Archive for Platforms
by Ewan Spence
August 15, 2008 at 6:16 am · Filed under Amazon, Development, Mobile Applications, MobileMe, Platforms
Where is your data’s weakest link? In the rush to return to mainframe like applications and dumb terminals accessing them… sorry I mean rich Web 2.0 sites running powerful applications on any platform via the web browser… it’s worth considering your worst case scenarios. While these services are run by large companies, with bundles of cash and servers, problems will happen…
Apple’s MobileMe service has had a rough launch, including loss of emails and access to many of its users.
Google’s Gmail service went down recently for a few hours not because of problems with the mail server, but because the Contacts app section was broken.
Amazon’s S3 storage had some server issues, which resulted in a number of sites loosing access to their files, Wordpress.com being one of them.
I’m not deliberately picking on these specific issues, but to use them to illustrate that… er… stuff happens. And if your strategy relies on these services, you’re passing over a vital part of your infrastructure to these third parties. Some form of back-up or second level that defaults back to your site or a reserve archive makes business sense.
So consider that, and ask yourself if you’re comfortable with the emerging way of mobile phone applications being built around the client/server model. Even though the power, capability and storage of modern handsets are in excess of the PC’s we were using a few years ago, there are more and more applications keeping the data on an external site.
Is this what you want for your personal data? For it to be held somewhere else, where anything could happen to it? And that’s not just loss of access or loss of data, but Amazon S3 comes under the jurisdiction of the US government – for UK users who are comfortable with something like the Data Protection act, those restrictions just aren’t in place in the US. Overtly paranoid maybe, but it’s one consideration. And there is always the nightmare of what happens if the company you are using goes bust (and that should be a primary concern with web 2.0 style start-ups!)
The solution, for me at least, is two fold,. The first is to only use applications that allow me local storage on my phone (and this they become part of my backup strategy for my phone); the second is if this isn’t possible, the web part of the app must allow me to ‘dump’ the data out to an archive file in some form, or let me get to the data.
It’s not perfect, but if I know I can reconstruct my data when the server of ‘cool idea’ goes boom, I’m happy. Can you say the same for your information?
by Ewan Spence
January 3, 2008 at 11:08 am · Filed under CES, Devices, Instant Messaging, Mobile messaging 2.0, Platforms, Wifi, iPhone
With CES starting this Sunday, the rumour mill is already firing up, but the one of interest to me looks to be a racing certainty after Sony announced on their CES site that they would be bringing Skype to the Sony Playstation Portable device.
Call friends, talk trash to fellow gamers, or catch up with acquaintances via Skype for PSP System.
That’s right – a games console, with roughly 30 million or so units in circulation, will all of a sudden be switched on, via over the air firmware upgrades, to become VOIP telephones. That’s a masterstroke (and one that Nokia are tying to mimic in reverse, by switching on the N-Gage gaming features in millions of Nseries devices).
I’ve always been amazed at just how multi-media the Sony PSP games console is. Using Wi-fi and the built in web browser, it lets me read my email whenever I’m in Wi-Fi range. The built in podcasting application will stream audio or video, or save it to the memory stick for alter viewing 9something that the iPods still can’t do without iTunes support). You can watch full movies on the go, stack up your mp3’s take family pictures, and a recent addition of internet streaming radio, while still a little unwieldy, provides yet another way to get messages into the device.
Now Sony are starting to publicly explore how they’re getting messages out of the device, there’s going to be a lot of people wondering why such a machine is still marketed as solely a gaming console.
All that’s missing is some sort of instant messaging application and we have a 2.0 comms device already here. And funnily enough, that’s exactly what Sony’ partnership with BT in the UK will provide; the Go!Messenger was promised for January 2008 and should be here soon.
by Ewan Spence
November 27, 2007 at 7:03 pm · Filed under Communication, Convergence, Instant Messaging, Jaiku, Messaging, Platforms, Twitter, seesmic
Many years ago, back in the dark days when I studied Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University I was a heavy user of the Usenet reading application TIN. This of course was in the fun days when all access was through 80×24 VT100 terminals. And I remember that TIN was a great improvement over RN and NN, and the main advantage was it used threaded messaging.
And I think that’s where Seesmic, Loic Le Meur’s play to get into the instant message + stream of conscious + video space which could (could) prove profitable in the future. I’ve been on the service for some time, and using it in anger over the last week, and while it is incredibly rough around the edges (and everyone is screaming for threaded messages - making it more Jaiku than Twitter?) there is something going on here that needs exploring.
Seesmic is not the final answer. It’s simply the opening shot, like a ranging shell in a naval battle. If any of the other presence services add video, the bloated Flash app of Seesmic will have a tough battle early on it’s career. TIN caught my imagination, but it was a News client on Windows 3.11 that really pulled me into Usenet. So the question is, will Seesmic’s TIN become lead or gold?
by Ewan Spence
November 23, 2007 at 10:47 am · Filed under ARPU, Apple, Communication, Convergence, Devices, Google, Instant Messaging, Mobile Tech, Openmoko, Platforms, Software, Symbian, iPhone
The launch of Android, and the Open Handset Alliance (primarily with Google and over 30 other partners) has prompted a huge amount of discussion around the internet, from Telecoms Analysts, Industry Watehrs, Developers and enthusiatic bloggers. That’s been reflected here on Mobile Messaging 2.0.
So what exactly is the impact of this in the mobile space? Debi Jones and I sat down to discuss that very topic in our latest podcast.
Google, Android and the Implications - MM2.0 With Debi Jones and Ewan Spence:
Play Now |
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Download
by Ewan Spence
November 12, 2007 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Communication, Devices, FOMM, Instant Messaging, Mobile Email, Mobile Tech, Mobile messaging 2.0, Nokia, Platforms, SMS
In all the fuss over technology, I wanted to take a step back and think about what the next form of messaging will be, and if we can’t do some logical thinking about it.
We all have five senses, touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell (and the arguments about there being a sixth sense too, that’s hard to explain, it’s a psychic connection, inside of your brain, so you can understand people like Shirley McClain are best left to The Animaniacs). Whatever form the next form of mobile messaging is going to be, it’s going to be using one of the first five.
While Nokia have piloted a touch screen with feedback (so that touching an on-screen key feels like a key), I think the vibrate alert on most mobile phones is about as far as we’ll get with touch – although I’m sure some enterprising programmer will come up with a morse code signaler it’s not going to be mainstream. Taste and smell are also something else I think we can safely ignore – scratch and sniff movies never made it out the drive-in 50’s movie scene, don’t expect Verizon to hail this as the next great boundary.
Which leaves hearing and seeing. So, audio, pictures, and moving images in some form or another. Seeing works for images and video is naturally a combination of seeing and hearing – plus of course we shouldn’t forget text or rich media (text, images and layout) content, which comes under seeing.
What about how it gets to your device? Well let’s talk timescales. You’re going to be having some form of communication with another person – and it’s either real time, or ‘delayed.’ So let’s take these and throw them into our senses and see what we can get.
Real Time Hearing
This should be obvious – it’s the core function of a phone, and what every single handset has to do. Important to remember that any service complements the full duplex audio of voice calls.
Delayed Hearing
An obvious way to supplement voice calls is to have an answering machine, where people can leave you messages for you to listen to at a later date. Again you’d be hard pushed to find a cellphone plan that doesn’t include voicemail in some form. And don’t forget a number of these allow you to forward just a voicemail to someone else, without actually having to phone them, Of course this is all network based, forcing you to dial in. It is possible on some smartphones to record audio, and then send that as data, so here’s one avenue that isn’t being fully exploited – although some carriers in the Far East make a great play on this.
Delayed Reading
Get some text, read it, and if you can, reply to it. Your classic SMS (Short message service) takes you to 160 characters, and MMS (Multimedia Message Service) originally took you up to 100K of textual data.
Real Time Reading
Strangely, the chat room experience hasn’t really made it mainstream on mobile phones yet, although you could argue that SMS just about manages to be real time with two people. Certainly the likes of IRC can run on devices (WirelessIRC running on Nokia S60 devices proves that to critical acclaim), but I’d regard the speed of text entry to be too slow for mortals (as opposed to 14 year olds) to do real time chat on current devices.
Real Time Watching
Video calls – the classic sci-fi of having a camera on you and conversing that way. It was demo’ed in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and the technology is on pretty much every single 3G enabled handset. It’s here, it’ll improve over time, but are we going to see an uptake on it?
Delayed Watching
Think a mix of podcasting, video calling and voicemail and you have one of the missing elements in the matrix that isn’t talked about. It’s not something that the networks provide in their infrastructure directly, but there’s nothing to stop you doing a little home recording on your hone, and then get the option to send it on to other - normally via email or MMS, but don’t discount ‘broadcast’; options such as a direct upload to YouTube.
Breaking it down into the areas like that, and you see that the actual properties of a mobile message are all pretty much covered in today’s modern devices. So looking for gaps isn’t going to find the next form of mobile messaging. After all blogs had been about, and SMS had been about, but it wasn’t until Twitter came along that the idea of ‘blogging SMS’ took hold in the technology market (and even then people are still working out what Twitter actually is).
No the future of mobile messaging isn’t going to be filling a product gap, it’s going to be exploiting the existing technology in strange ways, with new twists, and a crazed mind coupled with some VC funding to let them work on it for six months. To be honest I can’t wait to see what the next idea is going to be.
by Ewan Spence
November 9, 2007 at 3:07 pm · Filed under Devices, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Platforms, Symbian
Google’s news on the Open HandsetAlliance last week (www.openhandsetalliance.com) is a little bit like a firecracker. A big bright glow of news, and then a long wait until the results are seen in handsets – tentatively penciled in for Q4 2008 (but expect that to slip). Much like the iPhone, there are contrasting views around the telecoms world on just what this announcement could mean to the landscape.
Let’s face it, this isn’t the first time that a Linux operating system has been proposed… to name one high profile candidate how about Access (nee Palm’s) vapourware like version of Palm OS? Nor is it one with a Java middleware or application suite – Sava JE went down that road (and actually had Java right to the kernel as well). That set the world alight in case you hadn’t noticed.
Symbian, initially the company with the most to loose, have already decried the endeavour as lacking experience. “About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched,†Symbian’s VP of Strategy, John Forsyth, tells the BBC. “It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.â€
And as long as Nokia continue to use Symbian, they’ll be okay.
What’s more interesting to watchers of Symbian (launched in 1999 with Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Psion all holding an equal stake), is that two of the current licencees, Samsung and Motorola, are involved. While Samsung has always kept Symbian at arm’s length, the involvement of Motorola is going to, yet again, draw attention to Motorola’s haphazard strategy for smartphones. Only last month saw Motorola invest heavily into the Symbian ecosystem with their purchase of 50% of UIQ, an interface layer from Symbian OS.
Of course Symbian now has 8 manufacturers licensing their ‘Open Mobile Operating System,’ and a further 134 partners in their Platinum Program (which includes Google!). That puts the Open Mobile Alliance’s 34 partners into context. While yes, platforms have come and gone, they always say past performance is not an indication of future prospects, we shouldn’t be writing off Google just because we’ve seen something similar before.
After all, Altavista was pretty good as well.
by Imran Ali
October 9, 2007 at 4:51 pm · Filed under Google, Jaiku, Platforms, Twitter, Yahoo
Google! Yahoo! Google! Yahoo! Goohoo! Yoogle! Yahoo! Yeeaaaaaarrghh! It seems every service I use these days - Flickr, del.icio.us, Feedburner, Upcoming, Writely - is swallowed up whole by one of the two giants ot the Web Cold War…fighting their proxy wars, startup by startup!
Earlier today Jyri Engstrom’s Jaiku was acquired by Google, for an undisclosed sum, notaby to integrate Jaiku’s ‘Activity streams and mobile presence…where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users…a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams’.
It’s perhaps no accident that mobility is namechecked twice - a revealing comment, with the recent uptick in speculation that Google’s telephony play is less a handset and more a handset-agnostic OS or application suite.
Jaiku’s life stream has always been more elegantly implemented than its more popular counterpart, Twitter, enabling users to blend external RSS feeds with Jaiku posts; indeed, my own Jaiku account is automated, simply scraping RSS from Twitter, Flickr, my blog and other personal RSS sources.
Augmenting this life stream with Google’s suite of applications paints a compelling vision…
- Address books - GTalk user statuses set automagically; kinda like Tim O’Reilly’s vision of a smart address book.
- Blending social networks - bringing Jaiku’s life streams to the Orkut community, particularly its booming Asian and South American communities could help accelerate adoption of Google’s much vaunted Facebook-killer.
- Location aware contacts - user’s post their location via Jaiku, instantly marking themselves on Google Maps; great for iPhone users!
- Presence-based telephony - know the availability of a GTalk user, or Gmail contact, before placing a call
- Work status - let colleagues know when you’re working in Google Docs; perhaps great for timekeeping!
- Photocasting - let Jaiku syndicate your recently posted Picasa photos to your social network.
Couple this with Jaiku’s support for third-party data sources through RSS and you have a very powerful multiplexing engine; an open platform for signalling social and personal presence across the web and across mobile networks.
With these possibilities in mind - Jaiku may be one of the most significant acquisitions Google has ever made.
by Ewan Spence
September 25, 2007 at 5:51 pm · Filed under ATT, Apple, DRM, Devices, Platforms, iPhone
The news that Apple will potential ‘brick’ (to render a piece of technology as functional as a brick) any of the iPhones that have been unlocked and modified by their owners is something that I’ve both been expecting, and that I’m decidedly unhappy about. In no way am I a fan of Apple (as I’m sure some of the other writers here will attest), but while Apple are arguably within the rights of the software agreements that they placed in front of the user, the legal minefield of subsidy, unlocking, DMCA acts, and a million and one other things mean that there could be very choppy waters ahead if they go ahead with a controversial firmware upgrade.
All of this is horribly reminiscent of the war that Sony has been fighting against the owners and third party developers on the Sony Playstation Portable. The PSP, with a 480×288 screen, USB and WiFi connectivity, and huge amount of portable horsepower proved an irresistible lure to the bedroom coders, and they started to work out how to get their code running on their devices.
But while Sony closed down the loopholes, and provided more carrots to try and get people to upgrade to the latest firmware (adding in a Web Browser for version 2.0, adding streaming for podcasts at 2.6, the ability to save podcasts to the memory stick in 2.7, Playstation One emulation in 3.0, and so on); ensuring that each blockbuster game required the latest version; and generally playing whack a mole as coders continued to find tiny chinks in the code (classically, a buffer overrun in the code to display a picture ultimately led to the first major ‘crack’ in the system), they never took the route that would see them switch off a PSP. Any bricking was because the hackers were exploring with no official guide to the system.
The company that asked us to “Think Different†is about to embark on a huge game of cat and mouse with some of the brightest minds and collective wisdom on the planet. Apple need to be lucky every single time. The hackers need just one of them to get lucky, just once, and everything will open up again. And the process will begin again.
Herding lolCats would be easier than keeping the iPhone closed.
by Russell Shaw
September 18, 2007 at 12:51 am · Filed under Platforms
Monitoring the TechCrunch 40 conference from my electronic cottage, I noted that presentations from five mobile services providers were a key part of Monday’s events.
Voting after these presentations provided a clear winner.
That’d be Yap, a voice-to-text translation services provider. Yap was the only one of the five mobile companies to score a 4.0 or above on a five-criteria scale that included “idea,” “execution,” and “presentation.”
According to the blurb about Yap on TechCrunch’s CrunchBase site:
Yap provides voice-to-text translation services for mobile phones. Users can say anything they like and Yap will send a text copy to anyone of their contacts. The service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them and then sending them out. They also have a text messaging application call Yap9 that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keyboards.
Yap9 seems to be where most of the fun is. Again from CrunchBase:
Yap9 is a unified mobile client that connects to the Yap freeform speech recognition platform. It contains a threaded text messaging application that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers in realtime: by simply saying something, your words will then be converted into text within seconds, and sent out. Additionally, it unifies the mobile web by allowing you to instantly access web services just by talking. You can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, YouTube, or interact with Facebook without having to type on your phone’s miniature keypad
And the reviews are coming in. Just a little while ago, SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle)’s Ryan Kim wrote:
This could be a godsend for people who would like to text in their car and actually attempt it, much to the horror of other drivers. You can also imagine that IMing on a cell phone, one of those tough tasks, could actually come alive for cell phone users.
by Imran Ali
September 16, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under BUG, Chumby, Devices, GPS, Greenphone, Long Tail, Open Source, Openmoko, Platforms, Tuxphone, Wifi, touch screens
My dad was an electrician by profession, but even from childhood, he loved to take things apart and rebuild them into something new. An original tinkerer/hacker; when thieves stole a TV from Dad’s car, he designed and retrofitted an alarm of his own design; when we couldn’t install a doorbell to our aluminium framed front door, he designed and built a bell triggered by the opening of the letterbox. He’d love what the Bug Labs guys are about to launch…
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Bug Labs’ BUG product is something I’ve been jonesing to see for a couple months. BUG is essentialy an open source, modular consumer electronics platform that purports to making hardware design as easy as writing web applications.
The BUG system consists of…
- The BUGbase: a Linux-based computer with wifi, ethernet, USB, some onboard memory and rechargable batteries.
- BUGmodules: The company plans to offer GPS, cameras, touchscreen, motion sensors, keyboards and audio modules over the course of the next few months.
- Software: A combination of a software API and a developer community (BUGnet); I’m interested to see how Bug will enabled the various hardware components to be ’scripted’ together.
Open source hardware is nothing new - from my good friend Surj Patel’s Tuxphone project, to Trolltech’s Greenphone, the Chumby and Openmoko’s Neo1973 - but BUG’s moving beyond a single device made of open source components, to a series of hardware modules that can be combined and remixed into new device categories. BUG may represent the opening of the Long Tail of consumer electronics.
The implications on mobile communications are profound. What kinds of niche wifi messaging devices will BUG enable? Imagine the development of GSM, EDGE or 3G BUGmodules, leveraged by the BUGnet community?
Maybe BUG will enable my Dad to remix his car alarm with periodic texts asserting its GPS coordinates next time it’s stolen…
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