Mobilist for 19 years, last 12 in applications. Worked on numerous projects globally for operators, vendors and start-ups. Lots of patents. Most recently Motorola's Chief Applications Architect and ran their mobile 2.0 mash-up lab. Architect of several Web 2.0 start-ups. Speaker. Consultant. More me...
Tonight, our family watched Sony’s Daddy Day Camp, a mediocre film, but with enough funny moments to make it worthwhile. I’d give it a 5 out of 10. Anyhow, when the end credits rolled up, out jumped the fantastic Jackson Five classic of all time ‘I Want You Back‘ which my kids had never heard. They were shocked to find out that it was Michael Jackson singing, so we popped straight over to YouTube to check out the video and the young pre-surgery MJ. The song is now part of out iTunes collection.
They liked the young MJ’s moves, which led me to talk about his award winning performance of Billie Jean that led Fred Astaire to declare him as the greatest dancer of our time. So we just had to see it and the legendary moon walk, which in this performance is part of a massive extended routine to a solo drum+bass at the end, including a brilliant sidewards moonwalk - definitely moonwalk 2.0!
Of course, they wanted to know who Fred Astaire was, so I searched out his Putting on The Ritz routine in which you can see some moves that are directly imported into Jackson’s repertoire, such as the high-leg ‘running on the spot’ in time with the beat, used a lot in the Billie Jean performances.
If you would like to attend the Mobile Web 2.0 summit on June 11/12, I can offer two guests a 50% discount on the ticket price. I’m on one of the panel sessions and there will be a host of interesting speakers and sessions. It’s an Osney Media event, which means that they operate the shuffling round-table style so that delegates get plenty of chances to meet lots of new faces and debate the issues. Please contact me (goldingp at gmail dot com) for further details.
You may have noticed, I recently changed the name of my blog, although the domain remains the same - I’m getting sick and tired of registering domains that I never use for anything useful other than pseudo-branding or self-delusional project aspirations. You know how it goes: have a great idea and go register the domain name as a placebo for actually pursuing the project, or just to add to the infinitely long list of nice-to-do projects parked in the hope-to-do list. Mind you, I’m a big believer in this - you’ve got to stay positive, optimistic and hopeful and always write your ideas down, park them, mull them over. You never know. Like all good things, the right place and the right time might one day coincide to turn an idea into a ‘life experience’.
I just didn’t want to confine myself any longer to having to blog about wireless stuff. Firstly, my mind spends lots of time dwelling on a whole range of topics, not just wireless. Second, my career, inasmuch as that defines me, hasn’t been just about wireless for some time now. I do a lot of work in all kinds of other areas, mostly script writing for corporate videos. I’m also nearly done with writing my first novel and I’ve been asked to write a children’s book about robotics. I also have my own publishing plans, but that’s on my long-term list.
Anyway, writing blog posts is also a common proxy, or placebo, for doing ‘real’ work, which is why so many blog posts are, well, just more blah. There’s nothing new about blah. People have been writing blah for centuries. It’s what Sunday supplements are all about. Most office cubicle and water-cooler conversations are just blah. Heck, many meetings and conferences - expensive ones - are just blah. No wonder people want to bring their laptops to Twitter about the experience.
I remember a friend of mine told an anecdote about his encounter with someone of true scholarly status, although he wasn’t aware of this scholar’s presence in the current gathering. My friend mumbled on about some topic or another, spouting off opinions and factoids as if certain of his material, which he wasn’t. Moreover, the scholar was a genuine expert on the topic, which came to light afterwards. Being of humble character, he didn’t want to offend my friend with correctives and so merely noted out loud, in an indirect manner, that ‘people should talk about things they know something about,’ to which my friend replied that ‘there wouldn’t be much to talk about then.’
So blah is here to stay. With the advent of Twitter and so many other micro-blog status-update thingys on umpteen sites, we have clearly evolved blah into blah 2.0, characterised by (my own definition):
1. Yet more meaningless self-definitions of what anything “2.0″ is all about
2. “Thought blah”, which is completely useless and idle thoughts that are now verbalised, like “I’m thinking of buying a carton of milk”
3. Confusion of “chatter” with something called “the conversation”, which is meaningless nouveau marketing speak for involving the “community”
4. Confusion of the word “community” (see previous one) with “network”
5. Infection with the British affliction of queue-joining (line-joining) that has now evolved into “network joining” - see a network and join it, especially if everyone else is
6. Filling up more of our time with drivel whilst waxing lyrical about all the great new productivity (2.0) tools now available
7. Convincing ourselves that talking about the work is the “new work”
I am thoroughly guilty of all of the above, though don’t confuse this as a lament, pining for the old-school way of doing things. I’m more digital than Wall-E and Negroponte combined. I dream in hex and I don’t let my kids use pens - they have to use a PC! (Just kidding, well almost.) This is all harmless self-mockery, otherwise known as blah 2.0.
Yesterday, I had three client meetings back to back. The first two were onsite and the third was at a hotel. During the second meeting I was given a plot of a 3D drawing for a film set on a project I’m working on. I noticed the figures in the drawing were Google SketchUp art, so I asked if the designer could email me the files.
At the next meeting I was able to open up my laptop, stick in the 3 UK modem and download the files. I had instant access to the 3D model throughout the meeting. Just being able to swoop around the model and check different points of view was a powerful aid to thinking.
I’m getting used to easy access to my files and data thanks to the ultraportable Macbook Air (it’s the low weight that I notice most) and the 3 UK modem. My habits are slowly changing. Increasingly I will take the laptop out with me slung into a small messenger bag.
I have to say that I am a total fan of SketchUp. It is an awesome package because it falls into the category of ‘creativity at the speed of thought.’
I hardly spent more than 30 minutes playing around with it before I was able to create useful models. My kids picked it up instantly and are already using it for writing stories and making animations.
Following on from 100 things kids should know, we had a bash at figuring out the basics of project management. Key ideas explored were:
1. Notion of resources
2. Notion of tasks
3. Connectivity of one task to another (output to an input) - sequential tasks
4. The evil of all projects - the critical path!
5. Parallel tasks
Usually I like to jump straight to digital for playing around, but it’s often better to start manually (i.e. paper and pen) to let the idea settle before getting distracted by tools. Trusty stickies on a whiteboard work well - everyone gets a turn to think of a task and stick it to the board. When all the tasks are up, we get to play around with positioning and finding the relationships, using markers to draw the connecting arrows. For the purposes of demonstration, we used the idea of planning a trip to Centerparcs.
I haven’t blogged for about a week. I’ve been too engrossed with a spurt of creative activity. I thought that I’d share with you how stunned I continue to be by Mac OS X and the incredible productivity gains of using Apple’s tightly integrated application suites like iWorks and iLife.
For example, just a few days ago, I was asked for a 1-page overview of the course I wrote to go alongside my book ‘Next Generation Wireless Applications.’ Actually, the course came first, a few years ago now, and then I wrote the book as a kind of manual for the course, which is a lot better (for the students) than a bunch of course notes. With the new edition of the book comes a new version of the course.
Anyhow, O2 wanted an overview. I’ve run the course for them before, but this is the updated version, which I’m also offering to tailor to their particular requirements. Using Pages, part of the iWorks suite, I was able to create a decent looking brochure-style page and send it back in under an hour, pulling in graphics direct from iPhoto, such as cover art from the book and related imagery. I work with real graphics designers who use Adobe InDesign, a great tool, but aimed at the professionals market. I was able to create something comparable, mostly because of the fantastic design templates that come with Pages and the close integration with the media management of Mac OS X. For example, when pulling in a photo, the mask is already set up in the Pages template. It’s just a case of dragging and dropping the media from iPhoto. I should add that when it comes to creating new designs, I couldn’t do what my designer friends do. The tools aren’t that good!
My interest these days is in how I can use video and animation to communicate. Today, unlike a few years ago, we have the tools to create video and, perhaps more importantly, to share it, whether it’s via YouTube or some other streaming host, courtesy of fatter broadband pipes (notwithstanding that they might not be as fat as we’ve been led to believe).
Again, the Mac proves to be so powerful when it comes to creating video. This stems from their longstanding expertise in this area, mostly due to their QuickTime heritage. It’s so easy on the Mac to move in and out of video. For example, I recently created a storyboard for a 15-minute training video, which I did using Storyboard Quick. This allowed me to create the various scenes, position the actors and so on. I then imported the images into KeyNote so that I could add some motion graphics and, most importantly, a narration from the script that I wrote using the brilliant Scrivener tool. This is a Mac-only app and many writers claim to have switched to Mac OS X just for this app alone. I can believe it. It’s great for scripting and any other writing project. It’s actually a fantastic piece of software put together by a writer who understands the writing process, as opposed to word-processing! I could go on and on about it’s great features. I always have it open, whether putting together a script, a new text book or tinkering with a novel. I used its pinboard/synposis features to create the initial non-graphical storyboard concept, which I presented to the client.
From within KeyNote, I added narration to the storyboard images. I could have done this directly in a video editing package, but with KeyNote I can time the narration exactly with scene advances and I can easily add motion graphics and animated slide shots. This is far more productive than attempting motion graphics in a video editing package. It’s also easy to drag and drop overlay graphics (such as thought bubbles), which I created using Intaglio. Again, OS X drag-and-drop preserves as much formatting as possible, including vector formats so that the imported graphics will still scale without loss of resolution. When I’m done, I simply export the whole show as a QuickTime movie.
From there, if I want, I can take the movie into iMovie (part of iLife) to add titles and so on. In fact, what I wanted to do was use the imported movie as the baseline, including the sound track, which is perfectly synchronised from the KeyNote slide recording feature. I could then re-import some of the still images from Storyboard Quick. This would allow me to add smoother transitions and to add some movement (e.g. Ken Burns Effect) bringing even more life to the storyboard. All this can be done within iMovie, but it’s a little more difficult to manage the timeline in order to ensure that I don’t lose sync with the narration. This led me to upgrade my video editing suite to FinalCut Express. It’s priced for amateur use, but has semi-professional features. Most important of all, it’s tightly integrated with the media capabilities of Mac OS X and the other iWorks, iLife apps, which also means that I can export the finished project back out to iDVD to produce DVD titles and menus and so on.
If this blog post is sounding like an unabashed commercial for Mac OS X and I’m sounding like an Apple groupie, then that’s fine. I don’t mind telling you what a great experience Mac OS X really is. In my profession, I need to focus on creativity, which is where I add value. Creativity is my product. Alongside that, effective communication of ideas is vital. Using the Mac, I have found that I have been able to concentrate on building and expressing my ideas unhindered by tool problems. In the past, I could easily spend 80% of my time on tool issues, leaving 20% to do “real” work. Now, at least on a good day, it’s the other way around.
I could really get used to this - sitting with my laptop and 3UK broadband modem, surfing the web in, of all places, Argos. Waiting for my order and getting some funny looks. Great reception here and the pages are loading quickly enough. So let’s try uploading an 80kb photo from the camera to see how it fairs. Whoa - it’s already loaded whilst I just typed that last sentence. And here it is…
OK, must go now, before my parking ticket rolls over. Just bought some LED lamps to light an animation desk. Going to make a film about…(wait and see!)
One has to wonder where the innovation should be in mobile browsers, as opposed to plain performance, which should dominate the initial design criteria. No use putting a slow browser on an already slow phone. Time and again, the mistake is made to assume that faster pipes mean faster browsing. Wrong! Browsing a web page is a sum of many software/network processes, each of which incurs a delay. It is the overall delay budget that really matters for the average surfing experience. Once a stream gets going, then the speed of 3G+ networks kicks in, so YouTube ought to work better on the 3G iPhone, when we get one.
The problem is that we are putting more functionality into the mobile browser, especially Javascript to enable richer web pages and to support AJAX. Therefore, Javascript execution speed really matters. Mobile browser implementation is one of those areas where good old-fashioned code-crafting for speed still matters. From what we’re hearing so far, Fennec is going to be blisteringly fast.
The case for local caching and storage continues to be made. From my own recent experiences with browser-based mobile app design, design patterns are required to support pithy one-off status updates to various sites, be it Twitter, Facebook or something else. In other words, we need a fire-and-forget form submission. However, implementation of this will rely on access to underlying multi-tasking support to ensure that a fire-and-forget operation completes after the user submits and closes the browser. This isn’t guaranteed on today’s devices: close the browser and all its processes are suspended.
Otherwise, apart from these various performance-related issues, the innovation in mobile browsers will come from two directions. Firstly, there’s integration with the underlying APIs, so that web pages can do clever stuff with the device, just like the Opera Platform (now defunct) once promised.
The other direction will be in tight and useful integration with the desktop browser(s). I say browsers because there are an increasing number of users who have desktop and laptop machines, or want to access their browsing environment via a corporate PC (not on company time of course). We should expect a data-portable network-based means to support portable user environments, such as bookmarks and saved form-data (usernames, passwords etc.)
I’d like to see better support for saving for offline mobile viewing. In other words, I see something I like on the desktop/laptop and then bookmark it for offline viewing on the mobile. A good example is a web-based travel itinerary. If I bookmark this for mobile viewing, then I’d like the content to “flow over” to my mobile, preferably whilst it’s in local-network mode (i.e. WiFi connected) and be available for instant viewing on the device, even if I don’t have coverage. This is a common usage pattern already. Blackberry users will be used to emailing themselves stuff, like web-pages, just so that they have a copy on their device for later.
I’d also expect browsers to become more savvy about how they handle connections between social data in the page and my address book. For example, whenever I surf a page with someone’s content in it, or about someone, I ought to be able to instantly ‘connect’ with that person in which ever ways my mobile is capable of supporting, be it phone call, text, Twitter, or whatever. This kind of fluid at-my-finger-tips control is what the mobile experience ought to be like, especially to avoid such dumb ideas as taping paper phone lists to the back of the phone.
There are tons of other mobile browser innovations still to come and I look forward to some of them appearing soon on my iPhone. Safari has certainly got better on the desktop, but has some crazy limitations on the iPhone itself. For example, why can’t I save images from the browser (or the email client for that matter)? Seems almost as dumb as the ongoing lack of SMS forwarding. Will they let Fennec run on their beauty? Not according to the SDK limitations, supposedly.
The second edition of my book is now out (click on one of the images on the left of this blog). I got the advanced copy today. It’s even thicker than the first one and the cover has my Avatar on it - thanks to the wonderful guys at GoFigure for their help with that! Thanks to all those who reviewed it, especially Martin Smith from T-Mobile and Jag Minhas from Telefonica. Ajit Jaokar gave the first edition a full 5 stars on Amazon and I’m hoping he’ll do the same for the new edition, if he can spare a few days to read the 600 pages (just under). Finally, one day, I might get to work on one of the many writing projects I’ve discussed with Ajit for his growing publishing company.
I’m waiting on the illustrious Enrique Ortiz (aka CEO) to finish his review, but then he’s busy launching a business, so I can hardly argue with that excuse. Congrats to CEO! I hope you like it - I know how you Java gurus can get fussy about the naming conventions
I’ll shortly be announcing a new course to go with the book, so watch out for that if you’re interested. In addition to the 3-day course that I ran last time, which is being updated naturally, there will be a new 1-day course called ‘Mobile 2.0 - The Hype and the Reality’. I’m working with a leading Web 2.0 programmer in order to incorporate as much of the technology into the course experience as possible, including live mash-up demos that we shall aim to use throughout. Please do contact me if you’re interested in attending or want to know more in advance of the formal syllabus being posted (probably within a week). I shall be holding open courses at Heathrow (at the Marriot) and have already been invited to hold a dedicated onsite course for one of Europe’s biggest operators. If you’d like more info, please contact me (goldingp at gmail dot com).
Meanwhile, happy reading! I suspect that the book will be cheapest, as usual, on Amazon. Those interested in reviewing the book, especially formal reviews for journals, leading blogs and so on, please contact me (goldingp at gmail dot com) to arrange getting you a copy.
I just received a HSDPA mobile broadband modem from 3 UK, who asked me to test it and blog about the experience. So far, so good. It plugged into my Mac laptop, installed the drivers smoothly and immediately connected to their network. Real plug-and-play - nice!
A brief play shows promising performance so far. I’ll be testing it over the next few months and blogging/Twittering about the experience. Tomorrow we’re going to drive around for a bit and see how well it does, not that I’ll be laptop surfing in the car. I think we’ll try an iChat video call back to home, some YouTube and email. It’s just for fun and my son will be the one doing the surfing. We’ll probably need to a car charger first! Maybe we’ll use Plazes to chart the activity.
My fellow mobilist and Earthling - Mr Enrique Ortiz - gave me a chuckle in his pointer to Marc Andreessen’s posting about the Bionic Woman TV show and its plot inaccuracies.
Sure, we can pick holes in these things all day long, especially from a tech perspective. I mean, doesn’t 24 just bore you to death with all those lame calls to ‘give me a secure socket’? What about all that other baloney about ‘128-bit encryption,’ which they seem to crack anyway, usually by passing it to the tech-savy operative, some cocky nerd who probably has to ‘break all the rules’ whilst doing a quick bit of maths on the side of a Starbucks cup (vente sized). Never mind that the plot seems to be the same in all 6 seasons, obviously part of the Fox TV conspiracy to smooth the way to the ‘inevitability’ of nukes, but I exaggerate.
Given my dual world of mobile and film (I write corporate film scripts, by the way), I think that I should offer my services as a mobile tech consultant to the Hollywood studios. After all, I was researching mobile virtual reality back in the early 90s, I kid you not. If that isn’t a a ridiculous piece of fiction, I don’t know what is! Never mind surfing the internet on your phone (remember that late 90s comedy?), how about augmented reality? Jack Bauer could use VR goggles to perform open heart surgery on a villain he just accidentally tortured to death, hoping to resuscitate him just long enough to get the ‘codes’ for some gadget that serves no plot purpose whatsoever, otherwise known as a MacGuffin. Wait. Isn’t the whole show a MacGuffin, or is that McMuffin? No, I’m just getting confused by other tasteless objects.
I recently watched an interview with the Farrelly brothers in which they talked about how they store up all the amusing incidents in their lives to use as script material. I really need to start doing the same, not that I’m planning to write a comedy, but my life in mobile and tech is full of amusing moments.
Perhaps we need a comedy about all the 2.0 guff that passes for real work in the mobile tech corpus. I have to say that I increasingly feel stuck in some kind of Lynchian plot where all we do is talk about other people talking about themselves talking about what others are talking about, usually about themselves. And - it’s all on Twitter. We could be ironic (moronic?) and call it 2.0 2.0. We could be highbrow and call it Meta 2.0, or just 2.0? Wait, we’re writing a comedy here. It should be 0.2. Actually, I’m surprised that I never saw that mistake on some management ‘thought leadership’ presentation (you think, I lead).
Story, including comedy, has to incorporate exaggeration in order to work. As one of the UK’s ex-funniest comedians, Ben Elton, said - ‘You have to lie when you’re telling jokes. You can’t just say that a man went into a pub. He has to have a crocodile stuffed up his arse.’ How about an iPhone, or a Blendtec blender, or both?
Interesting announcement from Blogfriends creators about their Facebook app.
At the same time, the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.
What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.
This is a common reason given by Telcos as to why they don’t want to mash-up their 99.999% reliable services with these 3rd party platforms (I guess less than 99.999% reliable), subject to the whims of perpetual-beta API fixers!
It’s a fair comment, but welcome to the world of mash-ups. However, if a small Web 2.0 house can’t keep up, then that’s a different story. Of course, we don’t know how much API changes brought this project to its knees, but it’s a possible question mark over Facebook as a platform. I guess I wouldn’t build a whole service around FB anyway. The challenge is using it to bring traffic to your site.
LA Times is reporting about the trend to go ‘topless’ in meetings in the valley, which means not bringing laptops to meetings. At first, I thought this was a going green idea - less hot PCs, just more hot air!
But no, it’s an attempt to avoid distractions in meetings. No laptop to look at, no Blackberry to fiddle with, nothing but a pen and paper, presumably. Maybe these too are banned - no doodling allowed. Isn’t going topless actually a bit clueless in terms of solving the problem?
I have run into this before. I turn up, turn on my laptop and then get asked to close it. I have to politely explain that this is how I take notes. Can’t I use the technology that we profess to evangelise?
I understand the problem. Recently, I had the honour of travelling with fellow mobilists Nick Allot (CTO, OMTP) and Ajit Jaokar (CEO, Futuretext). We were snowed in at Oslo airport, which was an interesting experience. I asked Ajit if he realised how often he looked at his Blackberry. “You were even looking at it during your presentation,” I remarked.
Then he explained that he uses it to take and review notes - a subject close to my heart. I too, am a mobile note taker. I’ve been doing it ever since I got a PDA, way back. I asked around and quite a few of my colleagues and peers also take notes using their mobile phones. Do you? (Please let me know - I’m doing some work in this area.)
Anyhow, this no-gadget style of meetings sucks. It isn’t a solution to the real problem. From the LA Times article, then main beef of its proponents seems to be that they feel slighted by an audience that’s not listening. Maybe you’re boring them?
I understand that there are all kinds of meetings and all kinds of situations, so perhaps a hardcore no-distractions meeting has its place. Various scenarios would fit here, like rapid-fire standing-only meetings for quick decisions, getting to know each other meetings (where if you’re not listening, it’s obviously rude and self-defeating) and so on.
The word technology comes from the Greek words ‘techne‘ and ‘ology’, the former meaning skill or art. It seems obvious that we need to develop new skills for holding meetings, taking into account the various scenarios, objectives and tools on offer. In other words, we need to think of how to embrace and utilise technology, not leave it at the door (above exceptions notwithstanding).
It is stunning that in this so-called era of the ‘knowledge worker’, it is still common to encounter meetings that are verging on pointless. Attendance is just going through the motions. Stick a bunch of distractions into that milieu and no wonder nobody’s listening. And isn’t this the culture of meetings that we’ve come to despise, which almost guarantee that meetings are going to be poorly attended, whether in person or not.
Let me give one simple example of a technique to reduce distractions. Why can’t I present my slides not only on the screen, but on your laptop too, allowing you to take notes as you go along? Why can’t I put my laptop into “single task” mode when I’m writing notes - a mode that blocks out all other GUI activity, apart from the app I’m using?
These are almost trivial examples. On top of these, there are probably hundreds of other tools that can improve meetings and improve attention, even make them fun to attend. There are also multiple disciplines that we can develop in terms of the art of holding and attending meetings. [Note to self - add this to list of things that children should know.]
We continue to evolve our list of top 100 things that kids should know. Last week we got around to building websites. I consider this a two-part exercise. Part one is really learning how to ‘program’ in terms of HTML and some simple JavaScript. Part two is learning how to design a site and communicate via the Web. It’s mostly play at this stage, but you can throw in lots of side topics about thinking and communication. Great opportunities for synthesis!
We started out with a brief whiteboard session about how a page is fetched from a server, which they mostly understood. I hope that LeFever makes a film about it, similar to his great Twitter in Plain English.
We then opened up Aptana Studio and created some pages using XHTML. After an initial example, I just let them play with the various tags to see what they did (Aptana gives hints anyway). You know kids - they soon find their way around.
Then we moved to the incredibly powerful iWeb on the Mac, part of the iLife 08 family of apps. It’s a cinch to use and the rich themes enabled my kids to create media-rich sites with photos, blogs and videos, including embedded YouTube clips.
We’re going to use the blogs they created as a supplement to their (hand-written) diary-writing activities, which form part of their overall education program. Writing ‘out loud’ for blog readers is different to writing a private diary, although you might not think so reading some blogs!
The diary writing is really a vehicle to develop some writing skills. However, writing to one’s self is also a valuable thinking skill. I have adopted a different approach to note-taking ever since I read Accidental Genius, which is all about private writing as a creativity tool. Worth a read.
