Molecularist

Paul Whitaker says,

I want widgets. I want widgets that are similar to what I have on my lovely new Mac.

Great idea – I think of these as single purpose applets that are easy to figure out and do their job extremely well. Only thing for me is the UI. With a large screen, it’s easy to pepper the desktop with widgets or to find them quickly with Exposé. But what about a phone?

Microsoft was the first to have an active idle screen. Sendo put it first on Series 60 with their Sendo X. With the Nokia 6680 (Series 60 2.6?), there is now an active screen on all of Nokia’s newer phones too.

But, is it extensible? Can I write an app that registers info on the active idle, as does the calendar and to-do list? Then I could see having a line up of widgets I could scroll through somehow to get weather info, ticker tape of news and such, status of my whatever, and so on.

Uh, I think Paul could actually answer that better than I.

Also, I didn’t know Paul had a blog. Shouldn’t be a surprise. He’s an interesting dude. I had the good fortune to meet him a long time ago.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking this summer. There’s a whole lot of really smart folks out there, saying a bunch of stuff that is spot-on. I’ve also had many interesting discussions from which I have picked up further insights (meaning, some of this is mine and some of this is from others). Along the way, I’ve been collecting what I think are attributes for a compelling product (or service) which in my mind is a fusion of the Web, PC, and mobile (especially the mobile part). I’m not saying the product has to have all these attributes, but I think these are important things to consider when creating a product.

Here’s the list (in no particular order).

– Simple – the simpler and easier to use, the quicker to deploy, the quicker it can be adopted.
– Geographic diversity – keep in mind local specificities and regional sophistication.
– Disruption – think differently.
– Consumer electronics – still where the money is at.
– Mobile multimedia – my preference in tech space.
– Connecting people – collaborative filtering, profiles, making your social network work for you.
– End to end user experience – think of the whole solution, but not necessarily on a single device.
– Non-cellular – so we don’t make everything have to go through the network.
– Internet everywhere – sort of true, something to tap into.
– User-created content – where I think the value to the user is.
– No boxes – make it easy for the service provider partner to adopt and integrate.
– Enabling product recommendations – let your users do your marketing.
– Play shifting – don’t lock user media to a single device or format, freedom to the user!
– Play – tie this in and you have an addictive product.
– Mobile communication rituals and social capital – tap into the user psyche, they want to communicate and share, not sit passively and consume, think also of the mobile lifestyle.
– Business of non-consumption – a term from Clayton Christiansen describing an innovation that caters to something that previously could not be done.

I want to keep working on this list, add or remove some attributes, understand what they mean in relation to each other. Of course, I also want to understand what attributes I, myself, could pull together to create a compelling offering. At the same time, I am looking at different companies to see if they are ignoring one of these attributes, to understand the outcomes and consequences.

What do you think? Am I full of it? Clueless? Spot-on?

In my recent trip to Brasil, I met with some of the leading Latin American media companies. It was impressive how much they took to blogging. One thing I noticed was that a few of them had separate photoblogging (usually for the mobile) and text blogging.

Here’s UOL’s text-based blogs. Here are their mobile blogs (and mobile access!).

I was a bit put off, since I keep saying that blogging is blogging, whether you do it from a phone or a PC. But, these guys taught me a small something.

By having different versions of blogging – mobile or fixed, both for posting and viewing – you are able to actually segment the offering and also segment the marketing so that you better serve and inform the customer. What this tells me that it might just be that folks who like posting have their preferences and usually keep it that way.

This makes sense. You’ve got folks who just use Flickr for the photosharing, then you have the folks who use TypePad for text blogging and light photosharing.

TypePad has started segmenting their offering by providing mobile-multimedia-friendly templates and text-friendly templates. I have already figured out a bunch of things TypePad should do to be more mobile-friendly, but I keep thinking in terms of the whole TypePad service. This last tip from Brasil helps me understand what kind of segmentation can be done and how far to be able to better serve the different type of bloggers.

In the past few years I’ve seen a whole load of social mobile apps, such as Sensor (was a bit involved in that one), and more recently fotochatter and 6th Sense.

I think most of them are clever and work as advertised. But, all seem to be based on a Symbian or Windows Mobile app for a smartphone and thus suffer from a crucial weakness – density of devices.

All of these apps (they are not services, yet) require that a person be nearby with the same app running. Therefore, there needs to be a high enough density of folks with the right phones in the right places with the right app.

Uh uh.

Having used various of these apps, I have felt very lonely, even in the mobile crazy halls at Nokia. There just isn’t any penetration of these smartphones to a significant degree to make these apps useful.

I’ve seen some ideas of how to get around this limitation, but all of them still expect someone to have a smartphone.

Here’s my proposal, forget the smartphone and deploy something that can be used with simple Java phones. Indeed, I’ve seen some cool stuff there, too, but nothing out in the wild, yet.

It’s so easy to make an app for a smartphone and say you’ve got a winner. But the reality is that there are about, oh, 600 million phones out there being sold this year that will not be smartphones (which themselves should amount to no more than 10% of the total market for new phones).

What say you?