dotMobi
This doing the rounds (thanks to ceo), which of course makes me wonder what type I am.
Well, my golf is certainly not up to scratch, so I think I’ll plump for a blend of the first and second.
I think it’s phrases like “neither nocturnal nor diurnal”, “temporally ambiguous”, ”drawn towards alpha software like a moth to a flame”, and “prototypes that they quietly whip up and surprise the company with” that seem to ring true with my life.
Oh and a “whiteboard deathmatch” sounds like fun.
Er. Guilty.
It must be time for more obvious punditry from the augursphere.
“2008 will be the year of mobile data, flat rates, Apple & Google phones, mobile advertising… blah blah blah”
No kidding.
Me? I just got back from holiday and I’m chilled in a rum punch sort of way. So no frantic soothsaying from me. But I had one interesting prefiction for a few years out.
Can you imagine a day when Google Maps for Mobile becomes their primary search interface?
(Oh. Don’t forget you heard it here first 
)
Having often claimed that (mobile) telephone networks are already the ultimate social network, I’m trying a little experiment.
Having a personal page tied to my mobile number seems like a good way of eternally tagging myself.
So this page sort of acts as a mobile business-card / vCard / shared-items / presence / personal dashboard.
(I currently pull in RSS feeds and my Jaiku presence to give you the idea)
But imagine if… browsers had access to contact lists, and contact applications could launch browsers… now that’s interesting. I could even see operators providing such sites to discourage churn.
Ha ha! Maybe just a bit of fun. But if not, you saw it here first
Results in from the latest domain auction at Sedo:
1. music.mobi – $616,000
2. games.mobi – $401,500
3. sports.mobi – $101,000
Very exciting. This proves that there’s significant economic heat building up in the mobile web. A medium starting grow up.
It’s a shame that some people will undoubtedly whinge about the fact that this is pretty amazing income for something as simple as a domain name.
But most importantly to me, and, I hope, to the entire mobile community, is the fact that this is helping fund all the other stuff we do. It certainly doesn’t feel like money for nothing.
Ever wondered who pays for the essential dev.mobi, ready.mobi and …Device Atlas? Answer: the bidders in these auctions. And we’ll continue to do our best to make the community benefit from it.
(and PS: yes, we will be making sure these winning sites are .mobi compliant)
Following our little competition last week, we’re amazed to learn that 6 of our sites have been selected for the “Best of the Internet” section of one of our national operators’ portal.
Well, that was just in our spare time. I wonder what we could do if we really tried.
(Although I do wonder what that says about today’s mobile web… )
I did my part and updated MetaJam.mobi. It now includes musical artists and albums along with movie and actor pages. And I’ve earned a healthy 68 cents on AdMob already. Bling!
The folks at dotMobi are a fairly creative bunch, so we thought it would be fun to run a site building competition amonst the staff.
Competing in two categories – my engineering team vs everyone else – the staff were all in the running for two shiny iPhones. Plus, of course, the opportunity to try and avoid bricking them on Irish networks.
The competition has just finished. All in all, not bad work for a few weeks of our (little) spare time.
A quick fanfare for Ronan Cremin (of http://find.mobi fame), who built quite simply one of the coolest – or should I say most useful - mobile apps I’ve seen in a long time. SVG maps! PNG trains! MP3 dictation! It’s all in there
You can get to the full list of sites directly on your mobile at http://metajam.mobi/m/ …here are some of the best of the bunch:
The non-technical category (i.e. marketing, finance and the executive team)
Bear in mind (and I am sure no-one in this category minds me telling you) that none of them know how to write HTML or perhaps even recognise it
Amy Mischler; mobile yoga
http://mobiyogi.mobi
Caroline Greer; ICANN travel log
http://icanntravel.mobi
Gesu Sood (category winner); fun on the run
http://gesusood.mobi
Norbert Grey; “Gone to the dogs”
http://mtld.mobi/team/ngrey/
Zico Moro; Dublin city guide
http://mtld.mobi/team/zmoro
The technical category (i.e. the engineering team)
These guys know a little magic – or so they assure me, at least
Cyril Couffignal; Send picture-messages via email to a web gallery
http://uspot.mobi
James Pearce; a movie database for your pocket (disqualified for being the judge)
http://metajam.mobi
Jo Rabin; A W3C test tool for mobile
http://rabin.mobi/dmplbit
Ronan Cremin (category winner); how to commute in Dublin City
http://tjamm.mobi
Ruadhan O’Donoghue; directions and traffic information
http://Go4th.mobi
Stephen Stewart; The dotMobi Advent Calendar
http://1.61803.mobi/advent/
What creativity and invention! Yes, it turns out that there are lots of uncharted opportunities for the mobile medium.
When motivation and decent tools are put into the hands of people who have interesting ideas, you never know what will happen.
It’s here. Number 100. I’m linked. Thanks
I don’t usually get excited about media coverage, since it’s usually some obscure telecoms trade rag.
But now I’m in the San Francisco Chronicle as a quoted expert! The topic being Google Android and its impact on developers (which could be great, of course)
So please forgive me this one
Ha ha ha. My quote follows Sergey Brin’s. That made me smile. I mean, I only read the API like everyone else…
While other protagonists nipped off to London, I stayed at Mobile Internet World to provide the drinks for MoMoBoston.
The event’s headline scoop was a couple of developers, David Carson and Alan Blount, from the Google Android team. In fact I think they work just across the river.
It was a well-filled room of several hundred people, but when they started by asking how many developers were in the room, I only saw one hand (perhaps they’re just shy). I guess most of the MIW delegates that crashed the party aren’t coding kids.
Never mind. The presentation deleved into a component-by-component analysis of the entire device stack anyway.
The centrepiece of the presentation of the demo was them attempting live development in front of our eyes. With nothing more than Eclipse, the Android plugin, and some nervous copy-and-pasting, they managed to show how one can wire up a text box to a browser control to act as an address bar. Cool enough although hardly warranting the “we’re going to build a web browser in 5 minutes” anecdote.
For most of the crowd, I think the pace dropped a little at this point. We watched masters-of-the-universe wrestle with Eclipse autocomplete, on-stage typing nerves, and a few run-time exceptions. But they lashed together something in the end, and they got applause for coaxing WebKit to render CNN.com. Cute, I suppose.
(Aside: for me the most interesting part is not the Java particularly, but the declarative XML for GUIs. There are so damn many of these things now!)
Then questions. And the, perhaps unwitting, audience focus in on Dalvik extremely quickly. Why did you build a new virtual machine? Why not use existing approaches? Why not go direct to native Linux? And so on. Standard party line: designed specially for small devices, optimised for Linux, open, etc etc. Well done, no mention of Sun.
Also some inevitable questions about hardware support & integration, and security & ubiquitousness of the APIs. Yes, it’s not just a high-end phone platform – it’s aimed to be suitable for mass-market. Yes, of course different handsets will expose different hardware functionality. And yes, there are things like the location-based API which might be secured, but of course it’ll be down to the individual implementations.
Perhaps undue bravery & even naivety here. Surely every operator and handset manufacturer is going to be sorely tempted to bend and mould and constrain what the device exposes or what the applications can do. The default starting position will not be complete openness.
Despite the presence of the word “Open” in the alliance’s title, I expect reversion-to-type by old school telecoms, and that could be the project’s biggest nightmare. The developers suggested further such tricky questions were brought up at the following day’s keynote. “We just write the code” was probably the right thing to say.
Nevertheless, I remain enthusiastic overall. If Android becomes a dominant platform, then a lot of developer’s problems go away. That may happen. But of course it will only do so over many, many dead bodies - including those of plenty of companies of some significance. So success will be hard and bloody.
But even if Android does not become dominant, it will have shown that there is another way of looking at handset development. As Tom Hume says, it is, at the least, shaking things up a little. What other handset platform has ever exposed a developer’s API a year before any handsets are even likely to reach the shops?
Received and traditional telecoms wisdom is to build handsets for consumers first, operators a close second, and developers a distant third.
What Google seems to be trying to do (with no insignificant bribery too) is to see what happens when you reverse that order – or at the very least make developers feel like first-class citizens in the ecosystem. Build up a head-of-steam with third-party apps before the handsets ever emerge, and as such, an admirable experiment.
But will that be enough to make their force truly unstoppable when it meets the immovable object of today’s ecosystem? I’m certainly looking forward to finding out.
W3C Workshop this afternoon, MoMo tonight. Presentations, panels & briefings tomorrow and Thursday.
Give me a shout if you are about.
It’s a pre-conference workshop right now, so just figuring out the crowd. Seems a bit telecomsy. The conference poster shows a woman in a speeding car with laptop surfing the web (with husband speaking into phone). WTF.
Occasional Jaiku coverage until my N73 battery dies each day.
