Nick doing the intro again! Original presenter couldn’t make it, so his (Nick’s) business partner Brian Fling is speaking instead. Brian runs Idea Day (?)…one of the few mobile experts [in the US, as the Norwegians (or Asians!) will tell you]. runs mobiledesign.org (did I get that right?) blue favor director of strategy.
Brian used to work for, and is inspired by, the planned presenter. Will be mashing up both presentations. One person has some experience, the rest of us are blank stares.
Mobile is not the Web. Can’t just go buy a book and figure it out. 200+ devices in north america. (1000+ devices worldwide) device fragmentation is a huge part of the problem. and then…30+ browsers. hail mary mother of jeebus. some hope: a lot of them are various flavors of a previous version. most phones are locked down. carrier controlled ecosystem. no sh!t. napster would never happen with mobile. “to make it a better experience” but also a frustration. I/O limitations. not a lot of resources available: if David hadn’t been a close personal friend, he wouldn’t be where he is today. (!!!!) “Mobile Mondays” mobilemonday.com “no standards” — but that’s not true; more standardized in some ways because of the controlled ecosystem. and consumers (in US) don’t “get it”. (And in US it’s painfully expensive, IMHO.)
goddamn telcos.
jargon alert: “G” – 1G to 3G, with some decimal points in between. 1G …omg, I used to babysit some kids of a guy who had one of those, “car phone”! 2G, not so clunky, but just phones. “2.5G” is about where we are now…cheaper airtime. data capacity, but not much use. or we are at 3G?
LBS: location-based services. GPS chips, location-aware. locality to information.
skipping thru a bunch of stuff. ARPU — average revenue per user. or, how the carrier fsck over the consumer by charging for one thing 72 different ways. also, see Walled Garden. (Ala ye olde AOL.)
chart of carriers w/networks, platforms, etc.
some questions about walled garden issues, streaming, etc. storage space? (I jumped over to email briefly.)
awesome graphic! the device bomb. and then a big grid of pictures of phones.
mvno: mobile virtual network operator. Virgin, ESPN, etc. run on top of an operator/carrier platform. models by carrier, only double it to go back a year or two.
motorola is huge because of popular because of the razr: every carrier has them.
1 1/2% of phones are windows mobile….
pick 5 popular phone to support. how to know what’s popular? see what they’re giving away for free. 🙂 check periodically. people always go for the cheepest phone.
184 available devices available. 38 have audio playback, 64 have video streaming or playback. (it was kind of a PITA to find a tmo phone that plays music.)
Java/BREW support. Verizon is BREW, all else is Java.
more devices in US that support Flash Lite? No. hasn’t been released yet. Samsung has adopted for phone UI.
US is only country he knows of that subsidizes phones, and that drives the slowness of uptake.
Overwhelming majority of phones are “feature phones” — 120 px wide! presentation is on the website.
how many people are taking advantage of the features? and he goes on to talk about all the crazy nifty things that CAN be done. but it’s not happening. early failures. “mobile’s been hyped up.” spent more time talking with lawyers to do licensing for music/ringtones….
people still see their phones as phones.
getting cheaper to get better connection.
prediction: “mobile will revolutionize the way we gather & interact with information in the next three years.”
GOGL SMS queries.
zeldman’s head popping up randomly on the web 3.0 slide.
what do you serve by being mobile? find a need & fill it. nice chart/grid that he almost flashed past. (lots of little iterations, between hardware issues and connections to carriers.) wurfl(.sourceforge.net?) — open source database of phones.
how do you understand the limitations of each carrier? way he’s seen it solved in the past: have one contact at each carrier. (yeah, as if.) wikipedia (!) has info about carriers in North America. huh.
W3C believes in one web, with CSS to control the presentation. “.mobi” domain breaks the web in a fundamental way, according to TBL.
one web vs. mobile web debate.
options… the do-nothing approach. php script that strips stuff (other sorts of progammatical reformatting). alternate stylesheets. “handheld” to automagically reformat visuals.
stylesheet methodology doesn’t address context issues.
“mobile publishing is easy.” throw WML out unless you have extra resources. use XHTML.
I wonder what would be useful for students? (send me my schedule by SMS?)
questions about us vs. the rest of the industrialized world. japanese don’t have computers, so they use the phone. average US house has 1 1/2 computers, plus we are a ginormous country. (no mention of the endless bullsh!t that the telcos put us through.)
reminder service as a great example. if I paid for the bigger SMS plan, I’d probably use something like that. 🙂 again, I think that might be a nice spot for us.
publishing tools “like Movable Type” make perfect mobile web platforms. would wordpress do the same?
slides will be on blue flavor’s site.
Mobile was pretty easy for me to implement. Took me about an hour to put together a stylesheet that changed the mess I saw on our new Windows Mobile 2003 PDA/phone into something readable. Might take me another hour to make some changes to graphics that would make it look prettier.
This week, I saw an ad for a job prototyping scalable interfaces. If it was anywhere but the company it’s at, I would have been so there.
And yes, phone companies suck. That’s why we’re using the PDA/phone just as a PDA and keeping our SIM cards out of it; GPRS is too damned slow and too damned expensive. If we’re not in WiFi range, it can wait. (I’m very tempted to put the mobile version of Skype on this thing, though….)
I played a bit with WML a few years ago. Laura took a class in it when she was getting her Master’s in Telecommunications, and she wanted my help. It was pretty brain dead stuff. Interesting approach, but it was clear to me it was a dead end.