Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

I really appreciate the work that Andreas and Hampus at Vision Mobile put into this week's Carnival of the Mobilists. They were a little more selective in choosing their posts and (thankfully) didn't select me out! I very much like the effort they took to thoughfully encapsulate each featured article. It makes the Carnival so much more than a bunch of links. Thanks, you guys, and for the rest of you, get thee to the Vision Mobile Forum for the best and freshest mobile writing in the Web. Or so we'd like to think ;-)

Xen Mendelsohn rounds up a great selection of mobile-focused posts for the week, which for lack of time I will (mostly) have to comment on later. Highlights for me included Dan Taylor mulling over the way carrier handset subsidies mess up everything and what might be done about it, Andreas Constantinou on everything you'd want to know about Flash Lite that can be reduced to a number, and Ricky Cadden on Nokia's new strategy of selling devices through Internet retailers like Dell and Gateway. That is, they will be selling unlocked devices (including handsets) without operator branding or subsidy, which speaks somewhat to Dan's post. I think it's fair to say that Sprint's coming WiMax network and it's open "any device, no contract" business model help explain why Nokia, a close 4G partner with Sprint, is starting to ramp up on retail.

Michael Mace is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists this week and rightly features an incendiary post by Daniel Taylor about RIM's peculiar handling of the BlackBerry service outage. It's hard to argue with Dan's logic as he examines the possible reasons why RIM chose not to make any official statement or press release to explain what happened. None of the reasons could be good. Even the rumored explanation that the media attributed to an unnamed source at RIM smells very fishy. If they really expect us to believe that they were performing a software update in the middle of a work week (not during weekend slack) and that this was the cause of the outage, then a spokesperson should have been perfectly fine with stating this to be the case. Instead, no identifiable person at RIM has gone on record with an official explanation.

Dan suggests that RIM's official silence most likely means that they believed the truth to be too bad to report and an official lie too big of a risk. I wouldn't completely rule out incompetent PR-handling—I've seen a lot of companies avoid saying anything about some small bad news, believing that an official response will only make things worse, only to see the silence feed speculation that spins the issue into something much worse than it was. ACCESS is about to face a similar backlash once the press realizes that their statement in February about having released an SDK to developers was a "white lie." Over two months have passed and there still has been no release. A delay of a few months in releasing tools for developing software on devices that haven't entered the market yet is not a big deal. But pretending like no one is paying attention so nothing needs to be said is a huge deal. Why companies do these things to themselves I don't understand, but it's surprisingly common.

Getting back to RIM, you have to wonder what they were thinking with the thing they did manage to announce this week: the BlackBerry VM is being ported to Windows Mobile 6. Does RIM really think that it's BlackBerry's client software that is driving companies to get on the service? Or the paltry selection of mostly-crappy applications? Or that whatever experience their software does deliver is reproduceable on just any old WinMo hardware? Who is the customer for this software? Looks to me like it would be companies that are moving away from BlackBerry toward Windows Mobile devices! So you want to pave a smooth migration path to your toughest competitor? Fabrizio Capobianco (who I grant you has a dog in this fight) suggests that the carriers may actually be the ones that are pushing RIM to do this. Seems a bit far-fetched, but I don't have a better explanation. It's the craziest move I've seen from RIM in, what? ...a whole week!

Carnival of the Mobilists #67 is up over at WapReview and, as usual, it's a great way to get the pulse of mobility in a few minutes time.

I'm starting a new project for uber-cool Denver-based Internet company NewsGator this week, so no time to do my usual long-winded commentary on the Carnival. But if you have time to read only one thing from it, skip my entry and go straight to Mike Mace's hilarious April Fool's satire about his experiences beta testing the ultimate social networking tool. Look out, Twitter and Jaiku! A less satirical more research-based critique of the direction that social networking is going can be found in Kathy Sierra's recent post: "Is Twitter TOO Good?" Kathy pretty well sums up my concerns about the whole thing, so naturally I insist that you go read her now. Then close your browser and get your head into some interesting work!

Thanks to Dennis for picking my two-headed monster post about personalization and contextuality as his favorite. I'm flattered. But really, you guys shouldn't encourage me.

Head over to m-trends.org and get your finger on the pulse of mobility. Rudy de Waele does the Carnival up right, pulling in another great haul of articles for this week's edition.

I appreciate the emails and comments from readers who wanted to beta test my "mobile command line" project (I call it "Serenity," by the way). It gives me encouragement that I'm not crazy for believing this is a good idea for fixing the broken mobile UI. Interesting how many Enso and QuickSilver users are out there running their computers using "Command Line 2.0." (Sorry, couldn't resist.) It may be a little while before I have something I want to show, as my project load is very heavy now and free time scarce, but if you're interested in being a beta tester feel free to drop me an email and I'll add you to my list.

One of my favorite posts from this week's Carnival doesn't have much to do directly with mobile technology or culture. But since I've been thinking about the community aspect of the 2.0 phenomenon this week I found Graham Brown's piece A new age of Digital Maoism 2.0? an interesting challenge, especially combined with Mike Mace's thoughts on the subject.

Graham cites a recent article by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Laneer:

Lanier argues in an article published in The Edge that social media, in practise, is less about the underying values of democracy and more about mob-rule—i.e. what is right is not guided by principles but by the loudest voices.

I've definitely seen the "mob rule" phenomenon happen, and the mob is capable of trampling just about anything in its path. Communities that evolve around technology enthusiasts can become particularly rough when a company tries to leap the chasm to embrace the mass market. Palm got bit by their own enthusiast community when they tried to keep their focus on expanding to a broader market while Sony developed competing products that targetted Palm's enthusiast base, which, as enthusiasts often do, demanded features that Palm didn't think the mass market would support given the additional cost. Online communities like PalmInfocenter started to fill up with power-users bashing Palm for failing to keep pace with the technology and pointing to Sony as proof of Palm's incompetence. Sony flamed out, unable to profit off of the small market of high-end PDA consumers, but while this gave a boost to Palm's business, a self-replicating culture of Palm bashing had taken root in Palm's online communities. PalmInfocenter became a stage for a kind of crass performance art that attracted the loudest, most obscene critics and readers who enjoyed the community more for its gladiator quality than for any real information that the community generated. Once a community has taken on this character, dissenting views are silenced quickly or they just wander away in disgust. At that point it's too late for a moderator to do very much about it because it just puts him at odds with the community that remains and opens him to accusations of censorship or worse, being a paid shill.

The moral of the story isn't that enthusiast forums need to be moderated to eliminate negative responses to the object of the community's enthusiasm. That will kill a viable community just as surely as a gang of bullies can. But clear and steadily enforced rules of civility need to be established. I'm not sure that self-policed systems like SlashDot's are always enough to maintain a healthy discussion where free exchange of views can flourish. Certainly, introducing one after the community has been poisoned is useless. I tend to think that enlightened leadership is the most important factor. That doesn't always have to come from someone with moderator privileges, but having backup from a moderator helps.

Thanks for downloading this maintenance release of the Carnival of the Mobilists. This update fixes a bug in Carnival version 63.0 that may have caused you to experience Carnival withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety, shaking, blurred vision, difficulty sleeping or nausea. Thanks for your patience while we corrected this problem. No need to restart your PC, just read on for the best mobile writing of the past two weeks (or so).

Our first category is...

Mobile Web 2.0

Ajit Jaokar looks over the options for Mobile Web 2.0 and concludes that the opportunity lies with applications that leverage the principles of the Long Tail. Anders Borg is bullish on the mobile Internet, but not so bullish about the browser being the best tool to take advantage of it. Mike Mace (talking more broadly about Web 2.0) stuns its critics into silence by telling them they are right: most of the new web apps are pointless, duplicative and going nowhere. But don't be distracted by the inevitable carnage. It's exactly the sort of creative destruction we should expect at the birth of an amazing new platform. Finally, Enrique Ortiz serves up a great thought piece on the future of web and mobile. I really mean it. Go read it. It's short and has pictures of icebergs with arrows in all the right places. Maybe it's not that great and it's just that I think the same way, but it's worth a read. ;-) Next category...

Location, location, location

Dennis at Wap Review has written a valuable and comprehensive review of mobile traffic map applications. Martin Sauter turns in the first installment of an even more detailed review of Nokia Maps, which is not just for the N95 anymore. And while we're talking about GPS navigation, Ricky cadden asks how long it can be before there are large online catalogs of downloadable voices in which our turn-by-turn directions can be delivered to us.

The Mobile Inversion

I've always wanted to say that: "Mobile Inversion." Please make it a meme and put it on Wikipedia with my name attached to it.

So what is it? Ask Andreas Constantinou, who says mobile TV is a great idea. Only the content should go in the opposite direction. I agree, Andreas: it's brilliant. Abhishta Paranjpe performs a similar flip flop, telling us everything we need to know about how to get Apache web servers running on our S60 phones. This is a geek undertaking, but it hints at some really interesting social networking possibilities. I haven't had time to post recently, so here's an oldy but moldy post where I explain what I mean by that.

The Internet of Things

Pondering Primate Scott Shaffer thinks Dupont may have just created the defacto standard code for "physical world hyperlinks", the HTML for "the Internet of things." All you need to browse it is your camera phone. Meanwhile, Tomi Ahonen does some pondering of his own about this fact: the number of camera phone users is about to exceed the number of Internet users. Are these two onto something or what?

Set my mobile free!

Stefan Constantinescu wants to pay Nokia for S60 software upgrades and does the math for the Nokia bean counters. Krisse at All About Symbian has an even more radical proposal, calling for a (possibly bloody) revolution to liberate the handset:

Phone-locking should be completely illegal. Phone network operators should not be allowed to sell phones. "Free" phones should not be called free, but labelled exactly like any other product bought on installments with the real total price and interest rate clearly marked on all advertising.

Daniel Taylor brings us back down to earth with tough thinking about why circumventing the carriers isn't a realistic option for enterprise mobility. Alas, there goes the enterprise MVNO revolution.

Mobile marketing problems solved here

Mark Frieser delivers a thoughtful discussion of how to successfully extend a popular franchise to the mobile. Meanwhile, Xen Mendelsohn needs your help in fixing a vexing naming problem that's creating consumer confusion.

Can't get enough iPhone

Patrick Atolf has done some serious homework and offers up the 21 most important iPhone patents. Alas, no patent found for the Steve Jobs "Reality Distortion Field."

Barcelona!

If like me you missed 3GSM entirely this year, take heart: the Carnival is here to help. Rudy de Waele kicks off a fantastic round up with this excellent, lengthy piece. My favorite part was the discussion of mobile image recognition technologies that were on display. Carlo Longino begins his post-3GSM chin-stroking here. "Product Release Tuesday 16.00"... you're killing me, Carlo! Ian Wood suffers from 3GSM 3G data hype. He asks "why don't the networks focus on the fact that 80% of the income is from the simple function of Voice?" and suggests what the result of such focus might look like. Justin Oberman turns in another great piece that sizes up the best and worst from Barcelona. Kieran Bellubbi came away from 3GSM thinking about how the demographics of aging populations and increasing mobile adoption may be coming together to produce a new market for mobile health monitoring devices. Finally, Barry Welford asks whether Tim Berners-Lee's "one web" address at 3GSM might be tilting at windmills.

If I missed your submission (and I worry that I may have missed a few in the onslaught that followed my request for posts) I apologize. It certainly wasn't intentional. Everything I read was great this week.

What is my pick for best post of the week? Aw, it's just not fair to make me do this. I guess the post that got me thinking the most and longest was "The Future of the Web and Mobile" by Enrique Ortiz. But I was captivated by everyone talking about Mobile Web 2.0 this week. More than I expected to be, even.

Rudy de Waele has agreed to host the next Carnival over at m-trends. Let's get back on our Monday release schedule and hold the next Carnival on March 12. Mobilistas, get writing!

Cheers!

Updated Wednesday, Feb 28

Wow. I got a huge response when I posted that I'd be hosting the Carnival today. Terrific, quality stuff, including some great thoughts as folks have started to digest their 3GSM experience in Barcelona. Stand by and I expect to have it all posted here some time this evening.

iPhone speculation and analysis again dominates the Carnival of the Mobilists this week at Xellular Identity. Regardless of what you think about the iPhone, it's sure provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion about the future of mobile technology. Go check it out!

All the talk about whether mobile phone users will accept a touchscreen interface got me thinking some more. One concern is that it turns the phone into a two-handed device. Another is the messy fingerprints you'll have on your lovely screen. Here's an idea that might solve both problems: what about using a non-touch-sensitive screen but with a small touchpad on the back of the phone? You could do the same kind of cool interface but it would be operated by the index finger of the same hand that holds the phone. Some screens (I have the browser in mind) might even benefit from a mouse-cursor, which would be easier to point if your big fat finger wasn't covering up the link you wanted to click. But mostly you'd want to get away from the mouse motif and think creatively about how to represent the focus and how to make navigation of screens and menus snazzy, easy and smooth. A lot of what Jobs demonstrated would work just as well using a pointing device that wasn't located on the surface of the screen.

Not sure if I like the idea or not, but I think it has some possibilities. I like touchscreens, but they are also fragile, expensive, prone to wear and manufacturing defects, and the digitizer diminishes the screen brightness and contrast. I like my mobile phones to be more bulletproof.

Check out the 56th edition of Carnival of the Mobilists at MoPocket, compliments of globe-trotting Justin Oberman, who reports in from Bangalore.

There was an interesting developer-oriented thread kicked off this week that a few of the regulars on the Carnival picked up. The topic was balancing optimization of mobile Java apps (so they run fast and within narrow memory constraints) versus the use of object oriented design (to improve maintainability, testability, and project agility). It started with this post at The anatomy of a project, which sparked observations here, here, and here.

The original post pretty much got recanted here, which wasn't really necessary as far as I was concerned, but underscored an important point: even in mobile devices with crawlingly slow processors, tiny memory resources, and mobile users that get restless if they must wait more than a few milliseconds for the next screen to display, optimization is not the be-all, end-all criterion for software design. Know the ways you can sacrifice good OO design to take care of a performance or memory hot spot. But don't start thinking of Java as if it were assembly language or you'll miss out on the advantages it still holds over C for many kinds of mobile development. For most applications, the critical performance issue in most areas of the application is how quickly you can produce bug-free software that delights the customer, not how many processor cycles you can save by cramming all your code into a single class with a few long, undecipherable methods. For that kind of performance, object oriented design principles are where it's at!

The 47th edition of Carnival of the Mobilists is up at Communities Dominate Brands where Tomi and Allen have rounded up some wonderful pieces on mobility published during the week. Particularly noteworthy in my opinion are two articles that touch on the prospect for mobile AJAX applications and the mobile user interface, respectively.

Tom Landspurg over at TomSoft does a great job popping the bubble that some folks have been blowing concerning mobile AJAX. I think we're years away from rich browser applications competing effectively against apps with native GUIs and data stores. To Tom's list of problems with mobile AJAX I'll add the following: sufficiently capable browsers use way too much memory (the main cause of smartphone crashes), are slow compared to native wireless apps, lack often-critical OS integration, and handle intermittent connectivity very poorly. Mobile apps need to be very snappy and reliable to be accepted by users: people are out doing stuff when they're on their mobile, not sitting passively in front of a PC with multiple windows and a big mug of coffee. SoonR notwithstanding, I don't see AJAX delivering that experience for a significant number of mobile applications any time soon.

Hampus Jakobsson's VisionMobile blog is a new one for me and I enjoyed his post titled User interfaces and soft walled gardens of tomorrow. He makes an interesting and optimistic observation that the tables are turning on the network operators, whose walled garden approach to locking in users is not generating revenues as hoped. He argues that the user experience--which is still primarily controlled by the device manufacturers--is proving to be a better way to keep customers loyal. I can't speak for the world, but in North America it sure seems like the Palm and BlackBerry brands and the user experiences associated with them have vastly more stature with consumers than any carrier deck. Perhaps what they say is true: you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Sheesh, we can only hope!

Oh, and a big thank you to Tomi and Allen for picking as their favorite my post about the use of mobile phones as instruments in a major concert in Chicago over the weekend.

I'm sure that I am not the only one who has noticed. There are certain previous Carnival hosts (who shall go unnamed) who have been shirking their hostly duty to their mobilist brethren and sistren, namely the duty to pummel us with carnivalistic pictures plundered from Flickr and Google every week. After observing this I swore a solemn vow that when it came my turn I would not fail the mobilist flock in this regard. Carnival of the Mobilists #44 would supply enough cheesy Mardi Gras pictures to choke an elephant. I hope by the time you've finished reading you'll agree that this fine tradition has been thoroughly upheld and the Carnival put back on the straight and narrow way set forth by the mobilist prophets of yore.

Lest you think I am being facetious, let me tell you that in my hometown of Manitou Springs, Colorado, we take the annual celebration of "Carnivale" very seriously. All pictures seen here are from our local observance of this important festival. For us, Carnivale is a commemoration of pretty much anything that's socially deviant or tasteless. So, in that same spirit, let us begin! If you start to notice that the pictures pick up some theme you find in the text or articles by our fine contributors, you're very astute. But you're probably mistaken.

Now, I'm relatively new to the Carnival, but it didn't take long for me to realize that most of you contributing mobilists are geographically separated from me by a big, cold ocean. To be sure, we share a common bond, but I was nevertheless grateful to countryman Michael Mace this week for giving a terrifically detailed and often humourous explanation of how to understand the differences between Europeans and Americans in their attitudes about their cells mobiles. Just as I was starting to really admire you Europeans for putting my colonial mobilism to shame I read Chetan Sharma's (recommended!) mid-year update on Worldwide Wireless Data Trends and remembered that we're all mobile duffers compared to our gadget-loving friends in the East. Tomi Ahonen at Communities Dominate Brands underscored this point again in his discussion of the extraordinary Japanese consumption of advertisements on their phones--phones which in Japan have a built-in wireless payment mechanism. Martin Sauter offers some business logic that should give Americans hope that the rest of the world won't leave us completely in the dust when it comes to 4G networks.

If it weren't hard enough for people on different continents to understand each other, Xen Mendolsohn at Xellular Indentity points out that the wireless operators can't seem to come up with a common language to describe services they offer to people in the same country. And we wonder why consumers are confused. Now, if there's one thing we Americans do well it's inventing buzzwords and hyping them to high heaven. The new mobile buzzword just annointed by the inimitable Dave Winer: "river." Read Benardo Carvalho's explanation at rawsocket.org or everyone will think you clueless at your next gathering of mobilists. I notice Carlo blogged this one at MobHappy, too, and suggests it may be meaningful--not as a new concept, but as a notable event signaling that mobile data is finally attracting attention.

Before we leave the subject of confused consumers (a running theme in the CotM) Patrick Atolf blogs about five helpful phone features you probably never use--and probably should. If he's right that most people don't know about this stuff it raises a perennially interesting question: how to help people discover cool software that they would use on their phone if they only knew it was there. Then there's Tam Hanna looking at the other side of the coin: a kind of mobile software that no one needs but which some vendors are happy to sell them all the same. Barry Welford explores the idea of "choice overload"--the pushback that occurs when consumers have so many choices they walk away in confusion. If he's right it may be more important to consider in the mobile space than in richer, more immersive media. Meanwhile, Daniel Taylor shakes his head in disbelief of what sounds like the silliest VoIP product ever. Luckily it's free, which seems to be the price at which even a really confused consumer will buy. I bought three.

Also free is some nifty server-side software called Simple Machines Forum that Dennis at WapReview took for a spin. In addition to a web forum for desktop browsers, SMF produces a phone-friendly mobile version right out of the box.

Like this young woman, Rudy De Waele felt compelled to show off his stuff this week. If you want to hear him go on and on about his fantastic new Nokia N91 music phone with 4GB of built-in storage, Wi-Fi, and the S60 platform's new killer browser, by all means go right ahead. The N91 doesn't run on the 850MHz GSM band where I live, but I didn't want one anyway. I'm sure Rudy's right that it's as good or better than any iPhone we could expect from Apple, but I'm quite happy with my ancient Samsung i500 and it's 16Mb of storage. Really.

I am.

Speaking of exhibitionism, Keren Flavell at the Mobile Media Show has been giving some public presentations of her own, lately, but ran into a little problem: how do you demo your sexy mobile user interface to a large group when it runs on a 2-inch phone screen? She reviews some options and suggests a solution, but ultimately is not satisfied. Like Keren, I'd love to hear what others have tried for this.

Next in the Carnival parade are the developers. Anders Borg walks through his reasoning process in choosing the best phone for mobile application development. (Here's a Europe/US comparison for you: the phones he considers sound great but not one of them will be offered by a US mobile carrier. Even the Nokia E61 will have the Wi-Fi and 3G radio removed at the behest of the carriers here, resulting in a crippled device called the E62. Go figure.) Arjan Olsder at the Mobile Games and Gaming Blog has a great interview with a developer at the Dutch gaming shop CodeGlue, which has enabled players to get involved in creating and customizing the games they play. And Enrique Ortiz reminds us that while you may not remember what you did during Carnival when you wake up the next day, your smartphone may remember every unprotected Bluetooth chat session you engaged in. When it comes time to sell it, make sure you know how to wipe it...clean.

Thankfully, the cops are around to keep things from getting too far out of hand during Manitou's Carnivale celebration. But in some parts of the world the police are as likely to behave as criminals as they are protectors. One of the most important roles that mobile phones play in places like this is the role of impartial witness to abuses of authority. Emily Turrettini at SmartMobs highlights an important post at Global Voices about how citizens armed only with cameraphones have been able to turn up the heat on abusive police. Justin Oberman at MoPocket looks at an effort here in the US to use text messaging prompted by television ads to create a similar kind of accountability for legislators.

My own contribution was this piece about a renegade wireless ISP not far from Manitou Springs. This tiny local company is shaking up the wireless industry with a low-cost Wi-Fi mesh network that creates a mobile broadband wide-area network of the sort we didn't expect to see without 4G. I'm hoping they come to my town next!

For my pick of best post for the week I have to go with the peoples' choice. Mike Mace's piece European vs American mobile phone use was linked from several sites that I've noticed, and for good reason: it's some of the most eye-opening and entertaining analysis of how technology is shaped by culture and history that you're likely to see on the web.

Thanks for all the great contributions this week, hope I didn't offend anyone, and a big thanks to our sponsor, Khosla Ventures. Next week the Carnival moves on to Mobilecrunch. Bye now!