Other
Even genius has to pay its dues. It’s goodbye to the shortcuts, hello to the grind. Nobody ever said it would be an easy ride. So push more, risk more, feel more. How much is just a question of courage, a matter of heart (and taurine)
Up at 4.45am this morning, still going 21 hours later. Ah, the start-up life. Back to the day job tomorrow.
Hmmm. What can he be up to? Well I’m not telling. But it involves a little blue logo. You read it here first.
Hey, I get a mention in GoMo News. It was a slightly bizarre event, as it was right next door to http://www.aoexpo.com/.
Anyway, I was speaking on mobile video and its future. I was fairly clear that the IP-streaming ‘Mobile TV’ paradigm is in some sort of a sweet-spot at the moment, but I also covered some of the other technologies available, as well as the usual challenges (quality etc etc etc)
Before and after me were two speakers who both represented vendors in the ‘video shortcode’ space. Completely unknown to me, the world isn’t interested in video streaming – they only want to use their video phones to dial up shortcodes to see the telly. Or perhaps it was just a slightly biased panel…
Anyway, personally I don’t care whether it’s streamed over packets, or called in over a circuit. I’ll be happy for anything that evolves mobile phone usage to realms outside voice. And good luck to the gentlemen from MXTelecom and D2See 
Hey! Free party! Mobile Monday members invited. (Better brush up some RoR to keep the small talk going).
But wow. I’m fascinated by http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ - if the BBC can pioneer like this, then anyone should be able to. I love the idea of all these underlying data sources exposing APIs to a broad community of application developers.
It’s just like an operating system. Is http://code.google.com/ the new MSDN?
I’ve worked for Argogroup for the last five years or so, and we’ve been focussed on trying to help mobile data serices take off – by helping operators and content providers improve quality.
We did that using ‘active test’ techniques. Basically you simulate real users accessing your services and see what experience they would have had. It’s a great improvement (or complement) to using passive techniques to measure data traffic within the network to deduce quality.
But what’s next? I think even ‘active test’ needs to evolve. After all, how can you truly represent millions of users synthetically?
So I’m thinking a lot about this. “Quality of Service v2.0″ I’m calling it. Basically, why not use the power of the ‘crowd’ (your users) to measure your quality for you?
Instead of benchmarking your web site, or mobile application, you’d ‘crowdmark’ it.
Or to put it in grandiose terms, imagine every terminal, every web browser, every laptop, every phone, hooked up to a vast, virtual, peer-to-peer instrumentation space. Every application or service comes with an embedded quality deduction tool - that not only measures its own performance, but encourages the user to record their own experience, and so shares and collaborates in measuring the performance of this and other applications.
If I am using an application like Placeopedia, imagine if my session was be able to give something back to the underlying ’Internet Operating System’ services that it uses. Record the user-experience, for example, and share it back through the mashed-up APIs, to Google maps, Digital Globe, NAVTEQ, Wikipedia, Yahoo broadband, BT Wifi etc etc. My simple behaviour has added a small drop to the QoS data ocean. But that’s an essence of web2.0: act locally, interact globally.
And it’s not just about tracking protocol-level quality. Talk to the user, ask them how they are doing. Ask them to rate what they see. Let them tag their user experience!
Well, I can safely say it means nothing!
I registered it back in about 2002, when I was intrigued by a number of things happening in the Semantic Web space. That’s a world full of ‘triples’. I also like my film. And for some reason a familiar kids cartoon network popped into my head. Before I knew it, I had a name.
Actually, I rather wish I’d gone for ‘Semantic Cinema’. Might still do
Well I’ve had this domain for years, and never really did anything productive enough with it (except use it as my catch-all email domain).
Right now I’m feeling motivated to do something with it. Primarily a blog, I think, but also somewhere to put my Google Reader shares!
I’ve been impressed over the last few months with the collective enthusiasm around properly bootstrapping the mobile web. I’ve worked in this area since about 1997 (when the Unwired Planet products started crossing the pond) so it would be wonderful if it turns out that it took only 10 years for it to finally reach some sort of fruition.
I’m no environmentalist, and certainly far from green. But I’m scared about climate change. Rather than resorting to the common euphemism of ‘save the planet’ (which can probably look after itself), I’d go for ‘save the species’ (meaning ours). Bad times ahead.
And of course the web. It’s become a cliche to say ‘I hate buzzwords, but let’s talk about web2.0′. I think it’s great to unashamedly talk in terms of buzzwords! It’s that ‘collective enthusiasm’ thing again.
Probably also a good place to chuck links to a variety of other projects I’ve got underway.
Enjoy.
