Tom Hume

• When is it inappropriate to use your iPhone - a romance flowchart;
• All hail the iPod touch; isn't it kinda amusing that one of the most popular mobile devices is completely disconnected from any traditional mobile network? Kinda says something about the telecomms industry I think;
• Is modern web design too like print design: "It feels like we’ve lost the “webness” of web design over an incredibly short period". Absolutely agree. We seem to have falled into a bit of a rut as far as our expectations of web design go...
• Very interesting report of the post-mortem for a large iPhone project;
• Node.js, an asynchronous framework for web applications. Can't decide if this is really cute (performance suggests so), or insanely evil (in that it seems to be retrofitting the WWW with select() calls)...
• If you're a fluent Japanese speaker, perhaps you could tell me what I'm talking about here? It's one of the interviews from my week in Japan...
• Simple and gorgeous - PhotoCard for the iPhone, an app to send email or physical postcards.
• I Blame The Designer: "Of course clients aren’t skilled designers; that’s why they had the foresight to hire us. But you know what? They know business. They’re as passionate, committed and talented as anyone. Many of them put their livelihoods on the line to make the web happen. And let’s be blunt: they also pay our salaries.". Bravo!

• The worlds largest multi-touch wall: "34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers"
• Twitter beard!: "just insert your face"
• Why your friends have more friends than you do: "You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends"
• Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk: "my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40"
• Opera Face Gestures: "lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures"
• Interesting post on design decisions behind Skype Chat, the best IM out there I reckon
• Differentiated presence on GMail chat status, nice touch: "when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages"
• How rich are you? Humbling.
• Square looks cute - the use of the headphone jack is particularly lovely, and I could see it getting uptake from smartphone owners (particularly if the customer hardware becomes fashionable or desirable), but I wonder how they plan to get the merchant side of the infrastructure rolled out to the extent that it's worthwhile.
• Via Dom, Appvent Calendar - a free iPhone game every day. Cute.
• The two use-cases of mobile - amen;

• Nokia exec talks Ovi platform, really nice discussion of where Ovi is and how Nokia see the world;
• Android Market games revenues rose in October, but only 53% which isn't the kind of massive growth you might expect to see this early in Androids life...
• Android compatibility library: "During the cross-compilation process, both the application and the Android compatibility library are cross-compiled from Java to Objective-C and linked with the Cocoa Touch compatibility library to yield a native iPhone application. "
• A new theory of awesomeness and miracles, including the putative construction of a go-playing machine larger than the universe;
• Fake Steve Jobs exposes a wonderful example of doublespeak: "I sent a copy of this to Katie with a note asking how we missed out on this guy, because he’s exactly the kind of coin-operated true believer we need around here."
• 5 things I wish someone had told me: "If your significant other absentmindedly mentions that he/she never sees you for dinner anymore, you had better resolve the situation quickly"
• Who can save Palm?: "Palm can only hope for a niche role in the smartphone market. Palm’s technology can only escape this role if WebOS software will become part of a strong, larger service ecosystem. One possibility is acquisition by RIM. Consumer potential of WebOS can take Blackberry user experience to a new level..."
• It's Googles world and handset makers just live in it: "by creating flagship devices featuring their latest and greatest they ensure forward momentum for the platform"
• Russell Davies at Playful (which I'm increasingly gutted to have missed): "These aren't games, like the industry thinks of games, these are something a little less, these are Barely Games. And these, are what I wanted to talk about."

I did a talk at Mobile Web and Applications yesterday, grandiosely titled, "Capitalising on Popular Culture: the Interplay between Apps and Society". I was looking at places where mobile applications are just starting to go mass-market, with a view to seeing what we could learn from these early examples, and I picked out mapping (in the form of Google Maps) and personal fitness (Nike+ and GymFu) as my reference points.

Many thanks to Jof Arnold of GymFu and Craig Patton of R/GA for their help in preparing this talk. You can find slides and notes here.

Miles and I wandered along to The Future of Collaboration last night, there to meet up with 50% of the local digital/software/whatever community to hear a panel discussion with Nico MacDonald, Michael Bull and Cory Doctorow. It's an event being run as part of the Battle of Ideas season, by the Institute of Ideas. Good speakers, a hot topic: expectations were high. I took a few patchy notes.

Cory kicked off with the first in a volley of excellent soundbites, observing that predictions of the future tend to say more about the predictor than they do about the future. The internet is "the worlds best copying machine". It's become so important to businesses and governments that it can't be shut down, even during events like the Myanmar riots of last year - because large influential corporations like oil companies aren't, in fact, oil companies, they're IT companies that happen to move oil around. I didn't find this analogy particularly helpful; given that all IT companies need people (even Google have sysadmins), isn't it just as accurate to say they're all HR companies that happen to shift XYZ around?

Michael Bull was up next - I've wanted to see him speak for some time. If you've not heard of the guy he's been christened "Dr iPod" after spending a long time looking at how the device affects us - and writing a book on the topic. Michael's been looking at things more from a consumption point of view - comparing the rise of universal collaboration to the collapse of communism leaving nothing but capitalism as an option: collaboration is all there is. He clearly has some doubts over the fundamentally positive view of this technology which Cory was promoting, referencing a UNESCO report which found that use of communications technology in children was both inversely proportional to their happiness, and led to their difficulty in determining who to trust. "The more you use technology to mediate a community, the more multisensory experience you lose", said Michael, and despite being an enthusiastic digital over-sharer myself I found it hard to disagree. I'm not alone, apparently we each spend on average 27 hours a day using technology (if you double-count hours where we simultaneously use more than one device, e.g. mobile and TV - yes, my pedantrometer was tingling at this point, but I saved it for later). "We're all existentially alone together", Michael ended, noting that most people talk to on average 8 others with any regularity, and that seeing others talking when you're not leads to feelings of isolation. Michael took a circumspect view of things, and whilst I didn't feel he presented as attractive a case as Cory, I was left wanting to dig into his book and understand the points he was making better - they felt like they had some depth which couldn't be easily explored in this format of discussion.

Nico was up last, and as one might expect from a Register journalist, deftly cut into a few of the earlier points made - particularly those by Cory. He laid into the inappropriate reuse of terminology: applying the label "open source" to things which are merely broken and which you want to make better, e.g. politics, is both unhelpful and does an injustice to the nuances of the original idea. Beneath my calm exterior, I transformed, Manimal-style, into a sea-lion and started yelping and clapping in an uncontrolledly excited fashion. There's a lot of hype around sharing and collaboration, said Nico, because the industries most affected by it are the media, publishing and software: we got this stuff first and have a tendency to talk it up, but many people live predominately in the physical world and have a different set of concerns. He then made what I thought was a comparitively weak point about open source being fundamentally contributed to by people who should either be doing their day jobs, or spending time with friends and families in the evenings. I found this unconvincing, given the resource that companies like IBM, Oracle, Intel and Firefox are putting into open source projects. Similarly, he talked about open source replicating what's already out there rather than doing anything new, and being poor for work that can't be readily tested like user interface. Cory made a good rebuttal later on this point: all UI is pretty awful with the exception of two or three (cough Apple cough). I'd extend Cory's point to apply to replication: very little software from any source is doing anything truly new, and I could think of a few examples of open source innovation (Quicksilver and the web itself spring to mind).

Nico talked about sharing through social media being a form of affirming ones existence publicly - "I share, therefore I am", and ended his speech with what I felt was a very interesting point: that historically the friction in communications gave ideas time to develop, and that losing this friction might be a Bad Thing. I wonder if, just as Dopplr digitally conjures serendipity, we might end up producing digital artifacts which deliberately introduce or simulate friction. The closest example I can think of to this is the GMail "undo sending" function - where Google essentially lies to you, telling you your email has been sent when it hasn't, such that you can then postpone sending with for a short window of time. It's cheap and dishonest (not traditionally the characteristics of good software), but it's all for your own good - and it's a tremendously useful feature.

The panel debated a little from this point, with a few questions from the audience (fewer than I'd have liked, compared to the number of sometimes-vague points the audience chose to make). My notes and memory get hazy here, but Cory talked about the breadth of blogging content dwarfing the size of the publishing industry; Michael snugly pointed out that "we get the technologies we deserve and incorporate them into existing patterns of behaviour"; and Nico talked about our love of open source perhaps stemming from a societal distrust of authority, and pointed out that most social services don't succeed in giving people the self-actualisation they seek in using them. Instead they're used for showing off, rather than contributing to a collaborative work.

Cory again delivered a few excellent (and valid) soundbites: we have a temptation to treat everything as a destination, not a journey - which is like judging sex by what's left on the sheets afterwards: writing fan fiction can be more fun than reading it. He then spoke about the wrenching pace of technical change, and the need for business models than can last 3 months and then be revised. I found this last point really quite naive - as if the only thing that affects a business is the technology that enables or assists it, and as if inertia doesn't also come from how said business presents itself to the structures around it (customers, competitors), and engages with them over time. I'm sure some businesses may be able to reinvent themselves rapidly, but I don't see how it's necessary for all of them to do this. Perhaps this is the moment I shall look back on in 20 years time and murmur wistfully, "That was when I got too old, and Stopped Getting It". I hope not.

Michael drew some analogies with Czech writers in the 70s and 80s who transmitted their ideas in novels wrapped up and concealed inside paper bags; with communism gone they had nothing to write about, and there's a nostalgia for this time in a world where information flows so freely and easily. He talked about universities who had started giving pupils iPods as educational tools stopping the experiment, as public spaces in schools turned from areas of conversation and discussion into the areas where individuals chose to cocoon themselves with music. And he gave some examples from his own experience around digital media: when they podcasted lectures at Sussex University, attendance dropped 20% without any evidence that the podcasts were being listened to.

Nico popped onto the innovation bus briefly, opining that bringing together the best of what's out there is not innovation (though Apple seem to have done a very good job of just that, and get showered with the I word as a result). Mindful of predictions of imminent (or even current) wrenching technological change, he pointed out that our great-grandparents lived through the move from agrarian to industrial civilisation - surely a much more profound change than the Internet has delivered? And he talked about British culture, in particular, not yet understanding the profundity of having canonical information available in one place.

I left the event early, pausing only to embarrass myself in a pathetic display of pedantry; but I ended up feeling that maybe the panelists were having discussions along different axes. No-one seemed to be arguing that the scale of collaboration hadn't gotten larger as a result of the Internet, the points from Nico seemed to be fundamentally "yes it has but it doesn't make as much difference as the media likes to say", Michael said "yes it has but maybe that's not all good", and Cory "yes, and you'd better hold on because it's going to be an amazing and scary ride".

Were I to be sat on this imaginary rollercoaster with one of the panelists, I'd choose Cory, because fairground rides are more fun in enthusiastic company - but I suspect that his enthusiasm might not be too comforting to someone like myself, who's scared shitless on rollercoasters (even metaphorical ones, sometimes). The opportunity for global collaboration seems to be there, but even the poster child for online collaboration, Wikipedia, doesn't seem to have taken advantage of this scale:

Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

By comparison, the Apollo moon landing programme - predating the Internet - employed 400,000 people. I wonder what it is that Wikipedia is not fit to hold the sandals of, and can't help but be a teensy bit excited.

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players..."

Last year we acquitted ourselves well at Over The Air, winning Best Overall Prototype for Octobastard, a many-limbed pile of technology we had loving nailed together in an all-night frenzy. Octobastard was many things, but immediately after the event I caught myself thinking that next time around we ought to try for something less obviously overengineered to the gills...

...so this year, I had strong urges for us to produce something not just clever, but beautiful. I wanted to do something huge and participative - mainly because I've been thinking a lot recently about helping people feel they're a meaningful part of something bigger. Smule do this, I think our Ghost Detector did it, Burning Man does it... it's a bit of a theme for me right now. And I read recently about David Byrne's audio installation at the RoundHouse, which filled me with wow.

So in the week before the event I was chatting to Thom and James (FPers who also attended OTA) and we got some ideas together. We work with applications every day at work and we know how tricky it can be to get a large number of people to install and run any piece of software on their phones in a short period of time, so we wanted to avoid that... which led us back to the fundamentals of radio. Could we do something along the lines of detecting radio signals (GSM, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) and perhaps turn them into something interesting? Yes, it turns out we could. In the end we settled on Bluetooth, because every phone has it and we can access it from software we write for phones - and Project Bluebell took form.

The idea was to turn the whole audience of the event into unwitting musicians, and have them create a Son et Lumiere with their very presence.

To do this, we wrote a piece of custom J2ME software which we installed onto 4 commodity phones (cheapo Sony Ericsson devices with PAYG SIMs and a fiver of credit apiece). We hid these phones in the corners of the auditorium. This software scanned for Bluetooth devices nearby, and recorded their names, as well as whether they were mobile phones or something else (e.g. laptops, which were quite common at the event, and which we wanted to ignore).

These four receivers then reported the phones near them to a server, every 10 seconds or so. The server, a web application run inside Google App Engine, received all these reports and stored them in a database. It then exposed a list of the most recently seen phones, together with their location (which receiver had picked them up), and exposed this through a simple API over HTTP.

Two pieces of software consumed data through this API: firstly, an audio processor which turned the Bluetooth names of phones into simple tunes (simply by analysing characters in the names and decomposing them into notes, note lengths and delays) and mixed the tunes together, using a library called JFugue.

And secondly, a visualiser written in Processing which took the same data and used it as the input for several games of Conway's Life, which each run simultaneously in slightly different shades of blue atop one another. Periodically this visualiser would refresh and dump some new cells into each game, depending on phones found since the last check - ensuring that the animation was continually running but seeded with real data coming from the room. We'd also occasionally show some of the device names we'd found, which we felt might help build more of a connection between folks on the floor and the light-show.

"...Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel..."

All the above was produced between 11am on the Friday and around 4:30am Saturday morning: you can do a lot with a small number of smart caffeinated geeks, particularly if you're comfortable with their becoming vaguely hysterical in the process. Who convinced us that the glowsticks were a hotline to Google? Why did we start extracting new software development methodologies from Deal or No Deal? What exactly *did* we do to that bear?

How would we improve the product? I'd personally like to see a stronger link between individuals and output - so that as a participant I can see myself and the difference I'm making. I think it's possible to work this out right now by looking and listening carefully, but it could be made more obvious.

I was surprised at how well the music side of it worked (generating anything that sounds like music from what is effectively random and varying data was one of the tougher challenges). I'd like to see if we could vary the music further and perhaps add samples. I'd also like to set this up and run it again somewhere, to see how it works over a long period of time with a smaller, faster-moving audience.

Adam Cohen-Rose has kindly put some video of the second demonstration online, where you can see the Life and hear a little of the music. I'm going to try and get a better quality video of the two together over the next few days, I'll post this up when I have it, perhaps with some audio for iTunes :)

We also had a team who were covering the event for the BBC get quite interested, and I understand we may get a mention in an upcoming episode of Click.

"Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion..."

We were absolutely maxi-chuffed when Project Bluebell was awarded Best of Show by the panel of judges. Thank you :) Only a year to prepare for the next one, now...

So, it's been a week since I got back from Mobile 2.0 - and therefore highly remiss that I've not written about it yet.

I really enjoyed both the Developer Day and the main event. The former seemed to be focused around mobile web - with widgets in particular getting a lot of prominence. Whilst I'm not convinced that widgets are the future of all mobile apps, it's an area where - until recently - I've let myself lag behind a little, so I got a lot out of the sessions. And one quote from the very beginning has stuck with me - Dan Appelquist remarking that applications are nowadays being consumed more like songs than software.

The main event was pretty decent. On both days some panel discussions had a tendency to get a bit angels-on-pinheads - the one where 4 people debated publicly about who was most "open", each using a slightly different definition of the much overused word, didn't really hold my attention. But the off-track talks really shone for me - Tom Raftery berating the industry for its at best token gestures towards environmentalism, and Regine Beatty and Atau Tanaka one-upping each other with wonderful examples of mobile frivolity. And outside of these, Ted Morgan of Skyhook talking about their business (200m location searches a day, vs 300m or so Google searches per day!) and Priya Prakash's talk on Beyond Free (an evolution of the last few sessions I've seen her do) were particularly memorable.

The venues (Barcelona Activa and ESADE) were both excellent (modulo the temperature of rooms in the former, which got quite stuffy). Now I've experienced the double-whammy of rock-solid wi-fi and power at every seat, I suspect I'm going to be a little spoilt.

More than this though, on a personal level I got a lot out of the event. It seemed to have a perfect mix of 50% familiar faces and 50% new (and friendly) ones - I'm not a natural networker, but felt very comfortable at the event. And in particular it was great to finally meet Dom and Francois of the W3C and Mike Rowehl - all of whom I've known for a while, but only in a virtual sense. It's nice to have that corrected :)

I did a couple of sessions; one on Mobile User Experience for Developer Day, which was well attended but missed the mark a little, I felt. I emphasised how we run UX alongside development at FP over and above the specifics of mobile UX, and whilst my audience seemed happy to engage on this, I think I could've either been clearer in the title for the session, or put more emphasis on tactics than on process.

The "play" panel I sat on at the very end of the event was a different matter: really good fun, and an utter privilege to talk about location-based gaming, ghost hunting, shitting and sex, generative music and digital rights issues with Professor Tanaka, Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, Akhil Monappa of Atlas Venture, and Michael Breidenbruecker - the lovable nutter behind Last.fm and RJDJ - all ably held together by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.

And again, on a personal note I had a very interesting chat with Ted Morgan at the post-event dinner, learning exactly what it's like to get into work one day and find a message from Steve Jobs on your voicemail :)

Thanks to Rudy, Dan, and all the organisers and behind-the-scenes folks who made it happen. I'm already looking forward to next year, though I think I might give myself an extra day in Barcelona to help recover from Sonar...

Mobile 2.0: Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability

greenmonk.net

Drivers for sustainability: climate change (we're all fucked) and the business case (sustainable companies tend to outperform their competitors).

ICT could reduce 15% CO2 emissions globally: through 1bn PCs, 1.2bn landlines, 1.4bn internet users, 4bn mobile users. So mobile is the target for this stuff.

Handset manufacturers are doing sod all: they all have "a green phone".

Many carriers don't mention sustainability initiatives: O2 have a reasonable site, Telefonica and 3 don't.

What are developers doing? Clearstandards have an iPhone app to calculate carbon footprint. 3rdWhale, MobiMonster also get a mention - the latter reduces energy usage of phone. But nothing really significant.

What if:

• Manufacturers made phones to last 6y not 6m? 60% of a phones carbon footprint comes from manufacture. Rent phones, don't buy them.
• Phones were made from biodegradables?
• USB chargers were standard?
• Operators switched to e-billing?
• Operators shared networks?
• Developers used mobile platform to build apps which mae a difference?
• Grid computing client apps were made for mobiles?

I wonder... How does mobile compare to PC - are phones implicitly more energy-conservative? And what specifically can developers do?

• Nice video interview with Mike Cohn, including some lovely advice on how to start getting your Scrum on. I'd thoroughly concur - try it and do it strictly for a reasonable period of time before you start to adapt it;
• I'm sure I'll have posted this before, but it's worth repeating - Jeff Patton's 12 best practices for UX in an agile environment;
• Google Bets On Big 5 - old news as this dates back to last month, but I'm reviewing it after watching the Google IO Keynote video. Very interesting indeed, but I'd take issue with their presenting this technology as "all there" - a few experiments on Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the mac seem to show that some bits are present and correct on each, others lacking. Still, very exciting stuff whatever...
• Wave. Wow, double-wow for the demo of live translation at the end.
• A study on the effectiveness of using personas in product design. Really nice to have some evidence for this stuff, though the study involved giving participants pre-prepared personas. My take would be that personas are a useful tool when based on research, but as a catalysed form of assumptions about a target audience, they can be dangerous.
• Another study, on how price affects perception.
• Interesting presentation on digital inclusion in the UK, and preconceptions we may have. "It's a case of social equity: 93% of people under 70 who have a degree are online".

I've put the slides from my talk at Mobile Web Summit 2.0 online - they're here, if you're after them.

My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty.

We had fun in the panel session afterwards too, where I got to trot out a theory I've been nurturing around mobile advertising: on the web, the aim of advertising has been to drive users to useful web services, where they can get something useful done. On mobile, applications are a more appropriate destination for advertising.

Why? Mobile web sites tend to be more limited. There are a few really "sticky" ones (itsMy and Flirtomatic, I'm looking at you), but most destinations for mobile advertising are ad-supporting microsites with little long-term value for a visitor. As such, applications are a more natural and worthwhile destination for mobile advertising: give your prospective customers something genuinely useful they can carry with themselves and see value from again and again, rather than expecting them to return to a microsite.

If you're sceptical, I'd encourage you to look at iPhone app store statistics - the average free app is being run 80 times. This might not mean it's a great place to run advertising, but I'll wager that's roughly 80 times more traffic than most mobile microsites get...