The Narrative

Shawn Conahan’s Europe trip report

Posted on by charlie

Shawn Conahan is the CEO of Intercasting Corp, the folks who have brought us Rabble. He really understands the implications of the mobile lifestyle on multimedia creation and consumption.

Read the Intercasting Corp blog (link below) if you want to know where mobile multimedia is going.

A recent post of his  (see except and link below) stuck a chord with me, as an American living in Europe. Here’s my comment to him (I tried to leave one, but was having issues):

great report. i think there are two axes here: the teen scene and the europe-u.s. differences.

as for the teen scene, we need to listen and watch teens more since they are very clever in how they adapt and use tech. but, i keep wondering if they are actually the biggest market for everything from toothpaste to underwear, if you know what i mean – everyone wants a piece of the teen scene.

with the europe-u.s. difference, i’ve been able to see it evolve over the last 6-7 years, being able to dip to some degree in both worlds in the wireless and computing space. it’s been interesting to see the u.s. grow it’s own flavour of mobile. i get a bit peeved when folks say the u.s. is behind europe when it comes to mobile. it think that’s just too simplistic. the reality is that the u.s. perceives mobile differently because the technical foundations are so different. i stated this years ago and it still holds. but, that makes it challenging to create a global product and a global marketing message (been there, done that), especially viewing the challenges of scale, players, and consumer attitudes.

looking forward to rabble on this side of the world. 😉

Here’s the post:

Link: InterCasting Corp: Europe Trip Report.

I am back from Europe and learned a few things. One of which is that I am going to be spending a lot of time out of the country next year. You can also look forward to Rabble going international fairly soon, possibly in Q4. Overall it was a very productive trip. Here is my synopsis:

Strategy

This is Mobility � Blog Archive � Social Software Going Mobile

Posted on by charlie

MoMo Mike on some of his insights from a panel he moderated. He also goes over some very good pointers on smoothing out the user’s mobile experience.

Link: This is Mobility � Blog Archive � Social Software Going Mobile.

I moderated a panel on social software last week and got to talk to a bunch of interesting people, both on the panel and in the audience. I just want to get down a bunch of the stuff we spoke about, so here’s a random sampling of the ideas:

The Narrative

Sprint changes their band too

Posted on by charlie

Related to an earlier article I wrote on the near suicidal changes in the Palm brand.

Now, Sprint has decided to totally revamp their brand after the Nextel acquisition. Uh, now the brand has no connection to either Sprint or Nextel. I find this to be brand suicide.

Not only that, the logo which harks back to the pin drop campaign of early Sprint days, looks like the Amtrak logo (also a relatively new look for Amtrak – d’oh!).

What do you think?

Logo_sprint_1
Sprint is now Yellow!

Logo_amtrak_1
Is that the Sprint pin falling the other way there or what?

Strategy/The Narrative

More on Usability Vs. Features

Posted on by charlie

The discussion continues. Here is a nice comment from a simple observation. I definitely think this is so – that’s why geeks put up with crappy interfaces, but all my parents want is a simple app that works and you can forget the hootin’ falootin’ features.

Link: Hephail’s Jail: Usability Vs. Features.

Hence, people who want features, don’t mind sacrificing usability.

While people who want usability, don’t mind sacrificing features.

Strategy

Mobile computing vs. Mobile living

Posted on by charlie

Continuing this discussion, I’d like to bring a bit of distinction to the difference between mobile computing and mobile living.

Mobile computing devices are foreground devices. These are about Game Boys, Mobile TV, the Nokia 770, PDAs. It’s what 3G was made to serve. These are what Wireless Broadband is all about.

Mobile living devices are background devices. These are about mobile phones, iPods. These are about access to snippets of data in contacts, agenda, and to-do – what PDAs are really used for – and not email writing

Of course, it’s not a binary world and there’s a continuum, and ignoring the continuum is dangerous. For example, WAP 1.0 was mobility-only, discarding the rest of the Internet. I get worried that folks like the W3C are barking up the wrong tree, repeating the mobile-only mistakes of the past. Also, I think 3G and Wireless Broadband are about mobile computing and end up over-serving the needs of the general mobile phone user (geez, how’s the uptake been of these networks among the general mobile phone users?).

Likewise, it’s not enough to shove the PC into the mobile. There is a Usability Knee – the point at where adding more features in a certain form factor causes a tremendous drop in usability. Somewhere between phones and laptops are small tablets and palmtops, such as the Psion Series 7 that straddles the foreground and background world really well (phones into computers?). The Usability Knee analysis also suggests that there is something in devices that are single-function, very very simple.

In the end, you need to pick the one based on what you want to do – data, productivity, voice, or what. There will be no one über-device (though everyone seems to be proposing one). Heck, I’ve been advocating ‘horses-for-courses’ for years.*

What do you think?

*I found a really old article I posted about 6-7 years ago. Kinda funny flashback for me. 😉

Innovation

More on WINKsite

Posted on by charlie

David tells me that the new features I mention in my previous article are going live this week.

But, he says there are some other cool things coming really soon (next week!):
– A mobile version of the "Conversations" Tag Cloud
– The ability to send the link of the mobile chat room to your phone
from the desktop via SMS (initially US only)
– The ability to send or sync your desktop "Favorites" list to a
personalized "Favorites" list within the mobile version of the WINKsite
Chat Directory (http://winksite.com/chat from the phone)

And he’s sent me some other links that give some desktop views of what’s happening in the mobile world of WINKsite:

 
Some other desktop views (linking mobile and PC worlds!):
– Active Chats (Map & Conversation Module) – what’s really cool is that if you are using the  desktop Conversation module, you can see who is using the mobile or the PC. And there are many who are using the mobile!
– Tags (Category, Keyword, Last 24 Hours, Last Week)

Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

David Harper, of WINKsite, certainly gets it

Posted on by charlie

MoMo Mike was
most kind to connect me to fellow New Yorker David Harper. Mike and I had spoken a lot about
mobile and the state of mobile in Silicon Valley (took about 2 seconds) and he
tipped off David one day to give me a ping.

I am glad he did.

David Harper is the brains behind Wireless Ink’s WINKsite, a nifty tool for creating mobile-friendly
websites. You sign up, point and click to choose what kind of content you want
on your mobile site, and that’s it. It’s really easy and quite versatile. For
example, you can put your blog, RRS feeds, and links on your site. The blogs
will be intelligently transcoded for
easy reading on the phone browser. You can also put other stuff on your site, such as
surveys, notes, guest book, forums, or chat. The WINKsite control panel makes it really
easy and fast to set up and you don’t need to code anything.

Click here to open up my mobile site.

David has deep experience in content management systems,
having successfully run an online marketing company, among other interesting things. He thought up WINKsite one day, dreaming up a solution to make it easy for folks to create
mobile websites.

He’s been working at it a bit over 3 years with pal, Jason Sabella, WINKsite itself
going live about 2 years ago. In the last year, people really became aware of
it. With no marketing or promotion, he’s now at over 9000 sites with something
like 110 million mobile screen views over the year.

Also, he’s picked up an impressive list of users – go check
out the list of top sites that are mobilized by WINKsite. Some really smart folks, like Howard
Rheingold,
O’Reilly’s MAKE crowd,
Debi Jones,
Boing Boing, and Om Malik have
WINKsites. And Scott Rafer left his CEO position at
Feedster to be the Chairman of Wireless Ink.

Enough of the name dropping.

What I like about David is that on one level, he has created
a tool that makes it dead simple to create a mobile website. On another level,
the navigation and quality of the mobile site is really good. And on another
level, he really understands how to bring together the PC-based broadband
experience with the mobile experience.

For example, on the phone, you can add content to your site
and do some light administration. From the PC, you can obviously do a lot more,
but in both cases, changes show up right away – it’s all one site. Also, what
is really neat, is that you can view the site either from the phone or from the PC.
Click on some of the relevant links above to see what that looks like.

I haven’t seen any sort of tool like this. I will admit that
I have been playing with WINKsite for some time and have sort of been keeping
David to myself (scheming on my part, of course). But, I really can’t contain my enthusiasm any more, especially
with some new stuff David is adding.

What’s that?

David’s methodically adding new things to WINKsite that make
the PC-mobile-Web link even stronger. For example, with a few
clicks you can add a chat room to your site (how kewl is that?). But, David’s
worked up a way to display where the chats originate from, based
on the location info in the user’s profile. That makes these
mobile website chats a bit more physical.

Another little thing he’s worked up is an intuitive display (see below) of what are the most popular chat tags. This makes it easier for
someone on a PC browser to scan and choose a mobile website chat, which they
can later participate in from their phone.


Basically, the mapping and the tags
make a strong link from the PC browsing experience to a mobile browsing
experience. I really don’t know of any website that makes it easy for folks to
go between PC browsing to mobile browsing, nor any site that takes advantage of the PC browser to promote so well the
discovery of mobile sites.

I’ve been challenging David to figure out a way to do the
reverse as well, since I am keen on building that round trip between mobile and
PC. He’s been working on a text-only way of generating the tag list, but the
browsers are pretty pesky. And I know he’s been thinking of the right things and will be adding some more cool things soon.

In summary, David has this easy-to-set-up personal content
aggregator (DLA, Marc?) for mobiles, with a harmonious and integrated PC and mobile
experience, and with connections that facilitate the flow between the PC and
mobile.

I see WINKsite growing steadily and on the right path to become a great mobile interface to the Web, adding closer integration between the PC and mobile and increasing the bi-directional flow of the total experience. I, for one, am sticking close and watching David.

You should, too.

The Narrative

MobHappy announcing The Carnival of the Mobilists

Posted on by charlie

These guys are getting clever.

Link: MobHappy: Announcing The Carnival of the Mobilists.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is something of a blogging institution and one I’ve particiapted in both as contributor and host, from time to time. It was, in turn, inspired by the Carnival of the Vanities originally.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is still a great institution, and one I hope to keep contributing to, but Carlo and I thought that the mobile blogging world is now big and diverse enough to warrant our own Carnival – hence the Carnival of the Mobilists.