Carnival of the Mobilists #187

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is up at Mobilestance with some excellent entries on mobile and wireless as always.

This week’s carnival also features my post Netbooks lead the way on how we’ll be using our mobile phones in the near future

Netbooks lead the way on how we’ll be using our mobile phones in the near future

Netbooks are set to revolutionize the mega-trend “Cloud computing” sweeping the technology landscape.

Based on some findings released by ThinkFree based on a survey they conducted, Netbooks are mainly being used for for business, entertainment and communication. Another survey noted that Netbooks will be used as secondary devices. Let’s analyze how they’re being used in each of these categories.

Business

Primarily used for reviewing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and making minor edits, but not generally treating netbooks the primary machine for these applications.

My Opinion: As they are treated as secondary devices, I don’t expect people to pay for Microsoft Office. Thunderbird, Open Office etc are sufficient for simple email management and some word processing.

Entertainment

Browsing the web, listening to music and viewing/editing photos.

My Opinion: As browser and media player are anyway free, Picasa can easily be used for viewing and quick image editing and posting photos to the net.

Communication

Sending email, IM, making VOIP calls and creating blog posts.

Next Step

Since it’s not replacing the laptop, I think what’s basically missing
is a phone added to the mix. I don’t see why users will want to carry
mobile, netbook and laptop at the same time. I foresee a Nokia communicator type device with decent screen size and usable keypad to overtake the Netbook just like Smarphones overtook the PDA. The software being used will need to be adopted for this new phone, that said, software to do all the above already exists for mobiles, it just needs to be made more easy to use.

With larger screen size and better keyboard I don’t see a reason why we’ll not see Netbooks being phased out to give way for the next generation of mobile phones.

Is this thought too outlandish? What do you think?

The Carnival of the mobilists #185

Head over to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists at Mobileslate for some of the finest in mobile blogging.

This week’s carnival also features my post User Acceptance is the biggest challenge for LBS

Email 2.0: Google Wave solves the “See comments inline” problem

Image by marketingfacts via Flickr

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web. The biggest problem it solves is that you no longer have to reply to someone by saying “See comments inline” copying and pasting the email body and responding to specific points in the conversation. Wave allows you to respond within the original message itself while maintaining the context.

Users can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add others. It also allows replying to the other’s replies. Additionally, replies/edits are seen real-time, letter by letter, as they are typed so besides email it can also be used for instant messaging and real-time collaboration.

Oh, and you can also “playback” the thread to check the order which it was edited, and who edited/modified what and when. Pretty neat stuff.

For more, check out the video of it’s launch

The obvious next step is to incorporate it in the Blog Commenting System. WordPress, hope you’re listening… beat Blogger to the punch, after all, it’s open source.

User Acceptance is the biggest challenge for Location Based Services (LBS)

The promise of LBS is providing useful information and services at right place and right time using demographic, contextual and location awareness via the mobile. Primary applications are mostly in advertising, navigation and social networking. LBS applications have garnered the most hype since the beginning,  and yet, critical mass eludes them.

With the technical challenges more or less resolved, I believe user acceptance, owing primarily due to privacy and security concerns,  is the biggest challenge it needs to overcome. LBS apps face distrust by users owing to the loss of personal freedom and control over the technology e.g. intrusive advertising, commercial pressure, loss of autonomy, etc.

It is crucial for the service providers to maintain a level of trust with users by acting transparently with regards to personal privacy translating into strict application of a code of ethics on the service use combined with clear and simple information for consumers on the usages that could be made of their location data / ensure consumers have the means of controlling what they can and cannot do i.e. right not to be located, not to be disconnected, choose who will have access to his data, etc.

Going beyond Usability: The need to design for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust

Dr. Eric Schaffer, founder and CEO of Human Factors International talks about his new design approach christened PET Design. It offers a new approach to help companies influence and deepen their interactions with online customers through Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust.

Eric talks about the evolution of software from the early days, when software, hardware were differentiators which have now become a commodity… similarly, he says, usability was a differentiator but it’s now become essential. You have to have great software and hardware and it has to be usable. The differentiator now, he believes, is to make the software more persuasive and engaging.

just because a site is easy to use doesn’t mean it will engage customers and meet business goals

Although I completely agree with Eric, I don’t think this is a revelation… you obviously need to design products that engage the customers so that you can meet business goals, and I can’t think of any Product Manager or UX designer not trying to do that from the outset.

I for one have always designed my products to engage the user and provide a differentiated experience than the competition in order to meet my business goals. As you can tell, all the above factors are linked and all must be satisfied for a successful product.

I give Eric one thing though.. Usability is no longer a differentiator, it’s a must have.

Is it just me or do you think that this is what we’ve been doing all along anyway?

Has Twitter crossed the chasm?

Image by Matt Hamm via Flickr

When I came across Twitter about an year back, I was bewildered. So I can put 140 characters on a web site to tell the world what I am doing at the moment… Who cares? And why would I want to know what others happen to be doing at the exact moment they decide to share it with the world? However, there were quite a few people using Twitter so I decided to investigate Why we tweet and discovered it’s quite valuable both personally and for business. Ever since I have been an avid twitterer.

But something changed recently… all of sudden Twitter exploded in the mainstream, it even made it to the cover of TIME. Everyone from kids to businesses to politicians to governments are twittering. A few examples:

• Governator Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) twittered about an emergency plane landing. Not only did he tweet, but he took a photo of his plane and sent that out too
• Al Gore gets a million followers
• It played a big role in the overwhelming coverage of the #IranElection
• Dell took news confernence questions via Twitter
• The Israeli Consulate out of New York participated in a “citizen’s press conference” using Twitter

More often than not, Twitter is breaking the big story. Much like Youtube became the way to share video, Twitter is quickly becoming our open public wire service.

Twitter is beginning to change the way we communicate through crowd sourcing. By being connected and transparent we can get a sense of how humanity is feeling, thinking, and experiencing our world. It is only a matter of time before Tweeting is as well-known as Googling.

The trigger

I believe it started with Ashton Kutcher publicly challenging CNN to become the first to get a million followers on twitter. CNN of course obliged, thinking they’d use their media muscle to get viewers to follow them to victory. But Ashton had an ace up his sleeve, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to evangelise twitter, and as expected, got America’s moms to help him gallop across the finish line well before CNN. The drama during, and after these events, ensured wallpaper coverage in the US media and it wasn’t long before everyone in the US was hooked, with the rest of the world playing catch up.

Do you think Twitter has crossed the chasm?

New to twitter? Here’s a tip; answer “what’s important to me” instead of “what am i doing” – Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Arnold Schwarzenegger Twitpics Emergency Landing (mashable.com)
• CNN Loses Ground to Crowdsourced News (conversationagent.com)
• Tweeting from “the Barricades” in Iran (themoderatevoice.com)
• Ashton Kutcher: King of Twits (manodogs.blogspot.com)

Convergence of Terrestrial and Satellite mobile communication systems

Mobile Satellite Services

Mobile Satellite Services like Iridium and GlobalStar have a long established reputation of being able to successfully deliver connectivity to the most remote regions of the planet. Unlike traditional mobile phone providers that utilize cell towers for signal strength, satellite phone providers connect to low earth orbiting satellites. These orbiting satellites enable satellite phone service to connect in seconds with a clear signal. So, if you are hiking, cruising or otherwise travelling in a remote area, and need to stay in touch, the satellite phone works best. Only about 14% of the whole world is out of cover.

However, to make a call, you may have to go outside, for you’ll often find they don’t work very well under a roof of any kind. And, the handsets are large and clunky with big ugly antennaes.

Terrestrial mobile networks

Using cell towers, terrestrial mobile networks provide very good coverage in focused locations, however we all despise the “out of coverage area” message we keep getting every now and then.

There has been no good solution for people who were working on the fringes of cellular networks, crossing in and out of coverage areas. Or, those who want to be able to use thier phones when sailing, on hiking trips or vacationing in remote locations.

Integrated satellite-terrestrial Mobile Service

Enter TerreStar. They have come up with an integrated satellite-terrestrial mobile satellite service to be lauched in June this year. This service will enable users across North America to be connected to TerreStar’s network through a “virtual handshake” between the next-generation mobile satellite and UMTS (3G, upgradeable to LTE) terrestrial network. It’s the only fully IP-based satellite phone using high-speed packet data.

Terrestar has come up with a cute and compact device. It sports an internal antenna, touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard and runs Windows Mobile 6.5. It has satellite, quad-band GSM, tri-band WCDMA/HSPA connectivity along with Bluetooth and WiFi. The device will retail at about $800 USD. It’s the first satellite-terrestrial smartphone with planned service offerings, including: SMS, MMS, IM, Email, Push to Talk, Video services and Location Based Services (LBS).

How they do it

TerreStar will be using a geostationary satellite employing ground-based beam forming technology, a critical element in the system to deliver speed and performance to handheld devices with small, even internal, antennas. In the case of Iridium, a constellation of LEO (low earth orbiting) satellites are used to provide global, but much lower speed and signal strength, coverage.

Sam Churchill of Daily Wireless explains

L-band Mobile-Satellite Service (like that of Iridium and GlobalStar) uses 1525–1559 MHz (Space-to-Earth) and 1626.5–1660.5 MHz (Earth-to-space) while the 2 GHz Mobile-Satellite Service (used by some geosynchrous satellites) uses 2000–2020 MHz: (Earth-to-space) and 2180–2200 (Space-to-Earth).

The techniques developed and patented by Mobile Satellite Ventures (a sister operation of TerreStar) allow the same (MSS) frequency band to be used for both satellite and terrestrial communications seamlessly, yielding simplified single-band/single-mode transparent user devices 

Conclusion

I think it’s a great step forward which will have a profound impact in our lives.

Some of-the-top use cases

• Extention of cellular networks to rural, remote and maritime environments
• Provide mobile users at land, at sea and in the air with ubiquotous multimedia services (Internet, phone, entertainment)
• Always-on mode of communication in Crisis/Disaster areas

Photo sharing: Facebook leads Flickr by a long margin

Flickr had been the leading Photo sharing site for quite a while but off late it’s been trumped by Facebook. Flickr adds about 3 million photos every day as opposed to Facebook which adds around 30 million photos every day. Social networks, it seems have come up as preferred locations for sharing photos as opposed to the photo sharing services.

Facebook Photos saw over 153 million uniques in Jan '09, while #2 Flickr saw only 66.7 million

Stan Schroeder of Mashable explains

Flickr has many additional features, and the images can be bigger, but ultimately people use Facebook for the same thing – sharing photos with their friends. Add to that the fact that photo management on Facebook is very elegantly done, with some simple editing options such as rotating and tagging added into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a nice, large photo sharing site for not-too-demanding users – and all your friends are already using it

I’d say it makes perfect sense. You’d like to share those moments with your friends, and they’re already there on social networks… why bother with an additional service… so I guess Youtube is next.

What do you think?

What makes a mobile phone tick?

Isn’t this the million dollar question… although there are no straight answers, here are two important factors to consider while designing phones (or any product for that matter)

• Ensure the phone’s features are integrated with each other while maintaining ease of use in a meaningful way. It’s not about cramming more features, it’s about making those features work together to support a lifestyle. The buying decision comes down to the buyer’s perceived expectation of how well the phone will fulfill certain tasks. In other words, how well does a phone fit into the life of a consumer?

• Buying decisions are mostly driven by emotions, and we then use our intellect to add reasons and defend our emotional decision. Finding out these emotions is very important.