Tom Hume

Telefonica buys UK's O2 for £18bn: "Because there's no overlapping territories, we can really build on what we've got, as opposed to having to integrate and rationalise jobs."

First Screen Shots of Riya: "I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy."

Interesting - sounds like a photographic Shazam

Halloween usability cartoon. No, really.

The top 5 red flags of software development.

Sounds like a good rant: "Mobile game guru Greg Costikyan, formerly with Nokia Research but now head of Manifesto Games, highlighted a number of problems facing the mobile games industry, and developers in particular."

...but, reading Carlo's notes I'm struck that most of the problems Greg has highlighted aren't problems with the mobile games industry, but problems with the mobile games industry if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells:

1. Consumers don't necessarily buy games based on a single line of text. Many of the channels for selling mobile games (late night TV ads, press ads in the back of Viz or the back cover of Puzzler magazine) allow fuller descriptions of games. Even sales of games via operator portals usually include screenshots.

2. "Mobile device will always be an inferior game platform". Sorry, I don't buy that; or has my chess-set been obsoleted by my Gamecube because it's only got a resolution of 8 x 8?

3. J2ME can access phone and date book information. Not all handsets can, but hey - you're going to be building different versions of your game for different devices anyway, and at least the mechanisms for address book access are reasonably standardised in JSRs.

4. You can add new levels and content to a Java game on the fly. Flirtomatic is a great example of a massively networked mobile application. Sure, this brings its own set of problems, but it's eminently possible, and has been for some time (we wrote Java games that download new levels back in 2002).

5. Super-distribution of the kind Greg describes can be done. We're doing it on a project right now. It's a little bit fiddly, but it's feasible.

But overall Greg seems to have it nailed...

Flirtomatic: "the type of company you long to see in early stage VC: experienced management, with directly relevant skills starting a business with explosive growth potential.

El Reg on I-mode: "There's no denying that i-mode is great. I love the way it works, the selection of content, the pricing structure, the speed of access and the bundled push email. Unfortunately, the NEC N411i just feels a little behind the times in today's world of super stylish and fully featured mobiles. NEC should be congratulated for getting i-mode handsets out so quickly, but something tells me that we'll be seeing far better examples in the near future."

What can I say, other than +1

Flirtomatic launches: "When it comes to anything mobile Europe has always been ahead of the U.S. For example, there have been mobile dating/mating applications over there for years. Flirtomatic, the latest player, launched yesterday and promises to be the new industry leader. It's very well designed, simple to use online or on your mobile phone and makes it easy to connect with people by introducing those who have similar interests."

And more here.

A preview of Flash Lite 2.0.

Joel on Software - Monday, October 24, 2005: "This is where Google is actually hurt by the long tail world of millions of small sites."

This long tail thing - it's not all good, y'know. I was thinking about this the other day whilst chancing across some stats analysis we were running for a client.

We do a lot of porting work - taking mobile applications that we (or others) have written and converting them to work on new mobile phones. This is an inherent part of our business right now and whilst it's not as obviously rewarding as developing scratch, like it or not it's very necessary. There are porting frameworks which aim to help you get around this problem (in fact we wrote a rather snazzy one ourselves which we use internally) but they don't get away from the need to build and test your apps on real devices.

So which handsets do you port to? Well... there are a few biggies, a few which obviously stand out when you look at who's trying to use your service - and you should look at who the prospective audience is, up front, because different audiences will have tendencies towards ownership of different handsets. But there are a few up the top - Nokia Series 40, high-end Sony Ericssons, etc. - which are a no-brainer. But then look at the rest of them - the graph below shows the number of unsupported customers we've had for about 127 handsets which our service doesn't currently support (it has been explicitly ported to just over 40 more popular devices, of course!):

Oooh, it's a long tail - the top 19 out of 127 handsets (15% of them) which we don't currently support make up 50% of traffic. But look at the other 50% - to support these we'll incur incremental costs testing and development, so they become commercially unfeasible.

The morals of this tale?

1. "Write once, run everywhere". Stare into the mirror and say it's name three times - it doesn't appear, it's just a fairytale.
2. You need to look at your audience before you decide which devices to port to.
3. Porting costs are a matter of economics: the more you spend, the wider your audience. But it may not be commercially viable for you to widen your audience beyond a certain point.