Strategy

Kelly on: the mobile designer

Posted on by charlie

Kelly wrote a great piece on mobile design. What I like is that she also speaks to the idea that the designer and developer need to work together. You just can’t contract some web-head to design for you mobile service. You need to have the designer ’embedded’ with the developer.

I’ve seen this in practice and am addicted to it. I will always want the designer with the product folks. Makes sense to me. Eh. Must be one of my blind spots, since few companies build things this way.

Link: the mobile designer | gotomobile.

Mobile designers are the bridge between the end user and the engineering community. Unlike the web or mainstream design world, mobile designers cannot be simply visually or brand-oriented.

The Narrative

Cringely on: Stupid Net Tricks

Posted on by charlie

I’m a long-time fan of Cringley.

Here’s some great insight from him regarding all the crying the connectivity providers are doing to lock down the Internet (with the US Congress nodding in agreement).

Link: PBS | I, Cringely . February 9, 2006 – Stupid Net Tricks.

I live in Charleston, SC, one of the most technologically backward cities in America, yet I can call my Mom right now using any one of half a dozen completely independent and parallel communication networks. So my right to phone service is no longer dependent on BellSouth’s right to provide phone service. If BellSouth went out of business there would be no long-term disruption. The argument that any particular service provider ought to be given preferential rights in order to help them survive no longer has any real bearing on Public Service. That argument is bogus.

Strategy

Russell on: Box.net gets it

Posted on by charlie

Russ points out an interesting online storage company that is already adding mobile access to their offering. Russ also points to his old article on the need for a .mac for mobiles.

FWIW, Russ, I remember when it came out AND I’ve had it bookmarked since then. I thought is a great idea back then and a great idea now. Too bad no one has yet grokked the importance. I think Box and others (like Yahoo’s SynchML service) are building the pieces, but as you say, it’ll be the total experience that will make or break such a services.

Thanks for the link.

Link: Russell Beattie Notebook – Box.net gets it.

There’s a lot of things I like about Box.net – starting with its name. It’s short, descriptive and a real word. I don’t know how they managed to land it, but it’s great. It may seem trivial, but you’ve got to have a good name. On top of that they’ve got a nice site with a clean design, and a very clear service and value proposition for their customers: Free online storage with premium plans for higher-end customers. Though it’s been done before in one form or another, it’s an obvious need – how many hacks out there did we see that turned your 2GB of GMail into an online storage system? So right off the bat, these guys are winners in my book – good name, nice design, a service with obvious value and a monetization system right away. Okay, so they’re not pushing the envelope in terms of “changing the world” right now, but I’ll cut them some slack on that.

Why? Because they’ve got mobile support. W00t! Basic stuff today with some plans for very cool stuff coming up.

Innovation/Strategy

MoMo Mike on: Web Components For Mobile Applications

Posted on by charlie

MoMo Mike, from Ning, has been doing what he loves – integrating the mobile and Web. He’s been using Ning, of course.

It was a long time coming, and he’s doing it on his own, but I was waiting for Mike to start making cools things with Ning and mobiles.

Read up on what he’s done and join him in the brainstorming.

Link: This is Mobility � Blog Archive � Web Components For Mobile Applications.

My plan is to fool around with a couple more samples, and work on the mobile client side some over the short term. Over the longer term I would love to figure out how to make the mobile client side more generic, get the mobile side interacting with more and more of the apps, figure out the user side (assume I have a great app with a mobile component to it, how do end users interact with it), inbound and outbound messaging, and of course the whole general web issue. I posted about it cause I’m betting there are a bunch of people out there who have app ideas that would only really work on mobile, and for which a service like Ning opens up the door.

Strategy

Anders Lindh on: Where mobile innovation should be heading

Posted on by charlie

Anders has been running a successful mobile marketing company for over 5 years, so I listen to what he has to say.

In addition to what he says below, I think it’s interesting that with all his experience in mobile marketing, he still says that we should forget trying to monetize our mobile services with advertisements. While I am not too sure of that using the in-built mobile billing mechanisms is the only way to go (or that it is easy), I do agree that in the mobile world, you need to cut down to that part that folks would pay for. And of course, that part is where ‘the real world and the benefits of mobility meet.’

Link: the mobile experience � Blog Archive � Where mobile innovation should be heading.

The challenges in service innovation will all be about relevance and context. Sure, social bookmarking is a great thing on my desktop, but its not a killer mobile service. Google does a great job in finding millions on entries for some particular query, but in a mobile context I’m interested in one often very specific answer. Online maps and real-world-service-location become interesting only when my actual physical location is taken into account, even when moving around at greater speeds. I prefer to write blog entries from my desktop, but reading them while on the move will become more common. This leads to a great dependance on relevance, as the small screen greatly puts a limit on the amount of information that I want to be exposed to.

Strategy

Kelly on: integrated mobile research & testing

Posted on by charlie

Kelly has written a nice (long) essay on context, user testing, and ethnographic research used in building great products based on understanding the user.

Link: integrated mobile research & testing | gotomobile.

For best results, the user-centered approach employs not just traditional marketing research techniques, but also contextual inquiry, or methods that involve asking questions and observing within the subject’s own context.

The Narrative

Sippey’s back of the envelope calculations on ad-supported services

Posted on by charlie

Sippey (from Six Apart) was inspired by Kotke’s comments (links in post) regarding  ad-supported vs. sponsor-supported services.

Sippey then makes a very lucid thought experiment that drives home the it ain’t easy to support a service with ad revenue alone. And, to make it even more interesting, the math is set up to calculate $40k or revenue, which is not really any revenue to speak of for any business.

Oh, and Sippey is talking about a PC browser-based world. Fuggedaboudit, if you are thinking of click-ad-supported mobile services.

Link: this is sippey.typepad.com: back of the envelope.

OK, here comes the hard part.  Math!  $40,000 at $1.75 per 1,000 page views means that you’ll have to do north of 22.8 million page views in the year, or 1.9 million monthly, or approximately 64,000 a day.  Think you have it in you?

It doesn’t take a math genius (like me!) to know that this calculation is highly influenced by the eCPM you think you could earn; if you think I’m off, post your calculation in the comments.

The Narrative

David Harper on: An Open Letter to Google: “Page adapted for mobile phone?” Please stop now, you are crippling sites, not adapting pages.

Posted on by charlie

There has been some angry buzz around Google’s wanton transcoding of web pages. This was inevitable, since transcoding by nature rewrites pages for mobiles.

One thing that I think all transcoders (and some that lightly transcode RSS <wink>) are missing is that they strip out all images and sometimes even links (or like Google, replaces links with proxy links) without the users knowing or allowing the user to access the removed items. I think a generous tweak of the browsing UI could do much to help this issue.

As for the real munging of sites, that will always be the case with transcoding. But, as David says, a bit of device detection and a clever proxy will redirect to sites that already have mobile-friendly versions.

Link: Different Things � Blog Archive � An Open Letter to Google: “Page adapted for mobile phone?” Please stop now, you are crippling sites, not adapting pages..

From my perspective, the issue is not that Google unilaterally strips away eye candy only to deliver a hodgepodge of text on mobile devices. It is that you remove user access to mobile-specific services on which ours and many other businesses are based. By default, your actions censor those of us who provide a unique and/or useful mobile experience.

The Narrative

How big can your mobile portal be?

Posted on by charlie

MMetrics released a while back some stats on some of the larger mobile portals. I think it sets an upper limit anyone can expect when launching a mobile service.

Look at the number of folks visiting Yahoo. Do you think you can do better?

But there are some other interesting tid-bits in the number. Only 33% have sent or received a text message. What? How come? Yet, 10% have received info via browser. Heck, relative to SMS, I think that speaks well of browsing. It suggests to me that it is not cost or UI that keep people from using SMS, but habit.

So, going back to the portal numbers, if this is just browsing, what would happen if we brought in communication and sharing, something like WINKsite? Maybe tapping into the browsing habit and then modifying that to include sharing and communication would be the way to grow, rather than dumping SMS as a separate thing. Then, you might be able to grow a good-sized service.

Hmm.

Link: M:Metrics News.

M:Metrics, the mobile market authority, has found that Yahoo! is the most popular mobile content brand. During the quarter ended December 2005 12.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed Yahoo’s services in an average month – 4 million more than second-place AOL. MSN and Google follow, with about 7 million subscribers accessing their mobile offerings each month during the fourth quarter.

Announcements

Mea culpa and station identification

Posted on by charlie

As with all single-person publications, there comes a time when that single person needs to set priorities that impact the publication.

I’ve been traveling in the US these past two weeks and was in no position to post anything. Oh, I had a bunch lined up, but couldn’t enter them before I took off.* Also, I really haven’t been able to keep up with news or correspondence, so you’ll see some comments to stuff from two weeks ago.

So, no, I am not dead. Nor am I overloaded with interesting stuff due to 3GSM, CTIA, or CeBIT (though most of you are). And, yes, I am still at Nokia, but not doing anything I can write about.

And, yes, this is still my site to talk about mobile stuff – the innovations, strategies, and narratives around doing things in the mobile world. And my main interest is still the fusion of mobile, PC, and Web and how it is changing the way we communicate and create.

We now resume our regularly scheduled programming. 🙂

*Tip: Work up a queue of articles and set them to go live while you are away. Yes, I do that when I can (I’m an old hat at this, y’see).