Archive for Android
by Ewan Spence
April 7, 2008 at 6:14 am · Filed under Google, Communication, Convergence, Email, Gmail, Android
Remind me again what use Google Android is? I mean, I know what the party line is, to create an open platform, to have a standard approach, to let it run on lots of handsets, to give the Linux community another White Knight OS running on standard phone hardware (as opposed to OpenMoko, or Sava JE, or whatever Motorola’s Strategy department liked using last month), there may be another useful side effect.
While it will be good news if Google succeeds in getting a foothold into the Handheld OS market, it won’t be because they have a standard platform. With all the best will in the world, Apple’s market hare of mobile phones in the US could not be described as a standard; a foothold, yes. Even Symbian’s worldwide share of the total mobile market (and not just the ‘smart’ section) has a long term goal to reach 10% (2007 sa their share rise to 7%). So I just don’t see how Google can manage to make any ground selling handsets.
Maybe they have something else in mind? After all, Google’s strength is in advertsing. What they need is eyeballs over their sites and properties. It is leveraging the mobile search space with browser tie ins and plug in search widgets – all driving browser footfall back to Mountain View. If the fragmentation in the mobile space continues, then one of the key applications is going to be using the phone as a think client, via the web or small Java applets, back to destinations such as Google Maps and Google Mail.
If Google can keep the tech elite switching between devices like the iPhone, the Nokia NSeries, and now Android, then these cross platform properties become more and more useful to the users, they gain more presence and become even more sticky. So people can squabble all they like over the Operating System. Google will keep gathering knowledge via the Android project, but the real value comes from keeping everyone arguing over a lot of systems, while the tools used continue to stay with Google.
by Imran Ali
April 1, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, Openmoko, Politics, Android, Activism, OLPC
Last month - I had the good fortune to sit in on Ethan Zuckerman’s ETech 2008 session, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, summarising his insights into global activism and his role at Global Voices Online.
Ethan’s a research fellow at Harvard and has spent the last few years exploring activist usage of the web, mobility and social media across the developing world; Global Voices is an aggregated manifestation of bloggers and citizen journalists across this community.
Ethan’s talk was oriented around the notion that tools built for activism generally remain unused whereas mainstream tools adapted and adopted by activists remain the most popular channels; particularly when mainstream services are censored, driving even apathetic users to activism when they can’t reach their favorite sites!
Perhaps Ethan’s key insight was the importance of mobile phones as a light platform for activism and blogging; echoed by another speaker, Joel Selanikio, on Africa as a hothouse for mobile development. Their observations included…
- Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fateh’s use of Twitter and SMS to periodically indicate his status, such that when he stops updating, supporters can surmise that he’s being detained and begin agitating for his release as well as ensuring his blog
- Again in Egypt, anti-government activists organised resistance to the arrest of Malek Moustafa simply by coordinating themselves via SMS to block the street at his place of arrest.
- As early s 2004 there were 82m mobile users in Africa in 2004, but even as recently as 2007 only 4.7m broadband users.
- SMS could and should be the principle media for communications and content - from medical information and healthcare records to banking and commerce.
- Limited bandwidth and limited computing power aren’t necessarily barriers for digital innovation.
Though such insights aren’t unique - we’ve covered them previously - they point to an increasing disconnect between the services designed and offered versus those lashed together by the ingenuity of end users - the activism for open government embodied by those such as Alaa Abdel Fateh isn’t echoed by the closed nature of most mobile platforms and networks…I suspect Android and Openmoko will have a more profound effect than OLPC on the democratisation of technology and culture.
[ Note: You can see Ethan Zuckerman’s full presentation at his blog ]
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 4:36 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Usage + Usability, iPhone, Twitter, mobile social networking, Openmoko, Communication, Android
Late last year I wrote about the Mobility of Messages and how the tools for archiving our ‘emotional bits’ are crudely shortsighted, lacking the means for durable longevity and personal curation.
So I was recently very pleased to discover Treasuremytext, a startup - based in Liverpool and Amsterdam - that’s been helping users archive and preserve precious text messages for the best part of five years!
Treasuremytext’s founders - Katie Lips and Paul Stringer - were motivated by issues similar to those described in my earlier post; the very personal desire to treasure those evocative, poignant, sexy, cheeky and deeply personal messages at a time when handset inboxes were often limited to just 10-15 messages.
Katie and Paul very much saw their mission as one of liberating valuable messages from mobile handsets - presaging the currently in-vogue openness of Android, Openmoko and LiPS (no pun intended!) - and placing them in a web-based archive.
The web elements of the service came about due to the company’s frustrations at trying to work with mobile operators and technologies (SyncML, SIM readers etc.) - the web was simply the best medium for personalising and manipulating treasured messages. Treasuremytext’s strategy has enabled them to maneuver around cellcos, whilst still providing value to end users; a strategy that when multiplied across many service providers rightly deepeds the commoditisation of mobile operators.
Curiously, Treasuremytext has been a bigger hit with people in their 20s, 30s and 40s and messages largely focusing on relationships - indicating that SMS is a more disposable medium for younger users and romantic messages are likely to be the most treasured. Indeed, the service is almost inadvertently aggregating unique analytics and ethnographic data of the usage of SMS over time.
The service works well - with users simply needing to forward their messages to a specific number, via SMS; though it seems some meta information can be lost (original time, date stamp, sender name). This may simply be the vagaries of SMS infrastructure and handset software, but some simple tools to manually adjust metadata for each message (sender, time, date, tag) would be useful, particularly tags - with some users saving thousands of messages, folders will no longer be flexible enough tools for storage.
The more social features of the service are actually quite reminiscent of Twitter - but that’s no bad thing, Treasuremytext has a different emphasis and, as such, will be well positioned to evolve alongside other messaging services; indeed, they’re already experimenting with iPhone clients.
As my friend Ross notes, some operators are beginning to offer similar features as part of their suite of bundled services - notably O2’s Bluebook. However, operator services are notoriously, um, *crap* and generally closed like a nun’s knickers. By adopting open data principles, Treasuremytext could again maneuver around cellcos and deepen their claim on their philosophy of openness. New platforms such as Android and Openmoko could also help to provide wider distribution and I believe there’s a strong analytics and ethnographics opportunity for them too…
In the meantime, it’s worth spending a few minutes with co-founder Katie’s BarCamp session on 12 mistakes not to make when launching your startup!
by Imran Ali
March 25, 2008 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Google, Nokia, Chumby, Yahoo, UK, Android, Events, London
London continues to be a hotbed of mobile hacking and innovation, with next month’s Over The Air, taking place on April 4th + 5th at Imperial College.
Organised by BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester and Vodafone’s Daniel Appelquist and backed by Nokia and Google, amongst others, Over The Air will be playing host to around 450 attendees across 48 hours of hands-on hacking and code-campery!
iPhone, Openmoko, Android sound like they’ll be strong themes, but expect to see a bunch of sessions on user experience design as well as some masterclasses from handset and software companies, including Nokia, Microsoft, Adobe and Yahoo! on day one.
Head on over to the Over The Air blog for more information on the schedule and how to register…
by Imran Ali
January 28, 2008 at 11:03 am · Filed under News, Google, Nokia, Open Source, Greenphone, Android, Linux
A few hours ago, Nokia announced its proposed $153m acquisition of TrollTech…a curious and surprising development. So what does this mean?
- What will happen to Trolltech’s famously open source handset, the GreenPhone (that predates even the OpenMoko platform)…will we see some Linux-based Nokia handset in 2008?
- Nokia’s press release focusses on TrollTech’s cross-platform development technology - will the adoption of Qt be Nokia’s defence against Google’s Android?
I have my fingers crossed that this acquisition is Nokia’s ‘openness moment’ 
