Posts Tagged: mobile

Thoughts — No Comments
2
Apr 07

Mobile telcos rush to social networks – but are they missing the point?

After reading the BusinessWeek article Mobile Telcos Rush to Social Networking, I’m sort of left shaking my head, wondering exactly what telcos are thinking when they lay out their social networking strategy. In the article, writer Kate Norton describes partnerships between Orange Mobile and Bebo.com, and Vodafone and NewsCorp, parent of Myspace. The gist of these partnerships is that the provider will guarantee (exclusive?) access to the respective social networking service, which I guess is supposed to make people want to buy data plans or some such thing.

My problem with a strategy like this is that the telcos seem to fail to understand that social networking on the mobile is a distinctly different experience than social networking in the browser. As I’ve previously written, social networking is different experience between these mediums; in the browser, social networking has the luxury of being a browsing experience. That is, we can spend inordinate amounts of time traversing profiles on our desktops – which is a luxury not afforded by most handhelds, due to data plan speed and cost, as well as a number of other factors (extremely media-rich social networking profiles do not translate well to the mobile, for one).

What surprises me about these partnerships is that the major telcos seem happy to delude themselves that the experience customers want on the mobile mimics the browser experience. Furthermore, by pushing their customer base onto one social networking platform, the carriers strategic plans break the back of network-effects based adoption that could come from embracing social networking.

If Twitter’s amazing adoption has told us anything, it is that people want information solutions from their mobile device – these being primarily social informational solutions. Twitter operates in the TXT-based context – it isn’t media-rich, it isn’t GPRS dependent, it isn’t locked in to one carrier – but it is better mobile social networking than I’ve seen in years. And you know what? It doesn’t look all that much like our browser-based social networking experience.

Until we live in a world of media-rich mobile devices attached to fat pipes, we’re going to make do with the tools we have. That is, we’re not expecting the mobile to be the browser – and we quite like (or rather, grudgingly accept) the mobile as its own space. The social networking that we do in the mobile is different from that in the browser, and as long as it answers our information needs, we’re quite pleased with the results.

Along with Twitter, Loopt is another fantastic example of mobile social networking. The folks from Loopt (I believe the company has something like a 21-year-old CEO) built an entire product around the answering of a very simple, but very relevant social information need – “Where you at?” The Loopt platform took advantage of the E911 infrastructure and is now providing its location-based services to subscribers of Boost Mobile. Of course, Loopt is not cross-service, heavily limiting its usefulness – but imagine if it was.

Both of these services prove a very important point – the ways we think of social networking in the mobile are different. While the various Telco/Social Network deals make for good ad copy and probably sound sexy to some senior VP of something or another when pitched, the actual value in these relationships will come through implementation. If Orange and Vodafone can look beyond the mindset of simply connecting the mobile to the site as if it were a browser, perhaps they can leverage the real value of these partnerships.

As the article’s expert, Falk Müller-Veerse states, “it’s likely to take three to four years before social networking via mobile phones becomes mainstream,” that is probably the best argument I could muster for rethinking mobile social networking. The handsets aren’t here, the data plans aren’t here, the data speed isn’t here – but if we think of mobile social networking in new and innovative ways – ala Twitter or Loopt – there are tremendous opportunities. And the rub is, these opportunities exist for answering very simple questions.

Until the providers wake up to this reality – and perhaps they never will because their paradigm is so carrier-centric (Imagine a mobile company developing something that would work cross-carrier like Twitter – never!), the market for mobile social networking is squarely in the hands of those who design elegantly simple technologies that solve real information needs. I’m looking at you, readers.

Software / Thoughts — 2 Comments
19
Jan 07

WSJ on Loopt, the mobile social network

This morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a sunny profile of Loopt, the mobile social networking company (paywall, sorry). If you’ve seen the Boost mobile commercials, you’ve seen Loopt in action.

The new buddy-tracking tool is from Loopt Inc. and is available from wireless operator Boost Mobile, owned by Sprint Nextel Corp., Reston, Va. Loopt is one of a host of companies putting a fresh spin on social-networking services by adding in a new element: phones equipped with Global Positioning System receivers. GPS is used to determine an object’s location based on how long it takes for a signal to reach the object from satellites. Loopt alone has roughly 100,000 users since it kicked off last fall.

Many young people are obsessed with two things: social networking and their mobile phones. Companies have been trying to cash in on combining them, but up until now, nobody has found an approach that has really caught on. News Corp.’s MySpace and Facebook Inc. recently launched offerings that help people connect to their Web sites from their phones but the services don’t allow users to do much more than they could do online.

While I’m rather negative on walled-garden approaches to Mobile SNS, Loopt’s business model actually makes sense. Rather than being carrier-controlled, Loopt licenses its technology to mobile carriers, theoretically enabling cross-service networking.

Of course, there are a significant number of barriers that stand in Loopt’s way. First, the cell phones Loopt runs on must be GPS-enabled. Second, the service must be of significant value that the users will pay the $3/month Boost will begin charging in March.

Here’s what’s solid about Loopt’s approach: they are attempting to answer a situationally relevant question. For Mobile SNS to work, we must change our conceptualization of SNS. In the browser and in the mobile, SNS is significantly different. Mobile SNS developers must ask what relevant questions they can answer with the tools at hand; simply fitting a browser-based model to the mobile will not work (as the Facebook has seen with their not-new mobile apps). “Where are you” is a relevant social question that can be answered by the mobile, requiring little work on the individual’s end, that is of high social value. Mobile SNS developers must begin developing applications that answer this simple, valuable social questions that require little input or updating from users.

However, Loopt and Boost face significant challenges. Handset turnover is required before this application hits mass market, and it requires buy-in by the major carriers. Boost should waive fees on this service until January 2008, taking it as a loss-leader as it builds network effect. This will increase Loopt’s bargaining position with the major carriers, and it will give people a reasonable amount of time to realize they do actually want to pay for the service. By going pay in a month, I believe Boost may coincidentally damage Loopt’s potential. As Boost is a subsidiary of Sprint, they can certainly afford the write down (as it stands, Boost has 100,000 users on Loopt, $3.6M in pre-cost revenue a year).

It is critical the Boost let network-effect take its course. Mobile SNS is in its hyper-infancy, and to start choking it with fees at this point could be a disaster. If people turn the service off once it goes pay, network effects will be curtailed, and all of the people who bought Boost phones for Loopt will find significantly less value in their handset. They will be more likely to switch carriers in the future, which will be trivial as Boost is built on a pre-paid model.

Carriers like Boost (and Sprint) should realize that applications like Loopt could be the centerpiece of a brand, rather than simply a $3/month add-on. If Boost gets this message, they will delay fees and let network effects work for them.

Hacks — No Comments
7
Jan 07

Using procmail to avoid text message fees

Occasionally, I use the email-to-SMS gateway for my mobile phone. The only problem with doing this is email message size. If the message is too large, the Cingular email-to-SMS gateway breaks it up into many SMS messages, eating up a chunk of my monthly text allotment.

To combat this, I’ve cobbled together a procmail formula that forwards only the first 120 characters of the message to a mobile gateway. I drew the formula originally from some old postings to a monharc message board, to give credit where due. My rule follows (include in your .procmailrc or designated procmail rule file):

:0c
# First, set your procmail rule conditions
* ^TO_<conditional>
* ^Subject:.*<conditional>
{
# Now, clean the message and keep only the first 120 chars.
:0fbw
| tr -s '\011\012 ' ' ' | cut -c 1-120

# Finally, send the copy to the email-to-SMS gateway
:0
! <yournumber>@mobile.mycingular.com
}

To implement this rule, you’ll need a basic understanding of procmail. Also interesting is that while Cingular states the text message size is 160 characters, I found that sending over 140 characters resulted in message breakup most times. Therefore I picked 120 characters to give myself a margin of error. Hope this helps you save some money, especially now that Cingular is raising text message prices by 50%.

Noticed / Thoughts — 6 Comments
6
Jan 07

Thoughts on Mobile Social Networks

In my recent post about social networking in 2007, my predictions about mobile sparked some good discussion and comments. Here’s what I said:

1) Social networking will not go mobile in 2007.
Sure, lots of vendors are going to offer SNS on mobiles in 2007, but it won’t catch on to become a major force. With data plans and handsets as they are, mobile use just doesn’t match our use expectations of SNS. SNS is about browsing – and until mobiles let people richly and cost-effectively browse, our phones are going to remain glorified address books

At the same time, danah boyd shared some of her great insight into mobile SN’s, and Howard Rheingold linked to a post that was positive on long-term aspects for mobile SN’s. I’m going to effectively straddle the fence on this issue, standing by my statement that 2007 won’t be the year for mobile SN’s, but I do believe that mobile SN’s will be deeply integrated into our mobile experience in a few years.

Ok, so why won’t 2007 be the year for mobile SN? Two things. First, there really aren’t many viable offerings. We have Dodgeball and Facebook mobile, but these services simply haven’t made significant inroads with the mainstream market. There are also some exciting vendor-specific services, but these walled-garden plays just aren’t going to catch on – as long as you have to change your service provider to get access to the service. Second, handsets are behind the curve; many of the target market for mobile SN’s are on Razr’s or less – and it will be another year or two before they cycle out of these handsets into next gen handsets that would actually support media-rich applications. Finally, data plans are prohibitively expensive, and to think that teens are going to shell out 100/month for mobile plus unlimited data is expecting too much. It isn’t that teens don’t opportunistically waste this much money a month, but the mental price point is prohibitive.

These are three significant barriers for the mobile SN industry, and in the meantime we’re going to be using TXT based mobile SN’s like Dodgeball. Why don’t these services have mass appeal? The answer to this comes through use patterns of social networks. In most studies, two main uses of SN’s among young people emerge. The first use is time-wasting – i.e. browsing your friends and their friends endlessly, social grooming by leaving comments and changing your profile, etc. The second use is as a directory – i.e. how do I get in touch with Johnny.

Until cross-carrier rich apps emerge, SN use one (time-wasting) is completely out the window for mobile. It is expensive and annoying to try to browse a social network by text message. And in case two, directories – well, our phones are our directories. As Richard Ling and Bridgitte Yttri showed in their study of youth mobile use, teens clearly use their phones as directories. And what happens when they need a number that isn’t in the directory? Well, they could either waste ten minutes texting with a mobile social network, or just call their friend and ask them to Facebook their friend for them and get the number.

So the problem here is how the teen information needs are answered. Information needs are a large part of why we use technologies. And generally, as rational people, we will use the most efficient means to address our information needs. Until mobile social networks can cost-effectively, efficiently answer our information needs, whether they be browsing/grooming or directory needs, we aren’t going to use them. Yeah, it would help if they were fun, too, but what the mobile SN industry really needs to do is answer these young people’s primary needs, and then build from there.

Postscript: Interestingly, it may not be mobile providers or applications designers that really bring mobile SN’s to the masses – it may be campuses. At many campuses, including UNC, technology departments are looking at ways to integrate ambient intelligence into the infrastructure. With the convergence of RFID, mesh networks and wifi-enabled devices, it may be the campus that delivers the social network to the students. In fact, they’re already doing this at MIT.

Hacks — 3 Comments
12
Feb 06

Hacking the Motorola SLIVR (OS X)

This is a pretty lame hack but nonetheless – it will benefit those of you without Bluetooth enabled computers, or those who haven’t bought a Bluetooth dongle. The Motorola SLIVR comes with a USB cable to transfer MP3′s from your computer to iTunes. When the SLIVR attaches to your computer (I’m running OS X, 10.4.3), it shows up quickly as a mass storage device and then disappears; I’m not sure if this is DRM or the Motorola folks just trying to make the device as “simple” as possible to use. Essentially, what happens is the SLIVR is mounted as a mass storage device, and almost as soon as it is mounted, it issues an unmount and removes itself from your computer.

For those of us without Bluetooth file transfer, this is annoying, especially if you want to transfer ringtones, backgrounds or pictures. The good news is that you can easily circumvent the auto-unmounting of the mass file storage system. When you plug your SLIVR in to your Mac, it will show up in /Volumes for a few second – less than ten but certainly enough time to issue some commands. Here’s how to prevent the SLIVR from automatically unmounting from your system.

  1. Open a terminal on your Mac (terminal.app or iTerm works fine)
  2. cd /Volumes
  3. Plug your SLIVR in to the USB port. After a second or two, your SLIVR will show up in /Volumes as whatever you named it (My Slivr or whatever)
  4. In your terminal quickly cd into your SLIVR (cd MY_SLIVR)
  5. You’re golden. Since you’ve moved into that filesystem, the operating system will no longer automatically unmount it.
  6. MY_SLIVR will show up mounted on your computer.

You can now transfer whatever you want onto the SLIVR. They will go onto the flash card storage device, which you can access on the phone by switching storage devices.

You probably want to know how to move over MP3 ringtones, so here’s the hack. Basically, you move MP3′s into the audio directory (/Volumes/MY_SLIVR/audio), unmount the phone, copy the MP3′s from the flash card to the phone, and then assign them as ringtones. The ring length of a SLIVR seems to be something along the lines of 21-23 seconds, so crop your MP3′s accordingly (I use Audacity for this reason).

When you want to unmount the SLIVR, simply cd out of /Volumes/MY_SLIVR (or close the terminal), and unmount it like any other storage device.