The Narrative

Spam is killing mobile email

Posted on by charlie

I changed my personal email address a while back to reset the spam counter to zero. I don’t use my personal email address much and I managed to last a while, protecting my address from spam for about a year. Slowly the spam started appearing. It’s really not much – a few a day – but I don’t get much proper email, so relatively, it was a lot.

But, the main thing for me was that I heavily access my account with my phone. The spam headers were annoying to manage, since the email client on the phone has no spam filter. The only solution was either to pay my email provider for a spam filter or find some other free way of having a spam filter.

Well, I finally set up a Gmail account – forwarding my email to it, setting my reply address properly, and setting up the POP access from the phone. Yup, it all came together quite well, even better than before. I have spam filtering and my sent messages show up in my Gmail sent folder. Also, I can use my PC client to also access Gmail the same way.

The sad thing is that I had to go to a separate service provider to have all this done. If my email provider (in Finland, no less) had a clue, they would make spam filters free and make a more mobile-friendly email service.

Hmm, seems like practically everyone can use some help in making their services mobile-friendly. And of course, when I mean ‘mobile-friendly’ I mean integrated into the mobile lifestyle.

Mobile lifestyle – sounds lame, so feel free to suggest another term for me to use. 😉

Innovation

Can reading analyst reports help you innovate?

Posted on by charlie

One of the perks of working with a huge company is that there is no shortage of analyst reports and presentations you can peruse. I was going through a whole bunch of reports today and read closely two of them.

One was a presentation that was typical of analysts – fancy forecasts in a market segment we already know a lot about and nothing new was revealed (and for sure the numbers, winners, and forecasts changed quarterly). This was basic research, interviewing users and estimating trends. Yes, analysts are good at this, but you can forget about ever becoming smarter as a result of reading such reports. I ended up calling it ’20/20 hindsight into the future’.

The second report was a similar data analysis type of report, but the questions they were asking were much more clever. Therefore, the value of the trends were much greater, since it pointed out things in ways we normally don’t think of. Nonetheless, it was a trend report, a report on existing trends. More 20/20 hindsight, only with better guidance.

The second report was from: M:Metrics. I link to them here, since I poked around their website and was intrigued (they were new to me).

But, here’s my thought for the day. What if analysts backed away from the research a bit and used their big brains to guide innovation? What if they could figure out what could not be asked, what could not be measured, but what could use a bit of attention.

Isn’t that the best use of data? I have done this my whole career (I should say, my three careers) – measure and observe and analyze, and then kick butt with insights and innovations the data missed or suggested somehow. Data analysis is about now with a future predicated on now. Innovation is about tomorrow and a future predicated on tomorrow. You need to be able to go beyond the data of now to innovate in the future. I have never found analysts, with all their clever reports or presentations, to help me there.

Strategy

Wanna build a mobile app? Read this.

Posted on by charlie

Do you have what it takes to build a mobile app? Yes or no, you should read what these guys have to say.

Link: InterCasting Corp: Inferior Bathroom Technology and UI In The Mobile Space.

Rabble has been in development for a year. Sounds like a long time for a blogging and social networking app, doesn’t it? How about cramming that app into a 200k payload, working around caching limitations which are all different across hundreds of supported handsets, overcoming network latency issues unheard of on the web and doing it all in a presentation environment that requires creative solutions to the problems that are among the easiest to solve on the web? Now do it with 1.5 inches or less of screen real estate in a way that is logical and useful for the consumer. The coding was done in a few months. It’s everything else that goes into bringing a product to market that takes time. This is the kind of time I wish the automatic bathroom flushing people would have spent.

[…]

Here are my five criteria for useful mobile applications. (All of our
planned mobile applications must have at least four, but maybe you
don’t think they are all that important for what you are doing. Time
will tell.)
Successful mobile applications:
1) Are not just mobile relevant, but mobility relevant
2) Are personal or offer some form of personalization
3) Leverage the network effect of mobile connected devices
4) Originate in the mobile space
5) Utilize and extend the upstream capabilities of the mobile device
(this could be as simple as texting and passive location or as involved
as massively multi-user networked games.)

A few comments about the list:
1) Yes. ‘Mobility relevant’ in my mind is ‘relevant to the user’s mobile lifestyle’.
2) Yes. The mobile is personal*, great mobile services are personal.
3) Hmm. This I think is a challenge in some forms, but now is a must to succeed – it’s all about communication in the end. The best services currently are about communication: voice and SMS. And I think there’s a lot that can still be built upon those two pillars of communication. Rabble is an example of a service that turns the phone’s camera into a mobile communication tool. I’d be curious to know how much Rabble uses other channels of communication available to the phone.
4) Hmm. I am partial to a mix of mobile and PC originated activities. I think some services have failed because they pushed the mobile-origination without complementing it in other ways. So, ‘mobile-originated’, yes, but in moderation. 😉
5) Hmm. not too sure what you mean here, but I get a feeling that it ties into the network effect in item 3. If so, yes, the phone has some pretty nifty ways of supporting the flow of information in a service.

Great stuff.


*personal services – some folks here say ‘intimate’ services, which clashes when they mention ‘sticky’ services. i’ll stick with personal.

The Narrative

More on thought and jargon | 8/25/2005 | mobile jones

Posted on by charlie

Spot on. This is what you get when someone understands the mobile lifestyle. you need to live it to understand what it means and how to build for it.

Debi gets it. Do you?

Link: More on thought and jargon | 8/25/2005 | mobile jones.

New language to shape new thought

   

* Publish to web address and read everywhere versus location matters allot.
   

* Browser is the UI versus fragmented UI by device, activity or service.
   

* Information browsing versus information precision.
   

* Time measured as number of minutes on a single site versus minutes or seconds spent on all locations.
   

* All data lives on and is shared from the web versus data lives on and is shared across all devices.

 

 

The list above is a high level beginning. Just as many bloggers
are convinced that one must engage in blogging to comprehend a blogger
perspective, immersive experience as a mobile user and with mobile
experts would open new avenues of language and thought when considering
development of mobile services.

The Narrative

gapingvoid: we want to be part of something

Posted on by charlie

Without a marketing background, I understood this instinctively.

Link: gapingvoid: we want to be part of something.

Like I said, it’s all about Outreach. It’s about wanting to be part of something interesting, something larger than the actual product.

If I had had more time with Lifeblog, I just might have been able to have a case study to convince the mass marketeers in the rest of my company the value of participatory, conversational, personal outreach. In any case, it is amazing how far we got with what little we did (and spent). I even managed to get the flywheel going so that the conversation could keep going for many more months (still is!) after I was bumped and the Lifeblog team stopped talking.