Naked Bits

Representing Layar at ISMAR 09

dirk — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:24:16 +0000

Layar is a young company. I’ve joined the company as CTO only 4 months ago. So the people in the world of Augmented Reality are entirely new to me and everyone at ISMAR was a new face. It’s funny to think that after 3 days of ISMAR I already feel part of the club! It’s a small world, so running around the Marriott hotel with a Layar badge quickly got me acquainted with almost everyone at ISMAR. Everyone knew Layar, many knew me by name and wanted to talk with me, showing how much the new startups of 2009 like Layar have captured the minds of people and given a new impulse to Augmented Reality as a whole. And many presentations started by mentioning Wikitude and Layar as the companies that created a paradigm shift in AR for 2009, moving it in the eyes of the general public away from the marker-based 3D football players that you could see last year.

Read more about ISMAR on the Layar blog.

Can the SIM card become the future App Store?

dirk — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:48:17 +0000

It’s the dream of every operator: Regain control over the billing of content to their subscribers. We’ve had the walled gardens of Vodafone Live! and i-mode. And now operators are faced with handset manufacturers creating their own, successful content stores: Apple’s App Store, the Android Market, Microsoft its Windows Marketplace, Nokia the Ovi Store… Are operators reduced to becoming the bit-pipe?

It’s undeniable that app stores are a big success. Apple’s move created a new easy way to use all those web services you got used to on your mobile phone, anytime, anyplace. It showed that with an easy interface, where finding and purchasing/downloading new services is as easy as the click of one button, people are eager to explore and use their mobile phone for more than just calling, texting and playing music. The data streams are finally kicking! But the revenue streams on the content are completely by-passing the operator. Beside the developer, who usually gets around 70% of the revenue on all stores, the credit card companies, billing providers and the handset manufacturer are sharing in the revenue.

Is it bad? No, but we have to remember that the vast majority of subscribers are using feature phones rather than smart phones. And also that billing in an app store is usually done using a credit card, which can be a barrier for many. The operator is in a good position to regain a position in the content distribution value chain:

Often overlooked, but operators have some of the most advanced real-time billing systems you can imagine, with millions of billing transactions per day. Customers already have a billing relationship with them, so making purchase could be as simple as the click of a button.
Operators are in control of one standard element across all handsets, independent of the manufacturer: the SIM card.
The SIM card is evolving to become a full-fledged application host. One of these applications will be a web server that can serve pages to the browser of the handset. The pages can be updated over-the-air (!) and can make use of all the features of the browser

The browser is more and more becoming an application browser rather than a static page browser. With Javascript and HTML5, advanced applications can be made that look and feel like native applications. This is true for the desktop computer, but will also be the reality of the mobile phone.

I’m not predicting a demise of the native apps, like some believe for the desktop (see Google OS for example). Native apps always have an edge over the browser especially when it comes to fully utilizing the hardware capabilities (graphics card for games, gps, compass, accelerometer) of the device. But the market will remain fragmented: Android, Symbian, iPhone OS, Windows, Linux… I don’t believe this will change. Native app developers will need to invest in all those platforms if they want to target the biggest group.

The browser market on the other hand is finally starting to converge. Everyone seems to agree now that following the standards is the best way to go. The small tweaks needed to adapt your web app to the various browsers are a minor investment compared to that of porting a native app to another OS.

Operators would do well to think of an easily accessible, sexy portal for all their customers. A portal that makes it easy to find all these web apps written for a large base of handsets. A portal where it’s as easy to install an app on your phone’s desktop as it is on the iPhone or the G1. A portal where developers can bill their customers by one click of the button (either one-time fee or subscription). And finally a portal that doesn’t shut the doors, but also links to the other app stores out there based on the handset used.

The portal (with the installed apps) should be stored locally on the phone for quick navigation. And the best place for it is the SIM card. I know, handsets mostly don’t support it yet. But most handsets also don’t have advanced HTML5 with Javascript browsers yet. But it’s coming. And it’s the only way people will start using these services massively. So forget about the current feature phones as a means to get the massed on internet. Start investing now in your future App Store.

Links to more information:

Gemalto
The specification is ready: OMA-TS-Smartcard_Web_Server-V1_1-20090512-A can be found on the openmobilealliance website (currently page not found error).

MoMo#11: Visionary speakers on their vision of mobile

dirk — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:46:15 +0000

Last Monday, instead of spending the public holiday afternoon in a sunny park enjoying one of the many music festivals, I stayed inside the Rode Hoed to listen to some very famous speakers giving their vision on mobile. Two of them inspired me most: Andrew Gill and Robert Rice. On the mobile device as a means for personal advertising and for viewing the world with a 7th sense (or is it still 6th sense?).

The age of personal advertising

For Andrew Grill, it’s time to completely rethink the advertising space. Less is more from now on. It doesn’t make any sense that advertisers are still paying so much to reach millions of people who are just not listening.

If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face. And they’d be right about doing so.

I completely agree with Andrew when he says that the mobile phone is the ideal way to reach customers on a personal level. Basically this is the same message I stated at the previous MoMo: loyalty programs should be on your mobile phone rather than on a plastic card. But for many people in the advertising market it’s still hard to grasp when the number of customers you reach is so low compared to the numbers “reached” by a TV ad. 50% of 5000 is still less than 1% of 1 million. How can the value be so much higher then?

Andrew firmly believes that these 2500 potential customers reached via their mobile phone on their own request are much more valuable than the 10.000 potential customers who got the message via the TV ad. The chances that they end up buying a product are much higher: They actually asked for the information! And since you know them, you can also better adapt the offering to close the deal. You don’t know anything about the 10.000 people who show interest after seeing the ad on TV. You can’t even measure them.

So it’s time to think about the personal ad. The company that realizes that first and also knows how to fulfill Andrew’s 3P’s of mobile advertising (Permission, Privacy, Preference) will have huge success.

The age of augmented reality

Robert Rice has been in this field for the past 15 years. I think I started to hear about AR as a serious technology only about 3 years ago, before it was more science fiction to me. Now the first applications are actually live, it’s time to think about a future with AR.

Wikitude is a travel guide that tells you more about the building that you see right in front of you.
ING has an application to showing the nearest ATM superimposed on your screen when point the camera in various directions.
Layar will soon be launched for Android phones. It allows any company to superimpose locations on top of the screen. There are now layers for Funda and Hyves.

These are a few examples of what’s been developed the last couple of months and it’s starting to grow fast. So how will this evolve? Robert doesn’t want this to become another geek technology. His nightmare is if AR becomes associated with weird people with strange masks on their heads walking around and waving strangely with their hands. The masses would freak out! It has to become something natural, easy to use: Fashion items like sunglasses or a watch.

But above all, AR should add value to our lives. In Robert’s mind, it will become an essential intelligence that we’ll be able to use as our 7th sense: It will change everything: The way we interact with each other, the way we perceive our environment, the way we handle our privacy. Combine face recognition, all the information about someone available online and AR tools and you can start to get a glimpse of what this means in the social world…

Robert is optimistic about that new augmented reality, but also warns that it may be crushed if we do it the wrong way: complex technology, privacy issues, strange behaviour… It’s a thin line and easy to get wrong.

The iPhone as a playground

dirk — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:04:27 +0000

Is it an overhyped mobile phone? A lot of press coverage everytime a big company launches an iPhone app, but probably only around 130,000 owners in The Netherlands, amounting to less than 1% of the mobile phone market. For companies with customers accross the entire population definetely not a platform to dedicate all their attention. But fact is that the iPhone offers a great test bed for things to come and a playground to try things out.

Since the launch of the 3G version in July 2008 (less than a year ago!) that offered the possibility to develop applications for it, more than 35,000 applications have been launched in the App Store. With the exception of news corporations, very few of them are based on existing services. That’s a shame in a time where large companies are desperately trying to reach their customers in a more direct way. What could be more direct than a mobile phone which resides in every customer’s pocket?

Building an application for the iPhone is actually not a very complex undertaking. Building an application that will run on almost all mobile phones out there is! Restricting an app to the iPhone means targeting only a small group of customers. But it prepares the ground ideally for a future where more customers will own smart phones that are constantly online. A good application for the iPhone can be built in a matter of weeks if you keep the following in mind:

Keep the application simple, focus on one main task it should perform. The best applications are good at one thing and don’t try to offer a myriad of functions to encompass all the company’s offering.
Base it on standard User Interface (UI) elements from Apple. Except for games, most applications can be designed using the existing UI framework. It will only make the application more easy to use if it’s following the same principles as most other applications.
Test early, even if it only exists on paper. Let people try it out at every stage of the development. Give them sketches and see how they react to them. Go back to the drawing board if need. Give away early versions to get feedback while developing.
It doesn’t have to be released in the App Store if it’s mainly aimed at being a test case. Apple also allows ad-hoc distribution of applications. You need to be in direct touch with the customer in order to get the app on his phone but it will also make it easier to request feedback.

So why not try a new communication tool with your customers? See it as an experiment! With the high feel-good atmosphere around Apple and the iPhone it can only lead to positive reactions.

Feedback from customers

dirk — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:48:53 +0000

After launching a new product every company wants to know how the public reacts to their product. The essence of a satisfied customer is not only a good product, but probably more importantly good support for the product. A great online tool for customers to help each other and for companies to discuss with customers is getsatisfaction.

Small online startups don’t have the money to setup a call center for customer support. And yet many of them have a largely satisfied customer base. The reason is that they are very responsive online and that their customers help each other. By setting up an open platform for discussion, they allow customers to publicly discuss various problems and give feedback. Other users of the product can react, give advice and often even solve the problem before a staff member needs to intervene. Of course it is important that official staff participate in all discussions so that customers feel they are heard. But the time spent at resolving problems in such a collective environment is much less than when solving each problem individually.

Getsatisfaction.com, founded in 2007, is a service dedicated to offering an online customer support environment. It is set up to be as transparent as possible for everyone. Whether negative or positive, all feedback is viewable. Customers can second other people’s feedback so that the issues affecting most customers automatically show up at the top. For each topic a color indicates the status of the issue and how the company is responding to it. Green means there’s a solution, red that the problem wasn’t solved yet. Customers can also tell their mood (frustrated, happy, etc…) and give marks to products.

Using Getsatisfaction can be an extremely cost-efficient way to offer support to customers, while at the same time gathering a lot of feedback that would otherwise require costly surveys.

What on earth is Pecha Kucha?

dirk — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:33:26 +0000

Yesterday at MoMo Amsterdam #10 a new experiment was held: The public had been asked previously to submit ideas for presentations to be performed in Pecha-Kucha style: 20 slides in 20 seconds each. In the end five presentations were selected by the MoMo organisers, amongst which my presentation on the future mobile loyalty platform.
The Pecha-Kucha style was invented so that presentors conform to a strict time frame and have the audience’s full attention during 6 minutes 40 seconds. But for someone not trained in this style, like me, it’s certainly hard to get the right message accross when you’re so concentrated on getting your timing right. The reactions were also mixed, a learning for me that with Pecha-Kucha the message must be clear after the second sheet and the rest of the slides illustrating that message.

You have no room to adjust to your public and help it stay on track with you so you must get it right immediately. I personally prefer to have the clicker back next time I’ll present

The twitter backchannel reached a point when it wasn’t useful to the discussion anymore: It hardly contributed with questions to the speakers and had to deal with some outrageous comments. It’s time for change! Moderation to filter only the comments contributing to the discussion or some public filtering using a voting system? I bet we’ll see a different backchannel at the next MoMo.

View more presentations from uluruamsterdam.

Other blogs reporting on the MoMo presentations:
Mobile Cowboys
Dutch Cowgirls
Mobile Monday Amsterdam

Photos by @mmeester

Mobile Madness at Adobe User Group

dirk — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:58:21 +0000

Last week, the NL Adobe User Group organized an event themes ‘Mobile Madness’. While you would expect such an event to be entirely focused on Flash Lite development, the Adobe platform for applications on the mobile phones, most of the speakers actually didn’t use Flash Lite for their examples. Like any mobile event nowadays, all the buzz is about the iPhone (in this case it was “the other phone”) and how to duplicate the success and model of Apple.

Does Flash Lite have a future as mobile platform?
Some 50% of the 200 attendants of the events had an iPhone in their hands. Their main question was: “When will Flash come to the iPhone?” which wasn’t answered. But to me, it looked like the Flash Lite platform offers some interesting aspects:

More than 1 billion phones are equipped with Flash Lite. Think of all the S60 series phones from Nokia, but also many SonyEricsson and Samsung phones.
Developing for Flash Lite is really platform independent. Adobe gives you the Device Central application, with which you can preview, test and build your application for all the different mobile phones. All in one IDE.
Creating ‘flashy’ user interfaces is really easy for people used to working with Flash on the desktop.

So in all, Flash Lite is a very attractive platform for building demonstration apps that will run on many different feature phones.

How Twitter spread the news about a plane crash

dirk — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:16:07 +0000

Today I was amazed by how the story about the plane crash at Schiphol evolved on the Internet. One of our colleagues was first to tell us about it, some 10 minutes after it happened. She was called by her boyfriend who works for the local TV here. The first thing I thought when I heard it was to check Twitter.

Yes, one of my Twitter friends @sgfwarnaars had already reported the crash and made reference to @nipp, who seemed to be twittering from the crash scene itself. Actually the first Twitter about the crash by @nipp was really a mere minute after it happened. When I checked his report, he had about 30 followers and was telling his first impressions. Of course I retweeted his report, as did many others.

Then I looked at twitterfall.com, where you can look at all tweets on a certain search term. The flow of tweets was rapidly increasing, reaching around 2 per second at some stage. This is when the news spread as a fire through the Internet.

I switched on the radio to get the latest information. But the tweets that were posted were more informative than the radio. The first photo was posted on twitpic.com, a service used to by twitter users to post photos as twitter itself can only hold text. One link after the other appeared on Twitter to new photos. Some were published on news sites like nu.nl and nos.nl, but only via Twitter was it possible to get a full view of the events unfolding.

Within one hour, @nipp had amassed some 350 followers. Two hours later, the tally was at 807. Being amongst one of the first to report the crash on Twitter, he started to get requests from many news agencies. At around 15:00, he was live on Radio 3FM. Later Al Jazeera called him.

At the same time another witness story started unfolding. @ansgarjohn was apparently on the scene just after the crash and actually rushed to the plane to offer his help. He reported briefly about his heroic efforts about an hour later on Twitter, with a last message saying “going to take a shower to get rid of blood and mud #schiphol”. Later, he got contacted by many news agencies, giving interviews on Radio 1 and on TV in Een Vandaag. Starting with some 5 followers, his tally is now 162.

Whilst there were many false items on Twitter, the errors were also corrected most quickly. When CNN started reporting about the crash of an Airbus 380 (sic), the Twitter community picked it up immediately and made many sarcastic comments about it. The report of zero dead (this came from a Turkish minister) was quickly followed by eye witnesses, including @nipp, saying this was not possible. It seems Twitter cannot be used to spread false news, as there will always be people to correct it.

Overall, it’s incredible how accurate the information is you get from Twitter, just filter out the few false alerts and keep looking at the tweets with the most re-tweets. Of course a lot of the news on Twitter was coming directly from new agencies, especially after about an hour. But the combination of all the news items gives an incredible detailed account of the events.

UPDATE (26/02/2009): More reports on how Twitter is changing the news gathering can be found on The Telegraph, ireport (here you can see how ’schiphol’ became the nr 1 ranked tag on Twitter yesterday) and NOS (in Dutch).

Bridging the real world to the internet

dirk — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:26:49 +0000

A friend on Twitter drew my attention to a very promising project: ioBridge. This simple set of hardware modules makes it possible to control physical equipment from the computer. The big plus of ioBridge are its simplicity (you get some javascript widgets that make controlling the equipment really easy) and the price (for $100.- you can get started).

The dream is to have control over the real world from a website: Controlling home appliances, change a website’s appearance depending on the temperature or the ambient light (for example show different products in hot weather than in cold weather), switching things on and off from anywhere…

See here how Stephen Myers used ioBridge to be able to give treats to his dog even when not at home using his iphone as a remote!

While this is not new, it wasn’t until ioBridge that less technical people are able to create such applications. You don’t have to program complicated serial interfaces to control an on/off switch anymore. So it gives great room for experimenting with new ideas. Who’s got a great ULURU-like idea? We’ll build it and demonstrate it for you!