Go native, HTML5 is going to lag for a while

Facebook's new mostly-native iOS App has brought back the "HTML vs native" debate. I think the "answer" to this debate is fairly simple: Web apps might eventually dominate on mobile, but not yet... because there's still far too much work to be done in the OS's themselves.

If you're short on time, here's the basic idea:

Innovation in operating systems comes in waves. At the beginning of a totally new platform (minicomputers, mainframes, desktops, smartphones), the platforms themselves are so nascent that the operating system is key to unlocking the capabilities, so you need to be as close to the OS as possible to make the best apps.

In the desktop world, it was the OS that needed to provide things as basic as multitasking, windowing user interfaces, device drivers, and network interfaces... because there was a time where THESE were the building blocks needed for breakthrough innovation in the application world: the first generation of office apps, browsers, games, etc. all used these capabilities directly through OS-level API's and libraries.

As OS innovation slowed down, and the underlying platform became more and more stable, the innovation moved upwards: towards the browser. Today, the desktop OS is basically just the infrastructure you need to launch a browser (hence the promise of projects like Chrome OS). [Side note: this happens in every industry... as once-complex products get commoditised, the innovation moves up the stack, e.g. re-assembling those commoditised pieces and building new things on top... that get eventually commoditised...]

On mobile, Android and iOS are adding huge new features and capabilities with each release. Whether it's integrating social apps (one-click Twitter sign-in), geofencing (enabling payment apps like Square, and all sorts of smart-reminder apps), or adding seamless cross-device sync (iCloud ... maybe), the pace of mobile OS change is way faster than on the desktop.

When there's tremendous innovation on the platforms themselves, the apps that deliver the best experience (that users will come to expect) need to be tied fairly closely to those platforms. With the rapid evolution of Android and iOS, building on a platform (the web) that's one-step removed from the OS isn't going to let developers build apps that are as capable and polished as native.

A huge shift: Beyond the phone
A smartphone today can talk to all sorts of other devices: TV remotes over WiFi, watches and headphones over Bluetooth, health-sensors and car stereos through dock connectors, and TVs over AirPlay. All this is beyond the reach of HTML apps. Browsers may some-day offer hooks to these capabilities, but by then the native apps will have captured the market and will be on to whatever new capabilities the OS's have exposed.

In a world where the phone connects to a constellation of other devices through all sorts of radios and protocols, web apps are at a significant disadvantage... which is a important, because this is one hot space in the next few years.

Conclusion
Will this change? Absolutely... At some point, the innovation on the core OS's will slow down, and HTML will be a great way to build apps... but with so many unexplored possibilities left (we've barely scratched the surface of what these sensor-packed, networked, always-with-you computers can do)... I wouldn't bet on this shift happening soon.

NB: Yes, there are super-simple apps that would be just fine as HTML5 apps, or HTML apps in a thin native wrapper... you might be trying to build just one of these apps. But if you're not, and your competition is native, you're at a disadvantage.

If you've got a little time, here're two more reasons the best apps will be native for some time to come:

Power
Does your laptop ever get really hot, and start to spin up the fan? Whenever I notice this, it's invariably Chrome or Safari maxing out my CPU. Web-apps get a lot of latitude when it comes to resource consumption... as does anything, generally, that runs on a laptop. Unfortunately, to be able to get through a day of use, your phone has to be a lot more careful how it uses resources.

A lot of the mobile-OS-specific features like geofencing and background sync need to strike a balance between all-day battery life and great user-facing features. When iOS first let developers use geofencing, the power drain was enormous... more recently, it's become very reasonable... that kind of optimisation requires tight integration with the hardware (mostly WiFi, GPS, cellular radio) that neither web apps nor the web browser have access to. It's just one example, but there're many: mobile resource mangement is hard, and you need to be close to the hardware to do it well.

Performance
Thanks to a lot of hard work in the JavaScript community, the web is getting SUPER fast, and code execution in the browser is getting pretty good. But, total application performance is about more than just JS execution time.

• Being able to move big binary chunks of data around (even, say, a photo-app) in DOM/JS land is hellish-slow.
• WebGL is cool, but not broadly implemented, and the kind of graphics performance a developer can get by writing straight OpenGL (taking advantage of sophisticated shader models on more recent devices) is astonishing (just play Real Racing 2 on a pair of iPhone 4S's, streaming split-screen graphics to a TV over WiFi!).
• CSS 3D is cool, but not broadly (consistently) implemented, and if you happen to composite things in the way the browser doesn't like, all that 3D acceleration dies, and you're back to super-slow (and power-consumptive) rendering on the CPU. So: want super-smooth graphics and transitions that render at 60fps? It's going to be a lot of work to get HTML+CSS to perform like native.

The Seven Myths of RIM

In talking to past and present RIM employees, there are some myths repeated so loudly and frequently that people are beginning to believe them without question. So let's go ahead and take a look at some of the most frequent myths.

Myth 1: "We can't switch to Android. We'd just be another commodity player, and only Samsung makes money on Android…"

Reality: People don't give a damn about the OS. We buy our iPhones, iPads, Androids and BlackBerries *not* for the OS, but for what they let us do. People buy BlackBerries for the productivity tools: fantastic eMail, solid calendar, great keyboard. They do this, for the moment, *despite* the lack of apps. Switching to Android would give RIM users the benefits of the best productivity tools (email, calendar, keyboard) and a flourishing app ecosystem. If you don't believe people will pay you for great productivity tools (the thing they actually care about), just because you sell them atop another OS, then you don't truly believe they're worth buying.

Myth 2: "BlackBerry Messenger is too valuable to ship on other platforms for free, but it's so awesome that maybe we can get people to pay $1/mo for it."

Reality: iMessage has already created a great cross-platform (phone, tablet, desktop) messaging platform that had a wildly successful launch (140MM iMessage users vs 55MM BBM users). Facebook Messenger is on every major platform (including BlackBerry), is free, has an open API for developers, and works with the world's de-facto social graph. All the while, BBM still doesn't work on a tablet, on the web, on the desktop, or have an open API. Why would someone pay for this? BBM needs a major rethink before its value goes to zero.

Myth 3: "The BlackBerry Network and all its carrier connections are worth a lot... Carriers love it, and Microsoft or Apple will buy it."

Reality: The BlackBerry network architecture made a lot of sense 13 years ago when it was new, and perhaps as recently as 4 years ago. Simply, the architecture lets RIM maintains a single secure connection between every enterprise using a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, RIM, the network operators, and the handsets themselves. It also allows for smart things like compression, and some network/radio power optimisation tricks (that are beyond the scope of this post).

Several years ago, the mobile internet was pretty flaky: networks were slow, connections were unreliable, and bandwidth was extremely scarce. By comparison, your 3G (not even 4G) smartphone today has at least 40x more bandwidth and 40x lower latency than the old (GPRS) network. Things like HSPA, LTE and WiFi offload have given us way more bandwidth than we ever dreamt possible, and networks are continuously being built out.

Five years ago, you really did need the magic (and brilliance) of the RIM network to efficiently deliver your mail and calendar over unreliable, constrained networks. Today, with LTE and WiFi, we're approaching networks that are 100x faster and more reliable than those networks. The RIM architecture solves a problem we don't have.

Myth 4: "There'll be a backlash at the high data bills that people rack up with Android and iOS. Then people will see why BlackBerry compression technology is so important."

Reality: Sounds like a jilted lover hoping his girlfriend will return. Yes, every day a newspaper publishes an article about carriers screwing us on data charges… and yet, the usage of data and the apps that consume it keep growing exponentially.

Myth 5: "End to end 'enterprise grade' security is really hard and enterprises will only trust RIM."

Reality: 91% of the Fortune 500 are deploying or testing iPhone. Real enterprise customers that support iPhone include Credit Agricole, Dow Chemical, Salesforce.com, and GlaxoSmithKline. These aren't low-security backwaters. The phone is just another computer in your pocket, and the same technologies (e.g. disk encryption, SSL, VPNs) that secure your laptop / browser / network will work on your smartphone. Security is to RIM, as safety is to Volvo. It's a terrific brand halo, but - like Volvo - RIM have to sex-up their products… because Apple's proving its security cred in the real world.

Myth 6: "BlackBerry 10 is going to have a tonne of awesome apps on it… There's more developer interest than ever before."

Reality: The interest is from the same BlackBerry developers that brought us themes and multi-colour LEDs apps. Will we see apps like Kindle, Instapaper, Path, Netflix, Nike Running, Square, Chrome, Instagram? You know, the apps that make iOS great, and that become household names? No, probably not. Maybe in some sort of kludgey Android emulation environment… but native BB10? No.

Myth 7: "BlackBerry Fusion will bring the RIM-quality of device security and management to iOS and Android, so this will be where BES and the RIM Network remain valuable."

Reality: Maybe. It's certainly true that RIM has led the pack in remote device management. However, device management isn't a huge business for a company RIM's size will be contested by all sorts of other players without RIM's baggage. Also, there's two major challenges:

1) Apple already has device management built-in with iCloud, that RIM will have to compete with. Apple certainly must have their own enterprise management console for their own usage, and it'll surely get more enterprise customer exposure in time.

2) Android is just not secure. Every bank that tests Android seems to reject it for several deep security flaws… so being able to remotely manage and provision devices is irrelevant until the underlying security issues get resolved by Google and the Android OEM's. (NB: My next post will touch on why this might be a great opportunity for RIM making the switch to Android.)

So that's it… the Seven Myths of RIM. Next up, RIM's new Playbook - Plan B.

RIM: get honest and get moving

Okay, so RIM really keeps missing the boat, and this recent insistence on BB10, and touchscreen-only devices first indicates that they really don't get it. I've loved my BlackBerry as an email and calendar appliance for over a decade. But more and more I find that I don't use it... I leave the house with my iPhone, and typically bring my BlackBerry along on trips. This morning as RIM's stock continued to get trashed, I noticed that I boarded a flight with just my iPhone and iPad... No BlackBerry in sight.

Clearly RIM's in trouble and listening to investors prattle on about hope for BlackBerry 10 or the promise of an OS licensing deal has gotten to be too much... There's a much simpler (though more painful) path RIM - I think - needs to follow if it wants even a chance at being competitive, so here it is:

First, there're a couple of hard truths to accept:

1) Today, a mobile OS has value if it has a solid app ecosystem. BlackBerry 7 doesn't, and BlackBerry 10 won't. So let's just drop the idea that the OS is valuable.

2) RIM makes way too many phones, and it has never made an all-touch phone that was very good. Focus is good. Distraction is bad... Especially when it's already led to poor products.

3) RIM's never made decent developer tools, and there's no reason to believe that's changed with BlackBerry 10 (what few third party apps exist for PlayBook tend to suck). This is really more to (1), but let's just be clear: RIM - on its own - is never going to build an app ecosystem.

4) Nobody cares about the NOC. Android and iOS are gaining in the enterprise without one, and RIM's falling behind rapidly even here. 

So, with a new grasp of what's truly broken in mind, what needs to happen to give RIM a fighting chance?

1) Build BBM for iOS and Android. There was a time when BBM was a selling point for BlackBerry devices. That ended years ago, and iMessage and the onslaught of free cross-platform messengers have begun to eat BBM's lunch. And yet, BBM tends to be faster and more reliable than the competitors... So open it up, and get a much broader group of people actually finding something of value from the BlackBerry brand.

2: Make one phone. Just one. Kill the rest. Put in a global radio (like the new iPad), a keyboard and a touchscreen. One sku, one device to focus on... Without compromise, and with real single-pointed focus.

3: Kill the PlayBook. It is a terrible device, and it's  been decimated by iPad and the legion of Android clones. PlayBook failed because there were no apps. Build a phone that proves you can compete in the new smartphone world, and maybe you can translate that into a tablet competitor at some point... Nobody can deliver the 10x improvement that RIM needs when their focus is split.

4: Switch to Android. If you admit you've lost the OS war, and need to get apps on your platform, 

Android's the only real choice left. (Come on guys, BB10 is going to ship after the next major updates from iOS, Android, and even Windows-fucking-phone. The market won't bear a 4th platform with less than 2-3% market share by the end of 2013... Stop the fucking insanity!!!)

Build the core suite of apps on top of Android, and take advantage of getting to run all those Android apps not through some clunky re-packaging process, but directly. RIM have all the Android talent internally to do this. Maybe even do a deal with VMWare if you want virtualisation-driven security for enterprise customers... Either way, bite the bullet and make this switch.

5: Hire someone with vision, taste and a big stick to deliver beatings when compromise or excuses are made. Whether it's industrial design, user interface, or even core applications... Everything RIM's shipped in the last couple years has been filled with shoddy compromises that can only come from large groups making cover-your-ass-decisions. (e.g. How the hell did PlayBook ship with an email client that couldn't view attachments, and why wasn't that fixed even a year after launch?!? Surely somebody in the room was thinking "WTF?!")

Finally: go do this with <100 people. That's enough people to design and build something really special, and it'll kill the politics that seems to have been eating RIM alive these days. If they're not done in 9 months, RIM's probably toast anyway.

Is this enough to save RIM? Who knows... But it's clear that the company needs a radical reset and change of direction. First you need an honest view of what's broken. Then comes a tight focus that you can execute fiercely against.

Bon chance.

Feedback Loops in Healthcare - An Example

At Massive Health we've been talking a lot about feedback loops, behaviour change and chronic disease. Now let's talk about a technology change that could enable a real shift in the care of one particular disease: heart disease.

We know that heart disease is the biggest killer of people worldwide. We also know that there is a huge impact that can be had through lifestyle change. So what's missing? A feedback loop.

What do you feel when a bowl of pasta urges your body to manufacture loads of triglycerides? Nothing.

What do you feel when abnormally high levels of (inflammatory) insulin is coursing through your veins? Nothing.

As the pounds creep on, and you develop metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetes), what does your body tell you? Worse than nothing: You crave a bowl of pasta to jumpstart your low energy.

Sounds like your body has it in for you.

So where do you get the data you need to make positive change? It's in your veins.

All that pasta is going to slowly increase your insulin resistance over time, and you'll see it in your fasting blood glucose. That invisible inflammation? Check your CRP levels. The expanding cushion around your midsection? You'll see your triglycerides stay elevated.

The problem is that most people will never have such thorough blood work done, and those who do will get their numbers checked perhaps annually. Why? It's expensive and time consuming to draw several vials of blood and run all the labs. Frankly, your physician doesn't have the time or inclination to look at the data so frequently either.

That's all going to change. As more complex blood tests become as simple as a glucose test (just a single finger prick), and the costs begin to drop, these tests - and the data they produce - will be in the hands of normal people.

Imagine if you could get a full do-it-yourself cardiac panel for $10, and get your results in 10 minutes: you could test your blood weekly. You'd have between 50 and 100x more data about your body and what affects it. (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

But data is just half the problem. Once you have all that data, you still need to make meaning of it...

Want to make investments in healthcare?
Next-gen diagnostics = 10-100x more data.
Next-gen software = meaning, from that data.

NB: Yes, Massive Health is in the second group, and we're partnering with companies in the first one.

Massive Health: raised funding, spending it on new hires

Aza and I have spent the last few weeks trekking up and down Sand Hill road, speaking with investors and looking for firms and individuals who share our mission to help people get healthy, and can help us build a great company. As a result, we’re excited that we’ve raised a $2.25 MM seed round from Felicis VC, Greylock Discovery Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Charles River Ventures and the newly minted Collaborative Fund. (We’ve also got some amazing angels behind us... but our PR folks have asked us to keep the list short ;-)

And now that we are funded, we are hiring.

Our goal at Massive Health is to bring the kind of innovation we expect from the Internet world to health care. As Aza mentioned, we’re excited encourage a design renaissance to health care. We’re also excited to bring “big-data” analysis and other techniques to discover insights that improves lives. Crowdsourcing, game mechanics, and social networking are cool, but applying it to help someone get and stay healthy? That’s exciting. That’s powerful.

There are some great companies in the consumer health space today, so what makes us different? Massive Health sits at the intersection of health care and consumer products. There are some great wellness and fitness apps out there. Whether it’s Nike+, or Cyclemeter (my personal favourite), if you want an app to help you get and stay active, you’re spoiled for choice. But what if you’re actually ill? Then there’s nothing sleek or sexy to help you manage your disease. You’re back to the world of clinical health applications that aren’t especially friendly, easy to understand or use, and certainly aren’t social. Today’s apps don’t appreciate that you’re a person. That’s simply not good enough.

We’re not proposing giving you a badge for eating your broccoli or letting you check-in and become duke of ranch dressing. Tweeting the details of your health isn’t particularly useful either. We are talking about tight feedback loopsand deep insight into the interface which is your body. There is something magical in the intersection of health, motivation, data analysis, and your social graph. That’s where habits are formed, behaviors are changed, and people get healthy.

Doug Soo - our engineering lead - was employee #6 at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. They make enormously scalable systems and a product that’s fundamentally about people. It’s not a coincidence that he’s joined us.

We’re still in ninja mode, so we’re keeping the specifics under wraps. What we can say is that we’re looking for great people who believe in the social mission of helping people get healthier. Not just for wellness, but for the real health problems that plague our nation and the world. If our mission resonates with you, and you’re a great engineer with a lot of passion, we’d be honored if you’d check out our open jobs list. Otherwise, stay tuned... we’re excited to share more soon!

Why Android and iOS will kill the mobile security market

There's been some talk recently about mobile security, with companies like McAfee and others making acquisitions in the space, and companies like Lookout raising impressive VC-funded warchests. The problem is that there's just no way the mobile "security" companies will ever really make it, because the two most important mobile platforms (Android and iOS) stop them from doing anything useful. Oh sure, there're companies that provide provisioning and management dashboards to IT departments: that's a real problem that developers can solve... but they can't solve the problems that'll really matter soon.

Here's the big pitch for mobile security:

As more and more smartphones get on the market, there'll be more malware, spyware, phishing, viruses, network attacks, etc. on mobile devices, just like there is on the desktop. That sounds like a problem worth solving.

Well, yes, but... See, every app on Android and iOS needs to run within a pretty tight little sandbox. App_A can't read or write files that are in App_B's sandbox.

So, let's see, can a "security" app on iOS or Android:

- Detect or stop malware? Nope. One app can't "scan" another app or prevent it's usage.

- Detect or stop spyware? Nope. One app can't spy on another app... so it can't know if there's spyware.

- Stop phishing? Nope. Well, not unless you get the user to use *your* browser instead of the default browser... which will have phishing protection anyway.

- Detect or stop viruses? Nope.

- Prevent network attacks? Nope. An app on Android or iOS can't create/enforce firewall rules on the device, much less put packet filtering in place.

So, what CAN a mobile "security" app do on Android or iOS? Well, backup/sync/destroy contacts/calendar/eMail and locate your phone if you lose it. That's pretty useful, admittedly, but there's a lot of other people providing that capability, like Apple and Google themselves.

Is this all for naught then? No. There might be an opportunity to build a secure version of the Android OS, and sell it to OEM's / operators who want to put a "secure" or "trusted" build of the OS on certain devices. But that's a nightmare of a sales process to begin with, and would you really bet against Google and Apple just making their security policies tighter in the OS itself to prevent malware from running amok on their platforms?

Sad to say, but I think the stratospheric growth rate of iOS and Android, and the security policies they some with (unlike, say, the older Windows Mobile or Symbian platforms) means that anyone with a mobile security play is locked out of the two most important mobile platforms in any meaningful way... Who knows, maybe making Windows Phone 7 secure could be a business?

Android vs RIM ... Asian edition

Fake BlackBerry Bold, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

On the left is a new BlackBerry Bold 9700 (unsubsidised price $450 USD), on the right is a Chinese knockoff (even the homescreen looks the same!) that retails for $100 USD in Indonesia.

Actually, the knockoff has two features the real BlackBerry doesn't:
- 2 SIM cards (notice the two green Send buttons on the left)
- Rear AND front-facing cameras

The FakeBerry even has WiFi! For $100, unlocked and unsubsidised.

Now, what happens when the processors in the fake devices get a tiny bit faster, and they all just run Android OS instead of the kludgey thing they're running now?

Remember, these Chinese ODM's are going to the bother of getting their crufty OS's to even LOOK like BlackBerry OS. Imagine what they could do if they had the full power of an OS like Android's to build on top of.

Google buys GIPS: It's not just about video

Lots of people are excited about the video-calling capabilities that Android will be inheriting through Google's recent acquisition of Global IP Sound. What's more interesting - to me, at least - is the ability that Google has to turn the operators into just another IP pipe.

Today, your cellular voice calls are just that: voice calls. They're billed as voice calls. Sure, you can use Skype or Fring on your phone, but there are alot of tradeoffs to doing that (it's not the same phone number you typically use, you need to have a fast 3G connection, dropped calls more often when in motion, it's yet-antother-app instead of your "phone", etc.). Some vendors like Research in Motion have enabled Wi-Fi calling (aka UMA) on some of their devices. When you have a UMA-enabled device, and a UMA-enabled carrier (like T-Mobile USA), and your phone is connected to a WiFi access point, it tries to connect to your carrier's servers, and if the conection is good enough, it'll route all your voice and data over WiFi... so it's like you're using your phone back at home, even though you're in a hotel room in Phnom Penh. Pretty cool.

Well, sort of cool. For this to work, you need to be an old-school telco, with old-school gear from old-school vendors like Ericsson and NokiaSiemens.

But imagine a world where you had a fast IP connection on your phone wherever you went... a 3G, 4G or WiFi connection. Imagine that you'd already chosen a "virtual" telco like Google Voice to be the keeper of your phone number. All of a sudden, you can start making phone calls and just treating the data network as your main bearer network. What happens if you're in a spot with crummy (EDGE or GPRS) data coverage? Not a problem: the phone "app" on your device will just use the native phone network to route your call (like Google Voice does if you use the iPhone web app, for example).

So what piece of this puzzle does Global IP Sound give Google? The pieces that let you deliver high-performance voice (and, of course, video) across a number of different data networks (some fast, some not, some consistent, some jittery) and different devices (smartphones, not-so-smart phones, desktop clients, etc.). 

By making the acquisition, Google gets to own what could be a valuable piece of infrastructure as voice (and video) moves from the telco-centric model to a more Internet-centric model. The biggest surprise is that the existing guys (Alcatel-Lucent, NortelSiemens, Ericsson) didn't pull the trigger sooner.

Actually, I guess that's not such a big surprise.

How to save money and stay connected anywhere on earth

Summary:
Travel much? Here's the quick list of what's worth grabbing:
- BlackBerry 9700 (UMA means free WiFi calling internationally, 3G means it works anywhere on earth)
- iPhone 3GS (awesome browser and maps makes life easy. Skype is also pretty handy. Make sure you unlock it.)
- A Boingo account ($10/month to use lots of WiFi hotspots abroad)
- A Google Voice account (call forwarding, voicemail transcription)
- Gizmo account (call-forward from your Google Voice account to your local prepaid number seamlessly)
- Kindle (with international wireless, you're always getting the news and books you want... it's awesome)

Here're a little more detail:
I just got back from a 3 week trip to Japan and Thailand, and I didn't want to be TOTALLY disconnected, so figuring out how to stay in touch, and not pay $3/minute to AT&T or T-Mobile for roaming was high on my list. Here's what I did and how it worked out for me:

First up, my BlackBerry Bold 9700 on T-Mobile. On T-Mobile you can get a $20/month add-on that includes all the international eMail use you can imagine, which is a great way to control costs. Also, unlike AT&T, T-Mobile has enabled WiFi calling (aka UMA), which allows your phone to use voice and data service over WiFi just as if you were home... meaning, for free.

Next up, the iPhone 3GS. AT&T's data plans are pretty terrible for roaming, but there's no shortage of ways to unlock an iPhone, thankfully. Between a local SIM card, with data services, ($30/month for 3G and unlimited data on TrueMove in Thailand, for example) and GPS, the iPhone becomes an amazing travel guide. Maps, search, Skype, etc. all make navigating a foreign city a whole lot easier.

Whether or not you're taking a laptop on your trip is a big question by itself. In my case, we planned this trip as we went, and since that meant lots of research and online bookings we brought the Mac. One cool thing was that as soon as I got to a hotel room, I plugged my Mac in by ethernet, and used Mac OS X's "Internet Sharing" feature to turn my laptop into a WiFi access point. As soon as I did this, my iPhone and BlackBerry both became totally free to use. Love this.

Speaking of WiFi, it's still expensive to get WiFi in lots of places, from hotels to airports. Unless, of course, you've got a Boingo account. For $10/month, you can get unlimited WiFi access at hotspots all over the world. I've used it in hotels, airports, and cafe's all over the world. It pays for itself the first time you use it.

Voicemail is another of the tricky ways carriers get roaming fees on your bill. Say someone calls you when you're on vacation, and you ignore the call. Well, your phone *forwards* the call back to your home country so it can go to voicemail. Guess who pays for that? So, how to fix this? Well, call your carrier and tell them to turn voicemail *off* on your phone. Then go ahead and get a Google Voice account, and give everyone THAT number instead of your cellphone's number. If people call or text you, you'll still get the call/message on your phone. But if you ignore the call, Google Voice handles the voicemail bit. No forwarding. No roaming charge. You also happen to get email transcription, and a web interface for free... which is really cool.

Want to get a bit more nerdy? Setup a Gizmo VoIP account, and set Google Voice to also forward your calls to your Gizmo number. So when someone calls you, your phone will ring, and if your computer's running, your Gizmo client will also "ring". More interestingly, you can tell Gizmo to forward your calls to your new local prepaid number (the SIM card that's now hopefully in your unlocked iPhone). What's happening here, again? Well, when someone calls your Google Voice number, it'll get forwarded to Gizmo, which will then forward the call to your new local number. What's cool is just how cheap this is. Gizmo, for example, charges 3-cents per minute to forward a call to Thailand. So, when someone in the US called me, I paid 3-cents per minute to receive the call by using Gizmo and a local network provider. AT&T would have charged me $1.99 per minute instead. Yup, AT&T is 66-times more expensive. This is a great way to save some money when roaming.

Finally, get a Kindle. Besides being way easier to carry than a bunch of books, the international wireless feature is fantastic. I was sitting on a beach in rural Thailand (on an island with no paved roads) reading Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Work Week. At some point he mentioned another book that sounded pretty interesting, and I was able to find, buy, and download the other book in less than a minute, without leaving my pina colada. Oh, and while I wasn't likely to get my weekly Economist magazine on an island that doesn't have an ATM or a bookstore, every Friday morning the Kindle received that week's issue electronically.

Other nice things to have around:
- Zagat to Go, the iPhone app from Zagat, has a great list of hotels, restaurants, and cafe's that you can use all over the world. A recent update of the app lets you store these lists right on the iPhone itself. So there's none of the slowness, flakiness, or costs of roaming to deal with.

- TripIt is fantastic. Handles reservations from all sorts of travel services, and neatly organizes them into an easy-to-check itinerary right on your device. Ever need to look for your boarding pass to find your flight number when you're filling out a customs declaration card? TripIt has all the info you need right there. Hope your flight's delayed so you can sleep a few more minutes? TripIt tells you what your flight's status is. Have a connecting flight? Shortly after you land, you'll get an eMail telling you whether your next flight is on time, where it is, and how long you have to make your connection. Really well executed.

-Skype on iPhone is a great app to have around, especially when making lots of calls. Often-times, I was on the BlackBerry and my wife was on the iPhone. With Skype on the iPhone, we still didn't pay for roaming.

What didn't work so well?
- CityMaps2Go is a great idea: Opensource map data from lots of big cities all over the world, all downloaded right to your iPhone, so you can look at maps without needing a data connection... meaning, you don't need to pay for roaming to use the maps. On paper it's a great idea, but in practise, the maps just aren't good enough. Wandering around Tokyo, it was apparent that I was better off paying AT&T for roaming than trying to use CityMaps2Go. As the open-sourced maps get better and more complete, this will be a great way to reduce roaming costs while traveling in future.

- WorldMate. It's like TripIt's under-achieving little brother. Had all sorts of issues with imporing itineraries, and has an interface that seems really powerful, and just ends up being confusing. Also, it appears to have the amazing ability to let you find and book flights right on your phone. In practise, it was too painful, and I ended up using my laptop every time. It feels like they've tried to do too many things, and haven't done many well.

Apple & AT&T allow VoIP? Yawn.

At last, Apple seems to be allowing iPhone VoIP apps to use the 3G network... first with Fring and iCall, and soon with Skype and other apps.

The blogosphere is buzzing, especially with news that iPad owners will be able to use their $30/month unlimited data packages for VoIP as well... which is cool, except that it doesn't matter.

First off, are we really willing to trust AT&T's 3G network to deliver solid quality for voice? Nope. What about WiFi? Trying to make a WiFi call in your average Starbucks doesn't often end well. Lots of dropped audio, and generally poor quality.

Sure, that's acceptable when it's a free alternative to a paid phone call, but what about when all calls are free anyway?

With all the major carriers offering unlimited voice and data plans from $80-120 USD / month, it's clear that unlimited voice is something that the carriers are already thinking about pretty seriously... and it's not just because they're feeling generous. It turns out the average call to customer service costs a carrier between $10-15. The average customer calls in 4-6 times a year. That's a lot of profit gone each time you call to complain about a dropped call, or an incorrect bill. With an unlimited plan, there aren't any errors on your bill, so you don't call customer service, and with domestic calls costing next to nothing for the carrier, this is a great way to cut costs and grow revenue.

What about carriers building out their 3G networks and adding more capacity? That's great, but the quality of service required to deliver solid voice just isn't a part of the 3G data service that carriers offer... and there's no incentive for them to provide it. (We asked for net neutrality... and we'll get it... meaning, no voice QoS).

My bet? Unlimited voice and data plans will take off in a big way in 2010, and between the decreasing price of voice minutes, and our increasing use of data applications (which, without QoS for voice, means voice-over-3G-data won't work), VoIP over 3G won't get used very much at all. The biggest threat to carrier voice revenue isn't VoIP-over-3G offerings... it's services like Google Voice, which are benefitted by the unlimited voice plans, but compete on the long-distance minute side of the business.

Advancing Android

Ah, so Nexus One is on the horizon... the true "Google Phone", and there's a lot of people checking their Verizon receipts (and the return policy) to see if they've bought their Droid in the last 30 days or not.

Rumors abound about Google shipping this as an unlocked and unsubsidised GSM handset, and people seem to be wondering just what this might mean...

A few thoughts:

• So far, no Android device has been on par physically with the iPhone. Whether it was industrial design, processor speed or otherwise, the iPhone still feels like it's in a league of it's own. This handset gives Google the chance to remove hardware as a reason to buy an iPhone instead.

• Unlocked? Hmm... If there's no carrier burden, this can truly become a first class data device... These are devices that really are all about TCP/IP, and just happen to use whatever network is around to get a connection, whether it's cellular, WiFi, or something else... Suddenly, carrier networks, roaming agreements, and fancy technologies like UMA become a lot less interesting... it can really just be all about data, and whoever is able to provide you the right quality of data service, at the right time, at the right price. Changing the game like this isn't dissimilar from Google's participation in the last US spectrum auction.

• What does this say to all the OEM's like Motorola who are making large strategic shifts to embrace Android? Is Google competing with their partners? No. The Android ecosystem needs a true iPhone-class flagship device, and by providing one, Google makes things better for all the participants in the ecosystem. While HTC seems to be the OEM building this particular device, I wouldn't be surprised if Google quite freely shares most or all of the design for this device with other OEM's. Building a minimum-spec phone that's competitive with iPhone, and helping the other ecosystem OEM's get to the same point helps developers and customers: less fragmentation, better user experience. While Motorola and others might suffer some near-term drop in device sales, in the long run this is going to be beneficial for the ecosystem.

• Where's the money? Is this thing going to ship above the $500 mark like all other unlocked smartphones? Building a new flagship phone that you want traction around, and then pricing it way outside even where early-adopters typically tread doesn't sound like a great way to spread the word. So, either there will be a carrier channel here that'll subsidise it (T-Mobile seems like a good option, given the device's reported 3G frequencies), or Google's going to eat some of the cost. Google could well decide that getting a solid competitor to iPhone well entrenched is worth some subsidy cost,of course... just write a cheque out of the promotional budget... But I think it's more interesting to try and understand just what the combined search and app market revenue looks like per device. If Google can sell a device at a price competitive with subsidised phones, and make up the difference with ads and apps, that's one hell of an endorsement of the platform, and the mobile ecosystem as a whole... and it's signals a huge change in how devices will be sold and subsidised in the next few years.

All in all, it promises to be an interesting Q1 for Android, and the smartphone ecosystem as a whole.

What Droid/Android needs

So, I've been playing with a Verizon/Motorola Droid for a few weeks now? It's great, but it's just not ready for prime-time... especially not as the flagship device for the Android platform. So what's wrong with Droid, and what does it need?

Better Hardware

1. Motorola have managed to build a device with a physical keyboard that's worse than iPhone's virtual keyboard. A tremendous engineering achievement.
2. 2 years after the iPhone's launch, shipping a touch screen without multitouch (and at this price, on a flagship device, positioned against iPhone) is just silly
3. The lack of a decent oil-resistant coating on the screen means lots and lots of wiping the display against your jeans
4. While I'm sure I'd be able to beat any poor mugger senseless with this brick of a phone, a little elegance in design wouldn't be the worst thing

Some OS suggestions

Android still crashes once every day or so... probably because of third party apps, but it's still crummy. Managing third party apps, and preventing them from taking down my phone would be a great OS addition

Multitasking
Background processing is nice, in theory, but in practice the whole thing feels slow and cumbersome, especially compared to the iPhone. I'd suggest a sort of multi-tiered background processing option:

1. The app just runs in the background without any modification, but is EXTREMELY CPU, network and memory limited versus other apps, especially when the user is actively interacting with the phone.
2. The app runs in an "approved" background state, where it's got a sort of QoS guarantee... something like "we'll let you run at full CPU for 5 seconds out of every 60 or 120 or whatever", so the app gets more resources, but only if it's designed to play nice
3. The app gets to run in the background, with full resources, but the user gets a VERY clear warning about what this might do to performance/responsiveness of the phone, etc.

Push with Payload
So, the other thing that helps some of this along is the ability to give developers the ability to push notifications AND payload data right to their app. Integrate this with some sort of "stored procedure" and you've got a great way to keep "background" apps from breaking the user experience.

Imagine an eMail, IM or stock portfolio app for a minute. The server would push updates (like messages, stock updates, etc.) to the phone, and the OS would take the message's payload, hand it over to a "push procedure" method and say "okay, you have 5 seconds... do what you need with this message". The stored "push procedure" could then stick the message in the app's DB, do some basic parsing, notify the user, etc. But the point is that the app can do all of this while the device is still in the user's pocket... and not suck up cycles when the user's got the phone out of their pocket and want to actually USE the app that might have pending content.

Add push w/ payload to an intelligent background processing mechanism, and suddenly you've got a MUCH more responsive and power-efficient platform. Which translates to a better user experience. Which means closing some of the gap with iPhone, without giving up multitasking.

Some Market Rules
Okay, so the Apple App Store has all sorts of restrictions that drive developers crazy... including the approval process. But they've also got some things right. For example, to put an app in the App Store, you MUST provide screenshots. Android market? Not so. On the App Store, you need to provide an "update summary" to explain to a user what changes you've made in an update that they are able to see before updating the app. Android market? Nope.

So, while some of Apple's decisions don't make developers all that happy, they seem to at least try to get things right for users... and happy users mean more app downloads, which means happy developers. Google ought to take a page out of the App Store book, at least where user experience is concerned.

So

My Droid's going back to Verizon any day now, but I'm sure I'll be picking up another Android device in the near future... and I'll cross my fingers I get some of my holiday feature-wishlist by then :)

BlackBerry's trying to catch up, instead of striving to lead

At this week's developer conference in San Francisco, RIM released a slew of exciting new features for the BlackBerry platform: OpenGL ES for games, push messaging to developers, Flash support, and some cool APIs around payments and reverse geocoding.

With BlackBerry competing against iPhone, Android, and Palm, which of these new announcements was an industry first by RIM? Reverse geocoding. Yikes.

Even Apple beat RIM to delivering broadly-available push messaging to delivers. Yes, Apple beat RIM... at push.

Oh, and Apple and Google have both had OpenGL ES since they launched... and, with the App Store, Apple's got payments in the bag.

So, where's RIM sitting then?

- No material improvements to the user experience.

- Despite having bought a WebKit browser company, still no decent browser.

- Despite acquiring Dash Navigation, they aren't close to competing with Android's Google Maps implementation (though, to be fair, *nobody* is).

- Their developer tools are still a far cry from the polished Apple Xcode tools.

On top of all of this, RIM continues to shoehorn new technologies into a dated Java-based OS, while all their competitors are on BSD or Linux. (To be fair, I'll bet the next major BlackBerry OS rev will include a Linux kernel.)

The scary part of this is that RIM's gone from being the market leader and innovator, to continuously playing catchup with the other players in the space. That Apple, Palm, and Google have all built more flexible operating systems, better browsers, and solid multimedia capabilities in the last 2 years, while RIM has struggled to release Storm and Storm 2 is telling.

With Android expected to hit prodigious volumes in the next 2 years, and the growing number of one-way BlackBerry-to-iPhone converts, the BlackBerry platform looks less and less exciting for developers. At a time when each of the major mobile platforms is "good enough" for day to day eMail, SMS and voice, the differentiator is really the app stack and the browser. With RIM falling down on both counts, it really seems like there's less and less upside for developers to focus on BlackBerry, when they could instead be working on their iPhone and Android apps.

So, what's next for RIM?

RIM started out in mobile eMail by building the entire stack themselves, because Palm refused to buy their wireless modem. That's right, Palm could've owned mobile eMail, but RIM ended up building it themselves. They followed a Palm-like strategy of finding exactly the right set of problems to solve, and made the BlackBerry terrific at solving them (talk about a Lean Startup). The problem is that RIM seems to be competing as though the axis' of competition haven't changed: they're still the best at eMail.

But the axis has changed... now it's about the "computer-in-my-pocket"... the web matters, and so do apps. Almost, perhaps, more than eMail.

It seems RIM's next step needs to be a re-invention...
- A new, modern OS
- A browser at parity with everyone else
- Developer tools that are as slick as Apple's

Most of all, all those brilliant folks in Waterloo and Redwood City need to figure out where (besides eMail) RIM's truly going to lead... playing catch-up doesn't appear to be a winning strategy for the company.

It's curious that Palm needed a similar technology/platform/business reinvention, and while Palm's made the leap, it's unclear whether they did it soon enough or not. Will RIM?

Slow Crab Festival 2008 - Disappointing

I went to this year's Slow Crab festival in San Francisco, held by the Slow Food folks, and while expectations were high... for a $100/plate at the "VIP table", it was pretty disappointing.

- pre-dinner appetizers were a few crackers and cheese, quickly finished within a few minutes of the doors opening. Massively poor planning here.

- They had one white, one red, one sparkling wine, and one beer. Nice. So much for lots of interesting local selection.

- Oh, and they started to run out of every wine they had before the dinner had even started. More great planning.

- The meal? Some basic, not-so-yummy salad... and then crab with butter and lemon on the side. Not so interesting unless all you wanted to do was eat pounds of crab dipped in butter/lemon.

- Desert? Run for the coffee and biscotti at the other side of the room as quick as you can if you want some...

- Speakers? Some were interesting... then there were the angry "rebel without a clue" fisherman talking nonsensically about threatening the Governator (Gov. Schwarzenegger)...

All in all? Not expecting to go to 2009, or perhaps another of the smaller Slow Food events. Shame... it sounded a lot more promising.

Silent trains?

The Economist has a brief article about train operator C2C in London offering mobile-free phones by coating the phones in an RF-absorptive material. Basically it prevents cellular signals from getting into or out of a train car, and by doing so guarantees silence in the cab.

It's a little heavy-handed for a few reasons, though. Firstly, blocking RF transmission will just put phones into a wildly-seeking-signal state, meaning that many people will end their journeys into London or on their way home with batteries that have been drained more than they ought to. Also, it prevents people from using otherwise silent data services (eMail, SMS, web, etc.).

What might be a better solution? Well, yes, coat the trains such that they don't let phones connect to external base-stations. Then go ahead an put in picocells inside the train cars themselves, or repeater-like technology that Orange and Virgin have already deployed. Allow these systems to only allow services to work on the data channel, and you're done...

And the revenue model? Whoever owns these picocells can charge the operators for allowing their customers to use them. Not an unreasonable "roaming" charge, of course, but something akin to the charge operators charge for terminating calls on their networks, perhaps.

And what's next? Deploy this in the tube. In fact, wouldn't this be a great project for TfL to own, both on commuter rail and in the tube?

Is RIM falling further behind?

A couple of days ago RIM released a software update to the new Bold. It turns out that the software stack on this device has been the cause of a lot of issues for RIM and it's partners: Some operators (like AT&T) have refused to ship the device with the previous software offering, and others have halted sales of the device until the fixes were ready. All in all a pretty miserable device launch for RIM (especially for a new flagship product).

Because RIM's got access to all of their devices on the network, I happened to get a notice on my BlackBerry telling me that there was an update available, and that I could get it by visiting a certain website. When I got there, I found that (unsurprisingly) I had to download a 93 MB file, launch Windows on my machine (sigh), and go through the update process.



Notwithstanding that having to use only a Windows PC to update my BlackBerry is pretty obnoxious, the entire upgrade process was far from uneventful. See, what happens is that the installer does a backup of your device, wipes it, reloads the new operating system, and then your old data.

Well, mine got half-way through the reloading phase and freaked out. So, I momentarily had a shiny brick instead of a BlackBerry. Great.

I managed to get the new operating system installed on my device... but of course, BlackBerry desktop was too stupid to realise that I'd done this because it had failed in the middle of the update the last time. Yippee.

It turns out that BlackBerry Desktop *does* leave a backup file around that you can use to restore all of your information... or so it seems. After restoring the backup I noticed that I had all my contacts, and settings... but no apps. All those applications I'd downloaded to my BlackBerry, that I *watched* getting saved in the backup process? Gone. Why? Guess RIM thinks it makes sense to store one half of your backup somewhere and the other somewhere else (and hidden). Brilliant thinking, here.

Why is this so upsetting? Well the Bold is supposed to have over-the-air update functionality. Does it? Anyone's guess... but if it does, RIM's sure done a terrible job taking advantage of it. What's worse is that my Kindle... a simple book reader, does OTA updates, and does them beautifully.

I was flipping through the "content manager" on my Kindle recently and realised the menus had a few new (and useful) features there. Where'd they come from? No idea. It seems my Kindle silently upgraded itself, and kept on working splendidly...

Even more a sign that RIM's tech is slipping behind is the fact that Android includes OTA update capabilities, and is actually using them. The first batch of G1 is supposed to get an OTA update, which, considering the device just launched is at once distressing and impressive.

Either way, anything's better than the invasive, time-wasting, multi-step, failure-ridden process that RIM's got going for it today... hopefully they've got some bright folks in Waterloo working on it.

How can Android win developers?

The first production Android device (T-Mobile's G1) will soon hit the market, and the legions of Google faithful will no-doubt snap up many devices in short order.

Will that be enough to allow Android to be a real competitor in the smartphone wars? The G1 isn't a particularly attractive device, doesn't have as good a media player as the iPhone, doesn't have a browser that can best the iPhone, doesn't provide eMail that holds a candle to BlackBerry, and is locked to a network that's widely regarded as having lackluster coverage. It's unlikely that the G1 is going to be a hit with consumers, and it's not going to ship in volumes that will make anyone at Apple or RIM lose sleep.

That feeds a bigger problem, though: getting developers on side. Unlike the iPhone which got great consumer demand without any third-party apps just by having a sexy device, or BlackBerry which has thrived by providing a rock-solid communications "appliance" that nobody's yet rivaled, Android is going to need to differentiate on killer 3rd party apps.

When it comes to developer platforms, iPhone has a beautiful SDK and distribution mechanism that's sparked widespread adoration from developers. Sure, Apple's exerting far more control on the developer community than perhaps they should, bit they're still a whole lot better than the existing carrier / OEM ecosystem. Also, iPhone is a single, consistent platform... a developer can build one app and have it reliably run on the millions of iPhone 2G, 3G and iPod Touch devices in market. A great, powerful developer toolkit, robust operating system, ubiquitous distribution platform, and consistent device hardware? This is a developer's dream.

The BlackBerry developer platform isn't particularly elegant, doesn't have a great development environment (RIM just recently got decent Eclipse integration), and is a generally underpowered OS when it comes to doing anything involving graphics or media. It's also got a pretty significant number of inconsistencies between OS and hardware versions, which has proved to be an irritation for many RIM developers. It's particularly telling that RIM wrote the Facebook app for BlackBerry, whereas Facebook built their own iPhone app.

That said, BlackBerry provides a reasonably reliable and stable operating system, and millions of devices as an addressable install base (with users who have a disproportionately high usage of data and third party apps vs all the other platforms except iPhone). This makes it a no-brainer for many application developers to target.

So a developer just developing a new application will probably build their first app on iPhone, do a re-write in Java to support BlackBerry, and then give very careful consideration to whether they feel like building an app for Symbian or Windows Mobile. In a competitive marketplace, it's safe to say that if you can hit 30-40MM devices by targeting iPhone and BlackBerry, it's unlikely that you're going to spend anywhere near the same resources to target a platform like Android with <1 MM. Those resources are probably better spent on building either for a platform like Symbian (with broad reach), or towards building version 2 of the iPhone/BlackBerry app.

What's Google to do? Well, how about building a porting toolkit? If a developer decides to build a BlackBerry application, they're already going to be creating a Java version of their application. If Google provided tools to help more quickly port the BlackBerry Java app to an Android Java App, that could significantly reduce the time and effort required to get an app on Android, making the business case for doing so much more viable.

Sure, some classes of apps that are really glued to the hardware (e.g. games), aren't good candidates for something like this, but those apps are in the minority. Also, while Android's Java implementation has all sorts of great features like 3D graphics, rich sound libraries, and more, BlackBerry doesn't, so any app that was a straight port from BlackBerry to Android wouldn't really show off the full potential of the Android platform. Not ideal. But if the porting toolkit were extended to quickly and easily add some of these richer capabilities into the resulting applications, it could prove a powerful motivator for developers.

The name of the game is addressable market, and it's clear that as the new kid in town, Google's got an uphill battle. With a far-from-inspiring first device, the battle's just gotten a bit harder. Taking advantage of the current strength of BlackBerry as a platform is one thing that Google can do to more quickly bootstrap their own developer ecosystem... which would be great for the entire industry.

Yet-another-iPhone request: handle the network gracefully

Wireless networks can be crap... they don't work, you can't get a signal, etc. We all know this. So why does iPhone not seem to realize this?

If you're in the middle of writing an email on the subway, you might get interrupted by two or three messages telling you that your phone can't connect to the network, activate EDGE, etc. Why? Why not just have a queue of pending network events, and handle them when the network's available, without bothering the user?

Also, if I've written a few emails while out of coverage that are now waiting to be sent, why doesn't iPhone immediately send them when it sees a network again? What purpose does waiting for the next-scheduled send/receive time serve?

iPhone being built on OS X is great for a tonne of reasons, but mobile just isn't the same, and little things like this are good examples of why BlackBerry's market share is climbing and iPhone's has been dropping for the last little while... it turns out that people care about this stuff.

Fingers crossed for a great new update on Monday at WWDC. :)

Unlimited travel... but not.

Air Canada stupidity, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So Air Canada is offering a flight pass for "unlimited" travel inside Ontario for $1100 for two months. Wow. That's $550/month for all the travel you want in the province. There aren't a whole lot of airports (their email suggests three), but at least you can spend the weekend in Ottawa / Toronto if you feel like it, or commute between the two for those with jobs that require it.

Except not.

The flight pass explicitly forbids travel between Ottawa and Toronto. So... you can go between Ottawa / Toronto and Niagara? Um. All of a sudden this seems like less of a deal.

What a fantastic way to excite and then tremendously disappoint your customers Air Canada. I wonder why ACE Aviation wants rid of you right now...

New York City launches a seed venture fund

New York City, with a number of local partners has launched a $2 million seed fund called NYC Seed that will make investments up to $200,000 in local startup companies. There's been much talk about the gap in funding between angel and venture capital, and being able to get a couple hundred thousand dollars could help a lot of companies fill that gap. In a city that's dominated by financial services, it might be interesting to see some of the hedge funds or investment banks put in small amounts of capital as LP's: conferences like Money:Tech are proving there's a lot of innovation in software in that space. Come to think of it, it's something else that cities like London, Toronto and Paris might want to think about for similar reasons.

Is creating a venture fund the best way for a region to grow it's tech sector? Not sure, but it's a great start. Is $2 MM enough to start a small seed fund? Well, there're a few good examples of small seed funds (Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC being one) that seem to make sense. Personally I'm quite skeptical of the seed-sized convertible-debt instruments that some VCs use to make early stage investments, so for me anything that helps fill that capital gap is an experiment worth playing out.

Ascendance Project in Union Square

IMG_0034.JPG, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

Great performance from Ascendance Dance Project today in Union Square. Basically it's beautifully choreographed dance, on a rock climbing wall... very cool and unique.

There're still doing a few more performances through the weekend, and it's definitely worth seeing if you can make it out.

iphone wifi needs smarts

Note to Apple: just being able to connect to a wifi network isn't the
same as being able to send and receive data across it. iPhone really
ought to intelligently test the wifi connection and switch to cellular
data if wifi isn't working properly. Having to go in to settings
multiple times a day to enable and disable wifi isn't much fun.

Next generation gaming... will iPhone lead the way?

Nintendo's DS has been breaking all sorts of device sales records since launching, and Sony's PSP hasn't done too badly either... but is all that about to change?

Over the next 12-24 months, the chipsets in high-end handsets are going to have graphics processing power roughly equal to or exceeding Sony's PlayStation 2. That's some serious power for a small screen. Devices like HTC's Touch Diamond and Nokia's Tube are all going to ship with high-res touch (multi touch?) screens, as well. So in the not too distant future we're going to have devices with lots of compute and graphics power, memory, connectivity, with beautiful screens and consistent interaction mechanisms (touch and accelerometers, for example).

What's held mobile games back for the last few years? Well, aside from the crapulence of the games themselves (I can't believe that Guitar Hero III Mobile actually wins awards... have you *tried* it on a BlackBerry? Ugh. It's embarrassingly bad.), it's not the easiest thing to go out and find a game. There's all sorts of operator deck nonsense that a user's got to deal with to actually find the game they want. Of course, that assumes that the developer/publisher has actually struck a deal with the operator in question, so that the game's even available for download. Yikes.

Oh, and between the limited storage on devices and the slow network speeds, it's unlikely that you'd be able to download a very large game w/ lots of rich images and sound... at least not unless you feel like receiving one hell of a bill for data transfer.

On the flip side, anyone can walk into a store and pick up whatever game they want for their PSP or DS... and you just pop in the cartridge and away you go.

How might iPhone change this? Well, first of all, the hardware's pretty good so the kinds of games you can develop are pretty impressive. Go ahead and compare something like Tap Tap Revolution (available through Installer.app for jailbroken iPhones) to Guitar Hero III Mobile and I'll bet you'll be impressed just how much better TTR is, even though it was built by one particularly bright 23-year old developer.

Secondly, discovery isn't a problem... just fire up iTunes and browse around the app store for something that catches your fancy, click-to-buy, and it's sucked down at broadband speeds to your computer and quickly sync'd to your iPhone.

Finally, dealing with one company (Apple) is a whole lot easier than dealing with 40 operators, and Apple takes 30% of the sales revenue, compared to 50-60% in some cases with certain operators.

So, the hardware's pretty good, the discovery problem's pretty well solved, and it makes life a whole lot simpler for developers large and small.

If nothing else, Apple's going to put a lot of pressure on the operators, but they're also going to push others like Nokia to execute and innovate on strategies like Ovi.

But how're Nintendo and Sony going to respond? Between Wiiware and the PS3 Online store, both companies understand the importance of game downloads and online purchases. But can they overcome the massive change in phone capabilities? Remember that DS is wildly outselling PSP, and DS has a comparative paucity of compute power: they've innovated (like Wii) on gameplay. Well, with the hardware being equal or better, and in your pocket anyway, are we looking at the end of the portable console market?

Great article on Atari games

Gamasutra's got a great article on the history and design of Atari games. Especially helpful for people like me, who don't know a thing about gaming :)

Getting Things Done with iPhone

So it's been a few days since I swapped out my BlackBerry for an iPhone, and one of the biggest iPhone omissions seems to be the non-existent to-do list. Exactly why such an important feature (and one that's built right into iCal on the Mac) got left out is beyond me... thankfully, though, there're a lot of alternative web apps for iPhone including Ta-da List and Remember the Milk.

Apparently the Omni Group are working on a version of OmniFocus for iPhone, which I'm sure will be fantastic, but since I'm using both a BlackBerry and iPhone, Remember The Milk seems like a better choice (MilkSync lets you synchronize tasks to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device). That said, with all the great things I've heard about OmniFocus, I'm sure I'll give it a whirl when it ships for iPhone.

Experimenting with a different to-do list gave me a great excuse to start fresh with my task list and build a reasonably clean "Getting Things Done" setup. So here's my experience with getting a GTD solution up and working on iPhone.

First I gave Ta-Da List a shot, and while it's a great for managing simple task lists, it's not really up to the task of being at the center of your to-do list management. There's no ability to search tasks, move them from list to list, or use tags or any other mechanism to otherwise label things. If you're looking for a super-simple flat to-do list for your iPhone, though, it's great, and the site works great on iPhone and because it's so light weight things load super quickly, even over the EDGE network.

Next up (and what I'm currently using) is Remember The Milk. I've got to say it's more than a little intimidating at the outset... all these lists, locations, tags, smart searches, etc. It took me a while to decide on the simplest way to work with it.

What I ended up settling on was a set of lists for important projects, and tags for contexts (e.g. @computer, @ping, etc.)



Oh, there's another aside... @ping is my context for calling or writing someone. Since I'm always on a smartphone, I'm pretty much equally able to send an email or call someone, so I don't have @online / @phone as separate contexts to reach out to people.

I also especially like the smart search lists... For example the "High priority" list is just a saved search for any task with a priority of 1-3. This way on my phone I can just tap on that list to see the most important next actions across all my lists and contexts.

The homescreen on the iPhone version is great and shows you tasks that are due soon, which is always helpful.



Tapping on "Lists" shows you all the lists you've got set up, including your smart lists, and tapping on a list shows you all the tasks in a clean and simple view. From this view you can pretty easily complete or modify the tasks you've got. Of course, you can also navigate by tags from the homescreen if you (like myself) use them for setting task contexts.







Launching the browser on iPhone, and waiting for the not-so-fast EDGE network (assuming you've got coverage) isn't the most fun when you want to quickly jot down a note, so RTM also lets you send yourself an eMail that gets converted to a task and put in the "Inbox" list, where you can later re-file it. I often find this to be much easier than waiting for the browser/network/etc.

What's missing? While Remember The Milk seems to really take advantage of AJAX and JavaScript, to make most actions pretty snappy, it's just not the same as having a native app sitting on the phone. If Apple decides to implement HTML 5 offline storage or Gears, I really hope the folks at Remember The Milk take advantage of it. They've already done a great job of supporting Gears on the desktop website, so my fingers are crossed. On the other hand, I'd be first in line to buy a native iPhone version of Remember the Milk if they happened to come out with one.

Ultimately PIM tools are only good if they're easy to use and don't make you wait for them. Right now the mobile web isn't quite there yet, but until an offline/native version of RTM or another app comes out, I'm pretty happy with RTM for Mobile Safari.

iPhone 2.0 wishlist

I've played with iPhone off and on ever since it launched, but this week I finally decided to swap out my BlackBerry and start using iPhone exclusively (more on why later). The brilliant browser, great media support, and gorgeous fonts/display make a huge impact, but there're a lot of things missing from iPhone that makes it a less-than-perfect experience, and leaves me longing for my BlackBerry pretty frequently.

So, as I'll be eagerly awaiting the new iPhone software at WWDC, here's my short wishlist for the next couple revs of iPhone software.

1. Copy and paste. Yes, everyone's mentioned this already... but creating calendar events is a pain when you can't just copy-paste straight from an email.



2. Search in the address book. Scrolling through the address book is probably okay with a couple hundred contacts, but is pretty laborious with a couple thousand.



3. Faster auto-complete in email addresses. iPhone is strangely slow when it comes to being able to search through your address book when you start typing a recipient's name for an email.



4. Faster SMS. Loading the SMS chat screens seems to be quite slow on iPhone.



5. Better eMail UI. I've got three email addresses set up on iPhone. The number of taps to see a message is enormous. Home -> Mail Accounts -> Chosen Account -> Inbox -> Message is annoying and slow. Single inbox like BlackBerry, please.



6. Signatures for each account. So each email address should have it's own signature, instead of the one global email signature. A requirement if you've got corporate and personal mail on the same device.



7. It would be great if iPhone could extract contact and event details straight from an eMail just like Mail.app does on Leopard.



8. Info on the lock-screen. I shouldn't need to slide to unlock and then enter my PIN just to find out if I have any new mail or not. It'd be great if the lockout screen showed missed calls, SMS and eMail.



9. To-do list. A striking omission.



10. A better calendar. Yikes... entering calendar events on iPhone is a chore... can't click the time I want straight on the screen. There's no weekly view (a shame, as it'd look great in landscape view on iPhone). Events don't support time zones.



11. Working push. The Yahoo! Push solution has been (for me) very flaky and far from a reliable push experience. I hope this gets solved for the next rev. Integrating push for GMail would also be lovely :-)

Maybe a hard-button or two on the casing wouldn't be such a bad thing either. I love the minimalist design of iPhone, but a couple extra hard-buttons might make it a whole lot easier to get to your favourite apps, and that can't be a bad thing.

Fingers crossed ... just a couple weeks till WWDC :)

Taking ownership of your product

I'm sitting here on hold with O2, because RIM refuses to take ownership of their product. One of my eMail addresses (hosted by Google and pushed via RIM's BIS product) hasn't been working properly for days. I've sent RIM an email to support... and their response is:

As we indicated previously, your service provider is your first point of contact for support. BlackBerry Technical Support is available 24/7 if your provider needs to escalate the issue.

If you would prefer fee-based support from Research In Motion, please dial the appropriate telephone number below and enter option 3 in the phone menu.

So I call O2 from my BlackBerry... and after ages of voicemail hell finally get someone. Guess what? They can't help me. They need me to call back from another number. I said "well, why don't I give you a number and you can call me back?" Apparently they could take up to 48 hrs (!?!?!?) to call me back. Really.

So, fine... I'll bite... what's the number I should call? Some 0870 number (i.e. a TOLL NUMBER!). O2 has the NERVE to charge me for calling them for support!?

Thankfully SayNoTo0870.com had an alternative free number that I could use to call them back (no thanks to O2).



Once I finally got through the second round of voicemail hell, the first-level O2 support person had the nerve to say "Oh... the problem you think you have, isn't possible." Really?! So I'm just imagining this, huh? Please.

After assuring support that I wasn't patently insane I got pushed to a support engineer... a nice enough guy who spent over a half hour coming to no particular conclusion.



Which circle of Hell did Dante reserve for this?

Is it so hard to believe that a company like RIM should actually provide support to their consumers, especially given their huge consumer marketing push of late?

Is it such a great expectation to think that O2 might not want to charge customers for calling in for support?

Sadly leaving Orange

Looks like I'm making the switch from Orange to O2 (way better BlackBerry data plans - especially for frequent travelers - and they've got EDGE).

I was impressed at how easy they were to deal with. Less than 5 minutes on the phone and they claim to be sending a letter with my porting code.

Almost makes me wish I chose to stay. Too bad about the data plans. :(

The downside of getting to zero

I've been using a mail filter to help me manage my inbox for the last week or so. I'm already wasting way less time each day just handling email... and find myself needing to look to my BlackBerry far less.

The downside? Not nearly as much to churn through in the tube anymore. :).

Back to audiobooks, I guess.

Heating and Cooling ... from the street

Arian de Bondt, an engineer at Ooms, came up with a great idea. Use the heat generated by the sun on the road in summer to heat water that you'll later use in winter to heat a building and melt road-ice... then use the cold water that comes out of this process, store it again, so you can use it in summer for cooling.

Very cool.

Reminds me of the water cooling project in Toronto that uses lake water to air condition buildings... but even smarter. Well, if you've got an aquifer on hand :)

Via The Economist