Innovation/Strategy

A new mobile site creator

Posted on by charlie

Got a note from David Berube about his new MoFuse. He’s based in Rhode Island, of all places, not known to be a hot-bed of mobile dev work. That it’s Northeast, and New england to boot, is good enough for me.

A quick scan of the marketing page suggests something quite cool. And his comment below suggests a pent up demand for both creating sites and using them (it’s a theme that’s been at the front of my mind this past few weeks).

I’ll give it a look see over the weekend. I am sure another David I know will give it a good detailed look and review.

Link: David Berube Blog:

MoFuse has been open to the public for 20 days now. We’re currently serving up more than 60,000 mobile pageviews a week and we’re on our way towards 3,000 registered users.

Heh, MoFuse stands for Mobile Fusion. Isn’t that my line: ‘The fusion of Mobile and Web’?

Uncategorized

links for 2007-11-22

Posted on by charlie
Uncategorized

links for 2007-11-18

Posted on by charlie
The Narrative

Ty Burr says ‘Blade Runner’ is better than ever, in The Boston Globe

Posted on by charlie

So far, Ty Burr has never disappointed me. What he likes, I do. What he doesn’t, same here.

Now he mentions the latest Blade Runner release (see link below). He likes it, so I’m gonna check it out.

Blade Runner is one of my all time favourites. Interestingly, in the past month, I’ve ‘discovered’ Philip K Dick, after having watch so many films based on his stories – Blade Runner, Total Recall, Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Minority Report, Next, and Through a Scanner Darkly.

After watching Next, I vowed to find any any any Dick book and picked up a collection from a used bookstore in Melbourne.

Now, I so love Philip K Dick. Why did it take me so long to _read_ his amazing work. He’s got an edge, the heros invariably lose when they win, it’s not la-di-da clever sci-fi, but real people in real dilemmas with tech to add a twist that propels the story.

He makes Herbert and Asimov and Heinlein look like pansies (heh, how many movies do those guys have?*).

Link: ‘Blade Runner’ is better than ever – The Boston Globe:

Still, it’s nice to see Ford looking so young again and LA so old; the clockwork-toy sequences shot in the city’s Bradbury Building, with Daryl Hannah’s Pris cartwheeling through the wreckage like a homicidal wind-up doll; Rutger Hauer’s gleaming, tragic Roy Batty, an automaton so much better than the humans he serves – these are all welcome attendees at a 25th reunion. “Blade Runner” has become a chilly eulogy for a future that hasn’t quite happened.

*I mention these three because the forward in my book mentions how few these guys made (3 among them).

Innovation/Strategy

TinyURL should be mobile-savvy

Posted on by charlie

As far as I can tell, TinyURL is not mobile savvy.

I get a ton of TinyURLs now via Twitter over SMS and click them most of the time. I am fortunate to have a mobile browser that can handle most things. But, what if TinyURL recognized a phone and sent the browser to a mobile-formatted page, maybe passed through Mowser?

Russ, if you read this: get on the line with the TinyURL guys and inject some mobile-savviness into them!

Science/Strategy/The Narrative

Do community tools mix with scientific papers?

Posted on by charlie

I’ve been doing some reading on Open Access Publishing, providing free public access to scientific papers. The two publishers I know the best are Public Library of Science and BioMed Central.

These two publishers are trying hard to change the current publishing model in science, where a journal acts as gatekeeper, selecting the best articles, and then charging readers to subscribe to the journals. Indeed, not only are the subscription prices astronomical sometimes, but authors pay the publisher to publish their paper.

PLoS and BMC therefore, have many reasons to turn this model on its head (and chuck it out the door). But, in the end, to me, they seem like the same publishers they are trying to change – they still do peer-review (gate keeping?) and publish article for reading only.

Of course, being a service designer in this day and age, I wonder how one could take these publishers even further, such as how to bring in the readers to participate via the current common community tools (without digressing on the existence of community), or how to bring in some intelligence (folks or robots) to add value to the large mass of info so that, as a total, the publication can drive more discoveries and insights.

PLoS has done something interesting, creating Journal Clubs online. Journal clubs, a staple in universities, are regular meetings to discuss a research paper of interest (like a book club, except more focused and more geeky). PLoS’s take on it is interesting (see below) – if the discussion around a paper is captured over time, one could chart the evolution of the thinking over time.

Alas, I would not ask someone to read _all_ the comments. To me, this suggests that in this area, the post-comment model might be insufficient.

Link: Journal Clubs – think of the future! | Public Library of Science:

There it is: all laid out – the complete history of molecular biology all in one spot, all the big names voicing their opinions, changing opinions over time, new papers getting published trackbacking back to the Watson-Crick paper and adding new information, debates flaring up and getting resolved, gossip now lost forever to history due to it being spoken at meetings, behind closed door or in hallways preserved forever for future students, historians and sociologists of science.

Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

Mowser get me thinking of emerging markets again

Posted on by charlie

Previously, I mentioned Mowser, the mobile-savvy transcoder by Russ Beattie.

It’s really cool that he has so much traffic. But, it’s even cooler to see that the emerging mobile markets are well represented in the top countries of users, and a good quarter of it comes from India!  Along with some other usage data from other services I know, I am really really wondering how things like Winksite, Mowser, and MOSH (from Nokia) are really catering to this unslaked thirst for mobile connectivity and content.

I think there is a place still for mobile-only solutions that cater to the mass-billions of users who have only access to XHTML mobile browsers for all their internet service needs. It’s going to also take a new way of thinking of how to connect folks so that they can form social networks, solely fueled through a simple mobile browser.

I always say that Europeans (North Americans, included) are snobby for thinking that folks in emerging markets and without PCs are clueless and don’t use the same internet-fueled services that most of us take for granted. On the contrary, not only do these folks know _everything_ that they could do if they had a PC, they are frantically looking for ways to hack or do the same things from the only browser they have – their mobile phone.

Before I joined Nokia Multimedia, where Nseries devices reign supreme, I was deep into thinking of what could be done to bring the mass-billions of folks with simpler phone, the last billion of which are in the emerging markets, into the Hyperconnected Age. One of my thoughts did include a transcoder (influenced at the time by Russ, himself). I was trying to add some of the functions that we are used to using in our browser, to be wrapped around this transcoder, giving some interactivity and action.

That said, while playing around with Mowser this past week or so, I was wondering how Mowser could be extended, and stumbled upon this post by Russ about a site that puts, what I call, a wrapper around Mowser. The wrapper makes it easy for you to save some bookmarks that are then opened via Mowser.

I like that and I guess I need to learn to code if I want to play around the same.

Indeed, Russ is encouraging folks to use Mowser in clever ways. There are a bunch of Mowser-types connecting at http://mowser.ning.com/ and publishers and hackers can visit the Mowser Wiki to learn how to take full advantage of Mowser. Guess that includes me, I suppose.

Strategy/The Narrative

It always take two failures to make a real problem

Posted on by charlie

A CEO (who has now moved on to greater things) of a large and popular Web service once was relating to me a tale of one of his major embarrassing outages and mentioned something I now always look out for:

“It take two things to fail to really cause trouble.” (or something like that)

Y’know: you’re prepared and when the poop hits the fan, you’re respond swimingly. But then something else happens at the same time and it all spirals out of control. I think you all must have stories of such combo-punches.

Well, seems like the folks at Rackspace had a really krummy Monday.* First some stuff went down and then came back. And then a few hours later, a truck took out their power, leading to a second incident related to the power that led to even more servers going down.

Yep, stuff happens.

Rackspace posted a public letter to their customers explaining the outage (link, to which, in the article below). Read more below.

Link: Quick, Plug The Internet Back In: Major Rackspace Outage:

Rackspace’s generators kicked in but, as we’ve seen before, lots of other things can then go wrong. In this case, two chillers within the data center failed to start back up, and a number of servers were taken offline to avoid damage from overheating.

*Heh, I got a tip off on the story from one of my tweeps, @djacobs.