Tag Archives: mobility

riding shotgun with innovation

Posted by on April 13, 2010 No comments

ok…in hindsight, this post is just way too long…

As a budding technologist, I landed in a ‘sweet spot’ job in the mid-nineties. I was a web application developer for a wireless billing start-up.  Sitting at the intersection of two rapidly growing technical ecosystems (dare I say ‘clouds’), I was part of a team that built an e-commerce and ebp&p platform for our wireless carrier customers…a ‘white label,’ online extension to our billing system.  Part of our team was also responsible for building an e-business ‘wrapper’ around portions of a cobal based system running on SCO Unix.  We were using J2EE as the framework with BEA in the middle and Oracle on the backend.

 Our biggest technical challenges? An antiquated UI for the system itself (green screen), integration to other systems within the carrier business, and – most importantly data management for multiple millions of wireless customers – not only from a CRM perspective but also their usage, accounting for features, and accuracy of bills.  We needed to be more interoperable, we needed to be able to scale, we needed to be more intelligent with the data we were managing (to help inform our customers about their own customers), and we needed to be more innovative.

These ‘needs’ led us down some exciting paths over the next few years. We tackled business intelligence to profile and analyze customer data. We leveraged Flash (4 at the time and following) to create a veneer for the UI (and looked at gaming interfaces as inspiration for our designs). We focused on the MVNO space to cover turnkey outsource billing, and we spent significant time digging into location based services, mobile marketing (find your target where they are) and personalization, stored value, real-time rating, near field communication and mobile payments. Many of these are still being baked today…

We considered the mobile device as a ‘lifestyle remote control’ and looked for more things to pull through it to the end user. For each service, we would look for a way to rate it. Likewise, we expected the environment to become more intelligent and give mobile devices more things to plug into. The Internet, we imagined, would sit behind those plugs and push content, provide meta data, process transactions, and foster rich communication among a global community of participants. At the core, experiential design and experiential engineering would drive innovation that we thought would bring these disparate ecosystems together.

Because of the many moving parts, however, most of these visions have taken long and evolutionary paths (unless you own all the moving parts like DoCoMo). Many are still finding there way due to the sheer number of participants involved in resetting such complex ecosystems.  Either way, we were on the right track and I get excited to watch the evolution continue and to think about what’s on the horizon.

At the end of the day – getting to a point, I think – I was tickled to see this deck at OSBC a couple of weeks ago by Tim O’Reilly. He basically painted the reality of what we thought the world might be like 6+ years ago.  I’ll save comments about the entire 98 slides, but for this post, take a look at slide 21 through about 67 where Tim outlines the convergence, via many examples, of the fluid integration of web and mobile ecosystems. As he states, the PC is out of the loop and the handset has become a sensory device for the environment. Lifestyle remote indeed…

- B

Open Source in the Cloud Computing Era
View more presentations from Tim O’Reilly.

The Slacker

Posted by on December 7, 2007 No comments

If you’re like me, you already have some sort of MP3 and manage a significant number of songs, videos, pictures, etc through a utility on a PC. In my case, its about 10 videos, 50 or so podcasts, and about 2300 songs. I must admit, coming up with interesting playlists is getting more and more difficult because I find that I forget what I have and gravitate to the songs I know and like. Now – alas – I’m getting sick of my favorites. What next?

Walter Mossberg reviewed the Slacker yesterday which may be my answer. Building on the success of slacker.com, an online radio site, the Slacker is a device that plays sets of songs based on criteria you set and streams them to the device via wireless hot-spots. According to Mossberg’s report:

The player is tied to Slacker’s free Internet radio service, slacker.com, which is already up and running, and allows you to listen to music via any standard Windows or Mac Web browser. Using the service, you can personalize your player by selecting from over 100 canned stations or by creating stations based around any of 10,000 artists.

In addition to some buggy behavior noted by Mossberg of a couple of prototype units he tested, he also offered the following…

Because Slacker is based on Internet radio, it has some limitations imposed by the rules governing that format. For example, you can’t specify a particular song to play, or skip back to repeat a song. And you can skip ahead only six times per station per hour. Even if you create a station around a particular artist, the station will mainly be filled with artists the service considers similar. Songs by the artist you selected will be played only four times every three hours. The player has a ‘heart button’ for designating a song for frequent play and a ‘ban’ button to eliminate the songs you hate.

The devices will run between $200-$300 dollars but the music streams will be free. This is in contrast to the XM and Rhapsody strategy of subscription services for their music.

Wonder if the Zune or iPod folks are thinking about this…Combining a best of breed device / service combo with a capability of picking up this service as well. Perhaps their own song lists or stations? It would certainly save me a lot of time and frustration…

Blyk. A new social experiment in mobility.

Posted by on November 16, 2007 No comments

This reminds me a bit of the old netzero play. Free internet as long as you were willing to take on a few pop-up ads from sponsors. Hopefully they’ve worked out the kinks. Blyk in their own words  “is the new mobile network for 16 - 24s” thats funded by advertising. Blyk links young people with brands they like and gives them free texts and minutes every month.” Not a bad value proposition for young people who have limited resources (but otherwise what seems like an endless supply of disposable income, right parents?). Free minutes and free texting for opting-in to a social network with sponsors. The Blyk team goes on to explain that they “have developed [their] offer by finding out what [their] members consider most valuable – this will evolve over time as their needs do. ” In other words, Blyk controls the channel and the sponsorship will evolve based on market trends and consumer demand.  The constant becomes the social forum in which consumers and sponsors meet. Not unlike a shopping mall perhaps?

This should be very interesting to watch. Blyk expects to launch a pan-european program in 2008 targeting an estimated 40MM subscribers (they launched UK today). So, there are certainly a number of mobile operators in Europe who will be keeping an eye on this (and I need to find out whose network they’re riding on). I  actually posted this morning on challenges that mobile operators face today with ‘walled garden’ services. Perhaps this model is a game changer for communication service providers across the board? Time will tell.

Consumers in this age range are very particular. The novelty might grab their attention, but the service will need to be exceptional and the sponsors will need to be cautious. If users think they are talking through an ‘ad phone’ of sorts, I think it will crash and burn – even if it is free.  Avoiding hassle is one reason why we pay a premium for things sometimes, right? Blyk is headed by Pekka Ala-Pietil, former president of Nokia and 28 other industry veterans.  I’m guessing that they’ve thought through these issues but I’ve been surprised before. UK launched today, so we’ll start seeing take rates, and more importantly retention rates, in the next few weeks and months.

social networks

Posted by on November 5, 2007 No comments

Per my last post, I pulled down a panel discussion from the Stanford Technology Ventures program. Its worth a listen if you follow this space although you won’t get into much granularity. One comment that stood out was a forecast that social network sites will be obsolete in ten years. The thinking is that technology will evolve to such a degree that the notion of specific sites to manage our personas, profiles, and friend lists will seem archaic to users at that time. Instead, the nature of pervasive , or ubiquitous, computing will allow us to make the connections with others more seamlessly and with less effort.  An example given is that we might wear technology that carries our profile and when we come in contact with someone of similar interests, the technologies make the appropriate connection for us – perhaps noting the other user’s profile to be reviewed at a later time (Location based services are evolving rapidly for mobile technology so the idea is not that far fetched). But I digress. In the end – a good talking points to think about. For now, there is a significant amount of research on the topic as social networks exist today.  One resource that recently came to my attention is the work being done by Dana Boyd (Berkeley) and Nicole Ellison at Michigan State. See Dana’s post here or link directly to their research here. From the site, they cover a usable definition of “social network sites”, a history of some of the major shifts in the development of SNSs, a literature review of work done in this space, and a description of the articles included in the special issue. This is a great read and a great starting point for those interested in this topic.