, which is a slightly different device name than given in the Internet Tablet Talk forums, I think there’s just a typo in that version.
  • Reboot the device and run ‘mount’ from the command line, you should see /media/mmc2 as read-write mounted now.
  • Do a little victory dance.
  • I installed openssh and reset the passwords for both the standard user account and root account.
  • Disable RD mode using the flasher using ‘flasher-3.0-static –disable-rd-mode’. Power consumption and response times seem to really suffer with RD mode left on, so I always turn it back off now.

Seems like a really nasty firmware update bug too, if I weren’t prone to hackery of the sort or attentive with respect to what’s causing errors I could have easily assumed an incorrect root cause for these issues. I was already on my way down the path of cursing the package repositories for including screwed up dependencies before I realized the app installer log indicated a completely unexpected error from the underlying tools. The package manager should really throw a better error for something like that.

Posted in AdMob, Maemo, ThisIsMobility | 11 Comments

Where the Wild Things Are

Posted on December 7, 2007 by miker

wild_things.jpg

Today is my last official day at AdMob! It’s always hard to leave something you love and a group of people you enjoy. But it’s kind of like leaving home for the first time. It’s a necessary step you need to take at some point if you’re going to continue your personal advancement, even if you’re leaving behind something great.

I’ve been pretty buried with stuff to do over the last few days, and I’m going to be out of town for the weekend, so unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to post about the few things I wanted to recap. But I’ll be back next week, and if all goes to plan I’ll be back with some big news and a lot to talk about. Have a great weekend, see you on the other side!

Posted in ThisIsMobility | 2 Comments

Messaging Questions

Posted on December 3, 2007 by miker

The topic of tonight’s Mobile Monday is messaging (the lineup is here). One of the big questions I have is how do you use messaging together with the mobile web to make a better application for end users? As far as I know there’s no way to generically allow users to sign up to get updates from the mobile web.

Lots of times when we have discussions about building applications for mobile phones, and the discussion tips toward mobile web stuff, someone pops up and says “hey, this isn’t just about building the little brother of the web. Mobile phones are special, they’re always on, they’re personal, they’re asynchronous”. And we all nod because of course that’s correct, this shouldn’t be about just building a smaller version of the wired web.

Okay, so lets try to do that. For instance the simplest way I can think of to make the mobile web more mobile enabled is to allow folks to request updates. There’s a reason it’s one of the first things that folks like Myspace and Facebook add to the mix, notifications are kinda the first step. So say I would like to enable that for my mobile web site. How? There are some services that allow me to create a notification group, or I can do it myself using an aggregator of my choosing. But then I have to pay for every message that I send out, and if my application is successful that can be a large cost.

It doesn’t really make sense to say that mobile web applications should respect the mobile disposition of users and not just be smaller versions of the wired web, but then set an arbitrary and relatively high pricepoint per message and demand that application providers hit it. The reason that so many discussions currently about mobile applications tip toward mobile web is that it’s an open and free platform. Users can either choose to pay for the kilobyte usage charge if they want to download a page, or get an unlimited data service. What’s the equivalent for messaging? The payment is normally on the sender end, inverse of what it is for accessing a web page. You would have to have users pay you for the right to sign up for notifications. That’s a whole lot of friction, and in the US at least users are already paying for their messaging plan. They don’t understand why they have to pay again for receiving messages from my website.

The model there just seems to be broken, which is why I assume there are so many SMS services companies running around solving all the different issues. It’s great they’re out there working through the issues, but the overall setup just seems to be broken. It’s a great person to person communications mechanism, there’s a ton of usage for it. And in some niche areas like voting for American Idol it can be a great revenue stream.

But to tell a mobile website developer that “Hey, you should think about SMS as well, there are X billion SMS capable phones out there!” is really a misrepresentation of their addressable market. Reaching all those phones requires that you be able to extract a value per outbound message of somewhere around 6 cents. No one bothers to say that when they’re gushing about the addressable size of the SMS market.

Posted in Community, ThisIsMobility | 3 Comments

Fixing HTML

Posted on December 2, 2007 by miker

Douglas Crockford put up a document titled Fixing HTML that I think can best be summarized using his own words from the document intro as a “proposal for a kinder, gentler HTML 5″. I agree with a lot of the stuff he has in there, though I’m definitely not that hard core of a web weenie. However some of the stuff also seems to make life harder for the mobile web folks. Is that really a problem? Has the evolution of mobile handsets and the browsers that go with them eliminated the need for simplified parsing and special treatment? Hard to say. The “HTML Ecosystem” is a bit different in mobile than it is online. Here’s a quick rundown of the participants:

  • Content Producers – This role exists for the online world as well, it’s simply the author of a page. Sometimes their disposition is much different than when online however. Maybe content producers have already made web content for the online world and get frustrated that their skills and knowledge doesn’t always transfer over.
  • Standards Bodies – Like the W3C need to balance the needs of all these folks somehow. And within mobile the early standards were produced by a completely different set of folks using a completely different take on the technologies and how the environment would play out.
  • Authoring Tools – People making software that makes it easier for content producers to make their pages. Normally that means abstracting away the details of the markup that goes into a page so that the author doesn’t need to see it. But even if the authoring tools provider follows all the standards their markup could still produce errors when fed into something like the dotMobi ready.mobi testing tool. How do you provide an authoring tool for a target that’s always shifting?
  • Browser Providers – Folks implementing the browsers themselves. Lately more and more effort in the mobile arena seems to be consolidating behind the WebKit browser engine. It’s used in the Nokia Open Source Browser and in the browser on the iPhone. That’s been nice, you can expect a degree of consistency there now across devices. But Mozilla has also reentered the fray saying they’re going to be revamping their mobile efforts. And there are a ton of existing browsers out there with their own takes on the standards, all making life just a little harder for everyone else.
  • Indexes – The Googles and Yahoos and Ask.com’s of the world. They consume HTML so that they can figure out what links to what and extract the content of pages. But there’s also a bunch of special purpose indexes, take comparison shopping sites for example. When the HTML standards change all these folks would potentially have to make updates as well.
  • Gateways – Are a very mobile specific player. In the online world nothing generally stands between your browser and the server returning a web page you’re looking at. In the mobile world that’s different however, there’s frequently a gateway sitting in the middle which will do everything from cleaning up documents that say they’re XHTML but fail XML validation to returning transcoded pages instead of the content you asked for. These folks are supposed to shield the simple devices from inconsistencies, but as a result have also interfered with publishers trying to handle the issues on their own.

And of course, this is just looking at cellular mobility. The environment shifts if you’re using wifi networks, even using wifi from your phone shifts the mix some because the gateway is almost always taken out of the picture.

So take something simple like the reintroduction of tag minimization for empty tags. It makes things a lot more friendly for content producers. But it also means that the browser on a device can’t include an XML parser and be done with it, cause the content is no longer valid XML. Anyone who has ever spent any time actually using the web at all and programming for it knows however that just because XHTML is supposed to be XML, that doesn’t mean that it is. People make mistakes in generating documents and you’ll always find non-XML documents as XHTML “out in the wild”. Definitely true, but can you count on the gateway to turn that cruft into XML for you? Solve the problem in the network and keep the endpoint simple?

Personally, I think not. The intelligence should be in the endpoint, and as soon as possible I would love to see the whole idea of a carrier gateway to the internet go away. That means that mobile browsers really need to start acting like their online counterparts and quit relying on the carrier networks for a crutch to get them well formed markup. The devices are getting there I think, but the browsers themselves are immature still compared to their online equivalents (and I don’t mean that as a slam, it just takes time for the technology and codebases to mature). It’s one of the reasons I’m excited to see open source efforts in this area. The “with enough eyes all bugs are shallow” principle should help surface issues more quickly, and shared code at the web browser engine level seems like it would go a long way toward driving a uniform implementation. Whenever everyone reimplements the same standards you always end up with slightly different takes on the same specification. Shared code keeps that from happening as often.

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Innovator’s Engine Dec 5th

Posted on November 29, 2007 by miker

I’m going to be participating in the next Innovator’s Engine event at Carr and Ferrell: Ads2Go: What’s Working, Where and Why with Mobile 2.0?. It’s in the morning on December 5th. Very much in the morning, the discussion starts at 8am. I hear your senses are sharpest in the morning though, so we’ll see how that goes.

I had a conference call with the participants today, it should be an interesting discussion. We spoke about some interesting stuff, like how does the mobile advertising market in evolving areas like the US and Europe compare to the setup we see in more mature markets like Japan, are there any particular technical hurdles that need to be tackled before the advertising market can advance, and who’s really using mobile advertising currently as part of their media plan. Should be fantastic. Just don’t believe all the hype you read online, I don’t have all the answers. Only about 80 percent of them ;-) The other 20 percent I’m hoping will fall out during the conversation. Come down and join in, hope to see you there.

Posted in AdMob, Community, ThisIsMobility | Leave a comment

December Mobile Monday is a Go!

Posted on November 28, 2007 by miker

I just posted the details for the December 2007 Silicon Valley Mobile Monday. The topic is SMS messaging:

  • What: December 2007 Mobile Monday (SMS Messaging)
  • When: December 3rd, 2007 7:00pm
  • Where: Hands-On Mobile, 580 California St, 7th Floor, SF, CA 94104
  • Who: Anyone interested in mobility
  • Cost: Nothing!

Thanks to Hands-On for providing the space. We’ve taken a few months off while there were so many mobile conferences and gatherings that everyone seemed to be overloaded. It’ll be good to get back into the swing. See you there!

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