These are the links for August 3rd through June 24th:

• Forget multi-touch, it’s time for the Instinctive Interface -
• Should IT pros be thinking about Android? -
• Google?s Android Not Immune From Delays - Was someone really convinced that an Android phone would be on the market in Q4/08?
• Symbian OS Becomes Free - It seems that things are chaning fast in the mobile OS space
• Ericsson: JavaOne: Taking mobile application development out of the niche - Interesting point of view on why mobile application dvelopment is still a niche.
• Just Say No to Fragmentation (and to JSR-324) - This is a very interesting article that details a great approach to reduce fragmentation in mobile device application development

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In the past I had the opportunity to meet both Leandro and David and I was impressed by their new inititative, OpenSpime.

Have a look at their video!

Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to meet Roberto Ostinelli who is part of the team. Hope I will be able to meet him in the future.

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In the past we have written about what we think should be the perfect GPS device to be placed in your car.

The usual GPS that you find in your car today has pre loaded maps on it, possibly sitting on a memory card, a big screen, crystal clear voice that helps you during your navigation. When you jump in your car you will have to tell your device where you want to go, which preferences it has to take in account while determining the perfect path to reach your destination and then you are ready to go. From that point on the device simply execute the task it has been assigned. Only if you interact with it you have the option to change options or modify the route the device has calculated.

The main issue is that the device that is in your car is not connected to anything apart from the power supply and your eyes and ears.

GPS is becoming a commodity also on mobile phones. Unfortunately most of them do not have best of class navigation application, they typically have small screens, they do not have any touch interface, the volume of the loudspeaker is sometimes not enogh. When you jump in your car you simply perform the very same tasks you do with dedicated GPS navigation systems. To be honest a few exceptions exists, just like WayFinder.

The good thing is that your mobile phone is connected to the world via its data connection.

The idea to merge the best of these two worlds is a great idea.

GPS Dash is one of the first devices that approach this new concept.

From an hardware standpoint this device is pretty amazing:

• 480×272 WQVGA TFT Touchscreen LCD
• Sirf StarIII GPS Receiver
• GPRS data connection
• WiFi

I read somewhere that the platform is built using the OpenMoko platform and this is really interesting.

From the software side we start to see very nice stuff:

• The device implements what is called “TruTraffic”. Basically the idea is that while operating your device it will send anonymous data to a server to track real time information about the route and that data is used to signal other devices in your area about changes in traffic status. This will create a sort of collaborative network of devices that will increase the accuracy of the predicted time to reach your destination but, at the very same time, will make the device able to reroute you if there is heavy traffic ahead. This is definitely the best feature I have seen in this device.
• You have pre loaded maps on the device but they will automatically update over GPRS or WiFi when available.
• Since the device is connected to the internet you will find Yahoo! Search. This will be a great source of never out of data POI data for your navigation.
• Send2Car. This is another great feature. You can plan your trip from your PC and then send it directly to your device while it is sitting in our car. Fantastic. I can also see some business use of this device.
• Theft Deterrent. Great! Your device will be remotely disabled if stolen.

As you can see this is something that is going to change the approach to GPS navigation in the future.

Obviously there are some things that need to happen before the device will be really useful.

First of all you will need to have a big enough number of devices around you before you will get valuable data for your navigation. I think this is the reason why they guys at Dash Navigation Inc. are using traffic data coming from the internet.

You may also experience data communication interruption as you drive even if the presence of both GPRS and WiFi should mitigate this a little bit.

The device is going to cost 399,00 USD to which you should add from 9.99 USD to 12.99 USD for the service.

This is definitely something I woud be willing to pay for.

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Ops….

Just wondering how these operators will feel about the order shown in the picture…

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I had a quick chat with a friend who lives in the United States regarding the future of HSPA Data Cards. By chance I also listened to a commercial this morning while I was driving to the office. The commercial was one from FujitsuSiemens and they were talking about a laptop with an embedded HSPA card.

I think that from different point of views the HSPA market is similar to the the early days of WiFi data cards.

PCMCIA came first, a few ExpressCards model a little bit later and then a huge number of USB adapters.

The dynamic I see is quite similar even if the evolution is faster. It took three, four years to go from PCMCIA form factor to USB in WiFi data cards while it seems that the very same evolution has taken less than 18 months.

Nowadays embedded WiFi is almost a standard in any PC and the market is starting to approach in the very same way the HSPA connectivity.

Probably HSPA will become a commodity in the future just it happened with WiFi.

Or not?

There are some differences that may leave space for external data cards for a long time.

The first thing is about standards. WiFi has evolved over years form 802.11b (Direct Sequence or Frequency Hooping), 802.11g, 802.11a, 802.11n. These standards were adopted worldwide even if with some differences on frequencies utilization and the technology has become quite pervasive.

On the HSPA side there is much more fragmentation than there is in the WiFi arena. UMTS networks are not as wide available as WiFi Access Points and also HSPA is moving its first steps in these months.

United States are still a big market for computer manufacturer and i do not think they will add HSPA to current configurations even if it may be offered as an option.

Anyway the trend seems to be already set and some big companies are planning these kind of device in their portfolio.

Even chipset manufacturer are going to add support to personal computers via dedicated chipsets. As an example have a look at the Gobi announcement from Qualcomm.

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I have been a great fan of Second Life for a very long time. A few months ago I almost quitted since it was starting to become boring and quite repetitive.

Vollee Inc., a company with offices in the United States and Israel has anounced a Second Life viewer for Symbian enabled mobile phones. This is not really new to the industry, since I remember Comverse doing the very same announcement last year, showing me a demo but never relasing the product to the general public.

For those of you who do not know how the Second Life Viewer works I can tell you that it quite a huge piece of software. By no mean at all it can be ported as is to a mobile phone, no matter how good you are. Simply there is not enough processing power, memory and graphics capabilities on current generation of handsets.

The approach that Vollee used is quite different.

Apparently the real viewer is running somewhere in the Vollee servers cloud and they basically stream the viewer window to your mobile phone. A little bit more complicated that that, actually. The mobile client will also take care of you interaction with the virtual world and will transmit your commands to the remote viewer. At the very same time the mobile client will take of Second Life messaging for both Live Chat and Instant Messaging.

The Vollee client will also let you search as you would in the real Second Life viewer and teleport to whatever location you want.

I have been playing with that for quite a long time and I have to say that the User Experience is really good. Honestly I was not thinking that this was possible.

On the downside you may find that a mobile phone display is a little too small and that messaging through the mobile phone keyboard is a little bit tricky.

You may also want to notice that this is really a data intensive application and I strongly suggest to stay away from it if you do not have a flat data plan.

I think we all aknwoledge that the hype around Second Life is no more as big as a few months ago but this can be an interesting concept that should be further investigated for different use cases.

Vollee is actually going to sell PC video games experience on mobile phones using the very same technology the have usend for this mobile Second Life viewer. This will bring a real PC gaming experience to mobile phones. Sure, you will need to have a high speed data connection (UMTS or, better, HSPA), a low latency on your network and good enough phone to support the even light clients but I think it is an interesting approach.

It seems that the idea of virtualizing the mobile phone is starting to rise in the industry. Well, I know, virtualization is not really the right term to use here but it is something really similar.

If we consider this from an economic standpoint we may notice that hardware costs is going down quickly on the server side while on mobile phone it tends to be higher when you increase processing power, memory and ghapics processing. Prices in mobile phone will not go down as fast as they go on the server industry.

This is why it may a good idea to let the server to do the dirty processing job and let mobiles enjoy the full application via a simple, lightweight client.

The biggest limitation I see in that is that you will have your applications available only when you will be under high speed coverage.

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Very low blog posting in the last few weeks. Several reasons, no excuse.

Anyway in the recent past I have notice a few blogs and forums linking here because I decided a long time ago to remove the “nofollow” attribute in .Dust comments.

At the time I was thinking it was a very good reward for those people who spent time on here leaving good comments and putting energy in the conversation. Unfortunately it turned out to be a bad idea bringing in a considerable amount of spam.

I am trying to make up my mind on this. Spend a little bit more time moderating link seekers comment or enable the nofollow attribute?

I think I would go for the first choice and I can advise that one line comments from people I do not personally know will be deleted.

Thanks

I am looking forwarding to seeing you again on this when I will start my regular posting activity. Soon, very soon!

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I came through a short, but interesting, post from Simon Judge over at Mobile Phone Development.

Simon makes a very good point. When you have a brilliant idea for a mobile service you may find yourself engaging so many partners asking for slices of the pie that makes the whole service not appealing for each of the single partner on the venture.

I think that is absolutely true and, at the very same time, it is something that you cannot easily avoid.

Actually the mobile phone services ecosystem is, as of today, working like Simon describes.

We can try to make a simple example. Let’s imagine that we decide to launch the best of breed music application allowing our future customers to listen to music and purchase or music from a dedicated application sitting on my mobile phones.

On the right side of the ecosystem I will have to live in I will found the content owners, the music Major. Selling this content, even in digital format, is their core business and it is quite clear you will have to pay for that content. That cost is going to be one of the major costs you will have to cover with your budget and it is going to be a recurring cost as you go with your services. This is a huge slice of the pie.

Then you have in your mind the best music application ever designed. You need someone to develop and test it on a variety of mobile phones, possibly with different technologies since you want to address the majority of your customer base. You need customers in order to make the business plan profitable. This is going to be a cost too and it may greatly vary depending on the number of platforms you are going to address. In some way this can be considered a fixed cost and a small slice of the pie.

Since we want to offer to our customers the best music on the planet we will need to reach an agreement with different labels and we need to aggregate their content in the same place in order to allow our service to scale smoothly as our customer base increase over time. Aggreation, publishing and hosting is another element of the ecosystem and it costs money. Another slice of the pie.

We are almost at the end of the chain in this ecosystem. We have to market and deliver the service in the proper way. Communication to end users is critical for this be a success but this obviously mean that money goes out of your pocket and slims down the size of the pie.

And, finally, we have the customer who is going to cook the pie for us or, in other words, give his money to us for the service we have designed.

Different products and services may vary slightly but this is a very common approach in the mobile world.

As Simon has written there are a lot of actors involved in this and everyone wants a slice of the pie, even a small one.

It is true that you need to be very careful to seize the size of your slice of the pie but, at the end of the day, the pie is there and you may want to cook a number of different pies in order to eat enough to survive.

Unfortunately you cannot be the only player while delivering your fantastic idea to the market. At least the operator will be always there. So in your venture you will be always partnering at least with another hungry guy.

Anyway Simon has made a very good point with his post!

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After accelerometer technology made its appearance to the masses it seems that every mobile phone manufacturer is rushing to put the very same bit of hardware in their mobile phones.

There a lot of applications that can make use of the accelerometer to increase the usability of the products or services and there also some very funny applications that are delivered to end users.

• We have already talked in the past about these funny things:
• You can use your accelerometer as a mouse.
• You can snooze your mobile phone alarm clock by simply shaking it.
• You can read sms messages by simply moving your phone.
• You can silent an incoming call by tapping the phone.
• … and a lot of other different things.

According to my opinion we are going to make an excessive use of this technology.

Just to be clear I am convinced of the fact the mobile phone usability can be really improved by this technology but I also think that it should be used in savvy way.

A simple example. Some of the new SonyEricsson handsets have preloaded a very designed java game called Need For Speed Pro Street. It a great game, indeed. If you want you can use the mobile accelerometer to drive you car. Well, I found out that turning the mobile phone too much on the right or left handside makes completely hide the display making your game experience quite frustrating. I see two different problems here. The first one is the fact the typical LCD display can viewed clearly up to a certain angle and the second is the fact that the accelerometer sensibility may be too low.

To be fair with SonyEricsson I have to say that I was trying this on an engineering sample and the real user experience may greatly differ from commercial devices.

Anyway it is quite clear that when dealing with this technology you need to carefully evaluate the user experience before launching any product or service on the market.

One last word about those mobile phones that will let you run application in background. If these applications will make use of the accelerometer they will need to implement different “gestures” to interact with the users. No standard exists at all and this may lead to a very bad user experience making the end user think that anything is working on their handsets.

Finally, do you remember the early times of bluetooth headset when you could see people walking around talking to themselves? We all thought that they were sort of crazy people. Using the accelerometer technology we will see the very same people dancing with their mobile phone to answer a call or read an SMS message.

Note: Photos from Piutus phostream. Someright rights reserved from the author.

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• Just Say No to Fragmentation (and to JSR-324)
  This is a very interesting article that details a great approach to reduce fragmentation in mobile device application development
  (tags: mobile mobile-phone j2me java java-me fragmentation)
• Ericsson: JavaOne: Taking mobile application development out of the niche
  Interesting point of view on why mobile application dvelopment is still a niche.
  (tags: mobile mobile-phone development)

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Finally Skype has released a mobile client for their service.

This is great news. You will be able to access Skype services while you are hitting the road without having to be a 3 customer in Europe or firing up your laptop in a WiFi covered area

You will finally be free from you mobile phone plan and you will be able to talk and chat for free forever!

Sure?

As always, you need to be very careful about the above statement. There are a lot of bad things you may find while using this service.

Here is a small list of things I do not personally like about this application and the related service:

• In several countries you will have to use SkypeIn in order to receive calls. That basically means it will cost you money
• When you will originate a voice call you will use your SkypeOut credit. Moreover since the client does not implement a real VoIP solution your call will be routed trough a standard voice call from your mobile operator. That means that you will consume your SkypeOut credit and on top you will be billed for a standard voice call as per your carrier plane. Definitely not cheap.
• When you will use Skype Chat you will pay according to your data traffic plan. Just as an example there are plans that makes you pay a fee as soon as a data connection is set up. Again, a lot of money.
• Since the application is a standard J2ME application it will not be possible to have it running in background. (Well on some mobile phones it will be possible but they are a few) This means that you will always need to have your application running in the foreground consuming battery power at a much faster rate compared to the idle state. Moreover your contact list will be constantly updated over a data connection costing you money.

I think there is enough to stay away from this application unless you have a very good voice and data plan from your carrier.

For the time being I think I will stay with my 3 SkypePhone.

I am suspecting that the Skype guys are trying to bring in some money from this initiative. Unfortunately it seems that they are not talking with mobile operators and, as I said in the past, the truth is that “Who owns the (U)SIM owns the customer”. And this is still true.

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As many blogs have already reported Google has just launched the App Engine project.

In a few words, Google App Engine will let you build a full stack and automatically scalable web application hosted on their premises.

This is what Google is saying about the project:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can

* Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.

* Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.

* Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

This is definitely competing with Amazon S3, EC2 and SimpleDB suite of oservices and it is nice to see this happening.

There are some other interesting things that need to be noticed

If I were a startup I would definitely consider something like Amazon S3 or Google App Engine for my infrastructure. It will allow me to focus all of my efforts on the design of my product/service without having to consider any scalability issue. Moreover I can invest the money i will save in marketing and sales instead of bringing a bunch of servers in a datacenter. You will also spare money on the support of those machines

In some way this is a sort of technology democratization. Talent and creativity may count more than money

The other positive thing is that you will be already sitting in a Google environment and that will make easier for your company to be acquired by Google itself. At the end of the day isn’t that the dream of anyone of us

On the dark side there are a couple of things that need to be considered.

You will not have control over the infrastructure your service will rely on. The recent Amazon S3 black out is something that may happen and may turn to be not so easy to sort out

The other thing is that is may be not so easy to take out your application from Google App Engine and run it on your own server. If, for any reason, you may think that this will happen you need to take this in account.

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Yesterday night I was sitting on the sofa reading the March issue of the wired magazine.

One of the most interesting article was one titled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“.

Citing the article, this is an interesting passage:

Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore’s law of ever-increasing computing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1960s to approximately 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in Intel’s latest quad-core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to “waste” transistors.

As explained in the article with the sentence “waste transistors” professor Mead wanted to say that in early times of the computer history hardware was very expensive and limited. Programmers had to be very clever in order to save any possible bit concentrating more on making their programming task efficient and as ligh as possible. This led to great attention on how tasks were implemented and no attention at all at how the user would interact with the machine.

When hardware price finally dropped, programmers could concentrate more on the user interface side being sure that the machine their applications were running on were fast enough.

This finally brought to market the hardware and interfaces we know today.

I think that the same story can be applied to Mobile Phones.

When mobile phone were born they were running on non really capable microprocessor. Programmers had to cope with these limitation and focus more on accomplishing the mission of designing a working device than delivering an eye candy user interface or applications.

Basically in the early stage of the mobile technology the only thing the phone had to do was allowing the customer to make a phone call.

Nowadays we can find on the market mobile phone that have the very same computing power of not so old personal computers.

I think it is definitely time to “Waste transistors” also on mobile phones.

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When I look at how people use their mobile phone I always end up with the very same conclusion.

We tend to look at things with our eyes and not really with the eyes of your customers. Having a quick look at who is sitting near to me I find a bunch of tech savvy, marketing minded, well educated people. This is not the typical environment we will find out there.

Going back to customers I can see that when they use their mobile phone they feel very confident about some typical usage.

They know how to make a voice call. They know how it works on their handset, they know how much it costs and they know what to expect. At little bit less degree of confidence comes the video call. The same happens with text messaging and, again, with picture messaging and e-mail.

Most of them know how to buy a ringtone.

A smaller number of them know how to browse the web using their mobile.

Operators on the other side are trying to push new and innovative services, most of them on the data side. We see Skype coming to handsets, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Go!, just to say some of the most common applications. Every operators on the other side is launching proprietary services to increase revenues.

At the end of the market chain we have the mobile phone manufacturer pre-installing applications on their devices.

I think this is the place where the industry is not doing very well.

Just a quick example.

Today I am using a phone which is still not in the market. I am diving deep in the menu structure of the device and I stop to the RSS Reader application.

The first consideration is: how many customers do really know what is an RSS feed? How many of them can tell how much they will spend using the application?

The second consideration is: how do we expect the customers to find the RSS Reader application when it’d hidden deep in the menu structure of the mobile phone?

Let’s see what Wikipedia says about RSS:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content including, but not limited to, blog entries, news headlines, and podcast. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator“. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

Well, it does not help to spread the word to non tech savvy customers.

Why don’t we try a different approach?

Let’s say that we want to offer a service which delivers news to our customers.

What happens in real life for the average customer? He will stop by his preferred newsstand, he will hand over a coin to the vendor and he will pick up his preferred newspaper. At a later stage he will start reading his newspaper. The day after the very same thing will happen.

If we look at this from an operator point of view we should think something like this:

• We want to deliver news to the customer on a timely basis charging him for the service just like it happens in real life.
• From a technical point of view there is no better way to implement this as a list of RSS feeds from the main newspapers and news site and install an RSS Reader on the mobile phone to let the customer access the service.
• On the mobile phone do not use the words “RSS Reader” for the application but something like “News!” and change the icon from the standard RSS icon to a more friendly newspaper icon.
• Put the application at the very first level of the User Interface or even in the idle screen.
• Ask the user how often he wants to stop at the newsstand. (Hourly, daily, etc. etc.)
• Charge the user as you prefer.

We have used the very same technology I can find in the phone I am using but we have delivered it to the customer in a way he can easily understand, and, hopefully, use.

The very same approach can be used for other informations coming from RSS Feed. For each bunch of information simply user a different metaphor. Change the icon and the wording for the title of the application. It will still be the same application but it will be much more usable from the customer and, at least, he will understand.

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