My good friend Ken Bank’s from Kiwanja.net has written a phenomenal article for publius.cc, the syndicated project of Harvard’s Berkman Center For Internet & Society. You may remember the name because we first wrote about Ken’s FrontlineSMS mobile solution here on PDF several years ago. The article, titled One Missed Call, examines the mobile development world as it relates to the grassroots, NGO’s and non-profits of the world.
Paralleling Aderson’s “Long Tail ” Bank’s discusses our tendency to aim for the big and sexy when it comes to mobile solutions. According to Bank’s this type of cutting edge technology is therefore only available to the resource rich NGO’s. Bank’s sees a Mobile divide on the horizon. His solution? Look toward the Social Mobile Long Tail
I strongly believe that we need to seriously refocus some of our attention there to avoid developing our own NGO “digital divide”. To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.
The rest of the article discusses how as a result of this developers tend to ignore the “low hanging fruit” of using technology to enhance communication. This of course brings up, as an example, SMS.
I do not want to give away the entire article here but its very well written so I wanted to draw it to your attention.
Ken understands and taps the true nature of mobile technology. That its not about this or that campaign sending SMS alerts. The true power of the mobile medium rests in the people that use that medium and the developers that develop it for that.
In the US they are not such a big deal. But in the rest of the world the word cell phone and Nokia are often said under the same breath. The Finnish company has 40 percent of the world market. That means 1 in every 4 phones sold in the world is a Nokia phone. In emerging markets its almost always the only phone you will find.
Now Nokia wants to put the power of being the number one phone distributer (and camera distributor) in the world to some good use. Yesterday, Nokia announced its contest, Calling All Innovators, encouraging developers to design applications that could help better society.
The categories of entry are broken down into ECO-Challanges, Emerging Markets and a basic Technology Showcase.
This is a fantastic idea and one that is long overdue since the folks at Mobileactive have been chatting this kind of stuff up for over three years now.
My hint for building any mobile application: When it comes to social change and politics mobile technology is not a persuasion tool but a mobilizer of the already persuaded.
More at World Changing.
MOpocket Authors Mordy and Justin are heading out to the Pepcom Holiday Spectacular event tonight to see what new technologies we are suppose to see. We will be trying out something new here… live streaming from my phone which can watched here or in the embed bellow.
I know I know, how good of a VP of Marketing can I be if I do not even write about the launch of my own product on my own blog. But the good news is that we have had such a great reaction that I have been swamped with work!
So here it is (check out the video bellow). The cat is out of the bag. The project startup that I joined and have been working on and off for the past year or so has finally come to fruition. I would like to belatedly announce to you all the launch of Flyscreen, Cellogic’s premier product.
We launched Flyscreen at the TechCrunch50 where we were selected to be in the demo pit. I cannot even begin to tell you how amazing the TC50 event was, not just for us but for all the companies. Even if you did not get selected as one of TechCrunch’s top 50 companies the attention we got just being in the demo pit was astounding. I have never been to a conference like this. The fact that no one pays to present really shows in who presented. Whether on stage or on a table TechCrunch50 had nothing but quality companies showing very very very innovative stuff.
So, about what we are doing. First lets end the confusion. The company is called Cellogic, the product is called Flyscreen.
Cellogic is a US and Israeli based startup founded by entrepreneurs (and my buddies) Itamar Weisbrod and Avi Elias, and backed by Israeli angel investor Yossi Vardi.
Flyscreen is a dynamic mobile platform that provides always on access and streaming content to the mobile phone’s sleep screen. Essentially, we let user put and use their favorite web services on their phones sleep screen to act as a kind of dynamic screen saver.
What does that mean? Oddly enough it appears to be hard to explain but once people see it in action they get it right away. The reaction is usually, “thats so obviously brilliant I cannot believe no one else is doing that.” Even Jason Calacanis who stopped by said he loved it and wanted it right away. Unfortunately we did not have his model phone ready.
The concept of the product is quite simple. When you are not using your phone the screen either turns blank or renders a dim image of the date and time. It probably looks something like this:
This screen is called the sleep screen or power save mode screen. Not to be confused with the idle screen, standby mode or home screen which looks like this blue home screen with the 12:52 time on it:
Many companies have tried to figure out what to do with the idle/home screen.
Flyscreen is not one of them. Simply put Flyscreen reinvents what happens on your phone while your not using it, while its sleeping. What was once a blank screen or dimmed image with the time and date is now a dynamic screen that renders constantly updating content that is relevant to you.
This puts the content that you want to see, such as weather, blog feeds, twitter or any RSS literally zero-clicks away. So, if you want to take a glance at your twitter feed all you have to do is pick up your phone and look at it. Wanna see the headline that everyone is talking talking about then just slide over to your TechCrunch widget. Thats it. We make getting your mobile content easy.
And the magic of the technology is that it does all this while remaining in power save mode. That means it does not effect the battery life (well, very minimally). How do I know? Well, for one thing, I helped build and test the product. For another thing it lasted three days of demo pit duty without a charge.
Users simply sign up at myflyscreen.com, choose which widgets and content they want, save, and then they next time Flyscreen updates on their phone they will be able to see what they want to see at an eyeball away.
Its also good for brands in that it help them leverage their mobile marketing experience on a valuable and untouched space of phone real-estate. Flyscreen is fully compatible with click to call, click to text, click to application and click to mobile web. In other words, with Flyscreen being the first thing people see on their screen, it can help drive a brands many other mobile marketing plays.
All in all its a pretty simple product made for a simple purpose, to make getting the stuff you want on your phone simpler. That’s a lot of simples!
Flyscreen is currently launched on Symbian so if you have an updated Symbian phone you can go to http://www.myflyscreen.com to get on the alpha invite list. If you use the code MOpocket we will speed your invite along.
If you do not have a Symbian phone do not worry! Other versions will be out shortly! Make sure you sign up for when Flyscreen will be ready on Blackberry, WIndows Mobile, Android and iPhone.
This coming Monday September 22nd. Mobile Monday New York is having a unique event. Titled Broadband Everywhere - The Mobile Opportunity the events hope to spark a serious discussion around the issue of 3G, 4G, Wifi and Wimax.
The panelist so far are stellar and it hopes to be a discussion on the impacts of mobile broadband on carriers, content providers, laptop manufacturers and infrastructure vendors. So If you are any of those you need to attend.
If you haven’t seen the three part film Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog yet, you really should. There’s no excuse not to have seen this fantastic example of independent film making, especially since award winning Producer/Director Joss Wheadon has made it free to watch via Hulu.com.
If you’ve seen it, you may have recognized a device in the first act. There is a sequence in which Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) uses a remote control to drive a van, and his remote looks surprisingly like a large capacitive touch screen.
The remote’s face is shown a few times, and those glimpses reveal that it is, in fact, an iPhone, complete with an AT&T carrier tag and everything.
Now, you could go on about the irony that a character who is preaching about anarchy, social change and all the problems with society, etc, is using the most hyped up corporation-controlled social-status device in history for his evil doing. Is this a deliberate social commentary joke? Or is it just simply that the iPhone happens to make a really cool remote control prop?
I’d say its possible it was on purpose judging by the dark sense of humor that Joss and his brothers (who wrote the script together) have displayed.
However, after reading this interview with P J Haarsma, who is a friend of Dr. Horrible co-star Nathan Fillion, its much more likely that they just didn’t have the budget for any more props in the film, and Fillion happened to have his iPhone handy.
In fact, I was mildly disappointed to see a scene later in the film in which Dr. Horrible answers a phone call from Bad Horse (another evil character) on what is CLEARLY not an iPhone, but rather a simple looking flip phone.
According to Haarsma, his buddy Fillion had asked him to create a remote-control looking application screen for Nathan’s personal iPhone. At the time he didn’t know why, only that it had something to do with some secret upcoming guerrilla film making project with Joss Wheadon.
In fact, it appears the “remote” was merely a web app (since Haarsma doesn’t have an iPhone to develop and test on), and it is available to anyone who wishes to point their web browser here. Boom, don’t even need to Jailbreak to make your iPhone “Horrible”.
Truth be told, I just find this entire subject amusing because its an excuse for the title of this post.
Until next time…
Software development communities are what make an open platform OS great.
In the Windows Mobile world, XDA-developers member A_C, is famous for developing iPhone-UI inspired applications known as the S2 series (S2Play, S2U2, S2View). A_C distributes these completely free of charge for the benefit of the community and WM users everywhere, and are in a constant state of “under development”, despite being more stable than some commercial products out there.
The problem is, some unscrupulous people have decided to take advantage of A_C’s free software policy, and sell them as packages of “iPhone theme” bundles.
These bundles are being sold on a number of websites, from www.iphonethemeforppc.com to ebay. A_C has been trying in vain to put a stop to it, but its too large a task for one man.
So, in retaliation, A_C has decided to stop all development of the S2 series unless people learn their lesson.
Since A_C’s applications have a large cult following in the WM community, this whole fiasco has created the internet-version of an angry mob. Users on various message boards have started banding together to harass anyone on net who has the audacity to steal A_C’s software to profit from it.
As far as I know, this may be the first time a strength-in-numbers approach such as this has applied to software development. Meanwhile, S2 development has indeed stopped, leaving some users who were looking forward to compatibility updates (Treo 800w users, I feel your pain) devastated.
The moral of the story?
You ultimately hurt yourself in the end by preventing any future updates.
For the sake of continuing development, don’t steal software! Its bad, m’kay?
This weeks 141ist Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Chetan Sharma at Always On Real-Time Access, the Carnival showcases blog post gems from our industry’s busy week of events, including CTIA, TC50, DEMO, Mobile Web Strategies, and many others.
While the MOpocket article was not picked it is true, their are gems in this one.
My good friend Ken Bank’s from Kiwanja.net has written a phenomenal article for publius.cc, the syndicated project of Harvard’s Berkman Center For Internet & Society. You may remember the name because we first wrote about Ken’s FrontlineSMS mobile solution here on PDF several years ago. The article, titled One Missed Call, examines the mobile development world as it relates to the grassroots, NGO’s and non-profits of the world.
Software development communities are what make an open platform OS great. 
