Tag: Mobile

Mobile Presentation Posted

After a process that took far too long, I’ve finally managed to publish my slides from last week’s mobile presentation.

The big news out of the event was the announcement of Mobile Portland, a new user group focused on mobile development. We’re currently planning our first meeting for March. Sign up now receive details on our first meeting.

Why Posting Presentation Files is Difficult

At last week’s talk at Portland Web Innovators, I promised to post the slides on Cloud Four’s blog. It seemed like a simple promise at the time, but boy has it turned out to be an ordeal.

  • My slides don’t make sense without my narrative — My slides are typically photographs or illustrations that augment the story that I’m telling instead of bullet points that I’m reading aloud. This makes for more dynamic presentations and fits my belief that my job is to tell a compelling story by adding a visual and hopefully an emotional component to the narrative.

    Unfortunately, a slide that has a picture of a wall covered in post-it notes and a title that says, “And she married me anyways” doesn’t make a lot of sense to those who weren’t at the presentation.

  • To add context to the slides, you need to add presenter’s notes or audio — Unless you created presenter’s notes from the beginning that can be digested by other people, at the very least you will need to go back to the slides and edit them all to add presenter notes. If you choose to record audio, you have to find the software to do this and learn how to record and compress the audio correctly.
     
  • Some slides have to be edited to simplify their transitions — I also found that I had to edit some slides that had automatic or timed transitions to no longer have those transitions because I would no longer control the timing of the slides.
     
  • No good solution for posting presenter’s notes online — My first choice was to add presenter notes. In fact, I added presenter notes to every slide before I realized that the services for uploading slides and embedding them in other sites didn’t support presenter notes very well. There appears to be no way to see the presenter notes if you embed a viewer like Slideshare into your site.

    I ended up copying all of my presenter notes (including the onerous task of converting non-ascii quotes which Slideshare wasn’t escaping correctly) into comments on each slide. I then added a large note on the first slide instructing viewers on how to view the slides.

    Ultimately, I was disappointed in this solution because if I embed the slides into Cloud Four’s blog, the presenter notes won’t show up.

  • Recording audio isn’t fun — Actually, I’m sure it is for people who do it more often than I do, but I had several aborted attempts including one complete run that didn’t have enough volume.

    The lessons here are that Garage Band is much easier to use than Audacity, that I can’t listen to my own voice for any length of time so I didn’t try to edit the audio at all, and that 3/4 quarters of the way through the audio I realized that I had said that things were going to “radically change” far too many times (yet another reason why I *will not* be listening to the audio again).
     

  • Slideshare has been processing my audio for almost 24 hours now — The final hold up on posting the slides appears to be problem with Slideshare that is preventing me from uploading the audio file successfully. I’ve submitted a few support tickets, but have no idea when it will be resolved.

Throughout this process, I’ve found myself thinking, “This shouldn’t be this hard.” But the reality is that the type of presentation that is compelling live is very different than one that can be comprehended by someone reading online. Any way you slice it, it takes a lot of work to repurpose your slides for online posting.

So for those who are waiting for the slides to be posted, I apologize. They are truly on their way. And believe me, I want them posted as soon as possible. :-)

Carriers and Bit Pipes

One of the more interesting quotes from last week’s Mobile Congress came from Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin who cautioned mobile carriers that “we must not allow ourselves to become bit-pipes and let somebody else do the services work.”

I’ve been waiting for one of the carriers to say something like this. I’m certain that carriers will be conflicted in the coming months as they realize that there is a lot of revenue to be made from data services, but to capture this money, they give up control to companies like Apple, Google and Nokia.

In response to Sarin’s comments, Ajit Jaokar has a great post comparing mobile carriers to the builders of the silk road. In it, he writes:

But by common consensus, the company everyone wanted to meet was not an Operator – It was Apple. Like it or not – Google, Apple, Nokia and others drive the agenda today – and already with the launch of iPhone – the Operator is already a bit pipe. There may be no going back since iTunes is the billing mechanism for iPhone.

The truth is that mobile carriers are going to be bit pipes. The transition has already started. I expect to see a lot of carriers vacillate between opening their networks in order to provide more data services that consumers want and fighting the changes to the market that will mean that their importance is diminished.

Mobile Updates Part I

Some significant mobile updates over the past few weeks:

I’m a Zero

I got very excited today over the news via Truemors that Google is going to start offering location-based services using cell towers to determine the location.

According to the news reports, you press zero on your mobile phone while using Google Maps to find your approximate location using cell towers. The iPhone lacks GPS so this new service sounds like a winner.

Except you can’t press zero on your iPhone. There is no zero key to press. There are no keys at all on the iPhone.

Here is where my foolishness comes in. I decided to use Google Maps on my iPhone and search for zero. Amazingly, it worked. It put a dot on the map just a few blocks from my house.

I couldn’t wait to share my discovery with my coworkers. It was only when one of them said searching for zero returned a location in South Carolina that I realized the error.

Turns out there is a business near our house with the name “0 1 All Day 24 Hour 1 Locksmith.” Searching for zero didn’t find my current location. My current location just happens to be near the top result starting with a zero.

And that’s how I ended up being today’s zero.

Mirroring the Past

“There was a day when Web development was in a sad state of affairs. The majority of developers laughed at JavaScript, and were focusing on a killer new server-side web framework, or a new ORM library. The consensus was that that browser was dumb. The modern TN3270 if you will…

…We finally feel that the time has come for mobile phones to be the major device that users have for accessing their data and getting things done. You only have to travel around the world to see that already happening. Now, with the iPhone, a decent Java system, and more, we see the toolkits that will allow developers to build fantastic applications on the phone.”

Source: Devphone.com

What’s Next: Cloud Four

As many of you may know, I recently left my job of over seven years. In today’s world, it is an amazing thing to stay find a place to work that you believe in and feel passionate about. The first two years I worked at Kavi, I had two bad days. Who else can say that?

I have been incredibly blessed during my time at Kavi. I’m very proud of what the company has become, of the impact it has in the world (just try to buy a computer that doesn’t include a standard being developed on Kavi’s servers), and of the direction the company is headed. I have such admiration, respect, and affection for the people I worked with.

And like most things that have happened since I found Kavi, even my departure has been a good thing. We’re leaving on amicable terms. Kavi has been very supportive of our new venture, and we’re already working together on projects.

So what’s next? Three of my co-workers and I have formed a new company called Cloud Four. We’re going to continue to do web site development and expand our services into areas of interest like performance, analytics, and mobile devices.

I’ll have much more to talk about regarding Cloud Four soon. :-)

gPhone = Open Handset Alliance

The gPhone isn’t a Google phone. Instead, it is the formation of an alliance to develop an open platform for mobile devices.

The new consortium is called the Open Handset Alliance. The Alliance is formed around the Android platform that Google has contributed to the Alliance. Andy Rubin, Google’s Director of Mobile Platforms, describes Android as:

The first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.

If this is true–and the devil is in the definition of “open” as it always is–this could be a substantial development for mobile devices.

UPDATE: According the Open Handset Alliance FAQs, the platform will be released under Apache v2 Open Source License. The code will have a publicly accessible repository. It sounds very open thus far.

Last summer at Web Visions, I had an extended conversation with Kinan Sweidan of Ximda who had presented on determining location using mobile devices. During the conversation, Kinan talked about how difficult it was to develop on mobile devices.

The primary problem seemed to be carriers who don’t see their phones as a platform for other development. Handset manufacturers are beholden to the carriers because their hardware and software are useless if the companies like Verizon and AT&T decide not to allow the phone on their network.

The economics also favor the carriers because the cost of developing a phone is higher than most consumers will pay which is why the cost of the hardware is often underwritten by signing contracts that lock in services. Apple is rumored to receive another $432 from AT&T for every iPhone that is sells.

With this as context, it is possible to see why the Open Handset Alliance could be a game changer:

  1. The price of developing new hardware will presumably decrease because of an open and shared development of the OS. A decrease in handset costs will loosen the hold carriers have on phone manufacturers by decreasing the need for underwriting of phone costs. This does not decrease their stranglehold on their networks. Legislation would be required for change that dynamic.
  2. The combination of Android and Apple’s recent decision to release an SDK may mark a turning point in the understanding that the value of mobile devices will increase as they open up to outside developers.

If the second point has actually come to pass–if in the last few months the mobile industry has woken up to the realization that their future is dependent on becoming a platform for a wide variety of developers–then things will get very interesting very quickly.

The possibilities for mobile devices are astounding. 2008 is shaping up to be a very big year for mobile.