As someone who has been helping global technology firms implement their mobile strategies for nearly 10 years, I consider it my duty to educate companies on what truly works, and what does not.  Mobile is not as new as you might think; it is now picking up steam in the United States.  The reason for this is because it took longer for US carriers to reach market saturation. Thus, until recent years, there were less pressures to promote more data services (high margin) over their networks.  Now that we’re reaching new subscriber saturation, you’re seeing competition amongst carriers to poach subscribers and now the incentive to promote data services to increase the ARPU (average revenue per user), a key indicator on Wall Street. This is evident in the “unlimited” plans you see from Sprint that spawned competitive offerings from AT&T, Verizon and now Boost Mobile’s aggressive “un Wrong” push.

Europe and other countries got there much sooner so we can take a few pages from the books of others and not make the same mistakes, or at least minimize them as much as possible. For example, in 2001 I was working in Helsinki Finland and I could send a text message to a short code of the soda vending machine in my office - out came the soda and it would just show up on my mobile bill that month.  We still aren’t there in the US (8 years later) but are catching up now in leaps and bounds; you’ll see similar with parking meters sprouting up in some markets.

One thing that readers must consider is the buyer experience (or user experience [UX]) before considering any solution.  Many solutions will suffer in consumer (buyer) adoption not because they aren’t cool, but because of how consumers interact with their mobile device and their surroundings.  Otherssimply do not reach critical mass for a consumer-focused solution because they are too platform-specific.  Ask yourself if that solution will show up when voting on American Idol or The Apprentice and you’ll have your answer - no.  To reach the masses the answer is obvious: it has to work on the most devices, users, and networks.  Walk a mile in their shoes is what I tell people, and of course, Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS).

Many mobile solutions make the mistake of trying to duplicate the interactive web experience of browsing and searching on the device.  This is why uptake and ROI is painfully low for consumer-based marketing campaigns.  Instead, keep it simple and take a UX approach to solution design.  Buyers are often walking down a sidewalk, at a stoplight, or pulled up to a curb when a sign, billboard, or banner catches their eye.  Buyers in these instances are not “surfing” their mobile device; they desire information instantly - we call this point-of-interest marketing.

For over 5 years now, top VC firms in Silicon Valley, Boston, Europe, and Israel have tried to find that killer “mobile search” startup and they’re still floundering.  Contrarily, SMS (text) messaging has nearly saturated the global market because it gives consumers what they want - quick, instant results. M:Metrics, the leading provider of global mobile metrics, reported that 13.2% of subscribers used mobile web and of them 6% used mobile search (2008).  These numbers continue to creep up.  Compare this to a staggering 72% using SMS (text), which has grown exponentially.  Do you ignore 85% of potential buyers and only seek out 13-15%?

Location-based tools will flourish in time; they are still years out from reaching enough critical mass to add value to sellers.  GPS may solve common issue with search: not knowing the address of where you are standing, stopping or parked, or the time required to browse through various pages of listings on a 2-inch screen.  Europe has faced this for years and there are cost, device, and consumer privacy issues that slow adoption considerably.  Popular social network tools will smooth over privacy issues, but it will still take considerable time before the market is ready. The key here is to see metrics on the application download rates in a market for such tools, and compare with those that already have built-in apps like SMS (staggering gaps yet again).

I hope at least my insights give “food for thought”, and I’m happy to answer anyone’s questions over the mobile landscape.  For many, we’ll see you at the various shows this year. For others, we’re a blog post, tweet, text, email, or call away. The bottom line when considering mobile is User Experience (UX) so walk a mile in their shoes and ask what experience is ideal. 

Here’s to a prosperous 2009 everyone!

Mike

–
Mike Sparr, CEO
http://www.GoomZee.com
“Connecting buyers and sellers”

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift which is why they call it ‘the present’.” 

I read once that:

“There are two rules for ultimate success in life:

#1.  Don’t tell everything that you know.

It looks like the next battle will be for the browser of the future, allowing synchronous, presense-based interaction and security like a typical OS.  Expect to see more apps built as browser plug-ins instead of just web pages hosted on a remote server.  Google Chrome, Firefox and the new Microsoft Gazelle browsers will likely be duking it out in the not-so-distant future.

See MSFT’s research team project: Gazelle browser

As I have been uber-busy lately, I haven’t started up my 4-wheeler this past year.  In light of recent snowfall, I thought it would be good to get it running and hook up the plow so I can clear sidewalks and also have a little fun.  This turned out to be more of an adventure than planned.

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Today I read Machiavelli’s “The Prince” which was recommended reading for my friend’s MBA education and it really got me thinking.  About 2/3 through the book, Machiavelli speaks of hiring mercenaries and how they ultimately weaken the State.  If the mercenaries are successful in their job, then the State becomes indebted to them given the mercenary could align with an adversary and destroy the State.  This invoked thought about the globalization taking place and outsourcing.  I’m curious whether the outsourcing of a company’s key functions ultimately weaken it, despite the assumed efficiency it gains, and whether there any analogs between lessons learned in “The Prince” and what we see happening today.  What should and should not be contracted? 

We have a linux server running that hosts our internal systems like CRM.  We noticed significant slowdown of the system and failure to run batches on email.  In logging into the control panel for the server I was shocked to see 58GB of 73GB used for the disk.  Given only 9 domains and neither reported exceeding their allocated space, we didn’t know what used up all the space on the server.

I found two great resources that helped me isolate the issue.  First was identifying a series of commands that would display the largest files/directories on the server to start investigating:

# du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10

Thanks to: nixCraft

I ran this command and found that /var and /var/logs and /var/logs/audit.d/  directories had 50GB of file system used up.  I found in /var/logs/audit.d/ that there were save.1, save.2 … files all over 2MB each and hundreds of them.  In searching online I learned that these audit logs were not crucial and followed instructions to remove them and turn the audit service off (given internal systems anyway).

See this post from: Frank Mash - thanks Frank!

After performing these two steps, the CRM system is running fine and faster than ever.  Our control panel reports only 5GB used of 73GB on disk and I can breathe easy for a little while.    Hope this helps somebody else out there.

I finally decided to “attack the mac” and get the environment working again after my Leopard upgrade.  In my prior post, I noted how the Leopard install turned off the web server and PHP (simple fix) but the major issue was killing my ability to run Castor and XML-based applications.

I scoured the forums and first deleted all copies of xalan.jar, xercesImpl.jar and xml-apis.jar.  I found the latest xalan-j package online, unzipped it and it contained the various jars including serializer.jar, resolver.jar, etc.

It took adding the -verbose:class flag to catalina.sh (extending $JAVA_OPTS variable) and various trial/error to finally get it right.  The solution was to place ALL xml-based jars in the /tomcat_home/common/endorsed/ directory.  I had them split between /common/lib/ and the endorsed directories and when I consolidated them all, everything started working.

If you use Spring Web Services (WS) then you may see the error on “could not create Envelope” and this was what we were seeing.  After placing all JARs in the common/endorsed directory and restarting Tomcat, everything worked.  I hope this helps someone from countless days of headaches.

See below the proper jars in proper directories (mine may vary based on usage):

ALL xml-based jars in the endorsed directory solved xerces and xalan errors after upgrading to Mac OSX Leopard.

I recently upgraded my OS on my Macbook Pro to Leopard.  I must say it was as painless as possible but there are a few hiccups given I have a web server and a few other development-oriented programs running on my notebook.  Apache and PHP were not working and I have an issue with the Fire multi-chat IM client, plus some classpath issues in Eclipse IDE.

To get Apache and PHP working again:

- Preferences: Sharing: Web Sharing [turn on]

- Leopard installs PHP 5 and Apache 2.2 and I learned that it creates an entirely new config directory for apache.  I racked my brain over this one as it used to be /etc/httpd/ …  all the configs looked correct until I learned that Apache was now running from /etc/apache2/ so I edited the httpd.conf file and turned on the php5 module and restarted Apache and it worked.

- sudo vi httpd.conf  and uncomment the line w/ the PHP5 module

- sudo apachectl restart

I am still working on the Eclipse issue to get that working again and will likely use a different multi-chat client (unless Fire has an upgrade).

Given everyone was off on New Years Day, Jamie and I decided to continue to be productive so in the morning we took a dip in the hot tub, had some lunch, and then proceeded to remove the old 70’s paneling that adorns most of the walls in the basement.

One of our goals was to knock down the wall between the family room and one of the bedrooms to make a larger living space area but I wasn’t sure whether I’d have to hire an engineer to help us design a beam to support the load.  Much to my pleasant surprise, I learned that the “make-shift” bedroom was not a load bearing wall and the original floorplan called for 2 2×10 headers with a beam between them that rests on top of the foundation wall.  I saw the beam after removing the paneling and then tested by removing the closet, then removing some studs and the entire wall was free standing!  See demo pics below:

Wood paneling and spare bedroom.  See removed panel exposed beam the covers the span.

We demoed the closet that was in the bedroom, and then I got the fun job of punching and kicking out the particle board.  Jamie got in on the “fun” to and man-handled the remaining sheet into submission.

Dust still settling as I knocked out the remaining studs for the wall.  The two rooms are now opened up.

As soon as I decide where to re-rout the electrical switch, I’ll knock out those remaining two studs on the right.  Now we just have to find a place to haul all the scrap material - I’ll be re-using some of the studs to build an in-wall entertainment unit at the far end.  I’m also installing the electrical components into the wall to the right so there will be access from under the stairs for wiring, etc.  Enjoy!

I had a couple days off and so did everyone else. Well that didn’t stop me from jailbreaking my iPod Touch, installing new apps and on the non-geeky side, ripping down paneling and knocking out a wall in my basement to make a large family room. We’ll ignore the latter project for now and I thought I’d share my discovery for opening up your iPod Touch to install at a minimum, the same apps that are included on the iPhone.

Screen Snaps of my iPod Touch (now multiple pages of apps):

Read below to find out how to install additional applications on your iPod Touch. No tech support offered but it does work, all the steps are included and some additional snapshots at the bottom of this post. I hope this helps!

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A friend of mine is a seasoned Venture Capitalist based in Austin Texas and was kind enough to share his former fund’s due-diligence checklist with me. This helped me prepare for our own fundraising and ensure we had everything in order ahead of time. I was allowed to share this list and thought it might be helpful to others - it’s great for any company, whether fundraising or not, in that it forces you to actually have a plan and your documentation, strategy and financial/legal documents in order. ENJOY!

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From Spring Framework 2.5 Tutorial. Given AspectJ pointcut expressions can seem somewhat cryptic, I thought sharing these examples might be useful.

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I was using Bluetooth and tried to use the OBEX commands to send a file to my LG VX8350 phone but the phone was locked down for that file type. It refused the file. I then chose the browse option, navigated to the MyPictures folder, and transferred the file successfully. This may be a helpful workaround for anyone trying to test pictures, etc. on cell phones. (hint)

See the error you may have faced and then see my solution below (for Mac OSX):

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Does this look familiar? If so, I may have your answer - read on…
I recently had to view an application being built by one of my company’s partners and it uses Shockwave to render images/media. Upon trying to view the application, the “missing plugin” icon was displaying and could not find a suitable plug-in to play the application.

Given I am on an Intel-based Mac, I learned that for Shockwave to run, you have to exit out of your browser, configure the Application (Firefox) to run in Rosetta Emulation Mode, then download Shockwave, install and you’re good to go. Come on Adobe! Let’s get Shockwave running in Universal Binary - after all, it’s Universal right?

Instructions From Adobe

Upon launching our new website, we wanted to enable a keyword availability checker so people can check the availability of keywords before ordering. To make it more convenient, I wanted the keyword they were checking to automatically populate the “Desired Keyword” field on the order form. Given the keyword checker was running on a different server and pulled in using IFRAME, due to security restrictions on browsers, it could not trigger events on the parent page.

SOLUTION: URL Hash (#)

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Perhaps there is a domain name you want to find the owner, or perhaps just check the nameservers, status, domain expiration date or other information about a domain name.  You can look in a variety of places but my favorite is the following:

http://www.whois.sc

Click the link above and enter your website address.  You may learn more than you knew about your site, including similar sites, Alexa search ranking, SEO plain text, etc.

It happens to us all.  Your website is not accessible and you need to know if it’s just your computer, your ISP or if it’s a serious problem.  Usually this is a DNS issue with your ISP or internal network but there is a tool you can use to view the responsiveness of your domain from servers around the world.

http://internetsupervision.com

Click the link above and on the right-hand side, enter the website address in question.  You can leave the email field blank.  Click the submit button and wait for the results.

I am reprinting recommended startup sequences from a Mac forum for my personal reference. Thanks to MOFS for the original post:

Keywords: OS X; startup; won’t; boot; screen; funky; help…

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After installing the new thermocouple, the hot water heater worked and heated the water in the tank. Thereafter, the pilot went out yet again. I contacted the retailer and they warrantied the gas valve but would have to charge me for labor to install. I decided to remove and replace the part myself and learned a few tricks along the way.

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