unrated - mumblings of a mobile entrepreneur

It’s been a busy couple of weeks and now I’m off on a holiday. Merry Xmas and happy new year to you all, see you in 2007.

As a kid I always took a certain amount of pride in being knocked out of the running because of a sprained wrist or some other obvious injury. I loved staying home from school because I had a stomach ache.

Maybe it is because I’ve turned 30, or maybe it’s just because of the bad luck I’ve just survived, but foodpoisoning most certainly does not enter into my book of cool afflictions. Now lets get into my fourty-quazillion emails in my inbox after which I hope I have some time to blog.

Here is a typical reaction from somebody that has just heard my pitch on ShotCode: “ah cool, so ehm… you make people’s lives easier by blablabla. Cool application! Did you already speak to <nokia, Motorola, etc> so they start pre-installing your software?”

Why is it that everyone is so hot & horny about getting software pre-installed on handsets? What’s so bloody special about that? The standard answer is that it gives you so much more install base, but what does that mean actually?

When’s the last time you heard somebody saying the same to a PC-based software manufacturer? Probably never. On the PC based market it’s important that you create something that people love and that you drive your own install base creation strategy.

Sure, some pc’s come with pre-installed crap, Sony’s vaio laptops are notorious when it comes to that. But how much of that stuff do you actually use? Don’t you just take your own software along to your new PC?

Lets get back to the mobile space. Why should it be so different here? After all most people use barely 20% of the functions of their mobile phones. Yet they do download ringtones, themes and other stuff. If this is in fact true (which I believe it is) then why is everyone so keen on being pre-installed? You’ll probably end up in the 80%-never-used category like my P990’s businesscard scanner.

At least it’s cristal clear to me: Pre-installation is most definitely not the holy grail for mobile software developers, happy users are. It’s not rocket science, I’d even go so far as to say that it’s the logical way of thinking. Satisfy your users, create momentum, gain install base. If a handset vendor or operator wants to pre-install your software along the way, they should be more then welcome to, but these guys are not your customers. We (as in “the people”) are.

Rants & raves are very welcome.

For some time now I’ve been a fan of GTD. It’s a simple system in its core but to actually live it is a completely different matter.

To be honest this system sometimes makes me feel like a recovering alcoholic and quite recently I fell off of the GTD wagon. This is a pretty crappy feeling because you’ve sniffed at true organizational bliss and suddenly it’s yanked away from you.

Luckily the guys behind GTD say this is a common problem and I never saw myself as an organizational genious. I can live with myself for falling off, but I can’t live with myself if I don’t jump back on as quickly as possible.

So, I’m going to try and introduce GTD in smaller steps into my life. My first step is trying to develop a habbit (much in the same way I train for endurance sports events).

I’m introducing a daily schedule into my life. This schedule is the way I’m going to try to start my day, everyday, for two weeks. It looks as followed:

START:
- check day schedule (cleared time is holy)
- empty physical inbox (bills, notes, ideas, papers, etc)
- empty mail inbox (only do this once and then close it)
- check action lists (this is where all actions longer then 2 minutes are stored)
- check pending (the place where things usually come to die)
- make day action list (check how I feel, what’s my energy level, what’s bothering me, get the gauge for the day and list accordingly)

ACTION:
- do day action list

WHEN DONE:
- check action lists when in down time

If all goes well I’ll be able to update you in two weeks time, just before I’m going on a holiday, about step 2.

Thanks to the guys over at pocketpicks I’ve just added another couple of years to my life. How so you wonder (or you don’t which is equally fine)? Well because they introduced me to ZYB.

Last xmas I was in Sint-Maarten and I managed to get both my laptop and my mobile phones (yes plural) stolen. It was a very unpleasant experience and not least of all because of the French Gendarmerie who were grumpy as the hot weather would allow them. But absolutely worst of all was the dissapearance of all my contacts. Loosing all your contacts as a lowly mobile entrepreneur is guaranteed to cost you a couple of years of your life.

Ever since I’ve been looking for a brilliant (I wouldn’t settle for less) backup service for my mobile phone and guess what: ZYB is it! Believe me, I tried.

So without further ado point your browser to ZYB and sync your contacts. Maybe we can get them to remove that silly BETA tag from their website… Stop being so hip guys, you don’t need to. Your service is cool and it works. Thanks for making my life a little easier.

I’ve been on the road for some time and I’ve been dieing to write this post. My appologies for the delay, does anybody have any tips on mobile blogging tools? Anyways, here goes:

I don’t know if you’ve heard of originalsignal.com but if you read blogs you would’ve had to do some impressive evasive reading in order to miss them. Yes they are cool and not least of all because they’re all from Holland. However, I write about mobile and not web2.0-y stuff, so here’s the mobile angle into it all.

It makes wonderful sense for fixed internet surfers to make originalsignal.com their home page, after all it makes RSS useable for joe-average. Yet there are plenty more joe-averages on the mobile internet. Big was my joy when I saw a little mobile icon, promissing the power of originalsignal.com on my mobile phone (top right amongst the digg etc. icons). I’ve ShotCoded the mobile version for easy access.

First the positive, when I click a link on the mobile version the result page is automatically optimized using google’s mobile page optimization algorithm. This is great, no… fantastic! It’s a small and simple innovation but it intices me to click and click and click. Clearly 1-0 for originalsignal.com

Now for the bad. I can’t find any navigation on the mobile pages… I’ve looked, I might be blind, but I can’t find any navigation on the mobile pages. Why!? Don’t you need to navigate on a mobile? Wouldn’t I want to hop from left to right on the mobile pages? Mobile isn’t only small, it’s mainly usability and smart interaction. That’s a definite miss. 1-1

Another important reason why I think originalsignal’s mobile site is currently loosing the mobile match: Why is the mobile URL is so long: http://news.originalsignal.com/mobile will take you to the news section and: http://science.originalsignal.com/mobile will take you to the science pages. Considering there is no navigation I have to type my thumbs off in order to switch between these.

I’m pretty sure that with some fancy CSS work the /mobile dirs could be made obsolete and (at the time of this writing) mosignal.com was still available. This would allow for a special mobile sub domain also decreasing the amount of key-clicks. Mobile users dislike “key-clicking” more then fixed internetters, please keep that in mind when designing a mobile page.

All in all the mobile version of originalsignal bursts at the seams in potential but just like diggriver.com misses the point of mobile use. The automatic optimization of the result pages kicks ass and this is why I hope that originalsignal upgrades the other points of their mobile version. Just include some simple navigation and make the access urls a little shorter. This would motivate me to make originalsignal.com the starting page of my mobile phone and I’m sure it would motivate many others as well.

Every once in a while you bump into a blog that you just can’t read enough of. All of a sudden you find yourself anxiously watching your RSS reader for new posts.

you might think I’m talking about some porn blog, but I’m not. I’m talking about Little Spring Design’s blog. Barbara Ballard gives her take on mobile user experiences and generally explains why shrinking isn’t all that’s needed.

I couldn’t agree more with the majority of her posts and if you’re in any way involved with mobile I can only advise you to give her a special place in your feedreader.

By the way, I found Barbara’s blog through the Oxford Forum (free sign up required) which also, most certainly, worth a visit.

I’ve been looking for the translation of a psuedo-law called “de wet van de remmende voorsprong”. Literally translated it would be something like “the law of the advantage in being late” although that doesn’t sound all that intelligent. And thanks to Nicolaas I know it now, it’s called “the dialectics of progress” or “the law of the breaking lead“.Anyways, the reason why I’m wondering is based on something entirely different though pseudo-logic related. I was checking out Michael Mace’s “who reads Carnival of the Mobilists” post (great post by the way) and something caught my eye. Watch out: midnight logics coming your way.

According to Michael’s maybe-not-so-representative-research, Europeans like their smartphones more then their laptops. And in the US laptops & digital cameras are both more popular then smartphones (followed closely by camera phones).

In Europe SMS still kicks butt as the most used mobile service. In the US both “run other add-on software” and “surf the web” as well as “send/read e-mail” were more popular then SMS.

squueeek, screech, kloink… kloink… (my brain going)

I’ve said many times before that an SMS is nothing more then an over prized email and that SMS strongly resembles MS-DOS, so if both (rich) websurfing and e-mail are more popular then SMS at the moment, why should our American friends have to dive into the world that is called SMS?

Wouldn’t this be a great place for the US to actively apply the “dialectics of progress“?

Just a thought.

Sometimes I get the urge to destroy things, just pick things up and destroy them… I’m not psycho (or at least not diagnosed so), it’s blue-spam that does this to me.

Blue-spam aggrivates me so much that when I walk in a city and I receive a blue spam from some restaurant (admittidly it’s not happening that often yet) I really have to control myself not to set fire to the place.

As our mobile devices become more & more uniform we as consumers will reap the benefits from it. We’ll have better software, cooler games, greater interaction, improved efficiency and a gazillion other cool things because developers can actually focus on making applications in stead of compatibility.

But at the same time proximity marketing will grow and we’ll be opening up to spam from left, right and center. Blue spam (& sms spam) are only the beginning of what’s to come. Judging from how bad this pisses me off already I wonder what will happen with my anger management in the future.

Please allow me, my dear few readers (yes you’ve grown in numbers), to propose a solution. It’s a simple one, hell it might even be an obvious one:

A Spamarrest like solution for your mobile phone.

The application could have all kinds of functions to make sure that we cut these spam-vermin off before they get a foot in the door. As an example, we could only allow messages if contact information is in both phones. All you’d have to do to expand your safe-list would be to give that person a call and the number will automatically be added. After all, the average spam-idiot only spams because that’s his/her get-rich-quick scheme.

Proximity marketing shouldn’t be the next wave of lowest common denominator crap that is open to every idiot to broadcast a message repeatedly until somebody gives in. You should be in control, you should only get the information you want and Proximity marketing (eventhough it’s got marketing in its name) should help you. Because it helps you it should sell stuff to you, not because you’re just giving in to the onslaught.

Mobile spam shouldn’t have to become big, I’m thinking about starting a non-profit organization to address this problem together and fix it before it’s broken. Is anybody interested in joining me or does anyone know of such an organisation?

Go and check out the 54th carnival of the mobilists over at the Golden Swamp. Judy named me the noted newcommer of the week, thanks Judy!