February 9th, 2010
Yesterday evening I was at the ‘Enabling Mobile Voice Services’ MoMo London event sponsored by Skype. AudioBoo, HulloMail and Communigate gave demos/presentations followed by a panel/audience discussion involving people from Hutchison 3g (H3G), Nuance, Google, AudioBoo and Nicky Hickman who works freelance in project and innovation management.
Here are some of my notes from the evening…
- Audioboo has managed to get 38,000 users in 10 months.
- Is the async side of voice a missed opportunity?
- A challenge for small developers working with voice is that IP is tied up with large companies.
- Another problem is the large volumes of data that need to be handled.
- Skype has an open source codec.
- Voice is becoming a new input method for applications (can choose to speak rather than type on Android keyboard).
- Similarly, voice will become a new application output method.
- Nuance app (their iPhone app) sends data to the server for recognition. Unable to do recognition on the phone as it is not powerful enough and vocabulary/accents variants would take up too much space. (Their iPhone app has had over 3 million downloads)
- Nuance are open to sharing voice technologies via SDK.
- On H3G, network capacity consumed by voice is much less than that used by data (due to dongles I suspect).
- H3G are already seeing voice being substituted by sms, email, IM, especially in younger age groups, as it’s seen as cheaper.
- Why hasn’t visual voicemail (controlling voicemail via app) become ubiquitous? Hard to get compatibility across all handsets. No standard API that works with all carrier messaging systems.
- Why does H3G use normal phone call for Skype rather than VOIP (more details in my previous post)? To guarantee good call quality.
- Voice recognition (Nuanace) works well in ideal situations but not so good in noisy or (network) bandwidth limited situations.
- There may be a social barrier to using voice to control things in public places. It may need social acceptance.
- It has been shown that people can’t do complex tasks using audio. We aren’t wired that way.
Finally, a tip from me. There’s a
great site on VOIP if you are thinking of developing some sort of mobile voice solution.
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Posted in Mobile, MoMoLondon, MoMo
February 5th, 2010
A short while ago, I wrote how there’s a huge potential market for a fully featured cross-platform application generator. What tools that are available, are either functionally incomplete or don’t support many platforms.
However, this doesn’t mean they can’t be used to write certain types of application. One requirement I am increasing getting is from small/self publishers and brands who want to publish information (usually on the iPhone) without actually interacting with any phone specific features.
This can, of course, be done on the web without an application but you lose the discoverability that’s provided by an app store. However, some might argue that, with 140,000+ apps, iPhone apps have also lost the ability to be easily discovered. Coincidentally, Taptu’s (the mobile search people) latest metrics show there’s growing life in the mobile web.
It’s possible to use one of many (paid for) online iPhone app generators to auto-generate an application. However, in many cases you will want more control than the templates provide.
It’s actually relatively easy (and free) to create a more customised app for the web or for the phone. Start by looking at jQTouch. It’s probably the best plugin/library that allows you to write html pages with an iPhone look and feel. This will get you a great mobile web app with minimal effort.
If you need an installable application as opposed to a web application then take a look at PhoneGap. I was once wary about using frameworks like PhoneGap and Rhomobile because of the problems with Apple rejecting applications because they were using 3rd party frameworks. Since then, lots of lobbying has made PhoneGap (v 0.8.0) officially permitted on the app store so I now take it more seriously.
It’s possible to use jQTouch within PhoneGap. There’s a very recent tutorial at tutsplus. Also, if you are quick, there’s a whole O’Reilly book online (for review) at the moment on building iPhone Apps with HTML that includes a great chapter on including jQTouch within PhoneGap.
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Posted in Mobile, Tools, iPhone
February 4th, 2010
Earlier in the week I mentioned my new free mobile link exchange. Well, today it went live at MobileAdvertNetwork.com. There’s a press release at PR Log.
You can join via the
registration page. New registrations are moderated but after that, new ads aren’t and are shown immediately. The
Platform APIs page explains how to go about adding the links to your mobile web page or application.
Please let me know if you have any problems or new ideas. The Mobile Advert Network is something I want to slowly evolve and refine over time.
Posted in Mobile, Advertising
February 4th, 2010
Last year I mentioned how 5o9 had developed a solution that allowed BlackBerry and Windows Mobile device location to be made available to web sites. Since then, things have progressed and they now offer a range of multi-platform tools for mobile developers.
5o9 told me that their view of the future is that for mobile to really take off the web has to know the end-user better. This means that web browsers need better access to phone features.
If you go to the 5o9 web site you can learn more. However, what it doesn’t say is how this technology works and how it might be integrated into your mobile solution… so I dug deeper.
The 5o9 solution is a simple mobile application that can share critical meta data (without the need to type it in) with any web app in the world. It works by extending the HTTP protocol with new customizable HTTP_X headers. At the server side the data is accessed via php, perl, asp or whatever you like. In addition, menus options can be added to the browser.
5o9 actually provides a set of complementary tools…
- A web browser helper application that injects extra http headers containing phone information (location etc) into a http request, that can be read at the server. It also improves the UI of the browser to make it more contextually aware just like a mobile application. The web browser UI is also programmable from the web server side with existing server-side skill sets.
- The simple application I mentioned is auto generated via the online ‘Maggie’ tool. You get the auto generated source code that allows you adapt (for example brand) it to your own needs. End users can install multiple mobile (Maggie generated) apps and they all communicate to the web server via the browser helper object.
- JSAPI for Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone solutions allows you to write Javascript to access the device side capabilities. You can see how this works by going to http://www.5o9mm.com/jsapime.htm and do a view source.
The licensing model is currently free for Windows Mobile & BlackBerry. Customised versions for all platforms are available for $5k per platform (you get your own brand and specific data sets, plus more contextual menus). Real time encryption and content acceleration starts at $15k per server. If you are an ISP or MVNO and want a site license to install it on everything then they can accommodate that as well
Some people think that the future of mobile is the web. Until such time, technologies such as those offered by 5o9 can be used to bridge the gap.
Posted in Symbian, Mobile, Tools, Android, iPhone
February 3rd, 2010
Tom Hume has some interesting observations on how network operators are at breaking point and how recent events feel like the start of a shift to operators as pipes.
Speaking to operators, I get the feeling that some of them realise that it’s getting increasingly difficult to be part of every service offering (music, maps, apps etc). In 2007, I wrote how five years earlier, I had been to an Ovum presentation where they predicted today’s events.
However, with bandwidth becoming sparse, there will be opportunities for networks to differentiate themselves through providing different size pipes for different types of data. Operators are already starting to understand the types of (application) data traffic going though their networks. For example, email doesn’t need the same priority as video. In the future, some operators see themselves as offering prioritised data services to end users or even in partnership with companies such as Google and Apple who will come to depend on more reliable connections for particular types of data.
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Posted in Mobile
February 2nd, 2010
One of the problems I continually see is that mobile sites and applications have problems getting noticed. They get users but not enough to make them financially viable. This got me thinking how to leverage existing users to get more users.
In my spare time, as a hobby activity, I have been working on a mobile link exchange. It allows text links to be placed on mobile web sites or within applications. Each request for ads returns two ads. Showing someone else’s ad gets you a credit for displaying ads on yet someone else’s site or application. So, for every view by your end user, you get up to two ads shown on other sites or applications.
I am looking for a few people to try it out. It works on wml, xhtml, iPhone, Symbian, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In fact, it’s possible to swap ads on one platform for ads on another. It’s also possible to target ads by country and network operator.
The system supports static mobile web pages, via javascript, where end users have javascript available. Alternatively, I have examples for use from php, cgi (perl), jsp, classic asp, c# (.NET) and vb (.NET). I also have tips how to integrate into the various mobile platforms or use the HTTP GET or POST API.
I’ll post another time on how it was built. I had to think carefully about supporting lots of requests per second as well as serving ads very quickly. I wasn’t able to use CGI (php or perl) nor conventional databases.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in being one of the first people to give it a try, free of charge (the final service will also be free), then please contact me at simon@simonjudge.com explaining who you are and a bit about your mobile site or application.
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Posted in Mobile, Advertising
February 1st, 2010
I have been looking into what’s planned for Java ME now that, as of the end of January 2010, Oracle now owns Sun. The webcast on Java shows a summary:
This shows that it will be ‘business as usual’ for Java ME.
Oracle have also announced they will be unifying Java ME with Java SE to revive the "write once, run anywhere" ambition. I suspect the Android Java implementation has had something to do with this decision. It shows how close a mobile Java implementation can be to Java SE.
However, I am sceptical we will ever get "write once, run anywhere" not just between server and mobile but between mobile devices. Mobile device capability varies too much. A new ‘more Java SE’esque version of Java ME certainly wouldn’t be compatible with existing phone runtimes. Also, old Java ME applications wouldn’t be (source code) compatible.
Oracle’s plans mean that there is likely to be a large compatibility break in mobile Java in the coming years. A break to a newer, more capable mobile Java is certainly what’s needed. However, I question how long this is going to take?
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Posted in Mobile, J2ME
