JAJAH Development Blog

Last week Facebook announced it has become an OpenID relying party: any user with OpenID URI can seamlessly login and register to Facebook. After users link their Facebook account to GMail account, they will be automatically logged-in to Facebook after having previously logged-in to GMail. This move is very good for the user. By using OpenID URIs, the user needs only one set of username/password with which he sign-in to his OpenID service provider. From that point on, the user doesn’t need to remember other set of credentials. Yoohoo! Freedom from long lists of passwords at last! Single sign on (SSO) poses great advantages to users and web sites. Registration and login processes become much easier to both sides. Users will be more inclined to register to a site without having to manually type their details, wait for the confirmation mail, press on conformation links and so on. Emerging web sites will benefit from easing registration to new users. However, one has to wonder why Facebook, which already managed to have hundreds of million of registered users without OpenID, would spend resources on this standard. One might say that being open to the web, playing nice and live in harmony with the rest of the big boys is good enough reason. I certainly support this attitude. Sharing, collaboration and overall openness is definitely the direction the web should aspire too. Still, in the wrong hands, utilizing OpenID can have negative consequences. Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe I’m missing something but for me, the easiness of registration can also be honey trap. When a user links his Facebook account to a GMail account, Facebook ask for the user’s email, contacts, language and country. That information is not required for SSO. Facebook can use this information to learn more about the user, customize  its offerings, match GMail contacts with Facebook accounts and suggest user’s contacts to join  to Facebook. This kind of information is the bread and butter of many web sites. Web sites uses it for promotions, advertisements, customization and much more. Potentially, this information worth a lot for the web sites asking it. I wouldn’t be surprised if major players will start charging for that information crossing over. Maybe we can call it “Information border tax ”. What do you think?

Mobile devices are no longer tools for calling someone. That’s a known fact. You can take pictures with it, read emails, navigate, read web content, check your calendar and more. However, in the mass user eyes, it is still not regarded as an extension to your computer. Sometimes, when I’m outside my home or office, I come across interesting stuff; movie posters, concerts, commercials or even a quick glance at a newspaper’s headline. For example, I can see a poster about  Antonio Gades’s flamenco version of “Carmen” and wish to learn when and where it shows. Until recently, my mobile options to get this information were limited. I’d have to  open my browser, go to Google and type something like “gades carmen tel aviv”. Then I’d have to go over the results and look for the information I want. That’s very tedious even if you have iPhone. Next comes Nokia. Nokia has recently launched a beta application called Nokia Point & Find. The application, currently available in USA and UK only and for Nokia N95 models, utilizes the compound of phone’s camera, Internet connection and GPS to recognize a real life object and get information relevant to the context and location. For example, users of the service could get information about movie like reviews, local show times, trailers and could even buy tickets on-line. What I like most about the service is the management portal Nokia provides for publishers. Nokia wouldn’t want to have a dedicated professional service team to configure campaigns. Instead, Nokia’s management portal enables the publishers to do it themselves. What I don’t like is that the application is relevant only to N95 models in the USA and UK. Plus, the user will have to download and install the application. Finally there’s  Kooaba. Koomba is a spin-off company from the ETH Zurich, an outstanding science and technology university in Switzerland. Their technology was already used in several campaigns and looks very mature. Mobile users can send images in various ways: email, MMS, iPhone and J2ME applications, although video calls are not available yet. Publishers can use  a web-based campaign manager to set up their account. The company also offers API for partners and developers. Overall, this is very exciting! The products above demonstrate how to use the distinctive benefits that mobile device has to offer to provide new experiences for mobile users and business opportunities for publishers.

Google’s latest revolution and the usual suspect

By now, the news of Google Voice has spread all over the web. Some celebrates the new revolution from the world’s web seminary, while other raise the usual concerns about invading your privacy. To the skeptics, I can only say, common! Nobody’s forcing you to use it. Google’s power is incredible but there’re still alternatives out there. Besides, free services in exchange for some level of privacy invasion already exist and gain popularity. (Gmail, being the most obvious example, but there’re others). Moreover, we already deliberately provide so much private information about ourselves in Facebook, Twitter, windows messenger status and others that privacy claims about big brother monitoring seems somewhat archaic.

One number, many friends

However, Google Voice is facing other challenges before it become globally  available and gain widespread use. First of all, Google Voices should help its users to spread their new number with their friends, family and colleagues. Perhaps a variation of Google Mobile sync service could help in that. Another related problem is that the numbers given to users are still only US. Even if the service becomes global, the given number is always local to the user. So, if I get a US number and my friend live in Austria, it will still cost a lot of money to make the international call from Austria to Germany. Of course, this is a common problem with all international calls. However, if Google has ambitions to make their service ubiquitous, they’d need to find a solution to this issue. JAJAH Direct can provide such a solution and at low-cost rates.

I’m sorry, what did you say?

One of Google Voice prominent service is it’s voicemail transcripts. It’s a great service, if, Google can indeed make fully automated transcriptions. Personally, I don’t see that happening in the near future. Google’s Speech-to-text services are gaudi and GOOG-411. Both services are limited to recognizing specific words out of a pre-defines list like Joe’s Pizza, economics, Texas. At this point, it’s not possible to fully transcribe complete voice mails without making mistakes, asking the user to repeat some words or have human intervention. A partial solution might be to make an educated guess about the nature of the voicemail content. If Google could assume a particular voicemail is of specifi context (entertainment, sports, business), it could reduce the number of transcription mistakes to a minimum. Since Google already has vast knowledge about its users habits and interest areas, that seems to be taken care of. Also, let’s not forget that transcription service should be able to understand different accents, languages, oral mistakes made by the user’s themselves,  nick names, voice interference and more before it become accurate. I know of only one such device that does a similar task, but, it will be in production state only 142 years form now.

One last thing

In addition to the above , Google has to overcome huge operational and regulatory challenges. Call termination, VoIP-related fraud, IP call routing and hosting are just few of issues any valuable VoIP company has to deal with. I wonder how much Google Voice is ready to cope with these issues, especially if it wishes to become a global service provider like JAJAH.

Cell phones are amazing, in the way it changed our lives completely, and how it rapidly transformed from a symbol of status owned only by a handful of people to a device owned by almost half of the world population with over 3.3 active cell phone as of today.

“Over 30% of South Korean students send 100 text messages a day”.

"The First Cell Phone Came Out in 1983"

"Just under two-thirds of cell phone users use the backlight as a flashlight"

These and some other fun facts about cell phones can be found here

The websphere is buzzing about the new beta version of the Flash Player 10 that’ll enable users to connect each other directly (p2p). The new version will support the open source Speex audio codec that’ll enable it to more easily connect to a PBX and PSTN. The possibilities here are endless; it means that 99% of Internet users will be able to make a Skype like calls without installing anything on their machine. They will be able to share files, media, etc’, all from within the browser and without installing anything. The same way anyone can enter any website and watch a free video (e.g. youtube.com) Anyone will be able to surf the web and make a free phone/video calls, p2p phone calls that is. Slightly more info… Flash Player 10 Beta Release Notes

On January 2008 I wrote a blog entry about Google’s Android and Social Network API’s under the title ‘Developer is King’ . Recently a friend directed me to Google’s new initiative : Google App Engine . Google is actually not the first to provide and host a network based solution for developers, a well known solution is Amazon S3. But while Amazon provides Web Services for storage, payment and others, Google actually took this a step forward - Google is taking this way beyond Web Services and provide a full blown Application Engine running on top Google’s monstrous infrastructure. I think this is quite ingenious on Google’s part, they provide a fully hosted application environment, allowing developers to enjoy Google’s infrastructure for storage, load balancing and scale, authentication and various other API’s. Google’s MapReduce and GFS probably serve as an infrastructure together with their monitoring, and hosting technologies. Each application is running in it’s own secured Sandbox allowing distribution between multiple servers and distributed web requests. Currently only Python programming language is supported, but assuming this takes off more are likely to be supported. This move on Google’s part should attract application developers to use Google technologies as well as create an eco-system around Google web technologies. This is a bold move that will probably take a while to mature but if you’re a web application developer this is certainly something to look at. Thinking back, it was Larry Ellison, the legendary CEO of Oracle, who coined the term Network Computer (NC)  in the mid 90’s, while the initiative itself did not really take off it created a lot of buzz that later lead into ‘thin clients’. If Google will play this right, thin applications will emerge : applications that take into consideration their distributed and scalable nature, without worrying about the complicated setup, storage and hosting environments. While it’s hard for me to know how strategic it is for Google internally, and how they intend to push this, if at all, I think this could make a difference in the constantly evolving  computation world. I can only bow to what Google as a software giant is trying to push. If I were Microsoft I would do some serious thinking, mostly since .NET - Microsoft’s leading environment is severally lacking an application engine, but I will leave that for a later post… Amichay

For a long time now, there is a try to incorporate artificial smells into our computing experience, this field has known lots of ups and downs, but was never really solidified into a consumer product. There is a new try from NTT that enables mobile phones to receive smelly massages: More info

It is said that by 2013, 31 percent of all mobile phones will be smart phones, and by then, a smart phone might be almost like a full blown PC. In the meanwhile it seems like everyone is trying to push their feet into the blooming mobile phone market. We’ve seen a lot of ups and downs in this area, lots of promises that hasn’t been fulfilled. In fact only since the arrival of the iPhone, surfing the web become reasonable on a mobile phone. I refer to RIA, not just as rich applications that runs inside the mobile Internet browser, but, also as reach applications that are easier and consistent to develop, that runs across platforms and more important across devices. This has been the main hurdle, beside the low performance issues, to develop for mobile phone and devices. The resources needed to port a mobile application to run on multiple devices is enormous. There got to be a better way to develop applications and games for the mobile phones, something as approachable as web development. I’ve heard lately that the "Developer is King" these days it’s more like the Web Developer is king. I will summarize in this text the current leading technologies in the area. Adobe Flash and Flash Lite Flash Lite is the first RIA technology to run on mobile phones (since 2003), since then it has shipped pre-installed on more then 500 million devices. It is safe to say that, Flash runs on mobile phones, but, it is always a subset and always with some limitations. The  best thing about Flash Lite and Flash in general is that it’s easy to develop highly interactive applications, and the promise of - develop once deploy everywhere, is currently the closest to reality with it. The Flash Lite player isn’t exactly the same as the full Flash player we use inside our desktop’s browser. The current version of the full Flash Player is v9, Flash Lite is similar in capabilities to older versions. The Flash Player is backward compatible. Flash Lite 1.1 - Similar to Flash 4 - Simple games, screen-savers and animations. Flash Lite 2.1 - Similar to Flash 7 - Small games and applications, much more advanced Object Oriented programming. Flash Lite 3 - Similar to Flash 8 - Richer games, Youtube, live video and audio e.g., justin.tv, pandora. Take a look at Flash Lite 3 in action Pocket PC and Windows Mobile were supported by Flash and Flash Lite for a long time already. It’s been used also to enrich WM applications UI. Flash can be integrated inside a .NET Compact Framework 2.0 application to rapidly create rich UI. Microsoft recently announced they’ll support Flash Lite 3 on Windows Mobile Flash can be found, to some extent, on other type of devices, e.g., the cool Chumby runs Flash Lite 3, sony PSP runs Flash 7. There are already some mobile devices that run the full version of Flash 9, e.g., Nokia N810 List of mobile phones that are pre-installed with Flash-Lite 1 - 3 Microsoft SilverLight Microsoft has finally realized that a development platform isn’t necessary an OS, it saw how Flash is becoming just that, and want to join (take over) the party with its SilveLight. SL is a rich environment targeted to work inside the browser and across desktop platforms as well as on mobile phones and devices. The first SilverLight release 1.0, was mainly intended for PR. It lacks any impressive capabilities beside good support for video. With the upcoming SilverLight 2.0, which is currently released as beta 1, we’ll have the chance to really estimate it’s powers and if it can compete with Flash. SL 2.0  looks very powerful, as it supports a respectable subset of the CLR (Dot.Net runtime), rich UI framework and all kind of other goodies. As for SilverLight on the mobile, there was a great buzz recently when Nokia announced it’s going to support SilverLIght on it’s S60 and some S40 mobile phones. it is not clear yet what will be the limitation of the runtime on these devices only that it’ll "initially" support only SL 1.0, which means logic written in JavaScript and no CLR. Windows Mobile will support SilverLight 1.0 as well from the middle of 2008. SilverLight looks very promising, but it’s still a premature technology, especially for mobile devices. I wouldn’t fire my Visual Studio to develop a mobile SilverLight app, just yet. Visitmix.com has some cool videos of mobile SilverLight Apple iPhone: Although the iPhone isn’t exactly an ubiquitous platform and holds only 0.14 percent of the mobile phone share. It is still the most buzzfull mobile device ever. Creating your software to run on the iPhone and leveraging it’s dreamy features like the Multi-Touch and the accelerometer can lead to tons of PR and even some paying users. The iPhone has redefined the way we interact with a mobile phone and lifted it to a all new level. Apple recently released the iPhone SDK but still keep it very restrictive. Hopefully Apple won’t repeat her history of dismissing 3rd parties, an act that we all know hurt her greatly in the past. I’m a little tired of the iPhone and Flash affair already, this is the story in short: To the amazement of many, the iPhone was released without any kind of Flash support. The two most common assumptions were that Flash is too slow for the iPhone or that Apple is pissed over Adobe for some obscured reason. Lately Steve Jobs bashed on the Flash Player performance on the iPhone, Adobe replied and there were others. After the release of the iPhone SDK, Adobe’s CEO announced they will develop a Flash Player version for the iPhone. Hours later, Adobe clarified that it won’t be that easy to develop a decent version of the Flash player, only with the iPhone SDK and without Apple co-op. Now it seems that we won’t get Flash on the iPhone after all, at least until the next buzz alert. It was a similar scenario for Sun’s Java, first they said they’re going to put Java on the iPhone only to realize later it’s not feasible under current restrictions. Don’t wait for SilverLIght to appear on the iPhone anytime soon, either. Apple probably wants to push her own iPhone RIA platform, and insist to remain a sealed garden with a lot of restrictions to third party applications developed by their new SDK. Google Android Google has realized the need for a standardization on the mobile jungle, and came out with it’s Android, a platform designed to give the power to the developer. Here is a good explanation of the Android platform and what it can do for you. Demonstration of Android power. Currently there’s not many Android smart-phones, but, with the dedication of google we’ll surly see some more soon. Sun JavaFX Mobile Sun, the inventor of Java and "Develop once deploy Everywhere" concept, don’t want to lose its mobile presence with j2ME and is porting Java’s richer sister, JavaFX,  to the mobile phone as well. JavaFX Mobile Trolltech QT Trolltech the creator of QT - Cross Platform rich development platform, has been recently bought by Nokia and can be seriously considered as a player in the RIA mobile world. Conclusion For now, we can still use excuses like incompatibility and lake of an appropriate platform to continue and create dull mobile application but it’s going to change very soon.

Pantech has revealed some of it’s concept phones that might reach stores in 2010. I’m not sure if these phones will become reality eventually, it were designed by the Korean University students, and indeed it looks somewhat like a student project, but still interesting.

Check it out.

Nokia Research Center, along with the Cambridge Nanoscience Center, think they know how we’ll use our mobile device in the future. If I have to summerize the user experience of this concept phone it’ll be - insane usability and flexibility (insane in a good way). This beautiful animation, demo the concept: It is very easy to accuse concept project like this to be very unrealistic, and it’s frequently being compared to the concept device and technologies that were presented in the 50th. The predictions back then were mainly about that every house will be completely automatic, managed by humanoid robots, and we’ll all be driving flying cars. Even though this concept mobile device is not intended for production in the near future, it is said that some of its features might find their way into high-end devices in the coming 7 years. I truly believe that the concept creations of today, including this one, are much more realistic, based on real technologies, and not just the creator imagination like in the 50th. I remember that only few years ago, I saw a concept video about bizar looking cellphones that can do video calls. Can you imagine? For more info, images, and the above video in higher quality, go here.