Mobile augmented golf

Last week I was lucky enough to get an invitation to TEDxHelsinki event and I'm still excited about the quality of the event as well as the whole concept. It is just too easy to stick with your familiar thoughts and habits and reinforce the skills where you are at your best. Try sometimes to listen presentations outside of your comfort area and be prepared for an idea storm. You can start the journey from the TED website and remember my old investment tip.

I also had the opportunity to try playing golf (just to educate myself about what that is about). As a complete beginner two things bothered me and I think both of them could be solved by using latest mobile technology.

Where is my ball?

It was a surprise how much time is spent on trying to find the ball even if everybody saw where it went. When the small ball is somewhere 100 meters away in the long grass, it takes time to find it even if you know where to search. Why not put a small transmitter into the ball and use mobile phone (or similar) as a receiver. Even better if multiple phones could be used for that purpose so that they can together triangulate the ball's location. Sure, it can be against the allmighty rules of the golf but anyway, it would make playing faster and easier. Unless searching the ball is an essential part of golf experience?

Where to go next?

We were playing on a course that was unfamiliar for all of us. At least I felt that it was difficult to know where is the next tee or where is the hole. This is all very easily solved with a smart use of mobile augmented reality solutions that can display this information on a screen nicely. As there are already many available products for AR itself, the real task would be to make golf course information available for the applications.

I was told that golf etiquette would never allow applications like described above. That can be true but because I'm not a golfer I'm free to innovate....

//Harri

Not a killer application

You are reading this posting, you are doing well. You have access to internet, probably a mobile phone and what’s the most important - you can read.

Save the Children has published its its tenth annual State of the World’s Mothers report and you can be sure that it is not a nice paper to read. What do you think about this:

• every year, around 50 million mothers in the developing world give birth at home with no professional care whatsoever. In Niger, only 33% of births are attended by health personnel
• the majority of children under age 5 in the poorest regions of the world do not get basic health care when they need it
• for the 10 bottom-ranked countries, 9 out of 10 women are likely to suffer the loss of a child in their lifetime
• in Sierra Leone 1 woman in 8 dies in pregnancy or childbirth. In Ireland the ratio is 1 in 47.000

How could the situation of the poorest be improved? The report gives recommendations and proposes actions, such as

“Prenatal and postnatal care should include counseling to encourage a safe birth, awareness of danger signs that require immediate attention, a plan for going to a skilled health care provider, counseling on how to care for the newborn, and help to ensure breast feeding. “

This is a matter of getting information to the people when they need it.

However, it is not an option to print booklets and deliver those to the people. Where the situation is the worst, there are also most of the people illiterate; usually the situation for women is even worse than for the population in general. In Chad female literacy rate is 13%.

You might think that internet is the way to deliver information, but even that doesn't reach the masses. Mobile phones looks much better option, for example in Sierra Leone there are 66 times more mobile users than internet users.

Mobile phone is the medium to reach people that are in need of information. In the developing countries mobile phone is often shared by a family or a community, making the potential number of users even bigger than subscription numbers show. For people living in places where medical assistance is not available, getting basic information with phone is certainly an option. What’s most important, the information should be available in their own language either from a live person or from a recording. When a pregnant mother uses the service, she can be instructed and also her phone number can be stored. Later the phone number can be used by the healthcare personnel to get back in touch with mother or she can be reminded with a message to get more information as her pregnancy goes further. After the childbirth she can get information about the importance of breastfeeding, and so on.

Does anybody know if this kind of a solution has already been made?

This is not a killer application. This solution saves lives.

//Harri

The Cloud hits the Ground

When email storage space was limited users had to keep their inbox small, messages organized to folders and delete every message that wasn't absolutely important. Now you can use services like GMail that have (practically) unlimited storage space in "the Cloud" and let you search your messages so quickly it makes organizing just a waste of time. When using GMail I just don't organize nor archive messages - search is enough.

Nokia's S60 phones have an email client that can regularly login to your IMAP mail account and load new messages. When you enable that feature, it will disable the setting that limits the number of messages in your phone's email account (why is it like that?). Tried this automatic refreshing feature with GMail, decided to disable it and left other settings untouched.

Later I began to wonder why the email access has become very slow in my phone and why some applications either crashed or displayed clearly wrong information about my mailbox status. Then I checked the message count from my terminal's email application and there were 3900 email messages listed! Having all messages in your inbox is not a problem when processing happens in the Cloud, but then (fattish) clients like S60 email application will hit the Ground.

I know there is a GMail application available for my phone, but I rather use the native messaging application because that way I can have all my SMS/MMS/Email messages stored in the same place and I can access those without switching the applications.

Having all messages in the same place, hmmm....

Why my SMS/MMS messages are only in the phone? I'd like to have those archived in the Cloud, too. When I work with the messages, I'd like the changes to be replicated to my GMail account - that way I could also use GMail application to access my messages from the Cloud and messages would also be stored in a safe place. If all my messages were replicated like that, there could be just a new folder available in the GMail mobile application to access my SMS messages. That would also allow me to do search from all of my messages, no matter what media was used to deliver it. As far as I understand, it is no rocket science to create a solution like this to upload messages automatically to the Cloud. Anyone interested to try?

//Harri

Augmented (mobile) reality

For some time I’ve been fascinated about the idea of (mobile) augmented reality, the concept that things in real world can be increased or extended by some clever use of software. This sounds too theoretical to be interesting, but let’s take some examples what this can be.

Marketing people have already found really interesting ways to use new opportunities. What would you think about a car launch commercial that would allow you to explore the 3D model of the new car - on top of the newspaper. This has already been done by the Mini car company, check this page. The trick is that you use your computer’s camera to capture a special image and from the computer’s screen you can then enjoy and explore the model. Why this is better than studying the model from the pictures? Because this is a much more engaging experience!

To experience this by yourself, go to Boffswana’s page, print the image and prepare to be impressed. Tried this at home and my kids went crazy. How would you use this?

On the mobile side I have an idea that I’d love as a tourist. Take some new mobile terminal that has embedded GPS (to tell where you are) and a compass (to tell where you are looking at). Add that information to data sources similar to what Google Earth uses and display the information on the device’s screen while the camera is taking live picture from your neighborhood. This solution not only could tell you where you are, it could also tell you what you are looking at. The marketing people could sell ads to this service; imagine that when you look at the world through service like this, it could display you where in the picture is a good restaurant, for example. Physical and digital world meet on the mobile terminal's screen - nice.

It seems that Nokia has tried to create a service like this a couple of years ago, but at that time devices weren’t ready yet and add-on hardware was needed. Don't know whatever happened to the project, now time would be ready for applications like this.

Update

I was just pointed to a blog post made by a fellow Forum Nokia Champion David Caabeiro, he has already made an application that's demoing the idea I presented above. This proves my claim that terminals are now ready for applications like this!

//Harri

Do-it-yourself User Interface

Today new mobile phones - more or less - all share the same technical features. Still device manufacturers and operators must try to differentiate their products somehow to get media and customer attention. How to do that cost efectively is the question. New buzzwords arise frequently and technical gimmics are given too much attention. A couple of years everybody was supposed to have a phone that was slim like the Motorola Razr, today you must have a touch screen to be taken seriously in the game. These innovations and also the older ones like 3G and camera all are hardware related and so require the manufacturers to do the job and hope for the best. So far customer created innovations in mobile domain have been rare - it is a nontrivial task to create mobile applications.

I haven't had an opportunity to really use Nokia's new touch UI devices, but based on the quick feeling the user interface carries the legacy of the S60 platform. The latest and greatest UI is clearly an ancestor of the good'ol 7650 from year 2001. What was nice then, needs to be redesigned today.

What if user's could create their own mobile user interface? Could they innovate something that hasn't been seen yet?

I once began to think how we could implement a mobile home screen that a user could easily configure by himself? This time configuring is not about just changing the background image but really doing main UI structure so that user can decide what is visible, when and where. I made some tests with Nokia's S60 platform and I'm convinced that technically all this would be fairly straightforward thing to do. As always, having the implementation is...just a good start. Packaging the solution and marketing is completely another story. Did I hear someone ask about the business model? I don't have a clue.

Nerdy stuff follows.

Well, technically the idea is not very complicated. S60 terminals have an embeddable browser control framework that can be used to create an application that includes the native browser engine. Search for BrCtl* stuff from Forum Nokia or use my search tool. This is the core of the solution; you create an application that draws a fullscreen special browser and replaces or complements the native Menu application. 

When this application launches, it should connect to the server to download user's home screen preferences. As in any mobile application, here you should think how the application works in different situations (no network coverage, roaming, etc.). Caching data is a very good idea.

When you have done it this far, you are able to display a new menu to the user, only your designer skills set the limit. And yes, JavaScript works also. Now you understand there's a problem, you have no way to launch local applications or documents. The solution is that you can implement your own link resolver that you can use. Define your own url-type and encode the information of the application, view and other possible options.

Now the implementation has reached a point where you can display a menu to the user and he is able to launch applications etc.  Next question is where the displayed structure is coming from? Well, create a nice website for that purpose, where users can manage and share their own mobile UI.

When the solution described above is done, it will allow users to create mobile interfaces by themself using your nice editor, html and javascript, helping them out from the native S60 menu jungle. Because javascript is available, you can do lots of nice things, like enabling and disabling stuff based on the terminal's local time and so on. I'm sure you get the idea and can imagine more possibilities.

Somebody might notice that the solution above is quite near what Nokia's WRT-runtime can do today. That's true, but this way you will gain better control to the features that you will provide to the user and you can handle browser events at the lower level which will later allow more possibilities for new features. 

Previously I've given ideas to many student projects, I guess this could perhaps be a nice project work for a mobile related course in any polytechnic or technology university? Project would include mobile implementation, web implementation and graphical design, allowing a team with mixed skills work together.

//Harri

Usability problem with E71 calendar

Beware: it seems that the improved calendar in Nokia's E71 has an usability problem that will effectively delete your calendar history. This has been reported to me by a couple of independent users and it seems that there is a need for an application that would allow user to recover his lost calendar data. Worse enough, if you don't understand immediately what has happened and you sync your calendar account to your calendar server, data will be lost there, too.

What happens?

You have calendar open with a month view, looking like this:

Then you decide that the visible event should be deleted and you select Options->Delete

Because you have used calendar a lot, you don't look at the options very closely. Normally the first selection item will delete the selected entry and you select that. Unfortunately this time it will delete your calendar history.

Who reads confirmation prompts anyway - yes, I want to delete this entry!

At this point you might get an uncomfortable feeling that things aren't as they should be. Now you'd need an undo-command but that's not available.

Unlike other S60 devices the widescreen E71 displays individual calendar entries also in month view and user gets a wrong idea what he is about to delete. Users are also so bored with confirmation prompts that more experienced people just hit automatically OK without reading the prompt. Either the UI should be changed in E71 or user should have access to undo-command that could recover the lost data.

//Harri

Port forwarding and nice surprise from SonyEricsson

In the current turbulence of mobile business email after Nokia’s announcement about dropping the Intellisync solution from their portfolio I once started to think about new ways of connecting to corporate email accounts. The quick and easy answer is to use IMAP, but many organizations feel that opening direct IMAP port to public network is a security risk. I got an idea about doing port forwarding with smartphones, a trick that is common in the desktop environment: open an ssh tunnel between two computers and route traffic from a local network port over encrypted session to the another network. Kind of a "poor man's mobile VPN". This way we would need to first open an ssh session to the local network, map terminal’s IMAP (or any other) port to the remote site and create an email account that has “localhost” as email server. Implementing this seemed straightforward, as POSIX-libraries are available for Symbian and there are sources available for different implementations, like OpenSSH. The critical success factor would be how easy solution is to use and how well it is productized.

I did some Googling and found that this has already been done, at least by SSHForwarding application. Unfortunately application failed to run on N95, but anyway this application proves that the idea is not all bad if somebody else had already thought about it. Does anybody know other productized solutions that do the port forwarding thing with smartphones?

Nice surprise from SonyEricsson

I haven’t much used SE devices in personal use, just tried those every now and then. Some time ago I started to use SE K800i just to get some real experiences with the device. To my big surprise I found a remote control application from the phone, launched that and application found my Apple laptop. Before I understood what was going on, the application listed a couple of different keyboard mapping options, selected one of those and to my big surprise I was able to control laptop’s mouse and some special keys with my phone, over Bluetooth. Great tool when giving presentations and all this was available for free! I haven’t seen similar feature in Nokia terminals and K800i is an old phone, became available 2006. In addition to this surprise old K800 has been very nice to use - if you have used just smartphones for a long time, try to use something else. You’ll probably be astonished how fast a phone can be.

//Harri

Customer oriented device management

Have you ever wondered why such a great thing as mobile device management is so rarely used, at least in smaller companies? After all, when new terminals are deployed to customer, the major problem is how to get the settings configured and applications installed. If end-users are supposed to do that by themselves, you can say goodbye to productivity and finally majority of the users are not able to use the new terminals for any other purpose than making voice calls. This is just the point where device management comes to the picture and customers are ready to buy the solution but...is there anybody to sell it?

Every time I have seen device management solution productized, result has been the same; monthly fixed price subscription. Customer wants to solve a one-time problem and salesman tries to sell a subscription; you want a glass of milk and are supposed to buy a dairy. What if device management were productized from a customer’s point of view, what would the problems look like? I would list something like:

• how to move data from old terminal to new one?
  
• how to deploy settings to new terminal?
  
• how to install the corporate applications to new terminal?
  
• how to fix the terminal settings if user makes an unwanted change?
  
• how to remotely wipe the terminal if it is lost?
  

If we forget the subscription model we can create new products that technically use device same management protocols like OMA CP and OMA DM but speak language that customers can easily understand. A customer oriented device management offering could sell services like:

• Move contact and calendar data from old terminal to new one
  
• Deploy initial network and email settings to new terminal
  
• Install x applications to new terminal, additional installations cost ?€ each
  
• Restore initial settings
  
• Wipe lost device
  
• Create application inventory report form terminal
  

If you run a device management server, you probably can easily give a price tag for every feature above. Subscription model is a valid business model for companies who continuously make changes to terminals and want to keep device management contract as an insurance for the rest of the terminals - just in case something goes wrong. For other customers a simple pay-as-you-use business model that solves understandable problems really would make sense.

//Harri

Phone as a security token?

It is a good thing to notice that other people have got same ideas and even more, implemented those.  When that happens, idea probably isn't totally useless.

This came to my mind when I today started to think mobile phone as a security token that could add "something you have" dimension to the login process of a desktop terminal. In short my idea was that desktop computer could be constantly "pinging" a certain bluetooth hardware address, and when that device no longer is available then desktop will automatically lock itself. Think about following use case and you will get the idea: you are sitting at your office working with your desktop. Your colleague arrives and reminds you that the meeting is about to begin and you must rush. You grab your mobile phone and run to the meeting. Probably you forgot to lock your desktop and now anybody can use your user account. 

An easy solution to this would be that if desktop were pinging your terminal, the desktop would lock itself when the connection is lost. With Google I found  some applications that are able to do this: LockItNow and BTWatcher.

Because the simple use case (locking terminal when bluetooth connection is lost) is already implemented, I began to think about the reverse: unlock desktop when mobile phone becomes available. Obviously that shouldn't be done just by discovering some device (about bluetooth security issues, check this document).

What do you think about this idea: unlock the desktop when identification is done with bluetooth so that desktop sends a challenge to the terminal, terminal signs that challenge with PIN-locked client certificate and sends the response back to desktop. This way would be possible to implement a "poor man's secure id" system that adds an additional security to desktop environment. In addition to username and password, user must also carry a bluetooth device with a known hardware address, that bluetooth device must be able to accept and sign desktop's challenge and user's client certificate must be correct.

Did I just reinvent the wheel - has this already been done?

//Harri

Mobile audio guides

I like to visit museums, exhibitions and other attractions and I have noticed that there is nothing in common when it comes to audio guide systems. If the guide system exists at all, it is typically as close to chaotic as it could be: staff is too busy to help visitors, devices are not charged completely and visitor runs out of power, one wrong key press and language changes to something far too exotic, volume level is going up and down without any reason and so on. In short: systems are unstable and they require way too much support from staff. 

Why not use mobile phones instead?

Replacing museum audio guides with mobile phones is something that could make sense. There are many possible ways how to technically implement this: people could make a call to museum’s audio guide number and then “press 1 if you are at the first floor” and so on. Another possibility is that people could download audio files to their phones and listen those with built-in audio player. As you might guess, there are lots of obstacles for this scenario (but none of those impossible), not least that people are uncertain about the costs of such a system and hence they might not want to use it. Well, this will change over time.

Where could people then find the downloadable audio guides as there is no default start page for museum visitors? This is a job that someone talented web 2.0 guru could solve by creating a site where museum community could post data and promote their offerings. Consider also that today museums try to get more revenue by selling small souvenirs and memorabilia to visitors; this site could be a new sales channel for museums and hence switch old money consuming audio guide system to a new source of income.

I saved the best part to last: this new portal&audio guide solution would open up the possibility for community created museum related content. No matter which museum you are about to visit, you can be sure that there is a very devoted group of people that knows everything about some special topic presented in museum; whether it is pots, pans, sticks, dresses, paintings or whatever. Their voice can be made heard by solution that would allow “community created museum audio guides accessible from global museum portal”. That would give museums a Long Tail (if you are fed up with long tail -talks, I apologize. I couldn’t resist mentioning it here, because long tail this is).

//Harri

Roaming is dangerous (to your budget)

Last week a Finnish newspaper wrote about a poor customer who had subscribed to a fixed price data plan and thought that it is valid also when abroad. Result: his phone bill had 2.300€ data costs compared to normal 14,90€. Earlier this year there were a piece of news about a user who had used roaming data worth 25.000€. 

Although in cases above the reason might had been that user didn't know about the subscription details and was using data connections intentionally, it is highly probable that users use data connections abroad without understanding that. Many applications ask permission to use network connections automatically and sooner or later poor user don't know anymore how many applications there are that keep on pulling updated data from the network. When user is having fixed-price data plan and he is using his home network, there is no problem but when terminal connects to a roaming network problems will begin.

I feel I have to remind about a simple trick I presented last summer at Nokia's site. It might even make sense to productize "safe traveling with smartphone" solution and add also other features that people need when traveling; for example whenever I'm abroad I turn off all the unnecessary power-consuming receivers like Bluetooth and WiFi because I cannot be sure where and when I can recharge the battery next time.

//Harri

Can you speak now?

Observe people around you to find out what they ask when they have made a call to somebody: I'd bet that you will hear something like "Can you hear me?", "Where are you?" and "Can you speak now?" I've always said to my contacts that they are free to call me anytime, it's my responsibility to turn off the phone if I don't want to be disturbed but sometimes we all make mistakes...

When everybody was using fixed line phones people were merely making calls to some location and hoping that right person is present and available. Now at the era of mobile phones people are making calls directly to the right person but the location keeps changing. This is fascinating but also disturbing if you have travelled to other continent and you have just waken up to an innocent friend's call - how could he have known that you are at the other side of the world? Yes, how could he have known that? I made a quick search to find a solution that would allow me to share my clock with my friends; if I'd be able to see that somebody is at a place where it is currently midnight I would think again whether it is a good idea to wake him up just now. I didn't find such a solution.

This kind of a solution should of course integrate seamlessly to terminal's address book and updating the clock info must be automatic. The difficult part in this solution would be how to make service widely known and get all members of the contact list to share their information. Maybe this could be a part of services like Dopplr or some other cool information sharing solutions?

//Harri

What if phone could speak?

Lately I have been reading Alexander Manu's excellent book The Imagination Challenge: Strategic Foresight and Innovation in the Global Economy and I must say I like his idea to imagine what would happen is familiar things could speak - what would you ask from your toothbrush? To summarize the idea of the book: try to create strategic innovations that really change the way we live our lives and disrupt familiar patterns. As a contrast to strategic innovation Manu identifies tactical innovations that are merely about doing same things as before but only better. If you want to know more - and you really should - read the book.

So, let's try this method. What would you ask from your phone if it could speak? I'd like to make a very generic question: "Can you help me?". While I'm in the middle of a conversation with a friend I'd like to ask help from my phone, for example to get information about the local services. To make this service feel even more personal, I'd like to give my phone a name, "Jim" for example. Now we can imagine following discussion:

Me: "Let's have a dinner tonight, where could we go?"
Friend: "There is a new restaurant in Helsinki I'd like to visit, I think it's called FooBar."
Me: "OK, sounds great. Let's ask Jim if they have a table for us. Jim, Helsinki, FooBar."
Jim: "FooBar found. Do you want me to connect?"
Me: "Yes"
(FooBar joins the discussion)
FooBar: "FooBar, how can I help you?"
Friend: "We'd like to have a dinner tonight at 8 o'clock, do you have a table for two?"
FooBar: "Yes, that's OK. You are welcome."
Me: "Thank you"
(FooBar leaves the discussion)

---

So, what happened here? I took the opportunity to jump over the "innovation gap" which is the distance between what we have today and what we believe is possible. Here I assumed that phone could have speech recognition (I guess some phones already have that support, but is it available to 3rd party developers, don't know) and that can listen an ongoing call. If that was possible, teaching the speech recognition solution to find keywords ("Jim" in my example) should be fairly simple. Then the new solution could initiate a conference call to some voice guided search service and here you are, there is a bridge over the innovation gap and solution becomes possible. If you are located in US you might want to take a look at Google's solution (unfortunately only available in English at the US) and try to create this solution.

By the way: why Goog-411 is free, wouldn't it be just fine to have a premium priced number to collect some revenue from the users? Latest issue of Wired magazine has the answer: by letting the service run free Google will loose $144M revenue by 2012. But because the service is free, people will use the service now and Google can collect data from usage patterns, different voice accents and phrases. When they are ready, they can start selling ads to the service and that way the projected revenue from this service in 2012 becomes $2.5B. Nice.

//Harri

Feature missing from S60 contacts application

I was visiting an event this week and because of my mobile addiction many E90 users started to complain to me about an missing feature. The story goes like this: in older Communicators (9300/9500) contacts application had a feature that allowed users to search contacts by matching the search criteria to selected fields. Those fields were last name, first name, company and email address. The new E90 communicator has standard S60 contacts application that allows user to search contact items only by name. These die-hard communicator users were really missing this feature that allowed them to search people by company name, for example. Nokia's embedded Search application is not enough.

Luckily this feature is not that difficult to implement, what needs to be done is to  

• implement the contact database handling as instructed here 
• bind your new application to E90's dedicated contacts key, get the idea from an old S80 document

If anyone is interested to implement an application like this, go ahead.

//Harri

RSS2SMS, how and where

Being an RSS addict I began to search for a solution that would allow me to subscribe the most important RSS-feeds directly to my phone, over SMS. To my surprise this wasn't an easy task, Yahoo! seems to have such a service but that is only available to US subscribers. I also found a new site - Pingie - that offers similar service, but that is also available only in US. 

As a frustrated EU citizen I checked latest mobile statistics from the Netsize guide and noticed that

• there are 261M mobile subscribers in US but 525M in EU
• there are 41M 3G subscribers in US but 80M in EU

I want new services, too!

Action Points

• Viviane Reding, please continue your work to create EU a single marketplace for telecom industry so that new services are not only available for US consumers.
  
• Mobile Developers, please consider a new solution that would allow people to subscribe RSS feeds to their SMS inbox. Think about mobilizing the news items with Mowser (or something similar). Think about sending targeted SMS advertisements to your subscribers, for example at most one ad per day per subscribed RSS stream.

//Harri

Happy traveller sleeps well

Today when I was commuting back home I fell asleep and almost missed my bus stop. When I rushed out from bus I began to think why there isn't such a "commuter's smartphone solution" that - among other things - could notify people when they are approaching their destination.

How the notifier could be implemented is not obvious: using GPS data precision is either very good or zero and power consumption might be a problem (after a busy day). Using cell id information works as long as there is network coverage but public cell registers don't exist - service provider would need to gather data from various sources. Google has a nice MyLocation service that uses cell ids; that information would be optimal but unfortunately it is unaccessible to developers. Without a cell id register users would need to first record cell id's in their neighborhood to get alerts - not something that typical users would like to do.

Do you know any solutions that already have a feature that is capable of waking up a sleepy traveller? 

//Harri

A very niche home appliance

My typical workday begins with a cup of coffee and morning paper at 6 o'clock when my phone wakes me up. Fortunately this doesn't happen often, but today morning paper was late and I was awake at Monday morning, too sleepy to do anything productive. At that moment I remembered my old idea about a very niche home appliance. This is also very much a mobile gateway type of a solution, an idea I wrote about some weeks ago.

Rough idea has two parts:

• small sensor device that I could attach to my mailbox. When mailbox door opens, a sensor will notice this event and save the data
• alarm clock application in my smartphone

Think about following scenario: I have set my phone to wake me up at 6 o'clock, but only if morning paper has been delivered. When alarm would ring, my phone asks (over Bluetooth, WLAN, ZigBee; you name it) from mailbox sensor when mailbox was opened last time. If mailbox hasn't been opened this morning (i.e. morning paper is late) my phone lets me sleep one hour extra. Application for terminal is nothing special, any mobile developer can do it. Any volunteers who are able to create a mailbox sensor appliance?

//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

Personal Innovation Manager?

Do you know a solution for my needs? Problem description and use-case:

I read websites, books and articles; I watch TV and listen radio; I have conversations and meet interesting people. Because of that I get new ideas.

Now my problem is that I haven't found a suitable method for keeping track with all this. I'd like to have a solution to keep a record of all the items above and also about the ideas that they have generated. Slowly that would grow to a big mind map and I could be able to track ideas down to their roots and find interesting relations: "often when I speak with N.N. I start developing a new application, but when I meet M.M. I start reading business literature and go planning". You got the picture?

I have tried different tools to do this, but haven't found the right solution that is so easy and quick to use that I really could use it in everyday life.  Of course the optimal tool would be web based (because I use multiple computers every day), it must have a mobile interface (either an optimized browser page or a native application)  and I must be able to share ideas and sources with my friends. All this could be quite quickly implemented by a talented web developer and hopefully monetized by ads. 

Still not interested? What about a free community version as above, but also a professional version of the same system with more features? One of these extra features could be a dial-in service that allows an user to have a personal number to call. When user calls to number he can record a voice note and attach that to an idea; then later he can listen audio notes and continue working with those. This would be a very nice feature for people (like me) who get ideas when outside the office and paper is not at hand. Just save Personal Innovation Manager to you speed dial list and you are done - works with iPhone as well, no smartphone needed.  Of course number can be premium priced to keep your business going. 

If you know this kind of a solution, let me know. If you like the idea and setup a service like this, just drop me a message - I'm happy to be a beta tester...

//Harri