Aut inveniam viam aut faciam.
Either I will find a way, or I will make one.
(courtesy, Gary Silverman, when I left his lab)
Mr Rogers is ‘happiest when helping others.’
(something to live by)
Temet Nosce – Gnothi Seuton – Know Thyself
(a mystical classic)
Be an underdog with a bite, not a dog with an underbite.
(don’t know where I got the first part, but I added the second part)
Think straight, talk straight, walk straight through the barriers that confine you.
(one of my own)
Great list from MoMo Mike on RSS aggregators for mobile (also follow the link to Barb’s post).
The catch with reading RSS on a mobile is that photos come across as full sized, which suck if you are reading Flickr. To send feeds to phones, there should be a resizing, otherwise the user is paying to view a huge image on a small screen. Also, some feeds, such as Typepad, are not mobile friendly and are huge chunks of data. one more example of how folks just don’t think about mobile, but of free broadband connections.
Futurice has addressed this somewhat by coming up with a atom-friendly photo feed format and accompanying app. Also, I heard that Litefeeds also optimizes feeds for mobile devices. But, the Litefeeds app doesn’t work on my phone, an N70, so I can’t verify that.
I just want a feed reader that works with a basic phone browser. Bloglines works with a browser, but does not optimize the images. Argh! WINKsite works with a normal browser, but I think it goes too far in optimizing for the phone. Can we find a middle ground? The mobile app is great to give a wonderful experience, but the service should be able to degrade gracefully to a mobile browser.
Link: Mobile Feed Reading.
Barb has a post on the Social Software weblog asking about mobile feed reading. First let me chime in and say that normally I use Bloglines on both my Nokia and Palm devices, and Bloglines is my primary reader on my desktop too. But I was very happy to see that she mentioned something that I haven’t tried out yet: Litefeeds. Cool! So I got to thinking, what free RSS aggies for mobile phones are there? I know of these ones right off the top of my head:
A masterful essay from a great thinker I admire.
Marko shares his thoughts on various aspects of the mobile lifestyle and where some of the big questions lie. If these are the things that Nokia Design is thinking of, then great things are coming that will make the past 10 years look foolish.
Link (via Janne): Seven Challenges to our Shared Mobile Future.
What made this growth possible? Where did this massive scale come from? What was the structure of the mobile industry that made reaching this two billion mark possible?
Christian and I had a fun time with Lifeblog. If I had to pick his greatest gift to me it would be his enthusiastic goading of me to exceed expectations. He has constantly told me to go for more, ask for more, do more. Thanks and Wasabi!
If I had to pick the greatest thought he has imparted to me it would be ‘the experience’. He has taught me that it’s not about technology, not about UI and usability, but it’s all about the experience and that the experience be wonderful.
I am fully confident that he will bring Wasabi and the wonderful experience to Yahoo and Yahoo’s customers.
Great catch for Yahoo.
Link: ChristianLindholm.com: I have seen my Future. It’s at Yahoo!.
After 10 fantastic years at Nokia I have decided to quit. As of September 12th I will join Yahoo! as VP of Global Mobile Product first based in London and then moving to California late in 2006.
This is a nice fusion of PC, Web and mobile. I think this kind of mixing, made possible by Web 2.0 (or Web 5.5, if you are contrarian) is where the next big things are coming from. Only thing, we need to get more mobile into the mix.
Link (via MoMo Mike): Semapedia – The Physical Wikipedia.
Our goal is to combine the physical annotation technology of semacode with the availability of high quality information using the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.
I would love to see more growth in mobile devices as local sensors that are built to use and communicate with the immediate surroundings of the device. I’m not thinking of location based services, but of the mobile device as location aware (rather than location dependent), aware of the local context surrounding the phone.
The mobile phone is already a device that connects phone to phone (and people to people). This local awareness (connectivity?) connects phone to surroundings, leading to personal area networks, proximity applications, things like Nokia Sensor, health sensors, and so on.
Indeed, phones are already slowly becoming Life Recorders, collecting what we say through our messages (and recorded conversations), social connections via call logs and address books, whereabouts via cellID and calendar and BT, what we see via photos and videos. Read about some great research here from Berkeley and MIT.
This source for this commentary was mainly from Antti and Janne (see article below for more similar discussions). Thanks guys.
Link: Lifeblog: What are the true qualities of mobility?.
Successful mobile devices are ones that are background devices that don’t force themselves into the foreground. Background activities can be listening to music, waiting for appointment reminders, carrying snippets of actionable data (contact info, calendar, some notes, a to-do list), and waiting for a call or SMS.
If you read this, you can see that I don’t talk about technology at all.
Link: Lifeblog: What are the true qualities of mobility?.
So,
in short, a laptop with a fixed or wireless connection will always be a
foreground device that requires attention and engagement. A mobile
device is a background device that makes it easy to pop into the
foreground for a brief moment before simply falling into the background
once more.
I talk about the mobile device in terms of the lifestyle, the flow of how people use mobile devices. Therefore, you are wrong to focus on the technological differences or similarities between a computer and a mobile device.
For example, phones aren’t just browsers with smaller screens and lousy connectivity. Nor are phones tiny computer with small screen, krappy keypads, and smaller memory. And, integrating mobile into your app isn’t just about making sure it doesn’t crash the phone browser or have it send SMSs to the phone. There’s a lot more to it than that.
Janne Jalkanen pointed out something that I regrettably failed to ever mention: what really makes a cell phone different from a laptop with WiFi? Or, as I see it, what’s the big deal with this mobile lifestyle thing I keep harping about?
Janne and I spoke about it and he helped me solidify what the difference is between true mobility (the mobile lifestyle) and just being mobile. Janne had discussed it with others and I’ve incorporated some comments from Series 60 guy Antti Vaha-Sipila. What I write below, then, is not just mine, but synthesized from conversations with Janne, Antti, and others.
I definitely see that a pocketable, networked, one-hand operated device is the core of the mobile lifestyle. A laptop can never be a true part of one’s mobile lifestyle.
Snap question: Which do you carry around more often: your phone or your laptop?
I think you would see that your mobile phone ends up in more places than your laptop – the supermarket, the bathroom, the movie theatre, the car (even while you drive), the baseball game. What’s more, the mobile also ends up beside you wherever you use your laptop – the park bench, the café, the office, the den.*
Therefore, the mobile is always with you in a way no other device is. In that way, it is a personal device, a part of you, all the time, and is easily integrated into your lifestyle, the flow of your life.
And here’s, I think, a key concept (from Janne) that snapped into place the whole thought: the phone sits in the background, waiting until you need it. Then – a call comes in, an item comes into view that is great for a video or photo, a calendar reminder goes off – and you make the choice to bring it into the foreground.
Successful mobile devices are ones that are background devices that don’t force themselves into the foreground. Background activities can be listening to music, waiting for appointment reminders, carrying snippets of actionable data (contact info, calendar, some notes, a to-do list), and waiting for a call or SMS.
Things like video, chat, playing games, and browsing the Web are full-time foreground activities, and, while they can be done while away from the desk, aren’t really things I consider doable while walking or driving, or even for small snippets of time.
True, many of the background activities have actionable, arguably, foreground activities – reading the reminder, taking a call, responding to an SMS. Yet, I think most are point activities that end rapidly, or, in the case of a call, can be done while carrying out other types of activities.
A laptop is geared for foreground activities. You have to set it up somewhere to open it, and you need both hands and both eyes to fully engage in it. Really, you don’t see many folks walking down the street with a laptop, opening it up every now and then to listen to music, check email or call someone on the same time scale and flexibility of a mobile device.
So, in short, a laptop with a fixed or wireless connection will always be a foreground device that requires attention and engagement. A mobile device is a background device that makes it easy to pop into the foreground for a brief moment before simply falling into the background once more.
Therefore, to create an app that is truly geared for the mobile lifestyle, you need to take advantage of the background status of the mobile device and not bring it too far or often into the foreground.
*I also believe that it’s horses for courses – use the right device for the job. A mobile DVD player is great in the car with kids. Play Station Portable is great for portable foreground playing. The laptop with WiFi is great for Web browsing at the café.
A quick read to start off on understanding the dynamics of creating wickedly great apps.
Link: Feld Thoughts: The Death of The Killer App.
They asserted that – as a result of research they’ve been doing with their HBS Internet2 Business Group – there are two critical practices to overcoming impediments to identifying the next multi-billion markets for communication technologies.
Not at all related to mobile stuff, I’ve been invited to relate my experiences in the non-traditional ways we marketed Lifeblog. I’ll probably zip in and out, but let me know if you want to meet up with me and I’ll adjust my schedule accordingly.
Link: New Media Knowledge – Online Marketing at the Crossroads (Latitude with NMK).
The claim that the “customer is king” may have rung hollow in the past, but in the new always-on internet world, it’s truer than ever.
The ability of consumers to get information about anything they want, whenever they want, has serious implications for online marketing.
In the age of what The Economist has dubbed the “empowered consumer,” how will you have to change your company’s approach to online marketing? With industry giants such as Saatchi & Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts proclaiming that “Everything we used to do, everything we used to know, will no longer work,” and the ownership of brands changing hands from marketing departments to consumers, find out how you can take the right turn at the crossroads and make the empowered consumer your most valuable brand evangelist.
Who Should Attend:
Suitable for marketing directors, brand managers, business development directors, agencies and businesses, and anyone who wants to lead their business successfully into value-for-value online marketing.This half-day event will focus on the key issues and developments that are changing online marketing from its very foundations.
Good ol’ Niel McIntosh from the Guardian will be there with me, too.