About Mobility

When I read about mobileFaker – Tips & tools to fake your way to the top by Moderati, the first thing that came to mind was… "What a terrible concept!"
You have to be kidding me. These guys must have nothing else to showcase.

Mobile Faker is designed to help consumers navigate the competitive social scene by lying about themselves.

mobileFaker may sound like entertainment or a joke-like type of application, but there is more to this story that just the application per-se. At the end of the day, who cares right? …we are all free to create whatever (law biding) application and content we want, doesn't matter how useful or not it is; but what blows my mind is how hard it is to get into a carrier, yet see this type of application being distributed by Sprint – you know, we as an ecosystem need to get serious about our users and what applications and services we bring out, and stop treating this space as a toy-space… it is not only about “approving apps” for the sake of having a number of apps available; or approving the ones that go easy through the certification process… I know Sprint can't be that desperate… Useful services is key here… I know of much better and useful solutions (companies who are) trying to get into Sprint and other carriers… I have to disagree with Oliver on this one… this is not mobile content that represents the beginning of a very positive trend towards the mobilization of more data and more services for mobile subscribers. To move forward, let's open the platform, and make it easier (and cheaper) to bring to market meaningful applications.

So I tried to imagine how a company would come up with such an application… and I tried to imagine the use-case gathering cycle for this… maybe it went something like this… BTW, for the “made up story” below, I am using some of the actual examples and words mobileFaker folks give on their web site:

… the business and development teams get together to brainstorm and define some use-cases… They are desperately trying to figure out what to build on top of their CMX mobile multimedia software platform… but are having a hard time doing so. Then one of the guys, based on recent experiences at the bar said:

"why don't we create a multimedia application that helps people (me) look better or smarter, or bails people (me) out of embarrassing situations? let me explain…"

"…have you ever been at a bar and needed to look busy because some loser is giving you the eye? We can provide a feature to quickly schedule or send to yourself a fake call to your handset – you know, to get you out of the embarrassing situation… wouldn't that be awesome?"

"Wow, that's great", said one of the dudes in the group. "I have another one… what about someone asked for your number, and you're afraid to tell the person you've been flirting with for two hours that you're married? We can have this feature that generates a fake callback number…", and most of them exclaimed saying "Yeah! that's cool", except for one of the dudes who was more on the honest side and said "but you don't need a cellphone or fake calls or fake numbers for that… don't be a chicken… just tell her!". But the dude was voted down by the rest of the team who rather not face the situation explained in the use-case (which is why they brought up the use-case in the first place).

And they continued… "I have another one: have you been desperate for conversation topics for the wine tasting you were guilted into attending? We can provide information (by hitting Google in the background) and display it so that you look like you know what the hell you are talking about… wouldn't that awesome too?"

"Yes, that is awesome, I can use that one today!", some of them said… "I have another use-case, one of the dudes said… it happens to me all the time: coming to work late, would be great to fake a conference call so your boss doesn't give you the old stink-eye… We can use one of those fake calls to bail us out…", and they all laughed, except for the development boss, who was in the room with them.

They all laughed again… "well, what about this one, this happened to me yesterday, I bet it happens to many people, so we should include this use-case as well, you know, it is when you are afraid to answer your cool co-worker's query about what you're listening to, because you have an old Thompson Twins CD on repeat mode?…" they all laughed, again… this is fun!” they exclaimed.

The management team approves the use-case document, the development team makes dev estimations, the management approves the budget to implement the application, the app is developed… and the most surprising part, they convince Sprint to distribute it!

ceo

[Via Mike Elgan's The Raw Feed]

Three words: It's picking up …or is that four words?

I'm definitely seeing an increase in activity related to mobile, and in different verticals across mobile as well. Things are converging… job openings, and new startups, and other. Very neat… 2007 baby! Let's keep it up…

ceo

TellMe Networks has released their mobile speech-enabled Java application for searching etc. — in beta.

Great app. Multimodal is the next step for user interfaces – I firmly believe that.

I wonder for how long the application will be for free. Running voice recognition is a very, very expensive feature to offer, from infrastructure to licensing; infrastructure-wise to support this application there will be dozens and dozens of servers. TellMe is probably using technology such as Nuance Mobile Solutions, which provides the voice recognition and voice-to-text horsepower, and TellMe provides the application itself (and content) etc. And engines such as Nuances don't come cheap at all. So I would suspect that while the TellMe application per-se will remain free, TellMe will start charging for the service, unless they do ads or similar; it is a matter of economics. Question is how much are you willing to pay for this service… how much per transaction or how much per month?

ceo

[Via TechCrunch]