People are changing their habits faster than companies believe

Few weeks of my summer vacation are done, few more to be spent in August. And ofcourse, as any sensible (?) human being does, tried to stay away from computer as much as possible. But was not able to help myself, because of my prefession, interests and so on, so there was need to get online, still. To check emails, news, communicate with the people. All those things I did with my mobile phone, instead of computer.

While reading the news last week’s Monday, I turned into one interesting one at Kauppalehti’s site. About those problems Iceland’s ash cloud caused last April (Beating ash problems with mobile technology). Seems that this specific event has been real driver for people to use mobile services here in Finland. As Kauppalehti wrote, based on TNS Gallup’s research, mobile internet use in Finland has double during the first half of this year. And especially during the “ash problems” the use of mobile internet and mobile applications peaked, over all usage development has been far much more faster than anybody could have expected.

It will be interesting to see how fast companies can react, when the vacations are over… can and will they serve their customers, that big audience who’s willing to use mobile phones with network based services. Some of them will, but about those things we will tell you later on when we can …

National mobile site statistics are hard to find

Actually, seems that hardly exist at all..

I spent about an hour or so trying to find information and statistics about different countries’ mobile sites (popularity, number of visitors and impressions etc.) but damn hard to find anything outside some random research reports and press releases.

Few weeks ago TNS Gallup included mobile site stats as part of their publicly available TNS Metrix service (choose “Mobiilisivustot” from the “Kategoria:” at the top of the table). Good move and service, especially for advertisers, except there’s currently just five (5) sites measured..

Alexa, that nice source for information of different sites (categories, countries etc.) and their popularity, has no mobile category at all..

comScore and GSM Association has jointly developed and launched GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) service in UK. Not free of charge service, though..

My research did lead into simple conclusion: there’s no actual up to date data available of how much, and what, mobile sites are used, visited and so on. Ofcourse all (or at least should have?..) site owners have their own statistics but that data is not available publicly. So, for many ad agencies and/or media agencies its hard to sell any idea of mobile advertising as they can’t plan where to advertise or can’t have any exact information needed for planning. Or, ofcourse they do have some data and information which is.. well.. quite often outdated, lent from some company’s marketing & sales slides or some other bs..

Oh well, this mobile internet world is still taking it’s baby steps…

Apple MobileMe Free Trial – IT’S A TRAP

Watch out for Apple’s MobileMe service. I wouldn’t have believed Apple uses so cheap business tactics as they advertise “Free Trial” but end up charging your credit card for 79 €.

A credit card is required to start your free trial. After your trial ends, your card will be charged an annual subscription fee of €79.00*. Don’t worry, to avoid these charges, you can cancel your subscription online at any time during the trial.

Bastards! Don’t go for MobileMe. YOU SHOULD WORRY.

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

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

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.

Why C# / Javascript will be allowed and Flash won’t be as App Store programming language

All the Flash developers of the world wet their pants on 8th April 2010 when Apple announced that Flash based application won’t be approved in the Apple’s App Store. This essentially destroyed the easy opportunity to monetize existing Flash development skills and the huge Adobe expansion potential into mobile markets, pissing a lot of folks who had bet on Adobe’s technology, leading developers’ rage on Internet forums.  Bad news for those who had already building iPhone apps on Flash CS5 even before it was released…

Unfortunately it was not only Adobe and Flash who got in the line of fire: popular frameworks like Appcelerator, Unity 3D and Monotouch apps are theoretically excluded to enter App Store by the new developer agreement which states that the original source code of the application must be C, C++, Objective-C or WebKit/Javascript.

I belive Apple does not hate certain programming languages. Apple does not either want to force you to use their development tools. Only by understanding what Apple really meant with the infamous 3.3.1  clause in the developer agreement, we can start building a bridge to get MonoTouch et. al. to be Apple’s favorites again.

History of Flash (Lite)

Adobe (Macromedia) and Flash have been into mobile business far before iPhone was published. The thing is called Flash Lite run-time. It runs on billions of phones.

The problem of Flash Lite is that it does not very well integrate with its host environment. It does not even have so simple user interface component as a “menu” out of the box. Which means that every developer must create their own menu implementation. Which means that there exist hundreds of shitty Flash Lite menu implementations out there, each behaving differently and each not resembling the native menu component. This is not a very nice thing if you consider the user experience of the application and iPhone  is all about user experience. Note that this is not so big thing for games, as games have radically different user experience anyway.

Flash does not communicate with its host platform either. You wouldn’t be able to access native API features even if you fully controlled the deployment environment of Flash application, as Flash is a binary blob into which you cannot plug-in more parts. There even exists a product for mobile Flash whose sole purpose is circumvent the limitations of  Flash by using a localhost TCP/IP socket connection and a native server application. If developers choose Flash they choose to lock themselves into Flash and what Adobe gives for them.

This crippling of your platform potential with Flash is not limited to Flash Lite and mobile. I have personal experiences from a project done with Adobe Air for Windows. We wisely chose Adobe Air as a desktop application development platform, because it would guarantee the future portability of our code. However, this nice idea did not really interest in the point when we noticed that we e.g. couldn’t control how File Open dialogs behave (file mask, remember start folder, etc.), severely reducing the user experience of the application.

So, Steve Jobs definitely is on something when he says “intermediary translation or compatibility layer” is bad for your platform.

Note that the same limitation concerns Java ME also. Desktop Java has JNI interface for building extensions, but mobile Java doesn’t.

How other frameworks differ from Flash

Let’s take a MonoTouch for example. MonoTouch is Novell’s open source Mono project based development tool which allows you to create iPhone applications in C# language. Compared to Objective C, development using MonoTouch  has several advantages for certain audience: you don’t need to learn new programming language, C# is closer to traditional Java/C++ languages than Objective-C, you can leverage the full potential of existing C# ecosystem out there, the standard library has more functionality and of course, it is easier to port the core of the application from a platform to another.

Note that the porting part concerns core i.e. application logic only. MonoTouch does not try to separate you from Apple’s platform. It does not reinvent platform services or user interface building blocks, or force something like Windows user interface into your shiny iPhone. In fact, MonoTouch seamlessly integrates with Apple’s platform. You even need to use Apple’s own Interface Builder tool to create user interfaces, which will be exposed to MonoTouch’s C# code. Binding with native API is breeze: below ten lines of code guaranteeing that whenever Apple releases a new platform feature it will be instantly available for all MonoTouch developers.

MonoTouch embraces the platform. You can pick Objective C or C# depending on taste. The resulting source code is similar in idea, different in syntax. There is no “compatibility layer” so to say. Not even technically, as C# is compiled to native ARM binary. There is no way how a person could distinguish a MonoTouch application from an application build using Objective-C.

Open source philosophy and platforms

Appcelerator, PhoneGap and other open source / Javascript frameworks are also protected from Apple’s wrath. They are open source which means that you can tap the full potential Apple’s development platform as long as someones writes a little binding code. Also, they try to use native look and feel and components as much as possible, just to make the applications slick. The frameworks do not have conflicting interest with Apple; the frameworks provide portability to a certain point, but they do this respecting their master.

Flash does not enjoy this freedom; developers can’t change Flash or venture outside Flash’s sandbox.

The Future

There is no point of technically counter App Store’s developer agreement, like saying “hey I’ll just compile all my Flash source code to C so it is C code.” It’s Apple’s game. Apple can do anything they wish and they can also change the developer agreement. So when Apple sees something happening in its ecosystem which might damage it, it simply pulls the rug under your feet again. But Apple can also change the agreement in a positive way. PhoneGap has already went through process of becoming App Store approved framework once. I hope that development communities will not burn its bridges with Apple, but try to communicate this matter with a meaningful manner and come to a development agreement resolution based on ideas given in this blog post. Below is my proposition (IANAL. It is left to the reader to come up with something smarter):

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be written using Apple’s guidelines and best practices to express Apple’s intend how the application should behave.

iPhone is not a monopoly. You are free to build and run your Flash application on a device like N900 on any day and sell it in Nokia’s OVI store. If this is a problem for your business then maybe you should reconsider your business model to be less iPhone centric and promote heterogenicity of mobile platforms and application stores.

Until Flash is fixed so that you can mix-in native code, instead of it being a barrier between the expression and the hosting platform, I find it unlikely any company based their reputation around the user experience would allow Flash on their platform.

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Meet mFabrik @ Internet Expo 2010 Helsinki

If you can’t see the video above, please go to mfabrik.fi.

mFabrik will participate in INTERNET EXPO which is the biggest “Internet fair event” in Finland. Topics include e.g. social media, sematic web and IT security. Many major Internet companies and their products will be present.

Our expo representatives, as in the video above, will gladly help you to tell about mobile and CMS solutions.

You can get free tickets using the code provided on mfabrik.fi page.

Now hiring (Developer, Helsinki)

We are looking for a new developer to join our production team in Helsinki, Finland. Check out the details at our web site:

http://mfabrik.com/about-us/jobs/developer-helsinki

Mobile browser wars: Nokia microB vs. Firefox Fennec

Begun, this mobile browser war, has. When mobile internet is growing 8x faster than desktop internet everyone wants to have a share of it. In the core of this fight is the mobile browser – the doorway to the mobile internet.

Usually phone comes with a browser from the phone manufacturer: Safari ships with iPhone, Android ships with WebKit based browser and Maemo comes with Nokia microB. Besides the default browser, open platforms have seen third party browsers created for them: Opera Mini has 30 million users and several browsers have been created for Symbian platforms. (Note that iPhone is not really open platform regarding this as Apple developer terms specifically forbid creating alternative  browser engines for their Safari – all iPhone “browsers” are just the same Safari with new toppings).

Now Mozilla foundation is releasing Firefox Fennec (RC1 version is available  for Nokia N900), touted as the most innovative mobile browser this far. New user interface ideas, desktop syncronization and vibrant add-on community are something yet to be seen for mobile browsers. Mozilla did an amazing thing with Firefox when it actually managed to push Internet experience forward and compete against Microsoft’s bundled Internet Explorer with sheer quality. Can Mozilla repeat the same thing it did for desktop browsing for mobile browsing too?

Is Fennec good? I installed the release candidate and conducted some tests by visiting on popular sites. It is especially fruitful to compare Fennec against Nokia’s own microB browser as they both are based on the same Gecko rendering engine beneath the hood.

The differences of the browsers are, actually surprisingly, not limited to branding and user interface shell. Fennec is portable browser – Mozilla hopes to run Fennec on other mobile platforms beside Maemo in the future. Fennec user interface is based on Mozilla’s XUL library and you can actually run Fennec on your desktop computer too. Nokia’s interest, on the other hand, is have an optimized browser for their own mobile phones: microB user interface is using native Maemo user interface components.

Below are some aspects of the browsers compared against each other.

Start up time

• microB: instant
• Fennec: About ten seconds (warm start-up is little bit faster, but it is still slooooow….)

This is a pain for Fennec. Loading all that XUL Javascript  needed to run Fennec is just too much. You really don’t want to start Fennec for a quick browsing session, unless you have the patience of a cow. I am not sure whether N900 keeps microB loaded on the background all the time or what’s causing the difference.

User interface

This is really where Fennec shines. Nokia enjoys some reputation of being a boring engineer house with little innovation left to stir. After learning the trick of left and right sweep, which is cleverly demostrated on the start page, Fennec user interface instantly feels intuitive. microB, on the other hand, uses somehow clumsy “bottom right corner full-screen button” to access buttons and left-right sweep is not very well thought. For example, switching a tab/browser window takes three “clicks” on microB (show menu – switch application – choose next browser window) when Fennec does it with one sweep and click. Also, backward navigation is much more intuitive on Fennec and takes too many gestures on microB.

Both browsers have search integrated to the navigation bar. Fennec start screen is more clever, showing the history and shortcuts, while microB shows only the bookmarks.  Fennec navigation bar also is a combination of title and navigation bar, saving the precious screen estate on small physical form factor. Fennec zooms to text fields automatically when you start to input text into them and also have soft “tab keys” to navigate to next and previous input field.

Page reading and speed

On sites with above average layout complexity, Fennec is unbearable slow compared to microB, up to the point the browser is next to unusable in its current incarnation. As they both use the same rendering engine, I have hard time to understand how microB manages even the heaviest dynamic pages (Facebook profile page) when Fennec becomes unusable even on a moderate complex page (slashdot.org).

The thing with Fennec is that for some of the the time it does not register your interaction and does not have any indicator showing if it is responding – it has grinded to halt, little bit like desktop computer when swapping.  And even when Fennec is responding the scrolling of the page refreshment is sluggish compared to microB. This makes the page reading experience unusable. A normal user won’t stand 1-3 second frequent responsivity pauses or page movement which cannot be controlled.

microB must do the rendering somehow different  - is it hardware acceleration on font rendering, smarter management of images or some other trick?. However, until Fennec reaches the smoothiness of microB, there is no way I would switch to Fennec over microB.

(Note: You can press CTRL-Backspace from N900 keyboard to force application switch if you cannot exit from halted Fennec otherwise)

Mobile browsing

Though N900 has 800 pixel wide screen, it is still a mobile phone. Small physical size, low bandwidth with high latency and  limited CPU power might make you to pick a mobile internet version of the site when it is available. However, since the screen has exceptional high Dots-Per-Inch value, this poses a problem for rendering sites with the default font sizes.

Fennec does not seem to have a shortcut for setting a large text size. This is something one would hope to see on such high DPI device as the most of the time default web site fonts are too small to be usable. Also, Fennec does not use the shoulder plus and minus volume buttons for zooming – microB does it and it is very natural place for this function.

Fennec seems to have some difficulties with mobile site rendering: for example touch.facebook.com and yle.mobi are not scaled to full width. Instead a narrow colum of 1/3 screen width is displayed.

Bugginess

microB is very solid piece of software. It crashes more rarely than Safari on iPhone (might this be because of more memory – low memory conditions seem to be a normal crashing condition for Safari?).  Fennec is still in its first version and have some issues.

(Note: I managed to get Fennec to zombie state – I had to go to terminal and type killall fennec command to make the browser become launchable again).

Sites tested

Slashdot.org

Geek discussion site

microB: no problems

Fennec: slow, frequent pauses, not smooth scrolling

slashdot.org/palm

Very simple mobile version of the above.

microB:  Font too small

Fennec: Scales correctly

Facebook.com

High profile social networking site

microB: Sometimes little slow, but seems to work perfectly

Fennec: Unusable slow

touch.facebook.com

microB: Perfect (at least when scaling font up a little)

Fennec: Does not scale correctly (default scale uses only 1/3 of screen width, double click zooming scales too much)

yle.fi

Finnish national broadcasting company site

microB: Ok. Readable and usable with text size large.

Fennec: Ok. The default view is navigable, but not readable. You need to double-click zoom to read the text (Fennec doesn’t seem to have text size large option)-

yle.mobi

The mobile version of above.

microB: Perfect with text size large, ok otherwise (need to double click to zoom and then click to choose a link to follow).

Fennec: Ok – font size too small

GMail HTML version

The default Javascript version of GMail is too heavy for both the browsers. GMail still provides “Basic HTML” view as the fallback for devices with less CPU power and network bandwidth.

microB: Ok – you can do some basic emailing

Fennec:  Ok. Does not seem to be affected by as much of “slugginess” as other sites are (might the slugginess be a Javascript issue?)

Youtube.com

The web version of flash based video sharing site.

microB: Plays Flash movies ok – smooth scrolling even whilst a Flash movie is playing

Fennec: Frequent grinds to halt, sluggish, unusable. Manages to open Flash video, though.

m.google.com/youtube

The mobile version of above.

microB: Youtube claims the browser is unsuppoted

Fennec: Cannot enter the site – shows only the page of Youtube Mobile instructions

twitter.com  (web site)

microB: Perfect

Fennec: Ok. Sluggish when opening new pages, but still usable. Fennec start view ships with Twitter button, so one might assume this site is well tested for Fennec.

m.twitter.com

The mobile site of above.

microB: Ok – the default font size too small, but when settings text size large works well

Fennec: Ok – the default font size too small. Double click zoom does not work well on the twit feed, making reading difficult.

plone.org

A community site with relatively simple layout.

microB: Ok – minor rendering errors

Fennec: Ok – minor rendering errors

iltalehti.fi

Finnish tabloid web site with lots of images.

microB:  Ok

Fennec: Grinds to halt, unusable slow

Summary

Though having nice promise of innovation, the advise for Fennec development team would be “back to the basics”. The slugginess and response times of Fennec are such an issue that one would not yet consider it as an real alternative for Nokia’s default microB browser.

With Fennec’s user interface and microB’s speed one could have a near perfect mobile browser. Depending what kind of future co-operation Nokia and Mozilla foundation will have, we might live to see it.

It will be damn big, and damn fast…

Phew… been going thru hundreds of pages just last week released The Mobile Internet Report by Morgan Stanley. Interesting statistics and conclusions to read. I fully agree how those wise people at Morgan Stanley summarized the findings of their research:

Mobile Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will
Be Bigger Than Most Think –
5 Trends Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video +
VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices)

Regarding pace of change, we believe more users will
likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than
desktop PCs within 5 years

And seems to happen as it did with that “Desktop Internet”… driving force is the users and many (most?) of the companies do not realize that until they do not have any possibilities than to move “into” mobile internet. Sweet spot has reached already in Europe, next year world wide but… yeah… companies will wake up, too.. yet again late….

Evangelism, we need a bit that… and that will be done!