For years and years we used to make fun of the press and analysts for either saying that WiMax existed when it did not or for predicting huge uptake before the tech was even ready. Plenty of companies offered wireless broadband, but it was not WiMax, no matter what they (or the press) called it. Back in 2003, we even made a pretty clear prediction: WiMax would not be ready for prime time until 2008, going against plenty of analysts who insisted it would be the big thing in 2004. And 2005. And 2006. And 2007. So, it’s nice to see Sprint squeeze in the launch of its WiMax Xohm service before the end of 2008, and make our prediction accurate. Of course, those analysts who predicted huge WiMax success stories in 2004 have moved on and have already declared WiMax dead, and now LTE is the huge success story to watch out for. Let’s wait and see on that one as well. There’s just something about wireless technologies that make the press and analysts assume that what is being talked about at the tech level will take the world by storm immediately. These things take time.
It seems that we’re all going mobile marketplace crazy. It’s an old idea of course, but the iPhone app store has reinvigorated our appetite for developing mobile apps and for spreading their mobile goodness. I doubt if there’s a good payback for most small developers, but at least their apps are in a sales funnel with sizable traffic - you’re only in the long tail if someone can see you!
T-Mobile (US) are getting ready to launch their store, followed closely by Google for their Android platform. In the UK, we’ll soon have O2 Litmus, which is getting ready to launch. See their alpha site image on Flickr. Note the menu heading earnings. As I said before, this was a major omission from the Vodafone Betavine site. That may have changed, but I haven’t been back to take a look. I found it too irritating that an operator, especially one that big, would expect developers just to play with their APIs without a crack at making some money. It’s like R&D for free.
But this is the Internet and free is here to stay. There are still plenty of free apps out there vying for our attention. These can surely benefit from an aggregated marketplace. Phoload does just that - it’s a free mobile software download website. Free apps exist either just for fun or part of a wider mobile strategy - i.e. a mobile client to build a social network. I noticed the Trutap client, for example. Other apps are trying to pursue alternative monetization schemes, such as ad inserts.
The website aims to build an active community of users who recommend, rate, and review the software. The games and applications on Phoload are uploaded directly to the site by mobile software developers. There are already over 200 items in the catalogue, including location-based apps, social networks, language tools, and plenty of arcade and puzzle games.
Initially, Phoload will be offering software built for J2ME. The iPhone has been getting all the attention recently, but then most people don’t have one! With over 2 billion phones that support J2ME, there are plenty of people around to download MIDlets!
Phoload will also be launching Android support next week and adding Symbian support by
the end of the month.
Developers start uploading now!
I apologise for slowing down a bit on my posts. I’m busy putting together a brand new site to aggregate my blog with other resources and professional services that I offer or have access to, including a great new training course that was recently delivered to O2 Internet team.
Anyhow, for the new site, standard blogging software doesn’t really cut it, so I’ve returned to a more comprehensive CMS tool - the fantastic Joomla - with the resultant drain on time and energy getting it all up and running.
Picking up where we left off…
Market-Based Myths Abound
The argument against Net Neutrality really goes off-track when it gets into the nature of private property, the state of competition, and the effect of regulation. That’s more than one track to be thrown off of, so it’s quite the disaster scene. We may need CSI: Telecom to sort it all out.
Public Knowledge earned its headline in the Spectator because of the petition we filed with the FCC asking that companies like Verizon which offer text messaging not be able to decide which groups should be deemed worthy of service and which shouldn’t be…
There’s a Business Week article making the rounds saying that it’s not Microsoft or Yahoo that’s a real threat to Google, but the rise of the mobile web, which will somehow shrink ad inventory and cause headaches for Google. It’s a nice theory, but it’s hard to square with reality. Increasing use of the mobile screen is hardly likely to decrease usage of a full computer screen. If anything, it will likely make desktop computing more useful in some cases. The article also makes a few other questionable statements. First, it points out that the mobile screen is smaller, so there’s less ad inventory, and then it points out that the growing acceptance of the mobile web is due to the web browser on the iPhone. That sounds good, but the points contradict each other. The success of the iPhone’s browser is due to the fact that it presents a full (not limited) web browsing experience — so it doesn’t really limit the inventory available to Google. Furthermore, even if the inventory was limited (which seems unlikely) that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Google. Google’s success has been based on making ads more relevant — not just more available. This was what resulted in so much confusion during Google’s recent earnings announcement. Google had made some changes to drive more relevant clickthroughs — and while that may lower actual clickthroughs, it increases revenue. So, even if inventory is limited, if Google is still the best at making ads relevant, it will do just fine.
Why can’t I get in contact with people by telephone sometimes (often)? It’s simple. My telephone only offers me a 50/50 chance, or less, of making contact. If I dial your number, I have no idea if you’re available or not.
Why do we still have this problem? After all, we live in an age of mass computing. Moreover, there’s more computing power in my phone than yesterday’s laptop. And, isn’t it a problem that everyone has? Telephone tag. You’d think that we’d have solved this by now, wouldn’t you?
It’s possibly to do with frames of thinking. In telephony, we talk about circuits and circuit-switched calls, which is how most mobile calls still work. Therefore, to complete a call, you ‘need’ to complete a circuit. In fact, in the old days you’d need an operator to do this and they’re still pretending that they’re there, which is why roaming calls are artificially expensive.
Are we really interested in a completing-a-circuit experience? No. Only communications engineers care about such things. We’re mostly interested in having a communication experience. A conversation, no less. An exchange of ideas, requests, views and so on.
If we were designing a complete-the-conversation experience, we might think differently. We would think about all the ways that two (or more) people could connect and exchange whatever they need to exchange that day in a timely fashion.
The issue is primarily one of scheduling and availability. For two people to attempt a connection and have a high probability of success, then they need to agree when it’s going to take place. We all know this, yet why isn’t it a feature of our phones? Isn’t this an essential and integral part of making a call? Not in the telecoms mindset, no. Any state diagram showing a call being made begins with placing the call, it never begins with scheduling the call. This, it seems, isn’t important. It’s somebody else’s problem.
There are lots, possibly hundreds, of oversights like this when we critically analyse telephony services with a view to how well they support real human interactivity rather than meeting functional technological goals, such as completing a circuit.
This relates to my previous post about ecosystems and user experience. Thinking in terms of two people making contact is all about the user experience. Thinking in terms of closing circuits isn’t. Creating a solution that meets the experiential needs of the user in a holistic fashion is mostly about creating an ecosystem, not a point solution. For example, we would need a calendaring system to support call scheduling. It is remarkable that we still don’t have shared and group calendaring on our mobiles, especially considering that we all have them and we all have diaries, whether computerised, on paper or in our heads! (In fact, it probably doesn’t pay to think in terms of diaries, but that’s another story.)
We could brainstorm how best to facilitate scheduling and you might be surprised by the range of solutions. Why don’t you have a go.
What’s going on here? There is no simple answer, but a lot of it has to do with framing - how we think about things. This doesn’t just apply to technology. Almost everything we do has a historical basis. This becomes forgotten and we carry on with the solution without question. You might call it design-by-tradition.
This isn’t always the case. Sometimes we think that we understand the problem and we come up with a solution that fits with our preferred understanding. Later on, or even from the outset, that understanding might prove to be inappropriate, yet we stick with it because we ‘believe’ in it, perhaps for good reason. You might call it design-by-dogma.
It seems to me that IP Telephony is design-by-tradition. Apart from the cost savings, it is an almost useless facsimile of the whole circuit-switched experience. There is a vague attempt to solve the scheduling problem, using presence or chat, but this just pushes the problem into an out-of-band channel. These are not scheduling tools. They are not part of a holistic solution to having a remote conversation. They are just other traditional tools bundled in with the package.
On the iPhone, most people I talk with agree that it is a great device. Most of us who have one tend to admire it. I love mine. Overall, the experience is impressive. However, the texting part is incredibly poor, surprisingly so. In fact, it is so bad that I am left wondering what on earth they were thinking. For example, why leave out the ability to forward a message? This is like ‘messaging 101′ or ‘designing a messaging system for dummies’ kind of stuff.
It would seem that this is design-by-dogma. The iPhone’s texting interface is an attempt to copy the iChat interface - they are identical visually. Yet, they are NOT the same. Texting is asynchronous (’fire and forget’) and not exclusively a chatting tool. Anyone who’s read a basic book about texting habits knows that forwarding texts is a huge amount of texting traffic. Yet, this doesn’t fit with the iChat frame of thinking.
And then, only this week, I discover yet another problem with texting on the iPhone - it isn’t ‘fire and forget.’ Without coverage, it simply tells the user ‘error sending message,’ or some unhelpful equivalent. It doesn’t pop the message into an ‘outgoing’ box and attempt to send it later when coverage resumes.
Again, this is design-by-dogma. If you’re having a real-time chat, then you probably don’t want your message stuck in an outbox and sent some arbitrary time later - it wouldn’t mesh with the chat experience.
Where’s cut-and-paste on the iPhone? More dogma. It doesn’t quite fit with the multi-touch paradigm, so they simply leave it out, against all sense I would say. It’s like designing a car that does 100 mpg and then leaving out seats because they didn’t fit with the design goal, which was 100 mpg, not ‘getting me comfortably and safely from A to B within 100 mpg.’
Apple seem to be the masters of thinking about user experience, but this shows that even they can get it wrong, such is the power of sticking to a particular frame of thought.
Cisco is taking the open platform concept that has become so prevalent in the consumer mobile world to the corporate market. The company announced today a new mobile services platform that it is Read more…
Apparently a Mexican press attache at a meeting with White House officials in New Orleans saw an opportunity and swiped the Blackberries of a bunch of White House staffers. At many such meetings, it’s required for attendees to leave their phones and mobile devices outside of the meeting room. You would think that with such high-powered government officials that someone would then be left to guard the devices, but apparently not. This guy grabbed a bunch of the devices and made a run for the airport, where he was caught by Secret Service officials, who promptly showed him the surveillance camera footage of him taking the devices. His response was that he thought the devices had been left behind, and he was merely picking them up to return them to their owners, which might be more believable if the folks weren’t still in the meeting room when he grabbed all the devices. Who knows if it’s true, but I’m still wondering why no one was guarding the Blackberries.
My slides are available to view online or download from Slideshare. I hope that you find them useful, although I haven’t had time to add any audio yet. I intend to do so very soon. Meanwhile, if you have any burning questions, feel free to contact me via Slideshare or this blog post.
My favourite slide is slide 11 (below), which is a very simple framework for brainstorming a user experience story for your mobile application (although it would apply to any Web 2.0 application). This represents the phases that the user might go through, not necessarily in this order, but roughly so.
Whilst on the topic of UX, I was delighted to hear Michael Osborn (Times Newspapers) talk about their UX goal of achieving ‘flow’ for their mobile users. This is the principle of achieving effortlessness, such that the user remains happily immersed in the portal for a length of time, even in challenging environments (such as standing on a train). Interestingly, the average stay on the mobile portal is comparable to the average length of stay on their web portal, which is quite an achievement, although we need to consider more deeply what this implies (but here is not the place).
I had a chance to ask Michael if he had considered a means to quantify ‘flow’ in order to measure whether or not many users are experiencing it. The answer was no, but that is not a criticism of Michael or his team. It was really a set-up for a point I made later in my presentation about trying to define measurements for various UX objectives. Whilst I understand that certain aspects of ‘experience’ are difficult to define perhaps, the more that we can quantify the UX, the better chance we have of knowing that we are succeeding. This, like so many of my points in the presentation, is obvious. However, I still find that the obvious is overlooked all too often.
New broadband statistics from the OECD (through the last quarter of 2007) point to the complete and continuing failure of the United States to reclaim its prior successes, much less, even keep up with a growing list of other countries. Even the Wall Street Journal is jumping into the fray:
- “Once the undisputed leader in the technological revolution, the U.S. now lags a growing number of countries in the speed, cost and availability of high-speed Internet. While cable and telecom companies are spending billions to upgrade their service, they’re focusing their efforts mostly on larger U.S. cities for now.”
The Wall Street Journal article contains some real gems — pointing to historical precedents that mirror today’s broadband situation and debates:
- Chattanooga’s Mr. DePriest compares his agency’s plan for high-speed Internet to the rollout of electricity, which came to many parts of Tennessee only in the 1930s as a result of the creation by the federal government of the Tennessee Valley Authority. That was three decades after many businesses and homes in major urban areas like New York were first electrified. The country’s electricity at the time was largely provided by private companies, which denounced any government efforts to get into the business as “socialist” — echoing the debate over municipal fiber networks today.
Meanwhile, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, here’s a few bloggings worth of data:
.gif)
Lots more OECD facts and figures concerning broadband statistics are available here. For the truly ambitious, take a look at the OECD report on broadband growth and national policies to read about the documented importance of governmental intervention to supporting the spread of broadband connectivity.
Search
You are currently browsing the archives for the Wireless category.
Pages
Categories
- International (4)
- International Calling Card (1)
- International Phone Card (6)
- Telecom (2)
- Telecom Directions (1)
- Uncategorized (2)
- Wimax (29)
- Wireless (76)
Archives
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- May 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- December 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- September 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- March 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- February 2004
- January 2004
- October 2003
- September 2003
- June 2003
- March 2003
- February 2003
- January 2003
- December 2002
- November 2002
- October 2002
- August 2002
- June 2002
- March 2002
- February 2002
- January 2002
