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mFabrik Blog is about mobile and web software development, open source and Linux. We tell exciting tales where business, technology, web and mobile convergence.

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There’s buyers out there but do you want to sell?

Posted on April 29, 2010

After my lunch I usually browse few news sites, read some reports etc. while waiting the consumed food to settle down before getting back to work. This time I grabbed short report prepared by Gigaom with the title Why the Mobile Web (Not Just Apps) Is Critical for Retailers. I fully agree already with the report as the title says it all… met so many clients who are just asking for apps for this and that, somehow blinded by the media which has been writing quite much about the apps…

Well, mostly clients has been asking for iPhone applications… well, lets see… here, in this small country (Finland) is some 6 million mobile phone numbers (5,3 million people but quite a few have two phones, one for work, one for home, and then all those “sticks” providing 3G wireless lan for laptops). And quite much less than 100.000 iPhone’s… and Nokia’s market share here is between 80-90%… and any iPhone application for the Finnish market will quite easily climb up to Top10 download list at App Store if just downloaded 50 times per week… woo hoo!.. sure, lets make app for iPhone first before anything else…

How about taking care of basic things first? Like, serving “all” possible consumers and buyers first, via mobile web? Hmm.. why? Well, that report I did read had few interesting numbers which should raise anybody‘s and everybody‘s interest: eBay is looking for $1.5 BILLION in mobile sales this year (last year $600 million). Amazon’s mobile site had 3.5 BILLION visits during the first nine months last year… yeah, who cares… lets make that iPhone app first…

Interested to hear more? Or even make mobile internet, mobile commerce too, reality? Contact us and lets get yourself and your company into mobile age!

Beating ash problems with mobile technology

Posted on April 20, 2010

I guess everyone, at least in Europe, has been touched one way or another by this hot volcano in Iceland. People stranded in foreign cities, trying to find their way back to home and work. Even this damages economy, especially airlines’, a lot, it has been great to see how people are willing to help others, share information, arranging group transportations, even providing accommodation to foreign people. That’s simply great! And quite much those activities have been arranged by using technology and different services smart way, especially Social Networking services like Facebook.

But could be better…

This morning I was reading daily newspaper, those articles about current situation, different stories how people has gotten back home and other challenges in the world because of Eyjafjöll volcano and it farting lava and ash up to the sky. One piece in one article catched my eye: one big plane did fly back to Europe from USA just half-full – or should we say half-empty? – because airline did not reach waiting passengers in time, even there was hundreds of them waiting… airline representatives were calling each waiting passenger by phone, with a simple message: “If you wanna fly, get your ass to airport now!” (note: not direct quote..).

It is understandable that they called each passenger as then airline was able to control how many will be taken into that flight, and no fear ending up to situation – like if using just simple one way text (SMS) messaging service informing about the flight – where check in would be full of angry passengers, all wanting to catch the flight but can’t because plane could not carry everyone.

This could be done smarter, very simple, way, though… Example, by using our Sales Activator (or any similar solution), this airline could have sent one text message (SMS) to every waiting passenger, providing them easy and simple way to reply if they can or can’t make the flight, and still controlling the number of passenger allowed to the flight. Result would been better customer service, less costs and more passengers on the flight back home… and, oh, more happy families… :)

Contact us for further material about Sales Activator and other business supporting mobile solutions.

Looking for free icons?

Posted on April 17, 2010
Tags: , , ,

Check out this Smashing Magazine article with 50 free icons set.

Then there is 14 free mobile application icon set by Speckyboy design magazine.

Ps. Please if you have any good free icon set tips share them in the comments

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How to split() strings of indefined item count to Python variables elegantly?

Posted on April 17, 2010

A common problem for  (space) separated string parsing is that there are a number of fixed items followed by some amount of optional items. You want to extract parsed values to Python variables and initialize optional values with None if they are missing.

E.g. we have option format description string with 2 or 3 items value1 value2 [optional value]

s = "foo bar" # This is a valid example option string
s2 = "foo bar optional" # This is also, with one optional item

Usually we’d like to parse this so that non-existing options are set to None. Traditonally one does Python code like below:

# Try get extration and deletion
parts = s.split(" ")
value1 = parts[0]
value2 = parts[1]
if len(parts) >= 3:
    optional_value = parts[2]
else:
    optionanl_value = None

However, this looks little bit ugly, considering  if there would always be just two options one could write:

value1, value2 = s.split(" ")

When the number of optional options grow, the boiler-plate code starts annoy greatly.

I have been thinking how to write a split() code to parse options with non-existing items to be set None. Below is my approach for a string with total of 4 options of which any number can be optional.

parts = s.split(" ", 4) # Will raise exception if too many options 
parts += [None] * (4 - len(parts)) # Assume we can have max. 4 items. Fill in missing entries with None.
value1, value2, optional_value, optional_value2 = parts

Any ideas for something more elegant?

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