Hey! Palm, just brought back the Psion!

Take it from the UMPC crowd. This is a niche that is tough to fill. You can’t clip it on your belt or put it in your pocket. You basically need a bag to carry it. So if you have a bag with you, why not bring along a proper notebook computer? Honestly, they’re not that heavy.

Stop this intermediate form factor nonsense and start innovating expandable displays for mobiles. Make a ultra-high DPI screen and give people a magnifying glass, make an OLED display that connects wirelessly to the phone and folds up into your wallet, invent solid, reasonable ways to type directly on touchscreens and make the whole surface of the device a screeen (ahemiPhoneahem). You’re not going to find some magical sweet spot in the full-keyboard size range.

Though, actually… that Psion was as close to a sweet spot as you could get. Memories…

This made me laugh out loud when I discovered it. Remember that Yahoo Pipe I made in about 10 minutes to find apartments in Brooklyn for my sister? Well people are actually using it! Almost 200 runs and 12 clones. Not bad for my first pipe. Here’s a link to it in case you’re looking for apartments in Brooklyn - it’s a cutthroat market over there.

I have to say that as cool as Pipes is, Microsoft’s Popfly is exiting me a lot more. I got to check it out firsthand, and the combination of the thought that went into its UI, combined with the power of Silverlight really kicked my heart up a few BPMs.

Yeah Silverlight is getting a ton of buzz lately - but rightfully so. I just keep thinking there’s a huge downside - like anytime you run a Silverlight app, a baby seal dies. But so far, Microsoft hasn’t disappointed.

For you techies who haven’t put Silverlight on your radar yet, here’s a push that might perk your ears up - it’s not like Flash. You don’t embed a box in your doc for it to render to. It is incorporated into the page renderer - the presentation layer - and works alongside Javascript, DHTML and CSS. Yes you need to extend your browser, but they are trying to support a ton of platforms.

Interested? You should be.

Oh yeah, Silverlight runs on mobiles too:

I wrote this post on Hodgman so Justin couldn’t hear.

Here’s a few pictures and notes from MobileCamp. This only touches on a few of the sessions, so I’d like to point you to the links section on the MobileCampNYC page for links to more.

Intro:

We had a quick intro to explain the day and the dynamic scheduling inherent in all BarCamps, and we were off.

Voice Services: Google - Freedom With Speech:

Voice 2.0 = Community approach to speech training
My point: Need faster initiation time - Push to Talk for voice services
Making Money: Voice Ads? Sponsored Listings? Goog is doing it for free now
Need more graceful defaults when command isn’t recognized
Aside: Google guy thinks IMS is going nowhere. He thinks it’s a good dream that won’t be realized

Nokia Mobile Web Server - Juha Pusa:

Link to Nokia Research Page

Based on Raccoon
Single gateway handles external connectivity to all mobile web servers
You get a dynamic hostname that is managed by the NRC service
Can display media from the phone
Can request pictures to be taken
Interfaces to phone OS through Python bindings
Great demo showed pics taken on the spot through a connection from a desktop machine

Talking About LBS:

LBS apps are tough to developer because carriers lock you out
Potential applications - Tourism, Parking, Commerce, Finding Products, Prayer, Sex
Sprint is most open with LBS but you need to be signed
Can bluetooth spots help replace LBS services? Nah.
Best suggestion of the talk - we need location coordinates embedded in every HTTP header coming from mobiles. If only…

MUPE: Multi-User Publishing Environment - Josh Knowles

This is a seriously cool development toolkit that I’d actually consider. With a J2ME client, the reach is not insignificant, and the server-side execution keeps things portable and easy to develop.

Link to the site
Nokia is just starting to push this tech.
Open source platform to create multiuser content apps
J2ME browser for phone coupled with Java server
Load apps like URLs
XML communication
Server runs the code
MUD-style tools - user, room, world
Create a game anyone can join

WinkSite: Building Off-Portal Mobile Communities - David Harper:

Mike has some good notes on this talk.
They support 170 countries off portal
50 million mobile screenviews per month
Create pages that work anywhere with forums/chat/surveys
Large markets in developing countries

The big shocker was how many people use their service to escape and talk to others about problems in their lives like spousal abuse. Tons of racist content started appearing, and groups used their service to forward their sometimes racist agendas. They’re trying to figure out what their role is now. Should they moderate? Intervene? Call authorities? It’s a very interesting problem.

Note that David has taken the time to clarify in the comments section that the incidents of racism and intolerant agendas were not as frequent as I originally took from the talk, which is a good thing to hear. He also notes:

other then blocking IPs, etc. we are also providing tools so community managers can choose to limit their audience to “members’ only.

which is a move I think is very smart. Giving community managers power to control their own content is a great way to keep the content people invest their time in unable to be hijacked. Please see the comments of this post for his full explanation.

Physical Hyperlinks - Alexis Rondeau (Semapedia) & Timo Arnall:

There were multiple talks on physical hyperlinking. Alexis focused on Semapedia, Timo spoke about it more generally with some amazing photos to exemplify it.

Point and click for physical world
QR codes contain the actual URL data - not a reference to a lookup table
Competing codes - Nextcode, ShotCode, Qode… most are serial numbers into tables
FeliCa is HUGE in Japan
Yellow Arrow SMS campaigns in London would be faster with QR codes
These codes scale to building size
RFID could replace QR codes
There’s a disconnect between the picture and the code doing the action now - confusing
People are uncomfortable taking a QR code pic in public
RFID - around 4kb of data able to be stored
QR Code - depending on error correction tolerance needed - around 7089 numeric characters

It’s not too much of a secret that I’ve been working with Clearspring for a while now. So I wanted to post a bit of an intro here, since many people at MobileCamp knew of Clearspring, but pinned us more for widget aggregation and home pages rather than syndication, which is what we do.

Under The Radar did an interview with our founder Hooman, and it spells out the vision for the company better than I could paraphrase. So if you’re curious about us, go check it out.

My role is focused on extending Clearspring’s capabilities to mobile. We aren’t announcing anything yet, but keep in mind, we’re a syndication platform and not a widget aggregator or home page.

And hey, we’re hiring! (But not for a mobile position just yet.)

After MobileCamp last Saturday, I went to the Nokia Flagship store with Tish and her family.

I spent about an hour in there checking out pretty much every device. It was a surprise how many people at MobileCamp had N95’s - especially since they’re $750 and have shit battery life. The N80 gives you about 80% of the functionality (who really needs UPnP and a 5mp camera on a phone anyway?) for half the price. That said, I did see a good bit of N73’s and N80’s at MobileCamp too.

Check out the pics

I’ll be putting some notes on last Saturday’s MobileCamp online soon, but I wanted to get my talk up for those who asked for it.

It’ll be a little tough to understand (read: impossible) without actually being at the talk, but you can check out the cool FIGletized titles if you’re into ASCII art

The main point of my talk was to try to get people thinking about data and its relationship to individuals rather than the Web 2.0 standard of mashing it up to create new hybrid datasets. I propose that users can be allowed to describe what certain types of data means to them through a set of configurable attributes and connected mathematical relationships. As data comes in to the representation, it pulses and changes dimensions as described by these relationships, but remains normalized. The result is that you have an n-dimensional parameter set that you can feed into probabilistic decision trees to make decisions on.

I exemplify this with a small conceptual game called “Can Your Life Grow a Tree”, where the user describes the data’s relationship to themselves and the data coming into the model makes decisions on how a virtual tree grows and thrives. This tree is a metaphor for decisions like “can my phone bother me now?”, “will I need to know where the Starbucks is soon?” - that kind of thing.

Thanks to everyone who attended the talk - it was awesome to have an engaging chat about the material, since I haven’t shared it with many people.

I want to give a huge mention to Rob Clewley, Computational Neuroscientist extraordinare and good friend, who developed the model with me.

You can download the powerpoint presentation here.

It took me a while to see if I could make it, but I’m heading into Manhattan on Saturday for MobileCamp NYC - a BarCamp focused on mobile.

I haven’t attended a BarCamp before, but I’m hoping to have some good practical discussions on things like widgets, mobile web development (deploying real systems with WURFL/WALL), and ways to make mobile phone games not suck. I also want to have some good discussions on SMS and managing off-deck SMS-driven communities.

Though I can’t speak about my current work at Clearspring just yet, I’m coming prepared to talk about my past work in connected mobile gaming and ideas and tech I’ve developed around ambient gaming in general. If anyone wants to share ideas about new types of mobile gaming, that always holds a soft spot in my heart. I’m also ready to jump in with my own WURFL/WALL experiences, J2ME development and testing, and multiplatform support headaches.

Should be an awesome time.

We all know that IT folks love the berries for their unbeatable corporate setup, deployment and management. The Blackberry platform is a powerhouse of IT integration. But when RIM realized that they captured the interest of Joey Twentysomething (J Crew cashier and weekend club DJ) and his GMail account - they dove into cooler looking devices with more consumer-focused features. Like a camera… and… some mapping programs…. and……. um…. oh yeah, a barebones mp3 player.

You can’t knock the Pearl’s design. It looks spectacular, and once it’s set up, it’s relatively easy to use. But setup - there’s the rub. Being their most consumer-focused phone to date, you’d think RIM would take everything they learned over the years and create a consumer-friendly layer of setup in addition to all the corporate setup capabilities. Well they tried. But when we recently moved my wife over to Cingular (sorry, AT&T, the company formally known as Cingular, the company formally known as AT&T) and a Pearl, things didn’t go well at all.

First lets get to email and web browsing. Their idea was simple enough… sorta. Go to Cingy’s Blackberry email site and set up a new account. It gives you a new address that you can forward mail to. You can even get it to reply from any email address you want, keeping your addresses unified. This process wasn’t hard at all. For me. But if Joey Twentysomething didn’t like to read manuals or startup pamphlets, he’d have no idea to go to that site. What’s more, if he decided he wanted to play with the browser first - guess what? There’s no browser in any menu anywhere. Oh, it’s in the manual all right, but dammed if that icon was anywhere to be found.

Being experienced with Blackberry, I know that the phone needs to be provisioned and paired with an enterprise or internet-based backend server before any of its user networking functions will work. Until the device is associated with a berry server, you’ve got a phone and simple unconnected PDA and that’s it. But at this point, Joey’s confused and pissed, and he wants to get this thing going so he can jump in his Camaro, pick up his girlfriend and show it off.

People like Joey need a phone-based wizard. When that phone boots up, they need to see RIM’s version of Clippy taking them step by step through the setup process. But not only was there no wizard, but pairing the device with the server didn’t actually work. After doing all the setup and sending service books to the device (”What’s a service book?” asks Joey) I still had no browser. Logging into the Cingular forums, it appears I wasn’t the only one either.

Moving on a second. The other problem I had after getting the device was that their amazing maps program - Telenav Maps - wasn’t working either. Not only wasn’t it working, it was actually crashing! Right out of the box, it would die with the error

error starting tnmaps_rim_client_ help: module 'net_rim_ec mascript' not found

and I wasn’t the only one with that problem either.

The only way I could fix either of these problems was to upgrade the firmware. That’s right. No rebooting, battery removing, resetting, service book sending, anything would get these things to work. I had to go to a page deep within the Cingy web, download a firmware upgrade, and start again.

I could only imagine my wife, let alone Joey Twentysomething, trying to get this thing to do anything besides make a call. It’s a shame too, because after all the setup pains, the device is phenomenal. I even installed a free IM client that works like a champ. Battery life is great, and all the functionality is rock solid. Guess the rewards only come for those in the know - or who are married to someone who’s in the know.