These links are automatically posted daily from Magnolia, where I store all my Mobile 2.0 bookmarks.

MobaMingle: Home

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Tags: mobile 2.0, mobile internet

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

These links are automatically posted daily from Magnolia, where I store all my Mobile 2.0 bookmarks.

BipBip :: Welcome!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Tags: mobile 2.0, mobile internet, paulgolding

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

These links are automatically posted daily from Magnolia, where I store all my Mobile 2.0 bookmarks.

Mobile Phone Applications - J2ME, Mobile Software Development

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Tags: mobile 2.0, mobile internet, mobile apps, paulgolding

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

“There were 6.6 billion people on the planet in October 2007″
“There were 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers in October 2007″
“60% take it to bed every night”
“A study by Unisys revealed that if we lose our wallet we report it in 26 hours. If we lose our cellphone, we report it in 68 minutes.”

When a book hits you with these kinds of statistics about mobiles - and a lot more - within the first two pages, you know that you must surely be reading a book by the formidable Tomi Ahonen. And, if it’s stats and market insights you want, then Tomi won’t let you down. He has never let us down. I’ve been reading Tomi’s books from the start, having been in the mobile game for so long, and it is nice to see that he hasn’t lost his touch. The touch being his finger on the pulse of our great industry.

Tomi goes on to bombard us with fact after fact after fact about mobile usage, a method familiar to those who have attended any of his lectures. “Trust me,” he implores in the opening pages, “The ‘Crackberry’ is a mild drug compared with SMS text messaging.” And away he goes with another dizzying battery of usage stats and insights.

What, then, is Tomi’s thesis this time? The title reveals all, as do the stats above. For so long now, people with things to sell, stories to tell and points to make, usually political, have been muscling in on our busy lives via various broadcast technologies. To be clear, the seven mass media are: print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, Internet and, now, mobile.

Mobile has become the latest in a long line of mass media technologies. As Tomi says:

“The cellphone is certainly the most widely spread technology. There are 20 times more cellphones than Playstations; 30 times more cellphones than iPods. It is the only universal gadget, and it has now become the newest media channel.”

It’s a simple point to grasp. Given the above stats and the pervasiveness of the mobile in our lives, there is clearly a sea of tiny screens roaming the planet, always within a second or two of our reach. What more could advertisers and oracles ask for?

Understand that he doesn’t just mean Mobile TV here. He means New Media, as in Rich Media, as in what we used to call Multimedia. Of course, ‘New Media’ is an old term, as Tomi points out. All of the seven were once new.

Tomi proceeds to explain the significance of this opportunity and, perhaps more usefully, the unique nature of the opportunity and how to exploit it. This kicks off in Chapter 1 with Tomi’s 6 M’s, a deceptively simple, yet powerful, tool for thinking about mobile service development.

Tomi first introduced 5 M’s back when he was telling us how to market 3G services whilst most networks were still scrabbling to get 2.5G working. The five M’s are Me, Money, Moment, Movement and Machines. Think of these as vectors along which mobile services can travel in order to exploit the unique attributes of mobile. I have successfully used the 5M approach in numerous workshops and training courses, which led me to include it in the first edition of my book (see the reference here).

It was during these sessions that I realised that we needed a sixth M - Multi-user and relayed my thinking back to Tomi. I was happy that he included it in his framework and that we now have 6 Ms.

Tomi has a gift for numbers, so it is not surprising to find that he manages to identify seven unique benefits of the 7th mass media, as follows:

1. Cellphone is first personal mass media channel
2. Cellphone is permanently carried
3. Cellphone is always on
4. Only cellphone provides a built-in payment channel
5. Cellphone is available at point of creative impulse, enabling user-generated content
6. Cellphone is first media with near-perfect audience data
7. Only cellphone captures social context of media consumption

If you want to know more details about these benefits, then I suggest that you buy the book. It won’t disappoint. It is another valuable addition to the Ahonen catalogue of books that have provided much of our industry with great insights for so long. As usual, it is liberally sprinkled with Tomi’s insights, statistics and numerous references to real services throughout the world, including detailed case studies.

I don’t think that anyone else on this planet knows as much as Tomi about what’s going on with mobile services in nearly every single marketplace. This is yet another great title from Tomi and I thoroughly recommend it. Available from FutureText publishing.

These links are automatically posted daily from Magnolia, where I store all my Mobile 2.0 bookmarks.

Phoload - Free mobile phone games and applications

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Tags: mobile 2.0, mobile apps, paulgolding

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

T-Mobile (US) are getting ready to launch their store, followed closely by Google for their Android platform. In the UK, we’ll soon have O2 Litmus, which is getting ready to launch. See their alpha site image on Flickr. Note the menu heading earnings. As I said before, this was a major omission from the Vodafone Betavine site. That may have changed, but I haven’t been back to take a look. I found it too irritating that an operator, especially one that big, would expect developers just to play with their APIs without a crack at making some money. It’s like R&D for free.

But this is the Internet and free is here to stay. There are still plenty of free apps out there vying for our attention. These can surely benefit from an aggregated marketplace. Phoload does just that - it’s a free mobile software download website. Free apps exist either just for fun or part of a wider mobile strategy - i.e. a mobile client to build a social network. I noticed the Trutap client, for example. Other apps are trying to pursue alternative monetization schemes, such as ad inserts.

The website aims to build an active community of users who recommend, rate, and review the software. The games and applications on Phoload are uploaded directly to the site by mobile software developers. There are already over 200 items in the catalogue, including location-based apps, social networks, language tools, and plenty of arcade and puzzle games.

Initially, Phoload will be offering software built for J2ME. The iPhone has been getting all the attention recently, but then most people don’t have one! With over 2 billion phones that support J2ME, there are plenty of people around to download MIDlets!

Phoload will also be launching Android support next week and adding Symbian support by
the end of the month.

Developers start uploading now!

As with all metaphors, they conjure up various patterns of thought, depending upon who we are. One such pattern emerged in a recent dinner conversation with some industry colleagues. It was a pattern that equates ‘out of the box’ with ‘out of this world’ as in wholly unrealistic and fanciful hogwash, or ideas that will never see the light of day.

This is a common misconception. Out of the box really means anything that is not currently being considered because the current person, project or business is stuck in a rut. Another metaphor, I know, but a fairly self-evident one. Our minds think in terms of patterns. We make them and match them. Over time, we tend to use the same patterns over and over again. It can become extremely difficult not to apply these patterns, as illustrated in George Lakoff’s wonderful book title - “Don’t think of an Elephant” which, now you’ve read it, is difficult to do. Big trunks, tiny tails and lengthy tusks!

Out of the box can be as simple as removing a striker from one side of a box of matches in order to save costs. Why put the striking paper on both sides? This is the interesting, and possibly mythical, story of what happened in Swan Vesta (UK maker of matches). It could be as simple as the advice given to Parker pens, many years ago, that they ought to think of their products as gifts rather than writing instruments. Gift packaging, which back then was rare, transformed their business.

There’s no rocket science here. No out of this world ideas. One might even call it common sense, at least in hindsight.

Ultimately, most businesses fail because they do get stuck in a rut. The book shelves are covered with business books that explain these failures in intricate detail. You wouldn’t want to go down the same path (forgive the pun) just because a little ‘out of the box’ thinking was dismissed as too fanciful or unrealistic. The irony here is that deliberately sticking to the ‘reality’ of the situation it itself unrealistic. It is only going to deepen the rut.

The key here is the word ‘out.’ It almost always pays to use outsiders to facilitate OOTB thinking. Yes, it can be done internally. We can hold brainstorming meetings. We can take it in turns to wear our coloured hats. We can scoff donuts. I’ve scoffed quite a few in my time. However, as well intentioned as these brainstorms are, it’s the same bunch of pattern-making machines (i.e. minds) looking at the problem desperately trying hard not to think of an elephant.

Is this relevant to mobile? Yes it is. Very much so.

The booty in mobile has been from people making calls and sending texts. The money makers have been - and still are - the operators. Yet, we know that they face an uncertain future by ploughing the rut of telephony deeper still. Whatever we shall end up doing with wirelessly connected objects, it will increasingly be something outside of the box called making a call or sending a text. Essentially, operators are exactly what their name says - operators. They operate networks. Call yourself an operator and try not to think of an operator!

Sadly, this often means putting the word Agile in front of existing business processes, making people work harder and simply insisting that timescales get shorter, as if simply saying that a 2 week job should be achievable in 1 week will actually make it so. This reminds me of the frustrated - and generally incompetent - teacher whose only means of getting more from a student is to raise his or her voice. Take a different stance? No. Give an alternative explanation? No. Use a different method? No. No. No. Just repeat the same explanation a bit louder.

I was recently asked if I could work on a project that needed to be done in minus three weeks - the usual extremely ‘urgent’ that never is. You probably know the story. Gets delivered in minus three weeks and sits in some ‘in tray’ for another six weeks, perhaps doesn’t even get used.

Clearly this is a human problem, not a process one, if we can distinguish the two. It’s an emotional problem. People need to feel good about themselves. They need to feel as if they’re making a difference, making progress, getting things done. It’s all about the feeling and not the actual results. That’s how we often end up with someone whose surge of adrenalin, or some other brain chemical, sends out a big URGENT signal. Everyone gets in a frenzy to get things done. Was it the right thing to do? Was it really needed? These questions get asked later. About six weeks later on a minus three weeks project.

In my experience, the greatest delay is not the actual doing, it’s the deciding to do. Unfortunately, the so-called agile processes are almost exclusively about the doing, not the thinking. There is a critical phase called ‘Preamble’ that is worthy of all kinds of attention, but falls outside of the scope of what we think of as ‘project,’ so it gets left out. We have project management, but no preamble management. Problem is that all these preambles add up to a lot of time. Ironically, they probably add up to all the time that the Agile processes save.

Google’s potential lies in the network. I want my digital life to be more efficient, more time-saving, more effective than it is today. This certainly means taking mobile access into account, if not making it the main arc of my digital life story. Where’s the Google version of Mobile Me? That will get my juices flowing.

Doing stuff in the network must increasingly take meta-data into account. We all know this. I recently tried both iLike and iTune’s Genius service. Both are aimed at suggesting products that I might like to buy based on what I already own. They use meta-data to do this and ’social network’ power.

I have been fascinated by recommendation for some time. I remember my first experience of news groups before the web and my reaction to it. I could find groups of people with similar music tastes to my own and talk with them - something that I couldn’t do before, other than by joining fan clubs. This was exciting because I got to hang out with people who knew more than I did about the types of music I liked. I learned new stuff. I got recommendations. I gave recommendations. I was empowered by the network.

I have tried various recommendation services, but I am always left feeling underwhelmed by the experience. Apart from the higher chances of bumping into new content from artists I already know, I’m not sure that I’m doing any better with new content discovery than simply navigating ‘intelligently’ around the iTunes (or Amazon) store in the first place.

Genius is good for kicking off new playlists. I think they have solved a real problem here. It would be even better if the playlist would adapt to my ’skipping’ of tracks, moving these lower down the list next time around. No doubt, Genius ought to increase music sales simply by virtue of the ‘bump into effect’ when we see it in action in the iTunes window.

What I find with a lot of recommendation ‘engines’ is that they don’t really work. I think that the problem is that the long tail is its own worst enemy when it comes to recommendation because the filtering is too wide.

The fact that we can now so easily access the long tail of digital content must surely have affected our music tastes and catalogues, broadening them considerably. I think there is evidence of this in the recommendations. In the old days, when we went out and bought vinyl, it seemed more common to be into one thing, like ‘Punk’, ‘Goth’, ‘Metal’ and others I don’t really remember all that well.

I wonder if we even have such groups these days. It seems common for consumers to just go with whatever they like because it’s so easy to find and download new content, especially one track at a time. We are broadband consumers in every sense.

Of course, I might be getting confused by my maturing tastes. These days I listen to just about anything that I find interesting, ranging across a vast span of genres, except Chinese opera. Even the Olympics opening ceremony didn’t change my mind on that one

The single most influential piece of technology on my musical tastes has been the incredible Shazam music service - still my favourite mobile app ever. And I mean that! Sure, I use mobile email more than any other service, but that’s just email gone mobile. Shazam is only possible because of mobile and it’s completely personal, portable and insanely infectious. It works even better on the iPhone, which is great news.

There is a lot more they could do with this service to make it even more exciting. There’s great potential to combine this technology and ‘discovery experience’ with social networks built around music identification, which is perhaps what Shazam are trying to do with their Facebook app. However, I don’t want to hang around in Facebook to get music insights - I’d prefer to see them on my mobile, especially my iPhone.

I first started publishing ‘ideas’ because I didn’t want to blog about other blogs blogging about other blogs blogging about vacuous press releases etcetera. I still try to avoid re-posting. The other reason was just to share and to make sure that I recorded some of the ideas in the public domain.

There are plenty of ideas that I think I had first, although I recognise that this is a common delusion that goes along with other ones, like ‘my kids are smart and above average’ (everyone thinks that) and ‘I can make money from good ideas by viral marketing’ (lots of developers think that) and ‘I am destined for great things’ (who doesn’t think that?). Anyway, no need to go into all these neuroses - let Grey’s Anatomy and other brilliant US TV serials do that, or Seth Godin perhaps (for a corrective about the viral stuff). Hey, maybe we need a TV series called ‘Purple Cow!’ I will gladly pen the script, now that I am officially a paid script-writer (more on that some other time).

Anyhow, I wasn’t embarrassed to throw out any product idea that came into my head, so long as they were roughly related to mobile. Like I said at the time, ‘big or small’, ’significant or silly.’ I did say something like that, didn’t I? Oh dear, I hope I did, I mean qualify the dumb ideas.

So, resuming the tradition, here’s one that popped into my head last night, related not only to wireless but to US TV shows too! I settle down to watch an episode from a boxset and, guess what? You will know if you have kids. Yes - ‘where’s the bloody remote control gone?’

Under cushions, under sofas, in plant pots, in the toilet (not down it, I hope) and everywhere on the trail of the kids.

Then it dawns on me. If only these things used wireless and could receive a signal back from the DVD player. Yes - you’ve guessed it, a paging feature to make the remote buzz and let me know where he’s hiding. By the way, it was CSI Miami, so my mind was well tuned to investigation.

Now, which idea was this? 10,038 I think, filed under ‘nice to have but won’t make me a million.’