Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

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?

Posted by Anders Borg 01:33 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

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.

Posted by Anders Borg 00:25 | Permalink | 2 comments | Links to this post

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.

Posted by Anders Borg 22:45 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Is this descriptive of academics’ relation to reality in general? Kind of funny though.

Posted by Anders Borg 21:59 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

After having seen too many movies about the future and often with robots in (that goes for Terminator – Salvation too), here are a few thoughts about the matter, using reverse argumentation. Let’s say 15 years from now.

Robots will look like humans

Maybe some, but there will be mostly task-oriented robots. The human form is clearly not optimal for cleaning, surveillance, bomb disarming, in-body analysis, heavy lifting etc, so why make our new “slaves” look like humans if they are inefficient that way?

Of course, there will be human-looking robots as well, but their applicability is arguable. Would you rather use your future wireless terminal that’s efficient and precise to use, or a robotic bank teller that you have to walk up to and speak to? In Japan there’s talks about having for instance human-looking secretaries, but I just find that freaky, and it seems more like something thought up by a nerdy scientist. Then there’s the question about sexbots. I better stop there.

Robots will be human-size

Most robots will probably be rather small, but could also be very big, again optimized for their use, anywhere from blood vessel size, up to large machines for digging up ore etc.

Robots will be autonomous

I still see too little of this. Most robots of today are simply remotely controlled devices, or controlled by a preset motion pattern. They will not be really interesting until they actually manage on their own most of the time, and rather use central computer or human control as a fallback when “confused” etc.

Of course, autonomous robots need to be able to charge (they will be all electric) and repair themselves. Otherwise they become a burden to humans. Really large or specialized robots will probably require other robots for the repairs.

Robots will communicate via speech

Even with humans probably other ways of communicating (like with text displays, and keypads etc) will be used as well, but especially between robots there’s obviously no reason to use speech. Rather they will use very high speed digital communication (even at longer distances), to exchange text, audio, video, experience patterns, thought patterns, learnt behavior etc. So fast that more intelligent robots could probably exchange a day’s worth of experiences in microseconds.

This is of course not fun in a movie, but movies are movies.

Robots will be used for professional tasks

Surely, but also extensively as toys. See The Longest Journey - Dreamfall for a robotic orangutan (I think) that serves as a PDA and bad conscience as well.

Posted by Anders Borg 01:45 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Maybe you noticed #squarespace in my previous silliness of Twitter post.

There’s a company called Squarespace, so I’m just guessing: Could this be a viral marketing campaign from that company?

What did Squarespace do to make users adopt that topic (provided I’m guessing correctly)?

The remaining question in any case is: Why are Twitter users generally so willing to mention topics that have no relevance what-so-ever to what the users are actually tweeting about? What do they think they will achieve, except pushing a topic into the “high score” list. What’s the value of that to the individual, or are maybe ants or borgs (oops!) using Twitter?

A conundrum.

Interestingly and more alarming is one of the new top topics #iranelection, where it’s obvious there are genuine tweets about what’s going on around the election in Iran, and clearly it’s not all good things.

Posted by Anders Borg 00:47 | Permalink | 1 comments | Links to this post

Gizmodo compares iPhone, Palm Pre, HTC G2/Magic and BlackBerry Storm:

Gizmodo - Smartphone Buyers Guide: The Best of the Best

As competition will be between these phones as well as phones based on LiMo, Symbian and Windows Mobile, it’s an easy guess that evolution of smartphones (or as I use to call them, information-centric phones, or simply infophones or infones) wil be swift, and one or more of these platforms will disappear.

Posted by Anders Borg 19:29 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Long overdue, the mobile version of the Abiro site has now been completely converted to basic HTML, that should work on all newer phones. The site is still called wap.abiro.com, but I’ve also set up mobile.abiro.com.

iPhone and Android don’t support WML at all, and there should be very few phones used today that support only WML, so I opted for an HTML-only site. That should make future improvements simpler.

At the moment the content is pretty much the same as before, but this is a preparation for some new things coming up.

Posted by Anders Borg 22:41 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

While testing Android Twitter I noticed:

Twitter shows the most used topics (or keywords) among all Twitter feeds, which of course people have taken advantage of to force specific topics to “win”.

Currently it’s #squarespace and #crapsuperpowers. The other top keywords make sense though.

There’s even an API request to ask about what topics are the hottest right now, meaning you can automate the further domination of those keywords, or try to make something else dominate.

Can use of Twitter get more silly and pointless than this?

Currently, investors are crazy about funding companies that can even spell to Twitter, and most of those companies seem to be as financially unsound (read: without any revenue streams at all) as Twitter itself, yet unfortunately that irrational handing out seems concentrated to Silicon Valley.

Posted by Anders Borg 22:56 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

The Android Twitter clent is “prototype-ready” now. Still not showing user pictures, nor does any kind of formatting of the timeline text (colors would be nice, for instance), but it sure works, and it’s possible to follow links in the messages (actually a feature of the TextView widget).

It’s also been tested on the G1, as can be seen in the photos. After the public demo on Friday the obvious question is: What to do next?

Before a commercial launch is reasonable (what with TwitDroid showing pictures, has user searching etc) at least timelines need to be formatted. Probably the best way to achieve that would be to open a browser view in the lower part of the display, and generate HTML from within the application. I haven’t figured out how to do that though.

In total it’s taken 3 work days of development, and 1 day of reading books and web tutorials, so my other MIDlets would probably also be rather quick to port.

Click on the photos for more detail.

Main display

Main menu

More features are in the sub menu.

Posted by Anders Borg 19:56 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

The singularity in terms of IT is the time when computers/machines/gadgets can make better copies of themselves, creating a constant improvement of technology without the aid of human beings. Sounds a bit like what happens in the Terminator saga, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the Singularity Hub covers improvements to technology that could lead to the singularity, as if it could ever happen. After seeing Terminator Salvation I hope not, but I have to admit, it would probably be quite exciting (as in fatally dangerous) to be a human being then.

Surprisingly cost-efficient (“$250 to wire up a 5,000 tree orchard”) these new gadgets make it possible to track the watering status in professional farms. The devices are solar-powered, so there’s no problem with power either.

It doesn’t tell how, but clearly the devices themselves can’t send SMSs directly to mobile phones (what with SIM cards, enough power etc). Rather there must be some collecting devices that then convert the alerts into SMSs.

Singularity Hub - Thirsty Plants Can Now Use Microchip To Send Text Messages

Posted by Anders Borg 22:56 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

I added a few photos to Flickr, just to show I was there. They have no other qualities.

Dream Theater

Finally I’ve seen Dream Theater live, and it was very good (read: f****ng great!!!!!). I’ve seen them on DVDs before, and this was in my opinion en par with the best recorded shows. James’ voice didn’t crack up either, so it was all fun and games. They played a gamut of songs from most of their albums. Even songs from theme albums worked well on their own.

They are all very talented musicians, so nothing went wrong in the performance department. They also kept reasonable contact with the audience. They don’t need any gimmicks to pull off a good show (I was afraid the gargoyles beside the scene were theirs, but they were actually for Heaven & Hell).

Parts of the audience chanted each and every song. They played one song from their upcoming album (out end of June) Dark Clouds and Silver Linings: A Rite of Passage. The audience even sang the lyrics to that one. That’s impressive, until I found it’s already out and about on the Web.

The 1.5 hours were over in no time. I wish there had been more of it.

They will play at Hovet in Stockholm during September. See here for the full tour schedule.

Europe

Europe, the Swedish band from the 80’s, has been playing together again for a couple of years, and did quite well at SRF. Seeing them after Dream Theater was probably a bit unfair, but I enjoyed it all the same. I saw them live in 1986, and their confidence was at least 100 times better now.

Continuing mobile distress

Another day of some to no coverage. This is actually unusual for Sweden, as there’s supposed to be coverage even in the mountains of northern Sweden, so it was probably mainly due to overload. I’m sure most took the chance to call between the shows. Calling during shows was impossible, even when standing far away.

I sent an SMS to get the festival programme, but the response SMS never came back.

Some advice to future mobile service providers participating in shows like this:

• Make it much more apparent that there are such services. I’m pretty sure no one used the festival programme service, as it was only shown for a few seconds on a very long info rotator on a big screen.
• Provide services that are more disruptive and interesting, like getting backstage passes, voting for the best band or whatnot, not just information that could easier and better be obtained on paper. An information site with links to more information about the artists might be fine, but clearly people are not there to surf the Internet.
• Make it very clear how much the services cost, so there’s no question about that.
• Partner with operators to get better mobile “power” during the festival days. Operators can do that, provided they know beforehand. The SRF organizers should have secured this of course, not individual service providers.

Posted by Anders Borg 10:48 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post