Expanding horizons

Play Game dress up yoda [del.icio.us]

2009-11-10T09:02:28-08:00

High Performance Web Sites :: @font-face and performance [del.icio.us]

2009-11-10T00:26:41-08:00

iPhone Hacks source code! | Perceptive Development Labs [del.icio.us]

2009-11-09T14:05:24-08:00

Using the iPhone headphone socket to control external hardware without jailbreaking the phone or licensing "Made for iPhone"

Jobstats - IT Jobs Salary Rates and Market Information [del.icio.us]

2009-11-09T03:40:54-08:00

More average salaries across the UK and roles.

IT Jobs Watch, Tracking the IT Job Market [del.icio.us]

2009-11-09T03:37:05-08:00

Very useful site giving 3 month moving average salary levels across the UK and across roles.

How To: Restore a Seriously Ill Pre | PreCentral.net [del.icio.us]

2009-11-08T03:27:05-08:00

"The good news is that you basically can't brick a Pre and if it seems 'bricked,' there are lots of ways to restore it."

Epidurals and Labor - What Happens During an Epidural Video - About.com [del.icio.us]

2009-11-07T10:48:52-08:00

mjelly mobile 2.0 blog: iphone app store statistics [del.icio.us]

2009-11-07T03:01:25-08:00

A useful list of iPhone appstore stats, and several providers of analytics products too.

How we built topsee – the technical details – an intro movie « lastminute.com labs blog [del.icio.us]

2009-11-07T03:00:00-08:00

The guys at Lastminute Labs put up some examples of iPhone coding for their latest app, topsee. Useful stuff.

A possible huge step for NFC | It's a contactless world! [del.icio.us]

2009-11-06T15:37:10-08:00

Apple possibly putting an RFID reader into future iPhones... Could they do with NFC what they did with USB?

Smart phone market shows modest growth in Q3 (Canalys press release: r2009112) [del.icio.us]

2009-11-05T01:24:33-08:00

* Nokia, RIM, Apple and HTC command over 80% of the market between them * Over 80% of smart phones now ship with integrated GPS, more than 75% have Wi-Fi built in * As always, "Apple’s satisfaction ratings in our surveys are consistently the highest of any vendor".

O2 Litmus: Palm Pre Mobile Web Developer Event

2009-11-04T01:08:00.001Z

Tonight was a really impressive event organised by O2 Litmus. The two guys from Palm did a very good job presenting WebOS and Palm’s plans for the future. The food and drink was excellent. And they even gave us a Palm Pre each to take home! Certainly makes me want to at least try out making an app.

As usual, here’s my notes for the evening in a vaguely coherent manner…

webkit appearing all over the place on mobile
as well as opera (there were a couple of people from Opera at the event)
HTML 5 is providing standardisation for web applications in the same way that HTML provided standardisation for web documents
web applications are escaping the browser:
- fluid, prism — single app browsers
- adobe air, appcelerator titanium — provide additional features
why not flash, javafx or silverlight?
because:
- canvas
- fonts in the browser
- javascript engines — with JIT compilation
- access to native graphics
“When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better — you've made something new” — Stephen Levy
Palm Pre uses V8 javascript engine, just like Chrome
WebWorkers provide background threads
- came from Gears worker pool
- invented to stop database access causing hangs
Chrome uses WebWorkers for extensions
Firefox hasn’t implemented SQLite, but may go for a JSON-based database, like CouchDB
CSS Transforms
- e.g. http://satine.org/research/webkit/snowleopard/snowstack.html
“it’s not javascript people don’t like, it’s dealing with cross-browser issues”
- anyone mention IE…?
“it’s not just going to be developing apps for Palm — it’s making things for the web”

some detail

Mojo Framework is open-source
Mojo uses prototype.js at the moment, but will be made nicer to use other alternatives later
dashboard items and popups are just DOM items
want to integrate apps into system — background apps

security

web browser provides normal web sandbox
applications get access to native services
certain APIs still need permissions granted
- e.g. location
- can get app to ask when API is used
would like to push local APIs to browser windows
apps are packaged and signed
- working with developers to encrypt apps in different ways
- would anticipate that developers would be able to opt-in to encrypt their app
- protect against people uploading a copy of an app as their own
- balanced against the benefit of view source on the web

app store

Palm would like a “web app store” to emerge
Palm doesn’t feel that it’s the right company to make this move
creating a Palm catalogue & developer program for mid-December
- charging $50 for each app to be in the catalogue — as a spam filter
- money goes to funding developing programme & catalogue service
- interested in finding other “friction points”
can get an immediate acceptance into the web distribution of the Palm app catalogue
- submit and get a URL straight away
- can email/tweet other people
- no review process
opening up the backend too — feeds of all the apps and charts
would like digg-style rating
a developer can choose to make an app available for specific markets
also aiming to provide metrics for developers, so they can see how users are choosing or not choosing their apps
payment:
- right now they have PayPal
- would like to support several options
- want to decrease the friction

BONDI & others

palm works with them
including W3C widgets & geo
Palm way will be there originally, but will be switched out when
order depending on developer requests
native-accelerated CSS transforms are higher at the moment
“Palm pays us, but they didn’t pay us enough to sell out”

supporting open source

waiving cost for anyone working open source
$99 for developer

testing

O2 Litmus will be recruiting Palm Pre users for testing availability
DeviceAnywhere will feature Palm Pre in O2 VDL

feedback

devrel@palm.com
they already use Jira and want to open it something to the public soon
homebrew community will patch things before Palm do it themselves
there are differing viewpoints internally…

personal usage

like multi-tasking
don’t like UI latency
- hardware is roughly equivalent to the iPhone 3GS
- don’t have access to hardware GPU — so CSS Transforms is really important
- will happen with a over-the-air software upgrade

multiple devices

Palm Pixi seems a lot nicer
different screen size (80 pixels shorter)
should design liquid layouts…
the future is devices in all kinds of form factors

tooling

there are tools for Flash — what about tools for WebGL, etc?
mozilla is making tools
e.g. Atlas from 280North
this week there may be something new released…
should flash be a native platform for apps on Palm Pre?
- nearly supported for web pages — Adobe has shown something working already

Bundle Box - The better way to buy from the USA [del.icio.us]

2009-11-03T07:21:52-08:00

Get a personal address in the USA and bundle deliveries to the UK (they deal with customs too).

Mobile Device Stats

2009-11-03T14:44:00.001Z

I've been looking at various mobile statistics recently and thought I'd put up a quick post on my findings so far.

I started with some work at Kizoom, analysing the traffic we see on our UK Transport services. This then led to my session at BarCampLondon7, in which I presented the session counts for mobile browsers from a sample month (September) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. I've published these results in a DabbleDB database at http://mobilesessions.dabbledb.com/ for your slicing and dicing enjoyment.

I was inspired by Bryan Rieger's article on mobiforge, where he tells developers to "Expect and manage diversity" and links to some great graphs from the deviceatlas data explorer showing how screen sizes differ across device release dates. However, fantastic though deviceatlas is, it doesn't capture the actual usage of the devices on mobile sites -- it just counts one for each device, no matter whether it's a popular Nokia or an almost unused Sagem.

I've tried to rectify this lack of popularity data by publishing the Kizoom sample data. It's not perfect and each year isn't quite the same sample (we've released and withdrawn various services across the time range), but it's a start. I've even tried putting the same data into IBM's manyeyes to get some alternate visualisations.

Some of the trends that I've been seeing coming out of this data are not surprising: the iPhone punches way above its weight in terms of mobile traffic, and screen sizes are getting bigger as the years go on. One trend that is slightly unexpected is the growing popularity of BlackBerry devices over the last few years -- at least it's surprising to me quite how popular they've become (showing third in the brand popularity for 2009 behind Nokia and SonyEricsson, and ahead of Samsung and Apple).

There's been some other data published recently that seems to support the same trends. The September AdMob metrics have recently been released and this month they're highlighting the change in devices from 2007 to 2009 (a popular theme!). Their stats show that the iPhone and iPod Touch are number one and two in the UK -- probably due to in-app ads supplementing the web usage, especially when considering that the HTC Android phones (not nearly as popular a phone as the Nokia N95) also manage slots in the top 10.

Ian Homer of Bemoko pointed out the StatCounter Global Stats site, which has some very nice stats and pretty graphs to go with them. This site provides sliceable worldwide stats from 3 million websites (240 million hits in UK). Since the sites may not be mobile specific, I would expect mobile devices used to browse "the full web" would take precedence over smaller, more phone-focussed devices.

Here's an example: Top 9 Mobile Browsers in Europe 2008/09

As expected, the iPhone and iPod Touch (or "iTouch") gets the majority of the traffic, with Nokia coming a strong second. NetFront is the browser used by SonyEricsson smartphones (and others) so comes fairly high in the rankings (it seems that StatCounter may have changed how they categorise SonyEricsson browsers in August 2009, as NetFront swaps with SonyEricsson -- this is even more apparent in their Mobile OS stats for the same region).

Once more, BlackBerry devices are making a strong showing in recent months, a gain which shows even stronger when the stats are shown just for the UK.

toronto.ca | Open [del.icio.us]

2009-11-02T13:27:31-08:00

The City of Toronto's official data set catalogue - beta version. Access City data, get information about City data and the City's OpenTO initiative and give us feedback. The City of Toronto is committed to open, accessible and transparent government. Includes ESRI Shapefiles for neighbourhoods & parks. No OS Derived Data issues in Canada... Also includes a SOAP-based geocoder and web map services.

BarCampLondon7: Alternative Input - Striking a Chord

2009-10-26T09:40:00.001Z

Stephen Nicholas

3rd year project

Stephen works with Dale Lane @ IBM on microbroker & GUI testing
multitap & mini-qwerty not really suited for mobile input…
- qwerty not really suited for desktop input either :-)
- multitap gets up to 20 WPM
braille keyboard has one key for each dot
can get faster than qwerty keyboard input
- qwerty 80 wpm
- stenographers much faster: 200-300 WPM
can possibly reduce RSI since not moving your arm quite so much
drawbacks:
- have to use non-obvious input schemes (no hunt and peck)
microwriter, introduced in 1978
- got speeds up to 40 WPM after 7 months practice
- had great mnemonic method for encoding
- recently been redeveloped as the CyKey
twiddler
- has 3 x 4 keys, might work well on mobile keyboard
ChordTap for phones:
- has three additional buttons on back of phone to distinguish between multitap letters

BarCampLondon7: Social Manipulation on the web and in person

2009-10-26T09:35:00.001Z

Tim Nash

Social Engineering is still just as valid as ever…

If asked for photo ID, people will give it up willingly
given a photo ID with details, you can call up somewhere and say you’ve forgotten your ID
often the front desk will give you a new ID…
people are more likely to buy when there’s an official badge…
- doesn’t really matter what the badge is
- virtually no-one who clicks on the badge actually purchases
- but buy rate will increase anyway
paypal did an experiment about a year ago
- to see if it made a difference to not use the word PayPal on their “paypal verified” badges
- made no difference to sales conversions
- click-through rate to paypal went down
certain colours affect buying moods
- brain doesn’t like bright colours
- big red “buy now” button does not attract people — your eyes will avoid it
- instead have a big grey “buy now” button with two red arrows on either side
- eye tracking study shows people look for price and “buy now” button
- sales rates go up when the price is just above the buy now button
best place for comments on a blog:
- new comment box just under post
- other comments can be down the side
use the word “reply” rather than “submit” comment
scienceforseo blog
- highlight a part of the text and the comment will appear alongside

BarCampLondon7: Project Lombok - the end of Java boilerplate?

2009-10-26T09:30:00.001Z

Reinier Zwitserloot - @surial

Project Lombok is an extension to Java that allows you to write less boilerplate code by using annotations.

examples:
- @Data to provide automatic getters and setters for private fields, equality and hashCode, and a constructor for final fields
- @Cleanup to tidy up inputstreams when block ends
- @Synchronized to lock on private Object instance rather than this
- @SneakyThrows() hides a checked exception from javac, but leaves it for JVM
- (in JVM all exceptions are unchecked)
integrates with Eclipse (e.g. getters/setters provided without you having to type)
does mucking around through its jar, so can work easily with Ant & Maven etc
- use com.sun...ProcessingEnvironment to
Java Posse — podcast
- inventor of annotations happy that lombok exists, but not so happy that private APIs being used…

BarCampLondon7: Supporting the masses

2009-10-26T09:28:00.001Z

Tony McCrae

Experience from squadlist.co.uk — an online tool for organising rowing outings. Set up during a Guardian employee’s spare time for his own rowing club, but suddenly getting over 1000 users. He needed to support the users of the site without spending time on them.

sort out forgotten logins
- though have to be careful about security
- generate nice passwords using pwgen
- facebook isn’t permitted in some firms (so no facebook connect)
- prompt end users to talk to someone else other than you!
can your users be divided into groups?
- form a relationship with one member in each group
demo as documentation — install a full demo system with sample data and let them play
- reset its data regularly (but make sure you tell people!)
- Jira now has jQuery-based inline popup help
invest in getting your domain unblocked
- put SPF in your DNS
even if you send from noreply@, check the volume going to it!
- a spike may indicate something going wrong
don’t tell everyone when changes happen
- just senior users
introduce new features to a smaller test group
- enable beta group
allow users to export their data automatically
http://uservoice.com and http://getsatisfaction.com
- with a forum on-site, people keep on requesting the same new features, even if you provide a roadmap
- moving to these customer satisfaction sites means that existing feature requests no longer generate complaints!
- instead, people vote up the existing requests
- of course, if the requests never get monitored or picked up, you’ve still got disgruntled users
really loud heavy users can be very powerful for good or bad
- hire them! or at least make them happy
gmail labs has “canned responses”
open source core product to ensure continuity
provide “paid for” additional capabilities

BarCampLondon7: Release London's Data -- Feedback from #londonsdata

2009-10-24T19:59:00.001+01:00

Emer Coleman (assistant chief exec for London Borough of Barnet)

has been doing research this year about what data has been collected in london boroughs
big crisis in public finance after next election — what will happen?
to have a meaningful conversation, you need to have information available…
lack of trust at the moment (esp. for MP’s finances)
GLA holds a lot of data and wants to publish
already publish financial data
hoping to put pressure on subsidiary bodies to release more
invited developers to ask for what they wanted
- 65 developers gathering information
- TfL & transport info is really where they want to get to
developers have gone as far as they can to push agencies
“we’re just gonna do it”
asked “do you want raw data, or with some contextual data?”
- didn’t come to any firm view
should we just release with the cabinet office?
now an email list, and a google group set up
will be running a competition
aiming to release data store in January
data avilable
- air quality maps
- number of people in social housing
- school catchment areas
message coming from developers — just put the data out there
Daniel Shore (@LDN): what’s the attitude of TfL to scraping the journey planner?
IanForrester: other authorities (e.g .Manchester) trying to do things too
DIY Birmingham — scraped version of local authority site, but much more accessible
Cloudmade: NaPTAN data being imported into OpenStreetMap
- then allows it to be updated, corrected and extended
Beth Noveck (Obama’s advisor on transparency) has written a book about wiki government

BarCampLondon7: Non-relational Databases

2009-10-24T19:53:00.000+01:00

Simon Willison

Back channel notes on etherpad

why?
- scalability issues — have to do bizarre things to get to Flickr/Google size
- some models don’t fit schemas
Voldemort — used by LinkedIn
- needs at least four servers to get started!
CouchDB, MongoDB, etc
- download and type make
- MongoDB was much faster, tho’ CouchDB has improved
whenever you hit a tag page on on flickr, you hit a search
- if you hit “my photos, tagged X” you hit a relational database
Programming the Semantic Web
- by the guy who wrote Programming the Collective Intelligence — very good: all people who like X will like Y
redis
- key-value store, network accessible
- ridiculously fast
- doesn’t persist to disk — every 15 seconds it dumps the entire database to disk
- can improve reliability by replicating
- e.g. live stats services
- can have a key-set, with add to set, set intersection
Git
- has shown that it can scale to the size of the linux kernel
- so can scale to storing your desktop settings!
- git is not just a RCS it’s a file system with revision control
- there’s also git# and jGit
jaiku migrated to app engine
- including all the history
- need to think of queries at design time, otherwise you’re stuck and have to do a big MapReduce to extract data

BarCampLondon7: iPhone Stats

2009-10-24T19:46:00.001+01:00

Chris and Simon gave a good description of what it’s like to be popular in the Apple App Store.

get an angle for the app
- 0870 talked about in Guardian, twitter, TechCrunch, …
0870 download stats available on simon’s website
marketing from Apple is not the be all and end all
- and you have no control, so no warning when serious traffic hits…
top 5/top 10 is the big hit
when you put out an upgrade, 60-70% of new downloads will hit your app (and your feed)
- again you have no control of when this happens
- it’s usually at night (in the UK)
hosting:
- simon started on slicehost
- went down after a couple of hours…
- moved to rackspace cloud (engineX)
- their cheapest server — has cost about $10 so far
Kieran: tune apache so it can handle more connections at once since mobiles will talk for longer
Ads:
- good at the beginning but tailed off rapidly
- Simon looking at premium ad suppliers
- need 500K impressions/month
- made $800 this month, but could make more on a premium network
Q: Is it a point against you if you release your app on Cydia?
- A: don’t think so, but then haven’t tried
stats for paid:
- if you’re lucky you’ll get 1000 a day
- that will get you into top 25
- a little more will get you top 10
- if you’re focussing on a single territory, make it the US!
iPhone apps are a great marketing tool
- but probably won’t cover your costs…
- Nigel saw a company that saw increase on their mobile web site when the iPhone app went live
subscriptions are rolling:
- app will warn you that you need to purchase a renewal
Kieran: in-app purchasing is extremely successful — much more than subscriptions
Even Nike couldn’t get app fast-tracked….!
submitting & checking by Apple:
- even new versions get treated as a new app
- they only tell you one problem at a time
- it’s about a 2-minute review — not a QA test
AppViz — you need it for viewing your stats
- nikf: there’s some equivalents that run on your iPhone (see markjnet’s review)
0.5% of users write a review, and less than that actually write a comment
- paid apps get more reviews — people have invested
- people don’t know how to do reviews unless they delete the app
- appirater is an open source library that will prompt people to put in a review and take you to the right place on the app store
- definitely put a feedback screen in the app
putting apps cheaper at the beginning doesn’t seem to make much difference
- there’s a bit chasm from free to paid, but then once you’ve made it paid there’s much less of a drop-off

BarCampLondon7: Energy Efficiency & Usage Monitoring

2009-10-24T19:29:00.001+01:00

Nigel Crawley

digital meter — LED flashes fast or slow depending on how much electricity you use
can pick that up with an arduino with wifi and then make available as EEML
EEML (eeml.org) — XML for electricity cost
- can humm output eeml?
can then input into Pachube
can then do visualization like this:
lilypad arduino — can sew into clothes
- can include a vibra-ball
can recognise individual devices by whole home electricity usage
- fridge, kettle, toaster, electric oven
Tom Raftery — greenmonk.net
- devices using too much electricity — an organisation will offer to replace it and tell you the savings
- Camden, New Jersey: government offers subsidies on lower energy appliances
visualisations:
- one for schools that showed a polar bear running out of iceberg
- DisplayLink have done a blog post on energy visualisation

Gbenga Kogbe

the UK will run out of energy by 2014… we must save
comparing with your neighbours
mancini project — plug by plug usage
there was some effort in the Zigbee standard — all appliances would publish their usage to a standard hub
energyhive provided reduced price meters
- research that came out showed that by the end of the trial, loads of meters were in the drawer and not used
- several 1000 homes included in trial
putting information online and sharing it is much more effective than a little meter in the corner
in some places, there are dynamic tariffs
- would like to tell dishwasher to wash when it’s cheap
- not in the UK…
- energy providers buy at realtime, but sell at flat rate
Dale Lane: energy costs vary between 2p and £3 a unit!!
- it’s in their interest to get us to use it at the right times
base electricity is provided by nuclear power
peak is provided by hydro
DynamicDemand.co.uk: figure out national supply by checking frequency
- brownouts caused by frequency going too low
- looking at making fridges turn themselves off when the frequency is lower
- if all fridges did this, then peaks would be made less
- see also caniturniton.com
in California they have battery farms (since the 80s)
solar panels are less efficient in the heat…
- they get powered by light, not heat
bike generators:
- bikes available for free — have generators
- when they are parked, they provide their power for the local buses

MomoLondon: Go your own way? A fresh look at LBS

2009-10-12T23:31:00.000+01:00

Tonight’s event was probably the busiest I’ve ever seen the CBI Centre — the room was packed and there were loads of new faces. In terms of the content, there were good bits and not so good old bits — the “walk past a shop and get a voucher” idea reared its ugly head yet again, despite being shown several times to be of no interest either to advertisers or to the consumers.

Vodafone showed off their 360 phone and some services, but shorn of the glitzy launch, it looked a little clunky. The panellists spent a lot of time talking about foursquare and Andrew Scott of Rummble got a few words in edgeways. I’m not quite convinced that either of them have a business model. Shazam looked impressive and gave a good demo — they do have a business model, even with Spotify around. The guy from Cloudmade knows his stuff about maps (the stuff they do is fantastic), but didn’t seem to have much of a clue about mobile.

Skyhook Wireless

Kate Imbach

Now selling hybrid location: Wi-Fi, Cell ID & GPS
10-20m accuracy within 1s
Drive to find networks
London coverage follows people, but empty in parks
125m+ APs worldwide
70% population coverage in Europe
Commercial apps require an ad revenue share or a licensing fee
Free apps can use SDK for free

Some examples (all on the iPhone):

Sit or squat — rate toilets…
MyStarbucks
Flixster — cinema reviews w/social features + find cinemas & restaurants close by
Shazam tying music to locations
Sportacular — voting by location, then see stats over country
TuneWiki — see where people are listening to what music, and what’s popular around you

Advertising

MyTraffic — driving alerts, works in Boston
- has smarter location-based advertising — but who is selling them?
Scoreloop — location-based leaderboards
Amazon — what’s popular in Seattle this week? what are the business books selling in London?

http://www.skyhookwireless.com/developers/developersguide.pdf

New launch — Maps Booster for S60

feeds Skyhook location into all location APIs on the phone

Vodafone 360 Demo

Patrick Weissert

WiFinder acquired by Voda and providing location for 360 phone
VF 360 widgets (see http://jil.org) have location API available
Apparently Vodafone 360 is still beta…

Flook

Tristan Brotherton

browse photos (“cards”) around you and see where they are
can add comments to the cards
have a follow model like twitter
can collect cards you find interesting (favourite)
- can then add categories
scoring mechanism
- if other people collect your cards, you score more
seems too much like twitter with twitpic
(integrates with twitter)
what’s the business model?

Shazam

Jonathan Symons

> 35m users
live in 150 countries
Jonathan’s role is to think of the money…
money comes from:
- users getting involved, sharing app & music
- buying things
getting roughly 60,000 tweets of music a day
“I can find myself in a bar”…
meet new people who like the same music
basic service for free, funded by advertising & follow-on content acquisition
additional services cost

Panel Session

Panellists:

Stuart Dredge of Mobile Entertainment
Kate Imbach, Skyhook Wireless
Jennifer Hicks, Ink Communication
Nic Black, Cloudmade
Roberta Lucca, Vertu
Patrick Weissert, Vodafone

Vertu

just launched a new phone
together with a location awareness service
Vertu consumers work hard, play hard, spend hard
travel way more than average
not digital natives — use things that are relevant for them
want recommendations & whole experience, completed with human concierge

Cloudmade

here to lower the barriers to entry for location apps
making location a feature, not a whole application

Ink Comms

Global Marketing & Strategy
analysis

Is iPhone leading the way? What about Android & Symbian?

KI: a lot of focus on iPhone
- Android devs scaling back and going for iPhone instead, since that’s where the money is now
- Lots of faith in Android but it will take its time
NB: various limits for iPhone, esp. everything has to be active
- Android allows swapping out services for others, e.g. using Cloudmade map service instead of Google
PW: VF360 addresses 3 out of 6 segments
- iPhone is making mainstream what we thought a couple of years ago was just for geeks
- Android will take similar path
- can share VF360 even if you’re not on Vodafone (and it picks up facebook, etc)

Foursquare

JH: foursquare may come up with a biz model with advertising on a local level
NB: foursquare about building up local content
- need it for developers to play with
RL: content useful and so is location, but targeting is vital — need to match the right content according to the influencers
NB: have a choice of “what don’t I show on the map”
- depending on the activity, the time, the context
SD: segmenting by the apps you select
RL: sometimes people don’t want discover things — they want the choice made for them

Has the industry come round to starting with the service rather the tech?

KI: lots of complaints that the Apple App Store has too many apps, but there are a lot of niches
KI: 100s of millions of lookups every day — location is becoming ubiquitous within apps, becoming mainstream

How are people making money?

KI: Visa are sponsoring a shopping app, seeing $15-24 CPMs — does anyone know what this is?
JH: still trying to come together
- lives in Amsterdam, people are using foursquare like crazy
- social networking side of location services
NB: releasing first part of location based advertising service later this year
- tailor advertising to app’s context
RL: need to involve audience
PW: flixter are ticketmaster — they sell tickets
- the app is advertising for their own service

@torgo: What about the privacy issues? Could that lead to a backlash against location services?

KI: app developers are sensitive to the privacy issues
- generally sharing location for the user experience
- weird when app asks for location for no reason
- Skyhook don’t do user application tracking
JH: consumer issues will hit as this stuff spreads
- consumers can get picky
- getting libel suits as twitter becomes mass market
NB: thinks the early adopter community are more concerned by privacy issues

How does immediacy affect social mores?

RL: different countries reacting differently
- next generation will not bother about personal info
- e.g. Google StreetMap just useful
KI: gave up on privacy after my mother guilted me into accepting her friend request on facebook
Floor: In Amsterdam, youth feel privacy is very important
JH: want you to ask permission to share their info
- teens will not part with their phones
- will not be sliced by age; depends on industry
PW: need to enable location selectively
- not enable every tweet
- choose to

How does Vertu work with location?

RL: Vertu handsets are Series 40, but luxury
- use of location is made clear — transparency
SD: more like “push my location to the paparazzi right now!”

What is the thing that O2 UK could do that would be most helpful?

NB: reduce barriers to entry: make location part of the platform, and pay them for using it, via location

Does advertising really work?

A user is in Kensington, shoe shopping and I want to serve them an ad. Right now, advertisers might have an advert about shoes, probably clothing instead, almost certainly not Kensington
NB: might also want to tell people about coffee shops nearby
JH: talks about walk-by advertising…
@fj says “I’m not responsible for any store making money - get outta my phone!”
KI: no inventory
- no incentive to sell more targeted ads as they sell less impressions that way
- location-based banner ads are probably not the way things will go
PW: time & location push model doesn’t really work
- more about pull — enabling people to find you

Will there be more integration between mobile and web apps?

PW: VF360 all about that. Can sync them up
RL: all about lead time: takes a long time to put a new device on the market, but not to launch a service

Are we going to see content fragmentation?

PW: biggest problem of app store model — think that services will converge
SD: federating content like wikipedia
NB: will be launching a “publish content through a central service” later this year

For certain apps, a facebook app is worth about 400 leads

JH: it’s too early
- foursquare think they will make money from local advertising
- they’re experimenting at the moment
Andrew Scott: foursquare not making money — just taken $100m of funding…
RL: concentrate on providing something that is highly valuable for their consumers

Upcoming events

26 Oct — Mobile Phones for the Senior Market
- Even in the UK there is only about 50% penetration in the 55+ market
- Learn about the opportunities and how to take advantage of them
26 Oct PM — DCKTN Mobile World Congress competition judging
9 Nov — Mobile Monday joint birthday part w/Swedish Beers
7 Dec — Heroes of the Mobile Screen
4 Dec — OpenMIC in Guildford on AR & Location

OverTheAir '09: Fluid Layouting Techniques for Widget Development

2009-10-03T13:40:00.000+01:00

Daniel Herzog

Original slides:

Fluid Layouting Techniques - Over The Air 2009

View more documents from danfooo.

My notes…

There’s one web — “You don’t want .mobi — it wasn’t a big success”
widgets should be cross-platform
- should take a small amount of space on the desktop, but be bigger (full screen) on mobile
Vodafone widget engine is based on Opera 9

Fonts

use media queries to switch to high dpi mode, e.g.
```
  @media all and (-o-touch) {
      a {padding: 1em}
  }
```
- uses opera-specific -o-touch

alternative:

  @media all and (min-resolution: 200dpi) {
      body {font-size: 22px}
  }
  .myDiv {margin: 1em;}

Images

should use them at native resolution, loaded from server…
if you’re desperate, use image scaling using screen width percentages

UI-Elements

use dynamic images, or scalable SVG
SVG works across most browsers, apart from IE (but may change in 2009)
Google working on SVG Web — uses Flash plugin to render SVG content
- But if widget engine doesn’t support SVG, it may not support Flash either
Daniel uses Illustrator to create initial SVG, then uses TextMate to hand edit it…
- Can also use Inkscape but the UI is horrible

More resolutions…

Portrait & landscape, docked mode (also in portrait and landscape!)
Deal with these using window.resizeTo
Call this initially and when the orientation changes

Future

We’re in trouble — widget runtimes need to return real dpi/ppi values
Not possible at the moment since developers assume that 10pt is a certain number of pixels
Would be nice to have an extra CSS property for the real dpi

And another thing… zooming widgets

Zooming enlarges pixels — see Opera for an example
But SVG still scales effectively
Another example: WidgetCity is a widget version of Sim City!

OverTheAir '09: Natural Interaction Gestures

2009-10-03T12:30:00.001+01:00

Joe Macleod & Younghee Jung — Nokia Design Team, London

A though-provoking discussion on how interaction with handheld technology develops. Nokia seem to be doing some good research on user interfaces — shame that doesn’t seem to be transferring into the Series60 devices…

Exploring ‘natural’ gesture interactions

Not really anything that replaces face to face communication yet
Some gestures transfer across cultures well, e.g. fingers on lips: sshhh
Some are complicated, e.g. transferring business cards
v-sign doesn’t necessarily mean victory now
- in Asia it is now a default pose for taking photos
- watch out for reversing it…
in China, can count from 1 to 10 on one hand…
in Ghana there’s a really sophisticated hand greeting ritual that includes clicking fingers together with the other person
research exercise in Nokia to pull together existing gestures used in phones
- e.g. turn a phone over to silence a ring (Nokia 8800)

Initial research

what are natural gestures involving mobile phones?
selected 11 different tasks, from checking time to sending something
gave people blocks to play with (no buttons)
sketched out what people came up with in four cities around the world
e.g. silence gestures:
- stare at it
- put finger over the speaker
had to fight with people to get them to think outside of pressing buttons

Understanding the factors that make gestures work

60 gestures as stimulus mapped to 15 tasks (4 each)
- some were already known to be not so useful
14 nationalities among participants
video recorded each gesture to control how they were presented
some issues were physical capability — can I do this? is it comfortable?
- “I don’t want to feel tired using my phone”
- “I don’t want to hit someone in a crowded place”
- “Might I damage my phone?”
have loads of examples of bad gestures, e.g. skipping!

Testing with prototypes

Nokia Labs built a sensor packed platform to test prototypes

design principles

easy to learn
easy to perform
- you will learn it from other people in the real world
no unintentional triggers
designed for the mobile context
scalable visibility
- some people are more flamboyant than others…
- “draw a circle” — comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes!
fits the task
- even if the gesture is not from the natural metaphor, it should have some link to the task
works together as a language
- people already mentioning that if there are more than 3 or 4 gestures, they wouldn’t be able to remember… unless they were natural…

Q&A

Isn’t it easier to learn new gestures with a new object?
- e.g. introducing NFC cards
- making existing actions a bit smoother
- introducing new features
Do you think you could take inspiration from sign language gestures?
- Have you ever seen deaf people talking over a video phone…? The language meant to be seen from a distance…
Is there anything that allows users to start experimenting with their own gestures? Like users added hashtags and other meta-data to twitter?
- Some Japanese phones already let you map 4 pre-defined gestures to specific functions
Will some gestures inspire a new form factor?

OverTheAir '09: Mobile Visual Interactivity

2009-09-29T18:57:00.000+01:00

Geoff Ballinger — mobile acuity

Geoff runs a mobile development agency in Scotland, specialising in applying vision technologies.

lots of real people use the camera on their phone
in 16-34 age group 78% have sent an MMS, 48% cameras regularly
there are graveyards in Japan with QR codes on each headstone!
- scan them to get some details about the person
examples:
- take a picture of a goal and MMS it — it responds with a mobile web page that tells you whether you scored, then pulls you in to further interaction
- Nike PhotoiD — find some colours you like, send it in and get a picture of trainers coloured that way
Visual search apps on iPhone store (CDs and books):
- Snaptell Explorer from Amazon
- Barnes and Noble store app
- Mobile Acuity Visual Shopper — not yet released
recognise images from database of 10m
code libraries
- Haar recogniser
- ARToolkit
web service APIs: Kooaba & Mobile Acuity (available on a per-use basis)
- feature recognition from images

OverTheAir '09: Modelling the User Experience

2009-09-29T18:51:00.000+01:00

Bryan Rieger — yiibu

Bryan comes from a theatre and animation background and was sorely disappointed by the tools available for designing interactive services. He and his partner Stephanie have developed a lightweight prototyping mechanism for interactive mobile services. I like the idea — especially the bit about throwing away lots of ideas in order to explore.

Tools for traditional animation

scripts & storyboards —> models & layouts
adding structure, but always changing
dope sheets, now known as timelines
pencil tests
animatics — complete but not finished
- stills set to music/voice over, possibly panned and scanned

Tools for Mobile design

wireframes and… more wireframes
what are they?
- layout, behaviour and flow all in one document
are we expecting too much from one document?
Bryan started dropping little nonsense text on the descriptions of wireframes to see if anyone was reading them — turns out nobody was!
documentation gets bigger and bigger but not readable
document management != design

Prototypes

where do you start and where do you stop
paper -> HTML -> Flash -> Python, Java, …
- the more you get to development, the more people don’t want to tear it down
- developers (and those who manage them) should learn the value of the spike — a throwaway prototype that you really do throw away
want to get something more concrete than paper but has limitations
- really difficult to share
- usually requires some mediation

Agile

iterations are good for design
you can explore more, develop new different ideas and throw away bad ones
how can I make lots of mistakes? how can I get visibility of the project as a whole?

Integrating knowledge from animation

applying animatics to wireframes
- want something interactive, but still sketched
- and the sketched part must include the flow and behaviour as well as the layout
disposable data models:
- views, states and events
- views and states are scanned in from paper prototypes
- events switch from state to state or to different views
- creating these is relatively easy, esp. using Fireworks as a tool
- Fireworks allows you to create multiple states side by side, all based on a single view
can switch in different JPEGs really easily — iterate visual design
can easily alter model (flow & behaviour) by changing XML
- at the moment, the XML is hand-built
player built using Mobile Processing, so runs on real devices (as JavaME midlet)
- same player for any design — just load and go
models (including graphics) take about 1 day to create
- so can create 60+ models over several weeks
is this system similar to Cascade Breeze, or PhoneGap?

Experience

created lots of documentation up front, but then started culling pages
shipped prototypes with the documentation
created 60+ models — allowed change
took 2 designers 9 weeks of work
led to clearer wireframes
- but didn’t replace them — this is an additional tool
much greater user testing since lots of people could use it
slowly refining the tool:
- adding gestures and touch interactivity
don’t model the whole app — just specific flows

MomoLondon: Mobile Java

2009-08-26T20:54:00.001+01:00

I was delighted to be invited to be part of the panel this evening — and at only a few hours notice too (I only checked my email in the afternoon after getting back from holiday the previous evening). A flurry of tweets confirmed my place — thanks to Alex Craxton for thinking of me!

Consequently, the notes for this evening are briefer than normal, though the evening felt like it went fairly well. The topic was more technical than most Mobile Mondays and the suit percentage in the audience was very low. I hope we pitched the discussion at the right level. Thanks also to my fellow panellists: Simon Nicholson from Sun, Sergio Falleti from Future Platforms, Kieran Gutteridge from intohand and Andy Milloy from SurfKitchen.

There were a few new points raised (I’ll cover some below), but the most controversy in the room came when we got around to discussing app stores and the iPhone. There was the usual discussion around why the JavaME industry hadn’t advertised downloading apps until Apple showed the way — as Dan Appelquist put it previously, it would have been a documentary rather than a 30 second advert…

@fj questioned what Sun would be doing to catch up with Apple’s speed of development on the iPhone, but there isn’t really an answer — JavaME improvements come slowly as they involve multiple (often competing) companies working together through the often cumbersome JCP process. Apple can make changes daily. However, the JCP process eventually results in a large number of companies putting out lots of devices into multiple markets. This will inevitably cover a larger market than Apple ever wants to reach — @edent’s oft repeated point that there are many more low-level phones worldwide than there are smartphones will still be true for quite a few years yet.

As an audience member pointed out, not many of these low-level phones are used to download apps — it’s a big market but with no way of reaching it. I think this will gradually change, and we’ll start to see even the low-level phones having a reasonable JavaME capability over the next few years (this is definitely in Sony Ericsson’s plans). We’ll have to wait quite a while, though, as phones last a long time in some markets…

In other news…

Surfkitchen have recently developed a home screen app for Sony Ericsson phones on Telstra in Australia (called Telstra One). This plugged into a new API only available on those phones. I wonder how the new app affects battery life — and if it copes well, when this new API will be released. Sony Ericsson seem to be moving forward in JavaME in the way that the JSR community process cannot, but still creating an effective platform based on the JSR standards. I like their approach and I hope they do well.

Device databases

Sergio from Future Platforms said that they use the Java Verified list of device families and lead devices as a basis to categorise their builds. I wonder how often this list gets updated and how FP deal with newly released phones. This device grouping is something that should be part of a device database — something that’s sorely needed to enable developers to choose which builds to make in order to cover an appropriate range of devices. If you choose effectively you can massively reduce the testing required. Most development agencies have built their own databases, but aren’t that willing to share it as it’s part of their competitive advantage. The JavaME 3.0 SDK has a database included, but it’s not detailed enough and doesn’t get updated very often. J2MEPolish have an open source device database, but again it’s not updated that frequently and it also contains mistakes. WURFL and dotMobi have more up-to-date device databases, but they’re focussed on mobile web and don’t have the information required by Java developers. And developers need to be able to slice and dice the data to pick out appropriate pieces. Anyone for putting it all into a DabbleDB database?

New attack on fragmentation

One of the reasons that we need a comprehensive device database is that manufacturers implement their mobile Java VMs in slightly different ways. The existing official tests that mean they can put the Java name on their product seem pretty low-level and certainly don’t cover a lot of the user interface behaviour. Several manufacturers also seem to have a lower level of quality control for their Java implementations and bugs get through to devices with alarming regularity.

Orange, Sony Ericsson, Sun and Vodafone have got together to create a new set of tests, this time created by ordinary developers rather than JCP members. The aim of JATAF (you really don’t want to know what that acronym stands for) is to collect anti-fragmentation tests and release them as suite that can be run by manufacturers, operators and developers. I’m not sure whether anybody will be enforcing devices to pass the JATAF suite, but the participation of Orange and Vodafone is a good start.

Upcoming events

Ecomo September 11th & 12th — there will be netbooks as prizes
OverTheAir September 25th & 26th — still looking for more sponsors

EyeTV Export with HandBrake script

2009-07-29T11:39:00.001+01:00

EyeTV by Elgato is an excellent piece of software that turns a Mac into a Personal Video Recorder. You can record programs using a tuner and play them back at any time. We have an iMac stuck to the wall in our living room that acts as our TV and media player. Even the babysitter can use the PVR interface and we get to use full apps like iPhoto and Spotify on our TV.

EyeTV records video using the format that it’s sent over the air. This is currently MPEG-2 for Freeview programs, which is decent quality but reasonably large files. I’d like to be able to archive my recordings using a better encoding such as H.264. However, EyeTV’s (and Apple’s) built-in options for exporting video are pretty poor. They generally take a long time to create poor quality video at an unimpressive compression ratio.

HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder. It can transcode between many video formats and has built-in presets for compressing different kinds of video. It’s great at taking EyeTV recordings and transcoding them into space-efficient, high quality H.264 MKV or MP4 files.

Fitting the two together is a bit of a pain. EyeTV has Applescript support but HandBrake doesn’t. Instead HandBrake has a command-line version that is available for separate download (see the downloads for Command Line Interface).

I wanted to be able to choose a suitable HandBrake export preset (some of my recordings are cartoons, some are movies) and a destination folder and export several recordings at once. Since transcoding video is a CPU hog, I also wanted to use the HandBrake encoding queue, but this isn’t available in the command-line version.

Various people have written scripts to take EyeTV recordings and encode them using HandBrake, but they weren’t quite what I wanted. Most of them were intended to import the results into iTunes so that files are available to AppleTV. I did’t need this — I just want smaller files. And none of them had an encoding queue — they all ran in the foreground.

So I wrestled with Applescript (it felt like banging my head against a brick wall several times), honed my shell script skills and built the EyeTV Export with HandBrake script. The script can be added to the EyeTV scripts menu, so that you can select multiple recordings in EyeTV and export them directly. The script will prompt you for a HandBrake encoding preset and an output directory and will pass of the encodes to a background shell script that runs one encode at a time. If you have Growl (also highly recommended), the script will announce completed encoding processes in a friendly manner (otherwise it will pop up a dialog).

I hope you find it useful. Please add comments below!

Instructions

Download the script (or get the source from GitHub)
Put it in /Library/Application Support/EyeTV/Scripts and restart EyeTV (see EyeTV Applescript instructions for details)
Download the HandBrake Command Line Interface (HandBrakeCLI) and move it somewhere appropriate. I use /usr/local/bin/, but the script will ask you to find it if it’s not there
Select one or more recordings and choose “Export with HandBrake” from the Scripts menu (just between Window and Help)

MomoLondon: Mobile Entertainment Applications

2009-07-21T08:15:00.001+01:00

A fairly slow evening, but some nice gems tucked away. Lots of interesting stats from Flirtomatic (and a few interesting ones from GetJar). Interesting to hear that Vodafone widgets will be marketed as apps to customers (but widgets to developers).

Anyway on with the notes…

Adverts for upcoming events

EcoMo — code camp

http://ecomo09.eventbrite.com/
September 11-12th
Mobile Applications for sustainability

Over The Air

http://overtheair.org
September 25-26th at Imperial College

GetJar - some stats on downloads

Patrick Mork

aim to make it seamless for downloads for 1500 handsets
Half a billion downloads reached last month
- but the Apple app store has been going for a much shorter time and reached 1.5bn just recently…
75% of downloaders are under 25
- breakdown something like:
- <10 12-13%
- 11-17 23%
- 18-24 28%
- 25-34 15-18%
70-80% male
all downloads on getjar are free
- developers monetize content themselves
no cost to upload content
GetJar make money by paid placement:
- 20-25% of developers bid for placement on their catalogue
GetJar’s experience is that you must make the initial experience free to the user
- the general public are not used to downloading apps yet so we need to provide free tasters with no bill shock
Over 50% of users are downloading content at least once a week
Top 10 downloaded apps in UK last month:
1. Ebuddy
2. Nimbuzz
3. Google Maps
4. Opera Mini
5. Change Ringtone
6. Magic Bluehack
7. TV To Go
8. GetJar (web site shortcut)
9. Qeep
10. Facebook (web site shortcut)
which platforms?
- 70% of getjar downloads is JavaME
- mobile web growing fast!
“applications is not about smartphones — it’s about everyone”
#1 handset in Indian market: Nokia 6600
games are growing and probably will grow faster when billing is easier
what are people searching for?
- often specific programs (e.g. ebuddy, mig33)
over 30% of new people from word of mouth
in Egypt see a lot of download for religious apps (e.g. prayer times)

Panel

Chair: David Murphy from Mobile Marketing Magazine
Audience:
- few app developers
- similar operators
- slightly more agencies
- one client side developer
Patrick Mork: getjar
- used to be at Glu and iPlay
Andreas Constantinou: Vision Mobile (Analyst)
Joachim Hoffman: Fjord (Services Agency)
Mark Curtis: Flirtomatic
Dan Appelquist: Vodafone Group R&D

How do you go about making money from mobile apps?

PM: see various business models: adfunded, freemium, virtual currency
AC: sharing revenue (e.g. Nokia Ovi sharing with operators)
- sharing cost using open source (e.g. Symbian)
- now talking of wallet sharing
JH: funded (e.g. BBC iPlayer); ad-funded (and you have to make your service sticky)
MC: 160m WAP pages in UK in May
- every now and then they want to buy things
- “every time we’ve given away flirt points we see an upsurge in spending a few days later”
- users sent each other 5,000 ice cubes during the heatwave (at about 50p each)
- “cost of materials was very high” :-)
- most nights top spenders will be spending £20-30ea. to keep themselves at the top of the ratings!!
- when we increase inventory, they respond within three or four hours
- also do alerts (e.g. when people log in)
DA: have been spearheading mobile widgets over past year
- cross-platform, cross-operator
- Voda will introduce an app store later this year with a “competitive” revenue split
- are also launching in-app or in-widget billing events
- when Voda launch widgets, it will be called Apps
- Flight Control — see high scores of people playing around you (and on your twitter network)

Why does a developer develop for Vodafone and not for Nokia or SonyEricsson?

DA: widgets mean you can make one thing for everybody
- however, there is fragmentation for the operator APIs
- widget specification is bedding down — next step is to get operators
- setting up device APIs working group (Nokia, Mozilla, Google)
- already have geolocation API standard launched in iPhone 3.0, Firefox 3, Opera 9(?)

Flirtomatic stats in May

top handset was Nokia N95 and only 6%
only 4 or 5 other handsets above 1%
Vodafone is well over a quarter of our users in the UK

Is the future apps or web-based?

PM: a mix
- a lot of criticism a few months ago when Yahoo dropped apps apart from iPhone & BlackBerry
- but GetJar Yahoo shortcut was doing 40-50K downloads a week, so app would have to be very good to be worth more than that
JH: SportsTracker vs. Flirtomatic: SportsTracker needs hardware integration (bluetooth, etc)
MC: had an appalling experience making a Flirtomatic app a few years ago with Jo Rabin
- tried to make the service work in the tube offline
- speed of development on web is much faster
- games development are sold shrink-wrapped like a film — and are paid as such
- web-based dev often gets paid by usage, or with ongoing revenue so need to be able to change things quickly

Since most widgets are free, does calling them widgets endanger the market?

DA: you’ll be able to sell widgets through Ovi, Voda & others
PM: Loopt — mapping service to share locations with your friends
- make money by selling the service & helping operators sell data bundles

Flirtomatic: do you see a time when auction stuff will rival fixed price

25% revenue is advertising
75% is premium services
about half of premium service income is auction-based

Where do you think mobile entertainment is going? What type of apps?

DA: Casual gaming really taking off
- Augmented reality making a lot of noise at the moment, but really in its infancy still. Will play out over a couple of years.
- More interesting when put it together with advanced displays — in your glasses, or in your environment
- “We could either end up in a very dystopian world or we could end up in a utopian place where the user in control and their privacy is paramount…”
AC: augmented reality become possible due to simple sensor: compass
- temp sensor could pick up if your phone is in your pocket
- sound sensor could tell if you were at work or at home
PM: frustrated that can’t get a basic cell phone reception on a train back from Northern England
- apps must be useful for consumers
MC: sneaky suspicion that NFC will be huge
- Oyster went from nothing to mass market in 3 years (admittedly only in London)
- “When TfL get a 95% revenue share, the rest of us won’t be stuck in a corner called special needs”
JH: error handling has to be good

Are fragmenting app stores making getting money for development harder?

J2ME development a lot better than it used to be
PayForIt at least enables off-portal payment
3 UK can now go off deck

What are the next moves aside from technology?

PM: Coming along a huge way since a year and a half ago, people now know about downloading apps
- Apple started actually advertising download apps
DA: Social apps will drive it e.g. Facebook
- Flight Control local high scores shows how sensors enable cool features that drive user engagement
AC: sensors will change how we communicate

Taking a day a week for yourself

2009-07-02T09:07:00.002+01:00

More and more people I speak to are coming up with the same idea — that working one day a week for yourself gives you a better balance and loads more creativity and fulfilment. I ran a session at BarCampLondon6 on exactly this topic and it's good to hear more people starting to make similar changes to their lifestyle.

Here's Matt Webb's take:

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.

Because when you contribute, when you participatein culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

I moved from taking one day off every other week to one day off every week at the beginning of June and even that has made a big difference. My personal project has been learning to build apps for the iPhone -- starting with the Stanford iPhone Application Programming course and Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.

Through evenings and snatched half hours on the train, I've got through most of the course and am starting to explore other areas, such as adding hamcrest and OCMock to the built-in OCUnit iPhone unit tests. I still plan to build and release my own apps as I get more of an understanding of what's possible.

So Matt, I've taken up your challenge before you even issued it and I look forward to others doing the same!

MomoLondon: Demo Night

2009-06-16T22:24:00.001+01:00

A brilliant evening in a beautiful venue, with a fantastic view to round off the evening. Demo nights are one of the things that makes Mobile Monday great. 14 different presentations, most of which involving hands-on demonstrations and all for real, shipping, mobile software with plenty of ideas to inspire. Sure, some of the apps weren’t exactly new (ReVoice presented way back in 2007) and not all were particularly exciting, but with so many people presenting their ideas, you’re sure to pick up some valuable nuggets.

Here’s the presentations, with the tidbits that caught my attention:

Do Tank Studios: Photo Fit iPhone app

Adam Hoyle

Take a photo of several people and mix them up like a game of consequences: a forehead from Fred, the eyes of Isabelle, the nose of Norbert, the mouth of Millie and the chin of Charles. The app lets you take photos or source them from your photo album, and line them up using basic eye and mouth alignment. Shake to mix up further, or slide to choose your mix. Simple and fun.

Adam runs a design agency and this app is a hobby app to show that they can produce iPhone apps. They’ve mostly been focussing on a fashion app, which is currently waiting for app store approval. They were going to make Photo Fit free, but there was already an app on the store that did something similar for £1.20, so they put it in the store for the next price point down. Apparently they’ve made enough to have a few beers.

Total Hotspots

Alex Housley @ahousley

Global Wirefree Community — help people find the best WiFi connectivity
partnered with Rummble in October 2008
iPhone app rummbles to twitter and Total Hotspots website (using Yahoo GeoPlanet to show surroundings and identify location name)
had a few thousand downloads from iPhone store at £3 each
also working with Microsoft
Alex worked at multimap for a while while they were being taken over by Microsoft
Total Hotspots’ database includes data direct from service providers
cf. WeFi: client connection software, that has background app that does WiFi collection as you walk down the street — picks up personal and corporate wifi (mostly secured)

Audioboo

Mark Rock

“as used by Stephen Fry…”

geolocation embedded in the meta-data of the audio
will be releasing API in about 3 weeks
business plan:
- there’ll always a free version
- plus version: £2.95 a month
  - longer recording time
  - queuing recording
- pro version: for companies
  - just signed first customer: British Library
community auditing of inappropriate content
- had to put this in place before the app was accepted in the iPhone store

Artilium

Dave Hodder

software for mobile network operators
previously solely in Belgium
acquired location company that uses app on SIM or device to identify accurate location using nearby cell strengths as well as current cell tower location (TILS)
in London tends to be sub 100 metres accuracy
- lower resolution outside built-up areas
work with mobile operators — have their mast data
- also drive around the area
- improve with usage too
gets better accuracy than Google Maps for Mobile (using cell ID only)
end customer is mobile operators
will probably implement GSM ONE API when it gets more developed (i.e. has more event-based APIs)

Proxama

James Norris

payWave credit cards on an NFC phone
working with MasterCard
can change PIN over the net (combined with the secure element)
they use J2MEPolish for their JavaME apps
integrates with secure element in SIM
person to person payment is not supported with existing terminals & framework
upcoming NFC devices:
- Nokia 6216 — has secure element on SIM
- Samsung & LG also coming out this year (also USIM-based)

OOKL

Dan Phillips

mobile learning service
clients are schools & cultural venues
- have 25 venues signed up
provide hardware and software
- old Nokia phones that you can buy for £50
every object in the physical environment is labelled with a shortcode (two-letter code)
type it in on the phone to see and hear content
can write why collecting it
find out who else collected it
take photos or record audio to annotate it
all info collected is uploaded to a shared space to consider later

Synchro Arts’ ReVoice Karaoke

Jeff Bloom

As mentioned above, these guys have been around for several years now selling essentially the same thing, but the demo always gets a laugh… Jeff sings horrendously out of tune and badly timed into the ReVoice system (here an iPhone app), then uploads his “masterpiece” and has it retuned by the ReVoice server. The result is perfectly in tune and in time and still recognisably Jeff.

now have an iPhone app
1. record yourself
2. gives scores for accuracy
3. uploads, corrects, downloads to iPhone and shares online
can try out on http://singtone.com
aim is to send it to someone else as your ringtone
- when you call, they hear your voice
- At the moment, this doesn’t work with the iPhone, as you currently have to pay Apple to make a ringtone (unless you hack something…)

Masabi Rail Ticketing

Ben Whitaker (getting married this weekend— congratulations!)

Ben Smith (of the Really Mobile Project) recorded video presentation; may also be on Slideshare (old version)

Working with ATOS Origin (heathrow express & national express)
only 12% of rail tickets sold on the internet — most bought at station
masabi’s implementation has no sign up — no usernames or passwords
mostly offline…
for consumers: if it feels slick and looks slick, people will use it
Chiltern trial: compelling reason (get out of queue) got people who had never downloaded an app before to use mobile ticketing
- advertise at the pain point — “while you’re queuing, try this”
Q: How have TfL responded? A: They’ve already put their investment into NFC
Big rail & bus operators like the soft roll-out of mobile barcodes rather than ITSO…
- “there’s space for both”
IATA have legislated that all major airports must implement barcode tickets by May next year
In Germany, if you turn up with a mobile ticket and your battery runs out, you’re fined!

Corebridge with Wings

Simon Taylor

VPN via small app on phone
- iPhone, Blackberry, WinMo & Symbian
If phone rings, CRM app launches on laptop
Similarly, click a phone number on screen and phone makes call straight away
App logs phone calls made from mobile back onto corporate server
Can send SMS messages from Lotus Notes & Outlook, but this system uses your actual mobile phone to send — so responses come to you, not the SMS gateway
Also provides enterprise-wide voice mail

spoonfed

Alex Will

21st Century version of Timeout
high quality local event content
30,000 events per month
iPhone app — Event Radar
LBS mobile Java app launching in Q3 2009
- complete with maps…
- looking at options for map source
have small editorial team of 5 editors to cover the whole of London
has some social features — meet up with your friends, etc.
“user generated content is great for cats on skateboards”

Samsung

Samsung Mobile Innovator
- includes lab.dev testing (using Digia remote devices), market.dev pitching
- core partners are invite only but still free
Staines office focusses on supporting Symbian
- ramping up skills to support Symbian Foundation
Samsung IQ widget competition:
- opens on 24th June
- £15,000 top prize, 2nd & 3rd prizes too
- download the i8910 HD DevPack
- submit entry at http://www.samsungiq.com
- widget marketplace (More Widgets) is free to user

Vopium

Tanvin Sharif http://vopium.com/

based in Denmark
free calls on your mobile via VoIP, or else local call then VoIP then local call
free to download app — runs in the background transparently
first 100 SMS are free then charged after that
available from all channels
can do free mobile termination for Skype!
merge address books and identify with phone number
cf. Fring, Nimbuzz — they’re aggregators and run within a separate app
- main competitor is TruPhone — seamless integration into phonebook
tells you if totally wifi or involves a local call
- doesn’t tell you if one or two local call
remote leg: Vopium pay 1p, charge 2p

peepr.tv

Mun Kong, d2see http://peepr.tv

stream live from any webcam — pick up on http://peepr.mobi
can send an SMS when you detect motion
launches native media player on phone
showcase of technologies
cf. Qik: phone to PC, this is PC to phone, with no app needed on phone
can make feeds private, but not password protected

0870.me

mobile access to alternative to 0870 numbers
iPhone app got rejected — “circumventing carrier policies”
Android app intercepts standard dialler
with 5 minutes call length, estimated savings of £54K
0870.me — open API for anyone to access, or even download the whole database
API integrates with 0800buster.co.uk

OverTheAir — September 25/26th

Keep the date free!

Thanks to the organisers!

Kizoom team at Yahoo! Open Hack London 2009

2009-05-20T14:21:00.001+01:00

For the first time, I managed to convince some other Kizoom developers to come along to a weekend developer event. Dan, Matthew, Neo and Joyce joined me for Yahoo!’s Open Hack London 2009, and Neo’s friend San brought a much welcomed Lego Mindstorms set to the party.

And it was a pretty good party (though strictly a geeky one), complete with beer, music, snacks, giant Jenga and scalextric. There was even a fantastic live band (this being a geek party, the band consisted of guitar and Nintendo Gameboy…) and an iPhone orchestra:

But the most fun was the hacking. There were some absolutely stunning hacks produced over the weekend — better than both Hackday 2007 and Over The Air — and the Kizoom team had a great time playing with sticking things together for the hell of it. Mindstorms especially is great for hacks — you can run a Java VM on the programmable brick (see http://www.lejos,org) and then send it Java applets over Bluetooth. You then start attaching motors, microphones, light and distance sensors and building up the model with Lego pieces. Making silly things is fun and easy, and if you want to get serious you can even build a Rubik’s cube solver! We built a robot finger that pressed a button on a keyboard when it hears a loud noise (like playing a bongo drum!).

Since there were six of us, we pulled in other bits of hardware to play with as well — a Wiimote strapped to a scooter (ridden by Dan) sending its motion via Open Sound Control and Processing to a MacBook; and a JavaME app on a cameraphone with some image recognition to identify the omnipresent Hackday beanbags. Dan and Matthew built the hub of all these hacklets — a browser driven by Selenium, in turn driven by simple web services.

Aside from having a great time, both learning and building, we were very pleased to win the prize for “Most Awesome Hack”. I’d really like to include a video of our presentation, but that’s not available yet. In the meantime, here’s a few pictures of the various components:

The hacking itself was preceded by a morning of seminars on various Yahoo! and other APIs. I’ve included my notes below on the ones I attended in case anyone finds them useful.

GeoPlanet

Martin Barnes — Data Manager, Yahoo! Geo Technologies, UK (based in Shaftesbury Avenue)

barnes@yahoo-inc.com

Slides available

Most of the named places on Earth + relationships that tie them together
- Not down to street level — just towns, villages & suburbs
Not a geocoder — provides you with some idea of the centroid of the object of interest
Official databases such as USPS also have weird and wacky data that doesn’t really exist in the real world — database
Integrates with Flickr & Fireagle so can expand on WOEIDs from these
Telephone area codes also included — don’t have exact boundaries, but can find out which cities are involved
WOEIDs sometimes get deprecated, but the API still responds to them — it just forwards you to the new authoritative WOEID
Each API key is limited to 50K queries a day
Have neighbour relationships for cities and towns
- mainly for US, where they just spread one into the other
- but also useful for other places
Can return GeoJSON: http://geojson.org/
GeoPlanet Forum constantly monitored
UK postcodes data is currently about 3 years out of date since Yahoo! are refusing to pay license…

Future plans

Plan to have data in some sort of escrow
- depends on licensing deals with Navteq etc
Plan to integrate Geonames data
- Original WhereHaus was based on Geonames but branched from it to get other sources
Plan to have user-based input, like Geonames

RDFa

Mark Birbeck mark.birbeck@webBackplane.com

Allows RDF to be embedded in web pages using attributes
Can attach license information to an individual image:
- <img src="blah.jpg" rel="license" resource="http://creativecommons.org/license..."/>
No need for separate feeds
Helps for federated sites — just add markup to output from different systems
- Can then pull together disparate outputs
Have built extensions to Drupal to add RDFa to contact details, etc.
See also OpenCalais http://www.opencalais.com/about by ThomsonReuters
- identifies entities, facts and events in unstructured text, XML & HTML
See samples at http://code.google.com/p/ubiquity-rdfa/source/browse/#svn/trunk/_samples

Search Monkey

Neil Crosby — European Frontend Architect for Search at Yahoo

Slides available

extensions to Yahoo’s search engine: extend search results — making it easier for the user
users choose to install additional search monkeys from http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/
also supports XSLT that can transform whatever you want from the source page
- e.g. if you have tables, you can pull them out as tuples
not done a huge amount of publicity to users about specific monkeys, but have turned on a bunch of monkeys automatically for all users
can also develop a monkey for your own site — can add to a header (see documentation somewhere)
- in future may want to turn that on automatically

Blueprint

Ricardo Varela — Mobile Integration Engineering Lead, Yahoo ricardov@yahoo-inc.com

Blog: http://phobeo.com/

Presentation and handout available online.

I first learnt about Blueprint at Future of Mobile 2008 back in November last year, and Ricardo’s presentation was similar then. He understands the problems that are faced in mobile development, and Blueprint, like Luca Passani’s WURFL-based WALL, seems like a reasonable way to go forwards. However, it’s all down to the implementation and the edge cases and that’s a lot of hard work.

Quite a few people used Blueprint in their hacks, but didn’t actually demo on mobile phones (other than iPhones…). Dale Lane actually tried to make it work on Windows Mobile & Android G1 and had a horrible experience. When he visited his Blueprint site from his Windows Mobile browser, he actually got a message telling him to download Opera instead! That kind of ruins the point of a cross-browser system…

Yahoo!’s recent announcement that they’re killing all non-iPhone mobile native app development may point to Blueprint for mobile web getting stronger within Yahoo! But the promised native clients for BlackBerry and J2ME may now be dead in the water.

Anyway, here’s my notes from the session at Hackday:

Now gone to v1.1
Yahoo Mobile used to be text only, now graphics and styles etc.
- can’t get away with things looking black and white any more…
- cf. http://m.yahoo.com with http://new.m.yahoo.com (new one works well on N95)
some Nokia browsers won’t show tables unless you specify a doctype
video encoding for 40+ different mobile formats
- currently only for videos hosted within yahoo.com
slideshare did mobile site with blueprint — created in 24hrs
similarly, http://m.fynbus.info/ — mobile version of buses in Fyn, DK
1 out of 3 iPhone users has Facebook
Android and iPhone native wrappers still in development
- were in development in November last year at Future of Mobile, so not that much progress…
this first release doesn’t have style customization
- thinking about it — but can’t just support CSS, will have to have some subset
Some Blackberries are not standards-compliant for cookies
- use commas not semicolons
- if not in Blueprint now, can be added

Scenery on the way to Wigan

2009-04-21T10:00:00.002+01:00

Just outside Stafford -- beautiful lake viewed from the train. I was too slow to catch the pair of herons.

BarCampLondon6: Get Google's 20% Time for Yourself

2009-04-10T16:55:00.000+01:00

Flexible working has recently come under the spotlight — due to the change in UK law from the beginning of April, all parents with children under 17 are now able to request flexible working from their employers. Employers are only allowed to reject demands if there are “good business reasons for doing so”.

Parents often want to take time off to be with their children and to provide childcare during school holidays, but time off work is not just for looking after kids. Sometimes you might want to change the balance of your life and invest in your own ideas rather than those of a company.

This BarCampLondon session was a discussion on how you could take time for yourself, and what you would do with it once you’ve got it.

Introductions

Ben — a computer science student on his year out working for an ISP 2 days a week with flexible hours
Shadi — a “person of leisure”, problem solving for friends and family
Dale — working full time on flexible hours for a large IT company
- shifted hours to be primary caregiver when first child was born, now wondering how to adjust hours to deal with second child
Adam — took off half a day a week when son was born; that time now used for himself since son is at school; recently thinking of moving to a full day off each week
Melanie — working full time but dreams of finding her own project; hasn’t found a solution yet
- disappointed with work leaking in to personal time — e.g. people working on a Sunday to be ready for Monday morning
Anna — likes travelling; would like to have some work of her own she can take with her while she’s finding her feet in another country
Sarah — works full time but is setting up another company based in India in her spare time

Sarah’s experience

Sarah used to work for company similar to the one she has created. It was taken over a while ago, so she decided to set up something similar but better. She had a vague acquaintance who set up the contacts in India where development costs are very low (£300 per month!). At the moment she’s working on the English translation of the work done in India in her evenings, whilst working full time at her existing job during the day. This results in her working more hours than she would normally, but she has something of her own that she’s building up.

Ben’s experience

Ben is currently a student, trying to avoid going straight into full-time work. Instead, he’s working part time to his schedule. He has quit twice from his current employer as he didn’t want to work long hours. He wants to be able to work on his own projects.

Is working part-time really less hours?

Adam takes a day off every other week and gets to take that day completely for himself. However, Shadi used to work three days a week, but found that she was working until midnight to complete her tasks — her job was tech support so she had to get the customer back online. She also occasionally received calls on her days off if she was the last person to deal with a particular situation, asking her to deal with it. Since she had commitments to be in on certain days, she found she couldn’t alter her hours to compensate for working on her days off.

Ben pointed out that Carsonified have a company-wide policy to work a four day week — the whole office is closed on Fridays.

There’s also more choice than just full time or part time: some of Dale’s colleagues work compressed hours — working more hours a day, but four days a week. They still get paid full time. Others work longer hours during term time but have school holidays off so they can do childcare. See http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029491 for more information.

Sharing responsibility

As Shadi’s experience shows, you do need a job that can be put to one side — or a company environment that promotes sharing responsibility. Agile processes such as Extreme Programming make this a central part of the culture, not just to enable people going away but to encourage greater flexibility in the whole team. Hospitals also deal with sharing responsibilities regularly, with staff coming on and off shift but providing continuous cover.

Anna wondered whether the people sharing roles needed a certain level of communication skills in order to make this working style possible. Adam agreed: his company hire developers partly according to their ability to communicate in a paired programming exercise — the ability to clearly discuss what they’re working on is at least as important as being able to solve the programming exercise.

This approach clashes with a top-down, command and control culture: employees have to be able to trust their peers and communicate without going up and down the hierarchy. You can’t share a job with someone who you fear might take on your role and replace you when you’re not around.

When you have time to yourself, what do you do with it?

Setting up a new business is risky — so it’s good to balance it with the security of an existing job. Start-ups costs for online businesses are coming down — you can rent your servers in the cloud and only pay for as much CPU and bandwidth as you use.

There are also sites such as One Click Orgs which will enable you to set up a legal entity very quickly for little cost.

Sarah’s approach shows the value of capitalising on your experience — make sure that you’ve made the contacts and make sure that you build on them.

Involving other people

If you need to involve other people in your new venture, you have to balance their commitment with their involvement: if they’re doing you a favour for little money, they won’t necessarily work to your timescales.

Local currency systems like LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) can provide a community of people willing to help each other. The local currency is based on trust and disclosure, with everyone able to see everyone else’s trading history at all times. Members will hold to their commitments or risk other members never doing business with them (a bit like eBay reputations). Note that LETS are not a way of avoiding tax — if you’re operating a business that sells in LETS currency, you’re still eligible for paying tax on the income.

One of the original benefits of LETS schemes was the lack of interest on loans — you can easily have a negative balance and just agree to contribute more in the future. Given that bank interest rates are currently close to 0% anyway, this may not be such an incentive at the moment…

Anna pointed out that one of the most useful people to involve in setting up something new is a mentor — someone to get you moving and be there to provide advice on basic things like planning.

BarCampLondon6: The Guardian Open Platform

2009-04-02T09:33:00.000+01:00

Simon Willison @simonw (at Guardian since October last year)

Context — stuff available before the Guardian Open Platform

http://guardian.co.uk is built and runs on a completely custom CMS called R2. This was built recently as an 18 month agile project supported by ThoughtWorks. It’s written in Java, using Spring to hold things together.

Everything on the Guardian site is based on tags (you can see the tags as headings in the right had column). These tags are a controlled vocabulary, created and maintained under editorial control.

Every page that is not an article is almost completely controlled by tags. You can visit a tag home page (like http://guardian.co.uk/technology) and by default it will show a bunch of articles appropriate for that tag. Alternatively, editors can take control of a tag page to highlight articles etc.

The system also supports “tag combiner pages” — pages showing articles from multiple tags, like http://guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change. These are generated in exactly the same way as the single tag pages but will have fewer articles due to the extra filtering.

In addition, any tag page can generate its own RSS feed — just add /rss to the end of the URL. RSS feeds are full fat, sometimes with ads, but their Ts & Cs are currently for personal use only.

What is the Open Platform?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

The new Open Platform allows for commercial use of the Guardian content. The Guardian have made everything available to which they have full rights (so no third party feeds and no content with restricted rights from freelancers). This includes full articles, audio and video (the audio and video is not served directly through the API but it provides enough metadata to link to it). There are currently around 700,000 articles stretching back at least a decade and sometimes longer.

The commercial terms seem reasonable and practical: you can build an interface that links to content on the Guardian web site for free, but it you want to publish the content on your own site then you’ll have to display Guardian adverts alongside it. This works for the Guardian too — they already get orders of magnitude more readers on their web site than their print circulation, and anything that increases their online advertising placement is therefore a good thing.

They have also built an API explorer (with a UI modelled on Firebug) that allows you to play with the data and discover the requests you’d like to make. All the data is URL based, with each article having a web URL (its location on the Guardian web site), a data URL (its location in the Open Platform API) and multiple tag URLs. The other entry point is the search URL, where you can search by text, tags and various dates.

Data is returned by default in a structured XML document, but you can switch this to JSON using the explorer UI. There’s also an ATOM feed available by appending &format=atom to the URL — this data is the least rich at the moment, but easier to feed into other services like Yahoo Pipes.

The explorer makes it easy to browse the content — following links between articles and filtering any searches by picking out tags. Each search returns not just articles with full metadata, but also a section detailing the tags of all the articles in the search. In the tag data you get the number of articles in the search with each tag — so it’s easy to see how further filtering will affect your search results.

At the moment, the results only list topic tags, but there are also contributor tags and other kinds — all editorially chosen, and selected as interesting topics. For example, not every MP has their own tag, just those that show up in the news. The other kinds of tags will be added to the API shortly. These tags strike me as one of the most useful areas of the API — essentially the Guardian have built up an ontology of topics and they’re making it available for free. As far as I understand, if you use the tags but not the content (or at least link to any content on the Guardian website) then you don’t even need to put Guardian adverts on your site (this may be totally wrong — I haven’t read the Ts & Cs in full yet).

The Open Platform site has some examples on it already — the one that Simon Willison highlighted was a Stamen project: http://guardian.apimaps.org allows you to annotate Guardian articles with geo data (which isn’t built in by the Guardian yet) — then view the results on a map.

The Data Store

http://guardian.co.uk/data-store

As well as the content of the articles themselves, the Guardian have opened up some of the data that they use to prepare them. They have a team dedicated to collecting and updating various statistics from bird populations to government budgets and everything in between. The team is putting this data online and available as Google Spreadsheets — currently there are over 100 (up from 86 at launch).

Some of this data is the result of weeks of effort from the Guardian team — the sheet of government data by department was so impressive that the Cabinet Office called and said they’d like a copy as they couldn’t get the data themselves! All the data is vetted and has been published in the newpaper, so you can be reasonably confident of its accuracy.

New data is regularly published on the Data Store blog and the Guardian is trying to build up a community of data wonks around it. Already some people are getting involved, taking the data and doing new things with it — see various examples at http://ouseful.info such as pulling in the MP expenses spreadsheet into IBM’s Many Eyes visualisation system. Previously published data is also being regularly updated by the Guardian team — Simon Rogers has pledged to keep updating various of the data sets he has created.

BarCampLondon6: Self Documenting Web APIs (WSGIWAPI)

2009-03-31T09:29:00.001+01:00

Richard Boulton @rboulton http://lemurconsulting.com/

Richard develops Xapian while working for Lemur Consulting.

Recently he was working on a project involving several web APIs interfacing with each other and he wanted to have a good way of seeing what each API was doing. One way would be to ask all the developers to create and maintain documentation, but with rapid development, this would quickly get out of date.

Richard started from the idea of having comments by the code (like Javadoc or rdoc) but has taken it further to make the documentation machine readable. In the case of web APIs, this gives the benefit of being able to create live documentation — some simple comments together with a form that allows you to try out the API directly.

At the moment, the framework he has made (WSGIWAPI) is not quite complete (he put it together on train journeys to and from work…) but it is already being used in the Flax project — an indexing and search server based on Xapian.

WSGIWAPI is works in python and uses python decorators (similar to Java annotations) to produce a WSGI object with documentation included. A WSGI object is a python web service plugin (see http://wsgi.org/wsgi/Learn_WSGI for details) that can be added directly to a web server — so by adding documentation to each method and a couple of lines of plumbing to a class, you can generate full web services complete with documentation and examples.

Since the documentation is machine readable, it would also be possible to generate a Javascript client library or a WSDL specification automatically from the code.

Nice idea — though I think it would get further traction if the idea was rolled into an existing framework rather than being on its own. There’s nothing stopping that happening — the WSGIWAPI code is freely available from http://wsgiwapi.tartarus.org (code on Google code at http://code.google.com/p/wsgiwapi/).