Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Thursday, July 30, 2009
No more about Twitizer here
Unless it’s about major enhancements I won’t cover Twitizer more here. It’s got its own blog, and my intention is anyway to let it simmer a while to see where it’s heading. I have a long list of improvements I’d like to make, but most will have to wait until I have more time.
App stores on the lookout
An effect of the plethora of application stores being established now is that they need something to provide, and I’ve noticed an increasing amount of requests for providing MIDlets via new app stores.
Most requests concern fully commercial or ad-based setups, which is good. There’s been way too much free applications.
Therefore I wouldn’t call the MIDlet market completely dead yet, but it’s certainly not healthy either.
On a side note:
If you provide a service that needs a mobile application for e.g. reading GPS info, showing maps, sensing the accelerometer, accessing the phone book or file system, etc, something a browser can’t do, then a MIDlet is still the obvious first choice considering most phones support it, including most that also run more advanced OSs, like Nokia Series 60, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.
An obvious exception is the Apple iPhone that doesn’t support MIDlets (not even badly), and probably never will. The same goes for the current Android phones, but I believe some manufacturers will integrate KVMs.
So to cover the bulk of phones, get some hype factor into the mix (investors understand iPhone but not MIDlets), and also provide a better user experience for phones that have that capability, a MIDlet and an iPhone application is a good combination.
New service coming up
On a more positive note, I’m now fully active with a rather extensive commercial service project, where I’m the project manager, adviser on mobile technologies etc.
The service is based on Drupal, a rather powerful open source CMS that has tons of plug-in modules for anything from community, scheduling, maps, recipes (!) etc.
It’s coming along fine, but it’s without question the most complex service project I’ve ever been involved in, even if I include mm3’s service for mobile marketing. The schedule is also tight, with a set launch date and a planned marketing campaign at that time etc
The service will have mobile features as well, including a mobile web site, an iPhone application and a MIDlet. Not very complex ones in themselves, but nevertheless add complexity to the project as a whole.
What makes this service so interesting is that most parts of the service will be directly accessed by end-users and non-technicans, even on the information publishing side, so all aspects of it need to be very user-friendly and we need to constantly remind ourselves that simple is better than advanced, even though at times it’s complex to make it simple.
I won’t be able to say more until the company decides to go public about the service.
On the topic of arguable business models
I’ve written about Jamba/Jamster before:
- Abiro - Mobile News- Jamster-Jamba's business practices questioned again
- Abiro - Mobile News- Jamba controversy claimed to hurt ringtone business
- Abiro - Mobile News- Payback on Crazy Frog, round 2
- Abiro - Mobile News- Crazy Frog generates an annoying amount of money
- Abiro - Mobile News- Misleading TV ads of the crazy frog
Sadly the company still persists with its immoral business model, luring kids (and adults too) to sign up to its subscription-based service using “free” mobile content as bait..
Tons of complaints about Jamba and other companies using the same model arrive at consumer advisers, but nothing is being done. I’ve contacted Sweden’s “KO” and they don’t even (want to?) understand what I’m talking about.
Should really the mobile industry allow this kind of behavior? Don’t regulation bodies have a say here or don’t they understand what’s going on either?
As mentioned in the earlier notes, mBlox was sued a couple of years ago, when it was really Jamba that controlled the business model. Sure, mBlox could have dropped Jamba, but then they would have lost a major revenue stream. In that sense they were both guilty of immoral business behavior.
Subscriptions is the only way to get profit from independent mobile content sales (not counting operators, communities and similar services that for other reasons already “own” many customers/users), so it’s either that or bust, so I understand why Jamba is persisting, but that doesn’t make it moral.
From the fine print (this is even if you only want one ringtone or other content, ever; note that there’s actually no other subscription plans than XXL):
By subscribing you certify that you are the account holder or have the account holder's permission, and you agree to these terms, the full terms and the privacy policy at www.jamster.com. You will be charged $9.99 per month for the Jamster XXL Subscription Plan (6 ringtones/videos, 10 graphics and 4 games/apps) until you cancel.
We’ll answer any question, however stupid…
In Sweden there’s a war between companies that offer “we answer any question you might have” services, all with phone numbers starting with “118…”. Considering how much TV advertising they each do, the total spending must be millions of dollars per year. And this for a type of service that I’m not even sure many would use, or at least not more than once (as a novelty).
It’s kind of like advertising for detergents, soft drinks or hamburgers: They all offer the same stuff, so the one that screams the loudest (read: spends the most money) wins. Even worse actually, as there’s no real chance to create a meta value.
The recipe seems to be this: You have a call center with nothing to do and no revenue in these harsh times. Competitors claim they can answer any question over phone or SMS. You see an opportunity to jump onto the bandwagon or go bust. Investors seem to think this is a new gold mine and either invest in or simply buy the company. Of course, the later you are into this game, the less likelihood you will survive.
Supposedly these services use databases with already answered questions, and if there’s no answer to be had (like to “Is there a meaning to life?” or “Am I God incarnate?”) they just invent an answer on the spot.
Twitizer and user behavior
This is not in any way intended to ridicule users, but rather to list some observations:
- Several use it to send just text, and often text where the real content (excluding the added carrier information) is less than 140 characters. Maybe they don’t realize it’s possible to SMS tweets, or they don’t want the cost of sending SMSs. The latter actually makes sense. Sadly, as the carrier information is part of the message text, I have no easy way of removing it, so I currently show that as well, practically advertising for others’ services.
- Several register without sending anything. I hope it’s not because the service doesn’t catch the messages, and I’ve seen no signs of that. I’ve submitted many messages and none has disappeared. I will add OAuth authentication soon, but in the mean time the most risky thing a user does is to reveal their Twitter identity, so sending something is relatively speaking a non-risky procedure (not that I do anything with the user information of course). Maybe the issue is on the phone side: no e-mail account set up or no MMS.
Down the road I’ll do a survey, but right now I’ll stand on the side and see what happens.
I also noted that some carriers generate a complete web page of the message, including small images used as delimiters, “beautifiers” etc. As those are usually in GIF format I simply ignore them now, so that only the message text and possible other user submitted content show up.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
TRON Legacy / 2.0
New TRON movie on the way. Holy macaroni!
Interestingly the artwork is more like the TRON 2.0 game than the original TRON movie. Shows promise.
Marketing mobile messaging, the wrong way
Update August 3, 2009: The most brain-dead solution for MMS-to-e-mail conversion is probably Telus Mobility’s: The recipient gets a message containing only the message text and “This is an MMS message. Please go to http://mms.telusmobility.com/do/LegacyLogin to view the message.”. I now properly convert the link to a clickable one, but that doesn’t help in this case, as the recipient also needs to use Telus to be able to see the message. It’s not improving things when the followed page says “An internal error has occurred. The operation could not be completed.” Very helpful indeed. No wonder people still upload photos from mobile phones via their PCs. I had hoped I wouldn’t need a PC Upload page, but now it might be necessary. Thanks Telus!
I’ve seen a pattern in messages sent via Twitizer from users of primarily US carriers: The addition of lots of carrier information to the messages. I sense this is to achieve the Hotmail effect, where recipients of messages not currently using the specific service should be teased, but on the other hand, would you switch carrier just for an arguably better messaging service that will send recipients spam about itself?
It rather hinders people from using the service, as the added texts etc will dominate the message content, like a pizza delivery guy carrying a large poster ad for the pizza house, every time he delivers a pizza.
Examples (not showing the actual messages):
- Verizon: “This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture. Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime”
- T-Mobile: Additional pictures including a logo strip with “This message was sent by a T-Mobile wireless phone” and a large white square (?)
- Nextel: “Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with Nextel Direct Connect”
- Rogers Wireless: “You have received a Picture Message from your Rogers Wireless friend, mobile number <number>. <name> received a video or picture msg from <name>. Click link below 2 view from phone(fees apply) or view via PC. http://picturemessaging.rogers.com” Note that even the number and name are included. Not good for privacy. And why does it say “2 view”, as it saves only one character. To simulate hipness?
The above is the norm rather than the occasional oddity. I haven’t seen this behavior in Europe and when using MMS, but that doesn’t mean it’s unique to the US.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Twitizer in the movies
Update: I re-edited the clip a bit, so I’ve included the new version below. The script is still rather silly.
I’ve used Xtranormal to create an animation/video describing basic uses of Twitizer, as well as being a showcase of Xtranormal in general.
The speech is sometimes choppy and hard to understand, but Xtranormal nevertheless indicates what comic strips can be like in a year (or less).
It’s fun to use the animation and expression controls, even though I didn’t go too crazy on the controls in this video. Maybe if I try comics.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Twitizer goes live
It’s been public and stable for a week now, so this is kind of the “cut the ribbon” launch.
Nice features (I think), if you are into Twitter, want some multimedia, and are slightly nerdy:
- Optimized for submitting multimedia content to Twitter from a mobile phone via MMS or e-mail
- Worldwide compatibility (I hope; I’ve tried with Chinese etc; let me know if any script causes problems)
- Supports long texts, photos/pictures, video clips and audio clips / podcasts, and in combination
- Very quick and easy registration process, and easy to get a reminder for the e-mail alias
- Easy-to-remember automatically generated e-mail aliases, a la “4 letters from the Twitter user name plus a PIN”, e.g. nerd7053@twitizer.com
- Short permanent links (5 character code) to landing pages for the submitted messages, e.g. http://twitizer.com/xY6Lq
- Multiple media shown on the same landing page, supporting multi-slide MMS’s, yet not with animation, as that’s removed by the MMS transcoding gateway
- As much as possible of the subject and message body shown in the Twitter update, together with the link to the landing page
- Photos/pictures can be rotated in place, not affecting the original
- Video and audio clips are played using embedded players
- Videos are converted, hosted, and played by Vimeo
- All mobile phone generated media formats are supported (knock on wood)
- The original media file can be downloaded to the PC; this feature might disappear for videos due to the file size
- The latest submitted messages (independent of user) can be easily viewed without going to Twitter; currently without user images etc, so this will change
- The landing page links back to the message submitter’s Twitter page for easy access to other updates
- etc etc
The list could be made longer, and I might update later.
I’ve considered adding true MMS support, so that slides could be animated, but it’s really not that important, as most people only take one photo or record one video or audio clip, together with some text. Also, MMS to a phone number has a lot of negative implications from a worldwide rate and compatibility perspective, and if you use true e-mail the transfer cost is quite low.
Friday, July 10, 2009
A sneak preview of Twitizer
I’ve developed a new service within Abiro that’s called Twitizer. It makes it possible to tweet with pictures, videos and audio (and actually with anything, as long as you provide the viewer).
Pictures work fine, videos kind of too, but so far not audio, as I haven’t found a browser plug-in or hosting service that supports AMR.
The site design is still preliminary, as you see, but you can get a feel for what the service does by navigating the pages.
Feel free to take Twitizer for a spin. I can’t promise 100% satisfaction right now, but such things will be ironed out in the coming weeks.
I’ve intentionally made the registration process very simple. There’s nothing to configure (even though I can think of many things a user might want to configure), and even the e-mail address to send tweets to is automatically generated.
You can click on each picture to get to the real thing. I can’t guarantee these links are active for long, as I will empty the database in a few days.
Friday, July 03, 2009
The happy escape
As most of you know already, The Pirate Bay will be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X for 60 million SEK (~$8M). Not that much, if TPB is seen as a hyped IT company, but seen as a purchase of a popular domain and little else (TPD as we know it will disappear), it’s rather expensive.
The whole value of TPB can be summed up by “Everything’s free”. That’s hard to beat.
Rather it seems like a combined cash-in and escape from potentially more law suits, as that’s now GGFX’s problem, so the question is why GGFX acquired.
It sounds a bit like when Niklas Zennström sold Kazaa to Sharman Network, when things became a little bit too nasty. In that case it was for even less money ($1M, a symbolic figure).
The Local - Swedish IT company to buy Pirate Bay
The Local - Scepticism and outrage follow Pirate Bay sale
bnet - Kazaa BV assets cost Sharman $1m
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Location, full circle
Just a short time after WAP browsers were provided in mobile phones, and even before that via SMS, operators offered “near you” type services that listed (without fancy graphics or maps) e.g. petrol stations in your vicinity. That worked fine, using network-based cell location, except nobody used those services at the time.
A few years ago GPS was all the rage, but it’s still marginally available/used:
- Hardly any phones have GPS. Sure, iPhones and BlackBerrys have, but hardly anyone has iPhones and BlackBerrys (despite the media attention they get).
- The battery drain is still disastrous.
- Sensitivity is also pretty bad, especially on smaller phones, so oftentimes there’s no possibility to determine the location.
- Reaching many users (which mobile services must do to get enough revenue or reach) requires cell or (of increasing interest and viability) Wi-Fi location.
- GPS also has the drawback of not working at all indoors, however sensitive the receiver is.
Hence, what you need to use today for location is primarily cell-based, either by accessing information in the phone (device dependent/limited but free), or go via location brokers and determine the location via the network (device independent but costly).
I wonder though why GPS power consumption can’t be improved? I’m an amateur at best when it comes to radio electronics, but isn’t a GPS receiver just that, a receiver? So what draws all that current?
New frontiers
I’ve updated my LinkedIn profile, as things are a-changing, partly explaining my blogging absence:
- The biggest change is that I’m co-founder and board member at a new company (yet to be disclosed) that will provide consumer-oriented mobile services, and I will serve as the project leader for the initial service development there, and then switch over to a more or less pure board/adviser role.
- My work as CEO at Mobile Labs Sweden AB continues, and we recently announced a very compact vector font rendering solution (< 1M) for Chinese low-end phones.
- For Netville I part time (obviously) provide assistance with sales and marketing of professional services for the local telecom market.
- Already last year I left as active at mm3 Mobile Channel AB (yet I remain as co-founder).
- On my spare “Abiro time” I’m currently involved in 5 parallel development projects (I’m not kidding, but of course only occasionally) on platforms as diverse as Visual Basic, C#, Android Dalvik, Java ME and PHP/MySQL, and in cases in combination.
I own stock in all the mentioned companies, which is my long term strategy for additional (and hopefully in cases “hockey stick”) revenue. This is yet to be proven a sensible strategy. If it works I’ll probably write a book, or buy a Segway.
There will be more stuff happening down the road, but this is enough for now.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Distribution of MIDlets via Kalador/Mobilerated
Here are some stats and attempts to conclusions gathered from providing mobile applications via mobilerated.com. I can’t give any exact numbers for confidentiality reasons.
- Big difference in download/click ratio between applications. Conclusion: Downloading is not all. Repetitive use will create the long term ad revenue, so make useful applications that people want to use again and again. This doesn’t mean “glossy” promotion (an area where I fail utterly) is not important, but it’s definitely not enough if the application is a turkey. E.g. Jitter is downloaded relatively little (for whatever reason) but generates the most ad revenue.
- Very little pay despite sizable volumes. Conclusion: Don’t leave your day job on chance.
- Noticed at GetJar, but probably applies to Mobilerated as well: There are many more games than applications, so it’s harder to stand out with games. On the other hand, games are much more downloaded than applications. Conclusion: None really, as I have no games to compare with, so draw your own in this case.
- Indonesia and India lead, with USA and United Kingdom close seconds. Conclusion: Don’t just go for the Western markets, and don’t think Asian markets are less developed in terms of mobile use. That’s a huge mistake. Oddly Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea don’t show up. Not reached by Mobilerated?
- The ad frontend needs to be very polished, clearly pointing out the application is in there, but you need to look at an ad first. When publishing the same ad-enabled applications at GetJar, some user got really angry thinking this was adware, and nothing else. Conclusion: The market needs better in-app solutions. It’s on my (very long) to-do list to make one.
Android, a curiosity to academics
Is this descriptive of academics’ relation to reality in general? Kind of funny though.
