Tag: mobile

DeviceAtlas

Every year there 1 single event that every company in the mobile space wait for. New services are announced, hardware vendors easily announce 5 to 10 new devices each and journalists eagerly look for some groundbreaking news. It’s the Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM).

Well, we want to do the same and I think we are going to make it big. It’s going to be that kind of service that if you’re a developer and you’ve been pulling your hair because you can’t get something going for a mobile device, you will be very happy to get.
dotMobi has been keen on providing great tools for developers to make sure they would make their life easier. Well DeviceAtlas is no less!

Stay tuned because it’s coming and it’s running fast!

Can you guess the URL?

Yahoo! Mobile also local BETA

I took a look at the Beta version of the new mobile version of Yahoo!. I tested on an iPhone and I have to say that I really like the design and functionality. When you’re logged in with your account you get e-mails, your selected news and so on. Pretty good.

I searched for information about Dublin where I was at the moment of the test:

What i liked is that as soon as I specified my location (the default location was set to San Francisco, USA) it provided a number of links for local services. That was really good. I love movies, so I checked for the local cinemas to see if I should go watch any newly released movie:

Too bad that when checking for cinemas it “moved” my location to Dublin, Ohio!! I’ve never been to Ohio, but I’m sure Dublin must be a nice town, just not where I was.
It’s OK, it’s a Beta, you don’t expect everything to be perfect. I was positively surprised it recognized Dublin in Ireland in the first place, so I expected it to support any location.

I really look forward for the worldwide release of the new mobile site, looks very promising. The interface was clearly very optimized for the iPhone, using the style to show buttons on top of the page and so on. I’ll need to test on some other mobile device, maybe lower end.

Viral Marketing in mobile

Last week I received an e-mail from Michael of Mocondi that forwarded me an update about the status of their service. I can’t say I have known Michael for a long time, in fact I have never met him, but since the news is about mobile, it got me thinking.

The information is about their product called MeYou that, from what I understood, is a program in which you can buy mobile content and services and you can suggest the same contents to your friends in your network. When you suggest something or perform other actions you earn points. This is nothing new, of course. According to their numbers, their service is very successful especially in Italy (not a surprise, again, as Italians buy a lot of ringtones and contents in general).

What really got me thinking, was actually how they created the service. Reading from the website the service is available in Italy only to customers of 3 and Vodafone (I’m a TIM customer), users should download a Java application to get started. Users can browse a selection of contents available for their device and then can purchase. Billing happens via the operator.

The numbers that Mocondi reports are good, such as 1.6M recommendations sent and 24% subsequent purchases. What I just don’t understand is why you need the hassle of a Java application. It’s hard to download and sometimes will fail to install. You use it to browse and send messages to your network of friends. I suppose you will also be able to manage your network.
When I think about this application, I think the browser would be the perfect fit. Browsing is just what it’s made for, for a start! Managing your network is something you could do via specific pages. Messaging… Well, you have SMS and MMS and if Mocondi already has agreements with mobile operators I do not see problems delivering messages and tracking users. Settings should already be in place so no problems installing the application or downloading the catalogs. Also, I suppose that users will not get notifications if they do not start the application while with SMS and MMS you get them in any case and the browser can be started automatically (read wappush).

I really think that mobile devices are the perfect target for viral marketing and I like the idea. I just think that the browser would have been a better choice. Do you read me Mocondi? Check out Refresh Mobile or Flirtomatic and how they left the Java platform for the browser. There are things that are better in Java (games, etc) and other things that are better in a browser.

Will Apple share ownership of the webKit?

Android SDK has been released. There are videos that explain how the platform works and that the browser is based on the webKit. This was a bit of a surprise for me, I think I was not even considering that Google could go for something that is not Mozilla/Firefox.

Anyway I think this is great news and means that the webKit will keep growing and more sites will work on my Mac. Actually most sites already work, but sometimes I have to fire up Firefox or Camino, especially for AJAX-intensive sites.

Anyway, today, during Future of Mobile, I asked Dan Appelquist (another happy Mac user) if he thought Apple would let any other company take control of the core of the browser. My feeling, so far, is that Nokia is using the engine, but more in their own separate silo and not with Apple… And I have to admit this feeling is not because I think Nokia is evil and do not want to share, but actually because Apple wants to have full control on the browser and does not care to get changes and updates from Nokia!
Dan, on the other side, thought that Apple would have to let go a little bit of control on it so that Google and Nokia would get some space in the project.

Well, it looks like he knows what he’s talking about, see this post on Surfin’ Safari about Android committing changes to SVN.

Now I’m even happier.

RSS reader and sharing

I am a bit in a middle ground these days jumping from one reader to another and also between sharing my favorite articles between two different services.

I used NetNewsWire (a Mac RSS reader) for almost 2 years now and I’m very happy with it. Joining newsgator also gave me a web (2.0) interface for free that is nicely integrated with the client. Since I really don’t go very far without my notebook, I never used it.

Recently James Pearce brought to my attention the beauties of the mobile version of Google Reader. The mobile version is very simple and effective at the same time. Like most Google products, it does it’s job efficiently. I also enjoyed sharing my favourite articles via Google (and also temporarily embedded them in this blog).

Nevertheless, I could never find myself entirely comfortable in the web interface, especially when I am on an airplane with no connection (if the feed provide the full articles, I can read them even when offline).
Anyway, the reason why I tried Google reader was to be able to access the feed on my mobile. I tried to access the website of newsgator hoping to use it with Opera Mini, but unfortunately their interface is too advanced for a small screen. Browsing around the web site (probably the first time in at least 1 year) I discovered that thanks to the iPhone-wave, they have launched a mobile version. So thank you iPhone!
Now I’m happily back to my Mac-client, have a mobile version and even found a way to share my favourite articles.

But of course there’s always something that’s missing. How do I add to my shared items pages and links that are not in my regular feeds? I still haven’t discovered this. So here’s a news item I wanted to share:
Red Hat and Amazon Team Up for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing

mobileAJAX Workshop

On Sep 28 2007, in San Francisco, USA, the mobileAJAX workshop was held. I have not joined it, but it was good to read a couple of reports.

The W3C has published the official minutes of the meeting.

Also interesting to read the scratchpad used during the meeting.

I wonder where will (mobile) widgets go. I’m a bit skeptic. I think there’s much more than widgets to use AJAX. It wasn’t the main topic of the workshop but seems like it was one of the main points.

iPhone: The Web Browser is the only user interface

I was reading this article @AppleInsider and thought that if Apple is thinking about extending Javascript to allow applications to access more of the features of the device and is going to provide more visibility for Web-apps, then maybe they think that the iPhone is a Web-appliance. This means that the iPhone is a pocket-web browser. It’s not a device to build applications for.

There are so many services that have moved from their original interface to a web interface. If you can use Javascript to access information on the device and you can store data on the filesystem (like Google Gears already offers) then why do you need to build your own UI?
See this older post I made on a similar topic and I think this rumor, if true, would confirm.

Google’s GWT

Transcoding is a hot topic these days in the mobile community. Google’s GWT has come up a couple of times in some conversations I had in the last 2-3 weeks. I never wondered how they decide to transcode or not, anyway.
I gave it a shot today using cURL and an emulator to get access to some devices quickly.

How I did it
I got on http://www.google.com/m and searched for “WURFL test”; I left the default “Web” setting. As expected my http://t.wurfl.com was the first link. I clicked on it and got to the page, the layout was unchanged, but that’s not a surprise, it’s so simple. Scrolling down I noticed that the user-agent string is not my phone’s, but an ugly generic MSIE user-agent string. Scrolling down a bit more I noticed the standard chrome provided by GWT that lets you disable images or request the page in the original source.

The solution
I sent an e-mail to Sean Owen, who is in the W3C MWI with me. Surprisingly he replied on a Sunday and was very helpful. He explained me how their crawler is able to mark mobile sites and make sure the GWT will not transcode anything. The problem is that at the moment this magic feature is available in the US only and will be rolled out to the world soon. Since I left “Web” in my search I got the web version of my site (t.wurfl.com has a very basic device detection that provides different markup based on the Accept headers). US users should already get the mobile version of t.wurfl.com. Anyway, Sean also suggested a trick that now provides the mobile version to all mobile users without any other update required. I added the following tag in the head of the page:
<link rel=”alternate” media=”handheld” href=”http://t.wurfl.com/index.php”&gt;

Seconds after the update I requested again the page with the emulator and got the mobile version.

PS: if you want to get a mobile page using cURL you can do this:
curl -D – -A “Nokia6600” “http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=t.wurfl.com/&#8221;

You will see the page source and the HTTP headers sent by the server. Read the manual for more commands, cURL is super-powerful!