Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Meetings! We all hate them. Sometimes they are necessary. But what if you could minimize the number of meetings (and in particular status meetings) necessary to keep a project moving in the right direction. When I’m running a project, especially one with tight time-lines, I’m used to running daily (quick) “stand up” meetings in which each participant gives a quick status of what they’re working on; what they accomplished the previous day; what they plan to work on today and what challenges or problems they are facing.

For a development project I’ve been working on for the past few months (“Agora” – more on that soon), we have largely abandoned this “stand up” style and moved all of this daily status sharing into Google Wave. This was partially necessitated by the fact that the developers and designers we have working on this project are in a few different physical locations, but the results have been surprising.

I was sceptical at first that Wave would be a rich enough environment, but it has really enabled a kind of rich collaboration that.

Developers can post screenshots of UI mockups or code samples or error codes and then generate discussion and get feedback on these. Commenting on the Wave enables people to talk about priorities. And as some of our developers are not native english speakers, using the Wave combined with web translation has enabled them to converse more easily and clearly than via voice or real-time chat.

I approached this with an attitude of “Wave must be good for something” and I can honestly say I am a convert. It has really shown its strength in helping to manage a distributed small-team development project. And while it hasn’t eliminated the need for meetings, it has certainly reduced their frequency, and (I think) boosted productivity.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 13:51 under Web
Tags: googlewave

2 Comments

I have three predictions for the coming year:

Prediction #1: I have seen the future, and it is Android. Or rather, the Android model is going to be the model that “wins out.” Right now, especially for those who tote iPhones around, that might be difficult to see or understand. The iPhone seems like a device which embodies all the mobile 2.0 ideals I first wrote about in 2006. It provides access to a wealth of applications and services. It’s easy to use. It’s connected. It has created new product categories (apps) and new routes to market. But, as iPhone detractors often point out, it’s a closed ecosystem. I submit that no matter how “insanely great” the iPhone is, the ecosystem that Apple has created around it cannot scale. So, we are back to another prediction I made, at 2008’s Future of Mobile conference: Android will be to the iPhone what the PC was to the Mac. Why? User choice. You can download and install an app on an Android phone without buying it from Android Market. You can download it directly, or from an alternative app store such as GetJar. I predict 2010 will be the year that Android apps will begin to rival iPhone apps – maybe not in terms of sheer numbers, but in terms of consumer and developer mindset. This will be the year in which “download our Android App” buttons will join “download our iPhone App” buttons on sites across the Web. Don’t believe me? Check out this interesting data point (take a look at the “customer satisfaction” graph – I predict Android and iPhone will change places by the end of the year).

Prediction #2: At the same time, richer functionality (enabled by the HTML5 platform and APIs such the geolocation API) within to the browser and web runtimes will enable the creation of a new class of WebApp  (and Web Widgets) that will work interchangeably between Android, iPhone and other emerging smartphone platforms. The result of this trend will bolster the growth of Android as consumers will begin to perceive that they don’t have to buy iPhone to get a rich mobile Web experience.

Prediction #3: The Social Web will rise. This is hardly a surprising prediction coming from me. But what will it mean for the (mobile) industry and for consumers? We have already seen a rise of social apps and webapps on mobile, such as Brightkite, Yelp, Rummble and Foursquare: applications that take advantage of unique features of the mobile platform to bring real-time social connection into new places and to new user communities. We will start to see these applications weave together using emerging social web standards such as the so-called open stack and activity streams. For users, it will mean easier and  more seamless social sharing, especially for long-tail social apps. The social web will make it easier for people to choose the right tool for the job without being as constrained by “where their friends are.” The mobile industry, however, is generally more used to thinking about scale and market-dominating players (yes, e.g. Facebook), so the tools the mainstream mobile industry puts in front of people will continue to orbit around these market-dominating social networks. (Ironically, the Facebooks of the world very much understand the social web trend so are actually on their way towards dismantling their walled gardens just as mobile industry players are building more functionality on top of them.) Meanwhile, predictions #1 and #2 will mean that people will have more and more choices and will increasingly go “off-piste” and choose their own social tools and applications.

It all adds up to 2010 being the year of user choice: choice of handset, choice of platforms, choice of social networks, choice of apps.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:53 under mobile 2.0
Tags: android, iPhone, mobile2.0, MobileWeb

20 Comments

My friend Adam is a small animal veterinarian in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I rarely get the chance to see him, but when I do it’s always illuminating in some way. Last night over some lovely steaks and shirley temples at San Francisco’s A5A, we got to talking about apps. Adam is an app fiend. He has completely filled up his iPhone with apps. He yelps. He tweets. Adam is super-connected. More interesting though is how he runs his business. Adam uses Freshbooks to do all his business management online (or “in the cloud” as fashion now dictates). Using the Minibooks iPhone app, he is able to get into all this information while mobile, including patient records, blood work reports, etc… everything he needs to do his job. He uses VoiceCentral/GoogleVoice to manage his calls, get transcripts and make appointments. He uses MotionX GPS to get to appointments.  He accepts credit card payments with MerchantWare’s credit card app.  Otherwise, Freshbooks allows clients to pay him through Paypal. He has all kinds of Veterinary reference material and medical calculator apps on his iPhone.  He uses Osirix to carry around digitised xray images from hospitals. He uses Evernote to sync multimedia of pets (images, sound, and videos) taken on the iPhone to his Mac. His entire business is mobile. He can show up at a client, pull up their pet’s records and start working without a single piece of paper. This enables him to do something almost unheard of in this day and age: make housecalls. In fact, that’s all he does. The “cloud” + mobile apps have enabled him to create an innovative new business model and the result is happy pets and pet owners (read his Yelp reviews). How many other small businesses is Mobile 2.0 quietly re-inventing?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:46 under mobile 2.0
Tags: apps, mobile 2.0, shirleytemple, vet

10 Comments

Two years ago, I opined that Carsonified knew how to put on events like nobody else in the business. Two years later, it’s still true. I just attended a day of Future of Webapps London and I have to say – it was a great, inspiring event. I’m very impressed at how Ryan and team are able to put together a program of such good speakers, drawn from a range of backgrounds, and presenting across a range of topics (both technical, such as Twitter’s front-end coder Britt SelvitelleDustin Diaz waxing on about JavaScript’s relationship to Corn, and cocaine and “big idea” like the Guardian’s Chris Thorpe talking about the future of online news media) and somehow it all fits together and works brilliantly!

Another highlight was Bruce Lawson’s talk on HTML5 which got a vigorous round of applause from the (800+!) attendees.

Anyway, Carsonified’s badges, which I gushed over in 2007, have also evolved as the company has evolved. See a picture of my badge in-line. Attendees wrote in their own badges this time, which no-doubt saved them some money but also enabled everyone to customize. I took advantage of some “brain” handy stickers to write in tags for topics I’m currently thinking about.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:26 under Misc
Tags: fowa09 fowa

4 Comments

Yes – it’s almost upon us. Those who have been paying attention to my Twitter-stream recently will know that could only be talking about Over the Air. I’ve been working hard on putting together the session schedule for this event, with some great help, notably from Tory and Franco who put on EcoMo the weekend before last. I’m very pleased with how things have turned out. We’re featuring a program that delves into technical detail on numerous topics related to mobile development and at the same time covers user experience, design and the emerging field of service design on mobile. There will be panels, sessions, in-depth tutorials and master class sessions, all against a backdrop of an over-night hack-a-thon. At last year’s Over the Air, I remember walking from session to session and realizing that people were learning in an environment that is possibly unique in the world of mobile events. This year, sessions will cover such disparate topics as widget design and development, iPhone, Windows Mobile, W3C standards, Java, Symbian, Qt, Open Source, Teen insights, and Augmented Reality – and that’s just for starters! Imperial College London will once again provide a great back-drop for this event. If you’re a developer, designer, user experience practitioner, technically or design-minded entrepreneur, or anyone else who’s interested in learning about the real state of art of building mobile experiences, I hope to see you there!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:07 under mobile 2.0
Tags: ota09, overtheair

2 Comments

I read with some interest about the debacle of Amazon’s “total recall” of 1984 (and other books) yesterday. Kindle owners found some e-books they had downloaded and paid for had mysteriously disappeared from their readers (and that they had been reimbursed). Amazon apparently tried to explain away this digital goods heist by insisting that the material had been sold under false pretenses and that when the real rights-holder had complained they chose to pull the content. Now – I am not a Kindle user but I am an AppleTV user and I have to say I found something quite familiar about the whole Kindle thing. Movies and television shows regularly disappear from Apple’s iTunes catalog (and thus from the content available through AppleTV) due to rights negotiations issues. If a movie is due to be shown on television, for example, the rights holder can have that title yanked from the online catalog. This is a power that rights holders have never before wielded. Movie studios certainly couldn’t go around to every video rental store and pull the title. The prospect of publishers storming into your house and removing books from your shelves sounds like a scene out of Fahrenheit 451. But in the era of closed DRM-enabled systems they suddenly have this power, and it is a power rights holders are increasingly choosing to exert. Now, I haven’t had content yanked off my AppleTV yet, but I could imagine it happening, especially now that Amazon has shown the way. Remember, we are talking about marketing executives here. Do you really want your reading, viewing and listening choices within your own library to be at the whim of marketing executives? Big Brother had nothing on these guys.

The fact that Amazon has recanted and said “sorry, we’ll never do it again” is kind of beside the point. They have taught people the object lesson that this is possible. The goods they thought they were buying are in fact a license, and that license can be revoked at any time. If the Bittorrent era has taught us anything it is that consumers, when faced with untenable choices, will take the power into their own hands and circumvent these barriers put in place to stop them. Likewise, when given a fair shake, consumers will gladly pay for digital content. The general industry trend is towards openness, but it strikes me that we need a new consumer compact around expectation of digital goods – one that swings the pendulum back in the consumers’ favor. Otherwise the absolute power of the rights holders will continue to corrupt them, absolutely.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:06 under Media, Technology
Tags: amazon, Apple, appletv, DRM, kindle, time

9 Comments

One really interesting conversation that emerged at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference last week was about the emerging Apps culture. Clearly, mobile apps (applications, widgets, webapps whatever you want to call them – I’m talking about data-driven experiences on the phone here, irrespective of platform and technology) are in the midst of a renaissance. However, I have also been hearing a lot of critical voices recently talking about “useless” apps and questioning “how many apps do people really use on their phones?” So I made a point at the Developer Day portion of the event that Apps are like Songs which I didn’t actually think was terribly original but people there seemed to jibe with it. Why are apps like songs? Someone else commented that you can “use them once and throw them away” but I’m not sure that captures it – because you don’t throw songs away really. They might stay in your music library unplayed for months or even years only to resurface at the right time. I was reminded of this today when someone challenged me to find an app that made effective use of the “shake” feature. I immediacy called up the “shotgun” app on the iPhone, which is kind of a “one joke app” like the Zippo lighter or the Carling beer. It doesn’t mean they’re any less worthy – and in the case of the Zippo or the Carling (ugh – I hate Carling — but I love the app!) you can see the marketing potential of apps as songs. But it’s not all about new avenues for selling you terrible beer. Apps can be art as well. One of the first apps I ever downloaded for my (then) jailbroken iPhone allowed you to take a picture and share it, as part of an ever-changing collage, with a community of other users who were also using the app that that given moment. No purpose. No monetization angle. But very compelling. Are these apps any less purposeful because a user might only run them a few times? I don’t think so. I think this apps-as-songs approach changes the way we need to think about software development in this context, and also reinforces my belief that software development is a creative discipline.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 18:06 under Misc, mobile 2.0
Tags: apps, mobile 2.0, mobile2.0, songs

5 Comments

Osney Media’s Mobile Web 2.0 Summit has wrapped up. In all, it was a good opportunity to discuss the trends and technologies in the mobile industry, mobile social networking, etc… For me, it was a good opportunity to talk about the convergence that I see happening between the mobile and Web industries and communities. It was also a great opportunity to talk about the opportunities I see opening up in the mobile widget space, and the vital importance that we converge on a single standard for mobile (and desktop) widgets across the industry. Judging from the response to my talk, there is still a lot of misunderstanding of this space in the industry and a lot more education and evangelism required.

So be it! If you want to find out more about these topics and others vitally important to the future of the mobile and Web industries, come join me in Barcelona on June 18^th and 19^th for Mobile 2.0 Europe. Day one will be a developer day featuring presentations, tutorials (and unstructured sessions) on key software technologies and innovations in the mobile and mobile Web space and day two will be more strategic, focusing on disruptive innovation in the mobile space and featuring startups and innovators from across the spectrum. It’s going to be an exciting two days.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 12:54 under mobile 2.0
Tags: mobile2.0, mobile2event, MobileWeb

No Comments

Interesting post over at Mashable today about the failure of many social network sites to take down personal images even after the user has explicitly “deleted” them. The issue of data take-down is one we’ve started discussing in the W3C Social Web Incubator Group. The example of deleting images you’ve placed online is a simple one, but what about all the other digital traces we leave on the Web? In a world where more and more of our identity is expressed online, should data take-down be a universal human right? We’re collecting user stories that illustrate concepts like this in order to provoke some thought, both about what the future of a more social Web should look like and what technical underpinnings need to be in place to make this happen.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 10:24 under W3C, Web 2.0
Tags: socialweb, W3C

1 Comment

On U.S. election day last year, November 4th, I co-organized with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive a Barcamp style event we called “Mobile Tech 4 Social Change” focusing on the increasing role mobile technology is having in social activism, grass-roots organization, social development, and in the developing world. It’s possible we started a movement because MobileActive has gone on to run two more camps since then, in New York and Washington DC. Now Mobile Tech 4 Social Change is coming to London. I’ll be hosting this event on May 23^rd in at Vodafone’s offices in London. For all the details and to register, go to MobileActive.org’s page on the event. If you’re interesting in helping to build a bridge between the mobile industry and the social activism / social development space then I encourage you to attend!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 11:55 under Mobility, Politics
Tags: barcamp, events, Mobile, MobileActive

1 Comment