Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Matt just posted that the MobileBeat 2009 Startup Competition has extended their deadline for submissions to July 1st. I caught up with Matthaus out at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona to chat about some of the stuff they have planned for the event. For instance they have Michael Abbott from Palm speaking. Although I’ve seen a bunch of Palm folks out at events these days, it’s the first time I’ve seen someone from their crew speaking since the Pre release. And there’ll be a bunch of folks from the funding side too : Redpoint, Qualcomm Ventures, Blackberry Partners, Kleiner Perkins iFund, T-Mobile Ventures, and others.

Lately lots of VCs have been pinging me actually trying to get a handle on the mobile market. Things have radically shifted over the last two years. The current global economic crisis, major new platforms popping up, existing entrenched players making serious drives to keep relevance, and the redistribution of power and money from a few large players out to a larger number of smaller players has made the market really difficult to decode. Meanwhile, mobile is hot and everyone sees that there’s interesting activity going on. Venture folks still have money to put into the right startups, but finding the right startups is even harder than it used to be.

It’s definitely a unique time in mobile with respect to being able to launch a disruptive startup that carves out it’s own niche in the restructured market. People are open to ideas now that would have seemed ridiculous last year. And the partners and money are readily available if you can make a strong case for what you’re doing. So if you’ve got something that fits the bill, sign up to pitch your startup on July 16th and hopefully I’ll see you at the event!

There seems to be a lot of “take it for granted” style discussion around the possibility of Android fragmentation. Without strong top down control of the platform, folks seem to think that we’re going to end up with hundreds of versions of Android, all slightly different. This was the nightmare that mobile Java became. There were large engineering teams dedicated to and specialized in taking your write-once-run-anywhere app and actually getting it to work on the volume of handsets you wanted to hit.

It’s true that technically anyone who wants to build a slightly different version of Android can, so in that sense there CAN be fragmentation. However, the ecosystem has also fundamentally changed. Before we had the carriers tightly controlling the channel, dictating what was in and out in terms of hardware, enforcing strict standards on the software they pushed to users, and doing everything they could to keep anyone else from pushing software to users. In that world the burden of dealing with fragmentation was with the developers, and the benefit went to the carriers. The carriers controlled the channel, so fragmentation continued.

The one lesson that everyone in mobile seems to have learned over the last year was that the carriers were really bad at determining the right hardware and managing that application and content catalog. It’s why everyone is jumping on the App Store Bandwagon. One of the side-effects of that is that it breaks the strongly controlled content and application channel. If ATT decides that their Android version is going to do Bluetooth slightly different, sure, go ahead. But how can they strongarm Android developers who produce Bluetooth apps into making an ATT specific version? The control isn’t really there any more. Developers might do it, but only if ATT is offering up enough incremental sales revenue to make the port worthwhile. Right now developers frequently do it cause they’re contractually obligated to if they want ATT to promote their app.

Anyone who’s worked in open source knows that forks are technically possible, but practically uncommon. When the “market” is completely open folks tend to follow a path that serves them best. And it’s a reinforcing path. Even when someone with vested interest tries to keep a fork distinct, normally the burden ends up being more on the controller than anyone else. Forks tend to get folded back or die off pretty quickly. I think the same thing should happen with Android. Sure, people might try at the start to get a leg up by including proprietary features and customizations. But in the long run if Android as a whole works, the only person they’re hurting with a fork is themselves (to the tune of a decreased application catalog). And although it’s possible for them to create a custom application catalog with some differentiation in the short term and attempt to keep that differentiation going, there’s no difference between that and the strongly controlled channel that we currently see failing today. The cost of trying to do so will outweigh the benefit of joining the mainline.

Looks like the official cupcake release is delayed a bit I was able to do a manual install of cupcake on my dev phone (Thanks Debajit for the pointers!). Top feature I was looking forward to is the onscreen keyboard. Especially somewhere like the browser, it was always a pain before to have to flip open to type something, flip closed to view, flip, flip, flip. The onscreen keyboard has been working great. Few mistyped letters here and there, but I still do that on my iPod touch as well, so I’m not faulting it that.

Probably the most interesting point from converting over (I’m going to try carrying my Android phone instead of the E71 for the next two weeks and see how that goes) was actually more service than phone. The contacts app has an option to copy contacts off the SIM, but I always have too many phonebook entries for that to work. I run out of storage space on the SIM trying to copy my contacts over.

So what I had done last time was use Funambol to upload my contacts from my S60 phone, and then downloaded the connector app to my G1 to pull down contacts. It worked okay, but some of the data was somewhat munged (most contacts ended up in “last name, first name” format when they came over to the G1, and it just looked ugly). I was going to do that again to sync over the new contacts I have on my Nokia. But then I remembered that Nokia Sync supports S60 now, and decided to give that a try instead. It ended up working out quite well! Once I had my contacts all cleaned up (and now they live in gmail, where I get a lot more use out of them) syncing back to the Nokia seems to work almost as well as syncing from the G1. Have to see how it works over time, but it looks good. Getting S60 supported in Google Sync is a pretty slick move in terms of being able to entice over new users to Android.

One thing that still doesn’t work out quite perfectly for me is the account support. I have a main Gmail address I use for all sorts of personal stuff, and collects a half-dozen of my other email forward currently. It’s where I’m connected to folks on Latitude. Then I have a Google for domains setup for work, and that’s where I store my work emails and my actual calendar. Problem is I can’t get this mix of accounts to work quite the way I want them to. I would like to use email with both inboxes (and default to personal email when other apps are sending by default), I would like calendar to use my apps for domains account, and I would like maps to use my gmail account (I put a little Latitude badge in the sidebar of this blog with a happy little motorcycle zooming around wherever I happen to have last been, I love it!).

So what I’ve ended up with is my main gmail account embedded as the base setting in the phone, and using the browser to access my work email and calendar. Not horribly slick cause I don’t get notifications. However, the browser uses local storage for both calendar and email, so they’re available offline. Unexpected and very welcome! Still, I would love to see multiple account support in the native apps. But I’m going to have to fool around with the browser capabilities in this release. The mobile mail app in the browser is making me drool. Great stuff.

I also downloaded the 1.5 update of the SDK to poke around still. Seems like from the application developer side Android is getting little love. The number of devices in market along with the demographic skew of the audience just don’t make for a compelling target. I’m pretty anxious to see how the upcoming devices shift that however. I’m hearing lots of the old hands from mobile saying that the lack of a formal program to facilitate OEM integrations is a limiting factor in how fast Android can spread. Lots of manufacturers might be interested in it, but they tend to flail around when trying to get projects done with it and have no one to turn to. I’m definitely still rooted in the “cautiously optimistic” camp. The way that should work out with Android is that someone will put together a professional services firm disassociated from Google to help those folks plan and implement their efforts. And I think there’s still plenty of room and time for that to happen.

After being offline for a while, the Mobile Monday events in the Bay Area have spun back up. We had a fantastic event up in San Francisco in May. Now we’re going to have an event down in Palo Alto on June 1st. I like the format Kate has put together for these demo events. They’re slide presentations instead of on-device demos. But because the slide decks are merged into one and done from a single laptop it keeps things flowing. A lot fewer of the AV hiccups and no downtime while presenters swap around.

Ewan was at the May event recording and interviewing for Mobile Industry Review, hopefully he’ll be able to make it out for the June event as well. The turnout in general was fantastic, lots of great energy from everyone, tons of folks working on new ideas. Thanks to Skyhook we’re able to have free booze and some swank locations as well, which always makes folks happy. Feels good to be back!

There’s an interesting discussion floating around that a fanatical devotion to iPhone is blinding mobile developers to larger potential markets. And I’m amazed. Really, just freaking flabbergasted, that the conversation could even be taking place. How can anyone seriously say “well, you’re ignoring all those potential millions of handsets out there running Symbian” and keep a straight face? I’ve been working, for years and years. And years and years and years and years, trying to get out to all those handsets, trying to build applications or websites that were able to hit a critical mass of users on all those handsets out there. Or at least enough users to run a profitable business. Lots of us have been trying to.

And generally we’ve been working at it alone. There’s been little help from handset manufacturers, little help from operating system providers, and really no help at all from carriers (though they’ll be very quick to tell you otherwise). Whenever us developers would complain about it or attempt to change the way things worked there was always some excuse about why things aren’t better. We would ask for more capable browsers and the response was that battery life and network constraints make it impossible to create a browser of near desktop capability on a mobile device. We would ask for development tools that would make it easier to get started developing and make it easier to debug and we were told that mobile development is just too complex to try to make it simple. We would ask for a simple payment system that didn’t result in massive checkout dropoff and everyone would just laugh.

The entire system was deadlocked cause no one with the power to was really interested in shaking it up. We kept getting fed excuse after excuse justifying the general lack of forward progress on all fronts. But then something comes along that makes it easy, often profitable, and frequently even fun to develop for mobile again. Apple has exposed the fact that the lack of progress in mobile wasn’t something inherent in the system. That someone with the right motivation can really shake things up and get the train moving again.

So what’s the response from all those players who just got plowed under by Apple, sitting on the sidelines with egg on their faces? They start what sounds quite a bit like a FUD campaign cause they really don’t have any solid ground to stand on any more. Why should I start caring about the Ovi store now? I’ve done Symbian development in the past, I’m familiar with the handset lineup, I have an E71 currently, have been a long time user of Nokia devices, and I know what Ovi is the number of handsets out in the market.

You know what? I still don’t give a crap. And no, I’m not even sorry about not giving a crap. Actually I’m somewhat offended at someone impugning my foresight and knowledge of the market by saying I’m blind to other potentials cause I’m in love with iPhone. I know what’s out there. I’ve been running free events in the Bay Area for more than 5 years now to try to bolster the mobile community when nothing else would. I’ve been working in the industry for about three times as long. I’ve developed for just about every platform, and I know the ecosystem extremely well. It’s not that I’m blind to everything else. I know everything else that’s out there, and because of that I’ve chosen to develop for iPhone.

Stop lying to yourselves, and definitely stop lying to us. Is the Nokia store supposed to challenge Apple? Or Microsoft supposed to? Or RIM? You know what folks, you had your chances. If you want to impress me, if you want me to start developing for your platforms again, get your houses in order. Once things change, once you get your stores developed, released, and proven as a good commercial channels to end users - then we can talk again. Until then we’re all just going to keep laughing at you and developing for iPhone.

The dotMobi folks are up for an emerging technology award at CTIA for Instant Mobilizer. Instant Mobilizer is the evolution of Mowser, so of course it’s got a special place in my heart. The dotMobi folks have done an awesome job bringing it to market and adding some innovative mobile-specific features. Check out the info at the CTIA site and click “Mark as Favorite” if you like what they’ve done. I’m pulling for you folks, good luck!

I’m seeing more and more mobile payments systems getting used in actual products. Stuff like Zong, Paymo and Mobillcash. Surprisingly enough, the places I’m hearing about systems like this being used are in social games (for example social applications using Offerpal) instead of in mobile applications. One of the criticisms leveled at mobile advertising pretty frequently is that it doesn’t make much sense to have an advertising system built somewhere that commerce isn’t flowing. Why advertise on mobile phones if few people are buying through mobile phones?

I still hear pretty regularly that trying to deliver a paid application globally on mobile phones (note, I’m talking about systems outside of the app store models that have cropped up recently, they’re definitely an exception to just about everything) is at best a pain. Often it involves enough cost, revenue share, and engineering that the economics frequently don’t work out. So you’re stuck going through an existing channel even if you would technically have a route directly to consumers. I was expecting that to eventually get sorted out, that someone would crack the global mobile payments problem, allow unbanked users to pay using premium SMS, and deliver the platform in a package that developers could integrate without having to bend over backwards. And that has happened. But the unexpected part is that the uptake seems to be on the wired web, as an alternative payment form alongside credit cards. I was expecting the evolution to be that the systems would be used to back transactions originated on the mobile first, and then eventually start creeping onto the web as well.

For anyone who hasn’t poked around with the systems yet, the flow goes something like this when I pay with a mobile payments system on the web:

Actually a pretty nice system compared to paying by credit card. With most credit card systems I have a bunch of info to enter in, if I even have the card I want to use on me. And for folks who don’t have credit cards, like those using prepaid accounts where they charge up with cash each month (or kids who have their parents paying their phone bill), it opens them up to online purchases. Cool, nice, makes sense, I’m happy it happened, lots of good going on there.

So why didn’t this end up opening up mobile commerce more? Or did it, and I’m just not hearing about it? Why does Zong list all online properties and no mobile-specific properties in their list of partners? Did the new commerce line just follow the existing line of purchases? Are folks still hesitant to kick off a transaction from a phone, whereas they just “trust” the web more? They’re paying with their phone, so it’s not an aversion to using the mobile itself as a payment mechanism. But maybe an aversion to starting the transaction on the mobile. Or is it a technical/user experience glitch? Does punching out to reply to an SMS often kill the interaction going on in the mobile browser? Leading to a large dropoff or user disappointment when they can’t find their way back to their purchase? Or is it simply that social and online services are performing so much better than mobile services that the incremental gain of opening up unbanked transactions for existing online purchases way outweighs the benefits of opening up commerce completely tied to the mobile?

I’m pretty sure this is indicative of an opportunity of some kind. For instance, Apple is supposedly adding in-application payments options so that users can pay for goods or service updates within an app after purchase. So there’s probably a decent amount of demand for a system of the kind. I would assume that existing developers could probably use something like Zong or Paymo with some pretty minimal infrastructure to provide a system of their own to get in-app payments working today. We’ll have to see how granular Apple gets with their payment system, and what the terms end up being. Having a bunch of options popping up at the same time should lead to a nice healthy market. And help to keep the Apple based system in check should they start using their position as channel controller to try to squeeze developers.

I posted yesterday about wanting to use my phone to publish my location in realtime, and I got a bunch of fantastic responses both in the comments and as emails (thanks folks!) I fooled around with some of them with varying degrees of success. Nokia Sport Tracker seems like it would be great! However, I can’t figure out how to make the phone app do it’s job. Maybe my fault, I have an E71 and it’s not listed as a supported model. I’ll have to dig out my N95 and try that one. However, on the Android side, I put FirePin on my phone and was able to upload and share out info about my route (course, it only has to points, cause I have the phone on wifi only right now). FirePin supposedly also works with FireEagle based on the comments I got. But I can’t figure out how that’s supposed to work.

Generally I’ve been hearing frequently about how location based services are really starting to happen this time around. Yea, yea, I know. That’s what we’ve said every year for the last decade. Don’t even bother, I’ve heard it all before. However, this time we have some open platforms with GPS built into the handset, which means there’s a way to work around most of the problems inherent in the carrier based system we had before. Any by “problems” I mean “crippling cost structure”. I can kinda understand how that seems like a more mature market for location based services. Because end users can grant permission to an application for it to directly grab location info, there are all kinds of services out there.

However, I would hardly count that as platform maturity. That’s a degree of market maturity, but not platform maturity. Sure, it’s easier to build a location based app. Just plop your application into any one of the silos that folks have built to control the deployment of your application and management of your data, and blammo! New app. Yea, not the way I normally think about these things. Which is not to belittle the efforts like FireEagle, I just think there are a few missing bits.

Here’s the kinds of stuff I was expecting to see:

That basic set of functionality is a write-once bit of infrastructure. It gets us out of the “Oh yea, FirePin is great!! Wait, no, you can’t use it on your Nokia”. Not that the tools won’t evolve. But there should be an open set of base clients for all the different mobile platforms, and then anyone who wants to build a web app that pulls in location info can just say “Okay, add local.rowehl.com:9900 to your location client to start updating the Mike-o-matic pile of gold finder app with your current location” Instead we have all these different point solution client applications, frequently hardcoded to send location to a given server. Dumb.

I’m planning to go on an extended motorcycle trip in May. Whenever I leave to go somewhere for more than a few hours and my friends know about it I tend to get a lot of calls. They get very concerned and call to make sure I’m not lying on the side of the road somewhere bleeding. Can’t blame them, the precedent has been set. And hey, it feels good to know that next time I actually am lying on the side of the road bleeding there should be someone looking for me pretty quick even if I don’t have a sweeper following me. However, it also means that there are a bunch of worried people out there if I don’t answer my phone for some reason, for which I feel guilty. “I should be able to solve this with technology!” says Mike the geek.

Immediate thought, Google Latitude. I can keep recording info about where I am in the background with both the Android and Symbian phones I have. That way folks can see where I’m going as I’m going, and if I don’t answer the phone they at least know I’m moving. Which should mean I’m okay, unless I’m wedged under a truck getting dragged down the road. I haven’t figured out a technical solution to detecting that, so I’m leaving that corner case off the table for now.

However, the only way I can see to get info out of Latitude is through the iGoogle widget. Not a bad way for it to work, but I want to just post my location to my blog. Seriously, I don’t give a crap about privacy. I wanna publish where I am for everyone. And I’m not going to get my mom and my sisters to sign up for Google accounts, just not gonna happen. Is there a way to do a background update of location info and publish it your own website for example? Or a system where I can suck it back out easily and map the results?

Another option is to geotag photos and publish them on Flickr. That works, but requires that I’m taking photos in order to update folks about where I am. Perhaps a cool addition, but doesn’t get to the root problem I’m trying to solve, which effectively comes down to passively instrumenting myself using my cell phone and publishing that info as realtime as possible online publicly. I’m sure I could knock together an Android app to do it pretty quickly, but I have to assume there’s something out there already.

There’s a package now for installing X11 on the G1, which builds on the Debian for G1 package. I haven’t fooled around with the stuff yet, but what am I interested in running with access to the full set of Debian software? Well that should be obvious. Metaspoit of course. Cellular interface + Wifi interface + handheld device + automated security scanning = fun!