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A few days ago I made a discovery. At the exit of Vancouver’s Waterfront SkyTrain station there is a tiny Starbucks, which I passed hundreds of times before. This time I stopped there for a minute longer and noticed a plaque hanging on the wall under a glass cover. It said: “The First Starbucks in Canada - 1987″.
My friends were unaware of this as well. Yet, this is a fact that would make every coffee bought there just a little bit more special.
I am not a tourist in search of landmarks, but I want more depth in my daily interactions. I want to know that Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited the park next to my house, that I walked exactly 10 kilometers today and that eating another croissant would completely negate the effect of yesterday’s work out. I want interesting META-data about objects, actions and experiences I come across.
Clearly, the provider of this META information would be a mobile, location-based application relying on a mix of Wikipedia, web feeds and sensor data. Much of it is technically possible even today. The real issue is bringing these insights to my attention in a relevant and non-disruptive fashion.
The Twitter updates a couple of my friends have hooked up through SMS represent the first step towards this goal. Twitter tirelessly pushes updates from your friend circle to the handset, producing far more noise than signal. A better approach is a passive, feed-based META-stream that alerts you of present and past events in your vicinity. Every kind of haptic interaction is a distraction in itself, so giving the user full control about where and when is the only way to avoid the disruption.
FriendFeed is old news. Prepare for the next step…
Another week - another Carnival of Mobilists! MobScure is once again honored to be listed amongst several insightful mobile blogs from around the world. Now that Richard is blogging here we’ll certainly be even more interesting. Make sure to drop by this week’s host blog, Xellular Identity to read new pieces on mobile advertising, payment and web browsing. See you at the Carnival…
What kind of mobile content gets people excited? Is it ad-supported weather videos? Maybe full-length movies? It’s too early to say. I can only speak for myself - and I prefer content that makes my life richer and more exciting. Something that adds colour to it instead of facilitating an escape, Second Life-style.
Helping me discover local events, local news, local people worth my attention is one way to do that. Traditionally, small and medium-sized local newspapers and radio-stations had to do that job. Now, as their audiences dwindle, these media outlets look at mobile as a possible revenue source, rather than a key to transformation and relevancy. Does anybody even need radio when news appear faster on Twitter, traffic information is always on Google Maps and Perez Hilton has all the gossip? Yes, but like Richard has stated in his previous post, the media ecology has changed.
There are several strategic things a small media outlet can do to build a truly useful web/mobile portal to last through the next decade.
- Get really good at syndicating local user-generated content. It’ll be a while before Google or another big company can do this well, globally. Meanwhile, I would like to see worthwhile twitter messages, flickr pictures and blog posts coming from great local people I’ve never met - all available in one place, with little noise.
- Keep writing about and reviewing local events, venues, restaurants - and make the results available in all mediums. Great writers work in great newspapers - so why restrict them to just print? User ratings are great, but opinions of experts are often even more important. Once the piece is done - let the readers know no matter what social network / IM client / mobile phone they are using.
- Change frequency to “daily” and “hourly”. Mobile content has to be very timely and because of that, traditional weekly/biweekly cycles do not apply. Make sure the news staff micro-blogs to the portal - not all interesting things make it to the final edition!
- Try to guess the immediate location of the reader and adjust to that. People like me (car-less digital nomads) want hyperlocal content - information about objects, events and people in their immediate vicinity or a walking distance away. While the technical means for that are still being improved (GPS, triangulation, location tags etc), this helps to take out the “search” step from the mobile experience.
The future of smaller media outlets lies in migrating to digital and doing the difficult job of supplying people with relevant local and hyperlocal content. Let’s make it happen!
It’s fair to say that Mobile TV flopped. As much as some high-ranked executives would like you to believe the opposite, people aren’t looking to watch content on their phones - at least, not the same way they do it at home. The reasons vary - competing standards, cost, length, interruptions and so on. More importantly, watching video content on a phone is simply not the same as watching it on your large screen TV. No, really!
Think about it - the mobile context is about movement. Movement implies getting from point A to point B. Is there a place for media during movement? Perhaps - music works best, because it amplifies a person’s perception of the world without trying to hijack their senses the way video does. Everything else is difficult.
This is why I believe that there is more potential for media creation on mobile devices. As we move, encounter new things and experiences, a natural need to capture them arises. Photos, videos, text messages, audio clips - all of this needs to be stored and categorized. Life outside is too much fun to consume pre-made experiences.
This week Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted over at SkyDeck. Head over there to read the best blog entries from mobilists around the world. My post on Mobile Advertising is also featured there, which is quite an honour. My affair with mobile started two years ago in Kiev, Ukraine when I was reading entries from the Carnival - it’s good to finally be a part of it!
Mobile Advertising is hot. At CTIA, there must have been over a dozen companies all doing projects in the field (and certainly a lot more than interesting mobile services). AdMob is the most successful, the messages of other companies also revolve around contextual targeting, localization and behavioral profiling. The word on the street is, Mobile Ads are the next big thing.
I disagree and here is why.
- Paying a reasonable amount for using a service is better than seeing a small screen stuffed with ads. This one is easy - the payment flow is already integrated into the mobile experience. Blyk has had only a modest success with a limited audience - many choose paying over watching ads. Many users actually expect to pay for mobile services, unlike on the Internet.
- Success of AdMob and similar networks is due to demand for mobile service discovery, not advertising. Even though the company serves billions of ads monthly, their revenue is relatively modest (in tens of millions) - this is because conversion of mobile clicks into sales is not clear. People click the link to “a fun chat” or “free ringtones” because they are thirsty for more content and services, not because they are ready to make a purchase.
- Mobile is more about communication and creation of content, rather than its consumption. Ads work on TV and Radio because they are not too disruptive (the audience is passive). Imagine if we had to listen to an ad prior to making a call or taking a picture - that simply would not work. Sure, the iPhone supports a fairly decent video viewing experience, but do people actually use it for that purpose? Not many do - the mobile context is not suited for watching a movie.
These are just some of the reasons why ads won’t work too well in the mobile realm. Let’s make some kick-ass services instead!
The business of our company is Mobile Web. This means that we are solving issues people have on the go using internet, away from their main computer. While the Japanese access the Web from their phones more often than from desktop terminals, it is not the case in the rest of the world. People expect tight integration between the website they get on a mobile device and the “full” version.
What’s more important, the mobile use case (our core business, but 20% of the time) or the desktop use case (complementary, but critical for discovery and branding)? What should be designed first?
More and more great mobile services appear when popular websites take some of their functionality mobile. For example, various air travel-related products are a good match for mobile, yet still require the infrastructure investment that comes with building a portal like Kayak or Expedia. A typical chicken-and-egg riddle exists here - should one design for the mobile from the very start, or build a regular web service and then optimize it for mobile viewing?
The approach taken will depend on the specifics of the mobile activity, including the sharing mechanism. However, as mobile browsers evolve and boundaries between device categories start to vanish, it is important to pursue both modes. It is wise to invest at least a third of the development effort into the full web component of a mobile-oriented product.
It’s clearly wrong to try to cram full web functionality into a mobile site. Users are on the go, their needs are different and the attention spans are incredibly short. As a result, today’s best mobile websites are the ones that correctly detect the mobile subset a particular service and create a great experience around it.
However, it is incredibly important to go beyond that and do things that desktop computers never could. Somehow, the mobile web must become as context-aware as the best of native applications. I still don’t understand how - but a recent Google search through J2ME Opera Mini browser told me how far from where I am the Apple Las Vegas store was. What if every mobile site - with properly configured permissions - could do this? Leave content creation to complex applications, but provide a set of local context variables through Javascipt or Google Gears that would make this possible.
Recently, Google has been pushing its offline Web platform - Google Gears. Google Docs is now available offline and Windows Mobile has Gears too. The platform provides three key features:
- Local caching server
- A client-side database for storing user’s activity
- Threading support
When it comes to Android, it is features such as UI widgets and GPS across a range of devices that get developers very excited. However, it is almost certain that Android will include support for Gears, making the mobile web experience a lot better on all compatible phones. Latency and network availability problems will be pushed aside, making the websites available in places with poor reception. There will be less traffic used up, as AJAX will be executed locally. Caching, data storage and increased reliability will make the mobile web a more pleasant place.
Imagine - GMail, Flickr and Facebook websites running on your phone, anywhere (with limited functionality, of course) and with performance matching that of a native app…
A lot of us here in the Vancouver mobile community are big whiners. Maybe it’s the rain - but also the fact that Canada has one of the worst mobile developer ecosystems in the world (complete with high data rates, outdated phones, backward carriers and lack of official support for a certain Apple device). Developer-centric events often turn into rants, which doesn’t get anyone anywhere.
This is why it was so refreshing to see the Rules for Responsible Reformatting , which were recently released by several prominent mobile developers, including Luca Passani and Mike Rowehl. In it, they provide a list of guidelines that carriers should follow in order to make the Mobile Web a better place. For instance, the document lists recommended subdomain URLs and content headers for mobile websites - instructions that any mobile web developer should comply with.
It’s a brilliant idea. Who, if not these top engineers would know the current problems. Get them all to collaborate on a well-written document and instantly a point of authority is created. The carriers will definitely find it easier to comply when all the guidelines are stored in one place (and market pressure WILL force them to care sooner or later).
Individual developers always had a chance to change the world (most recently, Joe Hewitt’s introduction of Firebug and iUi changed the Web/iPhone development landscape completely). Seems that if enough of these “ninjas” stick together, even the big, old-school corporations will listen.
