Mobile Citizen Reporter

An interesting application genre seems to be emerging for mobile terminals: applications for submitting news data directly from smartphones to media houses' databases. Company called Fromdistance has its own solution in two flavors: for professionals and citizens. This solution includes a free smartphone client and a mediator server that delivers content to different publishers in the format they want. Citizen version seems to be in use in Finland, it would be nice to hear some statistics about the usage: how many users there are and how media houses feel about "mobile citizen reporters".

Nokia is creating their own application in a collaboration with Reuters; their solution seems to be targeted more to professional reporters, but they believe it is also usable at executive level.

//Harri

Application inventory service

This is again a new entry under the growing topic

Services that somebody should implement...

If you are a smartphone user, count how many 3rd party applications you have installed to your device? For my device the count was 35 (and growing). How do you keep those applications up-to-date? How do you know that there is an update available? How do you find new applications from all the time increasing catalog?

What about this: a (community maintained?) service where publishers can upload their applications for free delivery. Solution consists of a smartphone inventory client and a website for delivering applications and for providing suggestions for users. Smartphone application can send an anonymous list of user's applications and their versions to the server, which then compares reported application versions to its database. If versions differ, user is prompted whether an update is wanted or not. Publishers can upload their new application versions to the service free-of-charge.

Benefits for users

• no need to manually check from different sites if there is a new application version available for some installed application
• application recommendations based on user's current application list ("users who have installed application X have often installed application Y")

Benefits for developers

• no need to implement an in-house solution for automatic application updates
• good and cheap channel to deliver applications

Benefits for service owner

• Business. Sell ads to service and put ads to inventory client. Ads can be targeted based on user's location, language, installed applications, terminal model etc.

Whoever runs this service might want to affiliate with licensing solution providers so that also commercial applications could be easily delivered through this service. When user buys a license for application that has been downloaded from this service, developer/license provider pays a small fee.

Footnote

If you want to see a good implementation how an application can update itself, take a look at my favorite application, Nokia Sports Tracker.

//Harri

Kick start to mobile development

I've got some happy news for all the companies with cool solutions wanting to target Nokia's devices. Nokia has a nice developer program called "Launchpad" with great membership benefits, including free copy of a developer tool, 50% discount for additional developer tool licenses and access to the Nokia's famous "Discounted Devices Program" to buy discounted devices for development and testing purposes. Full listing of membership benefits is available from Launchpad website. All this is available for your company with annual fee of 800 euros; this is a good deal, you can easily cover the membership fee with the membership benefits.

One more thing

Launchpad offers benefits to its members, I offer benefits to my readers.
When you register your company to launchpad and use 

discount code "mobilitics" 

you will get a nice 25% discount and the membership is yours with 600 euros. Here is the membership application form, just remember to enter the right discount code when prompted to do so.

//Harri

Reaching out from the box

In December 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review Coyne et.al. present a methodology how to generate new ideas in familiar settings. In short the idea is that instead of trying to think "outside-the-box" people should think "inside-the-box" - just refine the box so that you get fresh and structured ideas. In the paper they give some questions that you can ask to make a product better and find new ideas how to improve it. Here are two examples of questions you can ask:

• Which customer uses our product in the most unusual way?
• Who uses our product in ways not expected?

This article came to my mind when I today read Nokia's latest press release that included statistics how phone sharing is emerging. Quote from the release:

More than 50% of respondents in India, Pakistan and nearly 30% in Vietnam indicate that they share, or would share, their mobile phone with family or friends - a figure which contrasts consumer behaviour in more mature markets.

In western countries mobile phone is one of the most personal products, from some study I found a result that if a british teenager forgets his home keys, that's not a problem and he will not return to take those. If he forgets his mobile phone, he will immediately return home and pick the phone.

What all this has to do with HBR'a article referred above? According to Nokia there is a huge number of people wanting to use mobile phones in such a way that (my guess) is unexpected from the network operator's and device manufacturer's point of view. In the press release Nokia tells that they have some innovations that take into account users' need to share the terminal but I'm sure that both terminal manufacturers and network operators could practice some structured "inside-a-new-box" thinking here. Perhaps start with the questions from above?

//Harri

Nokia phone and Apple Leopard

Some time ago my wife bought a MacBook (very nice device indeed!) and this weekend I tried to enable bluetooth modem connection between that and her Nokia E90 phone. I found that Nokia has a dedicated page for Apple support and even better, a tutorial how to use mobile phone as a modem. I have no idea what is wrong (maybe tutorial was for older MacOS version?), but I wasn't able to create modem connection with the steps described in the tutorial. The best I could do is to see bluetooth connection opening, but network was not brought up. So I just started to browse through the different settings screens and finally the connection opened.

Here is what I did: 

1. I downloaded iSync plugin, installed it and paired E90 and MacBook together (btw: iSync was easy to get running).
2. I opened system preferences from Finder and then Network settings.
3. Click the small "+" at the lower left corner of the network settings screen to add a new device
4. Small dialog opens, select your bluetooth device from the drop-down menu and give it a descriptive name
5. Set telephone number to *99#
6. Open the extended settings for the new network interface
7. Switch manufacturer to Nokia and type in the correct APN value (this depends on your operator) and save the settings.
8. This is it, now I was able to create a new bluetooth modem connection

//Harri