Tom Hume

I'm on holiday this week, having a fight with my attic. But before it's too late, here's a few places I'll be showing my face over the coming months:

• I'm speaking at Mobile Monday Amsterdam on 6th September, sandwiched between Rick le Roy and Matt Webb. We're talking about design and mobile. I'll likely go straight to nuts and bolts and talk about a few things we've launched recently, how we've approached them, and where we messed up.
• Then it's to Over The Air, which returns to Imperial College on 10th and 11th September. I'm sitting on a panel Bryan Rieger is running, tentatively titled "What Would Picasso Do?". We're going to be talking about art and mobile, then it's heads down for the overnight hacking.
• On 14th December I'll be taking part in a panel session at Nokia Developer Summit, titled "Simply clever – what Designs and Experiences make the user click?";
• Come October, I'm going to form part of the business track of DroidCon, the UKs first Android-focused conference running in London on 28-29th. I'll likely be presenting a warts-and-all case study of Future Platforms: our experiences building and operating a business in mobile over the last 10 years. As part of this I'll be talking about some of the problems we've faced: what should you do when Noel Edmonds kidnaps your project manager in launch week? How can you best handle the pervert in the flats opposite who keeps exposing himself to your staff? And other vital issues facing digital agencies in the 21st century.
• Finally, I'm going to be saying something, about something, at openMIC #8, which is coming to Brighton on 4th November. I've shamefully failed to make it along to any of the other openMIC events in Bristol or elsewhere, so really looking forward to making amends at this one.

A little birdie suggests that I may also be in Dublin in November to run a heavily customised version of the Mobile Mountains workshop (which I only recently swore I'd never run again). If so, we'll be digging up the corpse and reanimating it, Robocop-style. It will be better. Faster. Stronger. And fight crime. I'll post here if that's going to happen.

Oh, and I'm really looking forward to UX Brighton 2010: Rory Sutherland would have been enough to drag me along, and I've never seen Eric Reiss talk, but there's a great cast of other speakers there, most of whom I've never seen on stage.

Last but not least, I'm also helping judge the BIMAs this year. I did this way back in 2002 and it was a lot of fun, I'm really looking forward to it again.

Update: added in the Nokia Developer Summit panel.

Golly, I've not written anything here in a month or so. Time for an update:

• After losing the mighty Mary Nolan to antipodean climes (if you are in Australia: hire her FAST), we're looking for a new Product Owner. The quality of candidates we've had so far has pleased us mightily, we're interviewing at the moment and it's going to be a tough decision.
• Did I forget to mention that we hired a new ScrumMaster a few months ago? After an 8-year break, Cori Samuel (FP Employee #1 back in 2001) has returned to the fold and taken charge of keeping our teams and process singing: two wheels of our cart.
• Two of our products are doing quite nicely, thankyou. Roulette Cricket has been featured in the "What's Hot" list by Apple for a little while now and has passed 80,000 downloads; the app is also now brought to you through sponsorship from BlueSquare, the gambling site. Meanwhile the Guardian Anywhere has now had more than 16,000 downloads with a retained audience of over 6,300 - and we've distributed more than 300,000 copies of the Guardian to this audience, with more than 50,000 in the last 3 weeks.
• We're heads down on a a couple of really interesting projects: new operating systems, new hardware, new design metaphors, exposing genuinely useful services to a new audience, and a pleasing physical/digital mix. I should be able to talk about one of these quite soon, and I'm looking forward to showing them off - they're looking gorgeous.
• I'm spending a bit more time than usual in London, helping some new friends lovingly kick in some doors (mainly advertising agency doors). Our Proposal Engine is humming nicely.
• Magazines and publishing are occupying a lot of neurons right now. With respect to m'learned friends at BERG (whose Popular Science is a thing of great beauty and gets lots of stuff right), I don't think that anyone has quite cracked this yet, and I'm hoping we get a chance to play here.
• Future Platforms will be 10 years old next month. This is both wonderful and terrifying, I'm hoping we can find an appropriate way to celebrate this.

Also - some interesting stuff I've been meaning to link to:

• I thought the Old Spice campaign was fantastic - the sheer frivolity tickled me, of coruse, but the live element of it also pessed a few buttons. For me it's another data point on a line we've plotted between Ghosty and Roulette Cricket. I'm looking forward to seeing the first mobile-first campaign like this. I'm hoping we get to do that one.
• The era of online anonymity as default may be coming to an end: "Standing behind your words, owning them and the consequences they have on others, is part of adult communication. And it’s time that communication on the Internet grew up a little."
• Fake, a tool for test automation on the Mac.
• How we built teleport, an intelligent counterpoint to the "price-em-low, shift units" mentality which dominates app sales today. It seems common-sense that there will be successes with many different pricing strategies.
• What an iAd looks like. I'm really curious to see whether the response rates from iAds will justify the much higher production costs, or whether Apple are going to carve out and own "brand" advertising and leave response to Google.
• Zero tolerance for latency: "For classical medias, we are just seeing the beginning of a vast catching-up phase. In doing so, the incumbents face digital native challengers that are way more skilled than they are in dealing with interfaces and with zero latency delivery."

This months favourite new blog? The Ad Contrarian. Favourite new Tweeter? The sadly-quiet Brignumeeja, who seemed to fall over just as they were getting started. A shame, some of the scene here would benefit from a bit of a dressing-down and taking itself less seriously.

Does your heart skip a beat when you launch? Are you passionate about user experience? Do you play hopscotch between the worlds of business and technology? If so, rejoice! We're looking for a new Product Owner to join our team in sunny Brighton.

If you don't know us, we're a 10-year old software business, and we take products for mobile phones from the drawing board to launch, and beyond. If we have a house style, it's making something really special using playfulness and principles of participation. We've worked for some of the biggest names in telecoms and media, launched some successful startups, and won a few prizes along the way. We're unusually collaborative and cross-disciplinary, and tend to work quite closely with our customers.

The role involves working closely with our clients to understand their needs, their business and their customers; discussing these with our designers, developers and testers, and championing the resulting products internally. We don't expect you to be a mobile guru, but you will need experience in digital projects: a history in account management, as a digital producer or a product manager might prove helpful, though we'll certainly consider smart, mature applicants with other backgrounds.

Reporting to our lovely Client Services Director, you'll manage relationships with customers, understanding their priorities and acting as a customer proxy for our production teams. In practice this means that you'll need to:

• Identify, understand, prioritise and document product requirements for customers;
• Own customer relationships and take responsibility for driving revenues;
• Act as the main point of contact for clients during development, reporting progress and managing change;
• Work with our Client Services Director to create long-term release plans for clients;

It's a challenging role and you'll sit right at the centre of our business. You'll need to be authentic and trustworthy, with good negotiation skills. Attention to detail is crucial, project management and system modelling skills will come in very handy. We'll want to to continually develop domain knowledge for our clients, and to be able to understand their language, business and objectives.

Email recruitment@futureplatforms.com if this sounds like you.

I've a little stack of launches which I've been meaning to blog about recently... things have been quite busy, hopefully I'll write more about that soon.

We've been working with the team at BBC Bitesize for a year or two now. Last year we worked on a suite of GCSE revision tools for conventional smart- and feature-phones, which took in a large amount of quiz-related content and churned out simple Java apps. They're quite straightforward: each app covers a single subject and contains a database of multiple choice questions organised by sub-topic.

We're quite comfortable with the technical and UI side of this sort of thing; the biggest problems were probably around the automation of builds (there are quite a few versions of the product for different subjects), and the inclusion of the quiz content: a quite large pool of questions, answers and imagery which needed to be folded, spindled and mutilated in various ways for different screen sizes.

Early this year, the BBC came back to us and asked about taking the product onto more modern smartphones. With a relatively simple product, a limited budget, and a brief to go as far as possible on modern touch devices, this seemed like a good opportunity to see what we could deliver with HTML5. The work itself was fairly straightforward, and much of the original user interface didn't need to change significantly as we moved from keypad-and-menu to touch-based devices. We were also pleasantly surprised to discover how remarkably consistent browsers were between iPhone and Android, but see for yourself - the quizzes are all available here.

I'm also pleased that we managed to tie this work into the W3C Mobile Web Application Best Practices effort which I've been extremely tangentially involved in, by submitting an implementation report based on the project. If you're working on mobile web applications, I'd encourage you to do the same.

We launched an update to Roulette Cricket this week; lots of new features and a few tweaks. The previous version was pushed out in time for the IPCC matches and there were a few features we just didn't have time to squeeze in, which you can get now.

The big one you'll notice is commentary: you can now read a ball-by-ball account of the match on your iPhone, as it happens. One of the things I like about the app is that it's designed for partial attention - as a second screen whilst you're at work, listening to the radio or watching television. This means that accounting for the moments you'll miss is as important as showing you the game live. To that end we also let you replay the last boundary, so if you're distracted when it happens, you can see it again.

The other features are a bit less obvious; as well as the global leaderboard, which was rapidly filling up with players, we now have a per-game high score table. This means you still have a chance of getting fame and fortune on individual matches, if you can't follow all of them as some of our players clearly do :)

We also put in a few graphical twizzles and fixes, and a tweak around the display of times: where they used to be in GMT, they're now localised to your timezone. Cricket is an international game, pretending that everyone in the UK just didn't cut it.

There's more to come, of course - including one or two significant things we well know are missing. But this should keep you going :)

Like most people, I've not been a particular fan of video calling. The only time I've used it myself is on Skype, mainly when I've been abroad.

But a thought on FaceTime: if you really wanted to start eating the mobile operators lunch, whilst still working with them, a good place to start might be to roll out unlocked devices with tariffs that involve no loyalty to any given operator (iPads), and that switch really easily to wi-fi when they can (iPad, iPhone), to further reinforce the perception that operators are "the bit of the mobile experience that breaks all the time".

You could probably roll out a service that operators have consistently failed to get traction with (like video calling), without getting their backs up - how can they complain about your moving into an area that they've failed in and that generates them no revenue? You could do it on wi-fi first, but of course if operator networks ever improve (and like most things, they probably will), it'd be easy to move to 3G/4G - and there'd be no real rush for that, because most of the use cases for video calling involve being at home or at work. Once you were happily doing video calls, dropping back to supporting voice really wouldn't be such a big deal. And I suppose you'd want a mechanism for doing messaging between devices (like push notifications, say) which was independent of operators too.

Jeepers, the folks in Cupertino move fast. How long before iChat (notably missing from the iPhone to date) starts to compete with SMS? "Buy an iPhone and never pay for texting again" would be a pretty attractive offer for some folks.

To say that things have been busy is an understatement. I'm also out and about a lot at the moment - I had the pleasure of attending the excellent m-publishing event last week run by Camerjam, and am about to hop off for a couple of European events. In the next month or so I'll be:

• Talking about approaches to J2ME development at the O2 Litmus event sponsored by Sun^H^H^HOracle tomorrow evening, at Ping Pong in Liverpool Street;
• On-stage at Mobile Monday on 14th June to discuss my favourite subject in the world ever, fragmentation;
• Hopping over to Barcelona for Mobile 2.0 Europe on 17th, where I'm running our Mobile Mountains workshop and getting a few teams of interested folk designing and testing a product in 90 minutes. I'll also be on the jury for the AppCircus side of this event.
• Dragging my big bag o' wooden phones from there to Mobile Monday Slovenia on 21st June, where I'm running the same workshop format again;

Pop me an mail if you fancy catching up at any of those...

One of the things that sits on my Huge Ever-Growing Backlog Of Things To Do is write about some of the products we've launched in recent months. So, starting with the oldest first... Secret Lewis, which launched in March.

Last year we were approached by nDreams, a developer and publisher of games, to help them with the mobile element of an ARG they were putting together for Reebok. It turns out that Lewis Hamilton is not only a Formula 1 racing driver - he also moonlights rescuing works of art that have been stolen... and he needs help. The ARG runs from March until October this year, and is split into five episodes, with a mobile game for each. You can pick up the first episode ("Shanghai Mansion") here on Getjar. The games themselves are built for a wide range of feature-phone handsets, and we've produced 8 language versions. This is an international game built for an international audience that's wider than just iPhone and Android owners; much as we love the power and flexibility of modern mobiles, we love reaching the other 97% of the world too.

A nice little behind-the-scenes detail of Secret Lewis is the workflow between us and nDreams. There's a web-based Unity version of each episode, and we take a data file exported from this, run it through a rather nifty parser, and use this to generate new game files which the MIDlet consumes: so the mobile and web games are naturally kept in sync.

We'll be launching more episodes of Secret Lewis in the coming months...

Update: how remiss of me, I've realised that I failed to give a shout to the team at FP who put Secret Lewis together - mea culpa. That'll be The Fighting Mongooses, AKA Thom Hopper, Adrian Bigland, Chris Glaister, Tariq Tamuji, and Ali Driver...

I attended and presented at the Eduserv Symposium last week, an annual event for technologists in education. Notes are a bit lacking, I'm afraid, but an excellent venue (the Royal College of Phyicians, where I think WAP Wednesdays of yore were held), solid wi-fi and a strong lineup of speakers made for a good day. I was pleasantly surprised by the interest and engagement of the audience, too - education not being a sector that I'd immediately associate with enthusiasm for the new.

I presented some real-world experiences launching mobile apps, drawing on our work for Puzzler and a piece of concept work we did for Channel 4 Education a couple of years ago. You can find the slides online here.

Hah. Just found this whilst searching around for something I said years back:

"I don’t see this as meaningfully impacting on the mass market (other than giving a slight kicking to other handset vendors)"

That'll be the iPhone, then. Oh, I could argue that a few percentage of market share isn't an impact on the mass-market... but impact ain't just how many of them you ship, it's how much they affect everyone else in the ecosystem, and iPhone - like many Apple products - has had impact disproportionate to its market-share.