Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Charlie Schick posted about some of the stuff going on at Winksite. I’ve posted about tying together the mobile and desktop versions, and I think the embeddable widget is a great move. There are some quirks still, like all the chatrooms in California appear to be in Los Angeles if you drill down on the Metro tab. But the idea here is really solid. It pulls together horizontal slices through all the sites, which lets you find an active chat room without having to go through all the different individual areas. Definitely a good thing. I’ll have to spend some more time playing around with it. I like the map they have there. Winksite was way out in front in terms of location services. Ever since I first spoke with Dave almost 2 years ago every Winksite has had location info and every post has options for geo info. With the Google maps interfaces allowing people to shove their own info into a rich interface there’s a lot more info in consuming geoannotated info. Hopefully that’ll force through the demand for annoted content, and we’ll see some actual location services from carriers.

Great job Dave and Jason! This looks like a fantastic bit of work.

Our October event was last night at Google. An astounding group of somewhere around 300 people showed up. I have a bunch of images posted from the event. Special thanks to Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure for their help in setting things up!

Some bits and peices of information from the panel discussion:

• Right now the revenue that comes from data services style searches on carrier networks pales in comparison to the revenue that carriers make off 411 calls. There are somewhere around a billion 411 calls placed with an average rate of $1.20 to $1.50. This is a billion and a half dollar revenue stream. Carriers don’t really care about data service searches given that current income from 411. Poor doomed fools. General opinion from discussions I had was that carries will figure out that there’s an evolution going on once it’s already happened, but because no one can disintermediate them they get to just roll late to the party and collect all the money. Ahh. Yes, carriers are the way to the future. Once we drag them out of century old thinking they’ll help make all of our lives better.
• One of the hot areas of mobile search is mixing in content from the carrier portfolio with general search results. Cause, well, it makes the carriers more money if their ringtones and wallpapers show up at the top of results listings. And everyone loves carriers, right? I was mostly underwhelmed, and partially disappointed.
• There was some talk about the different modalities of interface, the capability you can provide with an SMS based search vs a WAP site vs a custom client in Java. This applies pretty much everwhere, but search is one of those applications that actually transforms well into an SMS style interaction. Sending a query to a shortcode and getting back a result set containing information and links to dive further is pretty decent. However, it’s still way outside of the behavior we expect from your average mobile phone using mom and pop. In order to provide a service that folks can find you have to exist on the handset in some easy to navigate way. Which once again turns back to carrier deals, which eventually just sputters out and goes nowhere.
• Lots of talk about making search simpler. Incremental improvements to shave clicks and screen loads off of getting the user to what they want. The UI issue is always worth adressing, just about everywhere. There was some mention of using voice as the driver for data search instead of the keyboard. And some mention of using past user data to figure out where people might be and what they might be searching for. Someone brought up that when you sign up for an account with a carrier you actually give them permission to peek at your data usage so that they can market to you better. They’re within their rights to watch the sites you surf to while on your mobile and use that information to tune your search. Interesting point, I didn’t know that. The use of context overall is a decent idea, one which we’re still seeing play out on the Internet side of the house. There are problems with context, but some of them might actually be solved by the highly personal nature of the average cellphone.

An interesting panel, even if it was rather discouraging in terms of business environment overall. The carriers rule your puny world with an iron fist – developers, service providers, and end users. For some reason folks who I would expect to want to do something about that just smile and nod and say “Yep, it’s all about the carriers, might as well accept it”. Fortunately, I can not. So what’s to be done about mobile search being relative shit but needing to pay off carriers in order to fix that? The number one option is coming up with some alternative to the carriers in order to provide wide area wireless access to people. There are lots of issues with that, but there are lots of issues with the system the way that it is. I simply don’t buy the “there’s no way to compete with carriers” argument. It most often comes from people in bed with the carriers and with a business model based on that to protect, so I’m going to ignore it. What are the issues with getting a competing network out there?

• Infrastructure buildout as a whole – Independent of whatever the technology is you want to deliver this network via, you need access points attached to power and network uplinks. Costly. Difficult to maintain. Lots of regulatory issues.
• Truely mobile devices – You need lots of devices suitable for use by “the average person” which attach to this network. The devices need to do seemless handoff from access point to access point like the existing carrier networks do, operated with one hand, simple, reliable, battery operated, produced in massive numbers.
• Voice support – Calling from/to the new network has to be completely transparent. Completely. Really. It does.

So, putting the Google wireless news together with the voice support in the Google Talk client one has to wonder if this is what Google is going after? Is there a device in the works somewhere?

I just read Personifying the Mobile Device (hat tip John Kern). It’s a post that pulls together a great set of recent conversations I had caught bits and peices of, and lays them down amazingly. As a sidenote, I’ve been calling cell phones mobile devices and laptops portable devices, it’s a distinction that I think works out pretty well. Although it is subtle it helps shape the conversations when you can talk about mobile vs portable computing. I love all the personification points in there, and the technique of using personification to define the role of a technology. This is the bit I want to pick up on however:

With the many functions that can be developed for mobile devices, we can personify the mobile phone and list some possible roles for it. Some roles are better done on a laptop than on a mobile, and vice versa, but the experience should be seamless and you should be able to pick up on one where you left off on the other. With the advent and rise of web services, online storage and wi-fi access, we will essentially be able to perform the same functions and access the same information through a mobile device, as through a laptop.

And harp on that point I always harp on, a seemless environment from Internet to mobile network. I think this vision is fantastic, I would love to blend work from my mobile and work from my laptop and desktop into one fluid set of actions and activities. However the infrastructure to deploy applications is always restricted by the high barrier to interact across the carrier/Internet boundary. There has to be a way for something happening out on the Internet to let my phone know about an event I need to pay attention to. SMS, of course. But what if I’m running a site like SourceForge and looking to notify owners of applications about security concerns posted to their projects? Am I going to absorb the cost of messaging into the mobile network? Not too likely at the prices currently set. I can setup a complex credit and payment account system, and establish a relationship with an aggregator so that developers can pay for the messages they want sent to them. But the developers are already paying for the messages when they receive them (In the US at least, yes, we pay for inbound SMS. Don’t ask, I have no idea why or how that could ever be accepted by the consumers), they’re not going to pay to get messages sent and then pay to receive them. Support for SIP and UMA announced for upcoming handsets I hope will move us somewhat in the right direction. But notice what’s happening here. The Internet has a pretty decent ability to route around dammage, and with the support of UMA as a necessary technology I think we’re saying that cellular networks are effectively a dammaged part of the Internet that needs to be routed around.