I think we were able to share a couple of valuable insights based on our real experiences of designing location-based services. Topics include automatic location tracking vs check-in models, curated vs user generated content, how should location data surface in a newspaper sites, instant customization based on location etc. As always when people are talking about location-based services, the discussion side-tracked to the important but a bit dull topic of privacy, but all in all, I think it’s worth of watching if you are interested in the topic.

A video of the panel discussion is now available Finnish Broadcasting Company’s (YLE) web service YLE Areena. The event was organized by YLE and you can see that in the video quality, although audio volume is a bit too low.

You can view the video here, the panel starts around 1:36.

We have build a domain-specific language on top of C++ to easily define, control and mix animations, music, asynchronous events like user input and network requests. It allows rapid development of visually rich networked applications.

Implementing quality user interfaces is time-consuming process, usually taking a major portion of development time of any service or application. In game development, which is a creative iterative process, this is even more true. Server-side technologies and practices have been developing very fast and allow you to do amazing things quickly, but progress in user interface programming technologies has been much slower. Our technology tries to help with that pain point.

Currently our technology runs on iPhone OS, but it’s written in a platform independent way and we will be porting it to other major smartphone platforms in the future.

Come to MobileDevCamp today to discuss with us!

The smart young lady wasn’t the first toddler I have seen using an iPhone or a mobile phone in general. It’s only a natural part of their development that children imitate things that their parents do. Many seem to figure out TV remote controls almost on their own. However, I haven’t seen any kid experimenting and playing with a more traditional mobile phone with the same ease as an iPhone. They know how to unlock it with a swipe; they find their favourite visually appealing app, be it a simple game or an interactive toy; they spend inordinate amounts of time playing with it and they figure out a Home button to exit and try something else. They are really using iPhone’s interface.

iPhone UI has a certain sense of physicality to it. It feels very natural, touchable. Touch is the main component of this experience, but it isn’t the only necessary ingredient. In my opinion three other aspects play important roles to give that sense of naturalness and ease of use: animations, response times and overall simplicity of UI.

Animations

People used to think of animations as eye candy for UI. They are not: quite on the contrary, they are one of the most effective means to show causation in UI design.

For touch UIs, animations are a fundamental ingredient. Think about photo browsing on iPhone. Without an accompanying animation, the swipe gesture would feel totally unnatural – your mind would have a hard time connecting the gesture to the state change of UI. But with the animation, you don’t ever think about it, it just feels right.

iPhone really shines on animations. Now that I’m developing games, I have learned how delicate an art animation design is. You need to try out different timings, different kinds of ease-in and ease-out, and different movement patterns to get that natural feeling for even simple animation. iPhone SDK is offering powerful APIs to implement animations, but they are still quite clumsy to use. As animation design is a creative trial-and-error process, we need much more convenient tools for it. I bet that in coming years we will see a lot of innovation in both design and programming of animations.

Responsiveness

With any kind of user interface, if you press anything, something should happen immediately. If there’s a delay of even a few hundred milliseconds, the illusion of realness is broken.

Why would anyone make an unresponsive application? Any UI programmer knows that without careful programming, keeping your application responsive is one of the toughest aspects of UI programming. The truth is that modern UI libraries offer poor abstractions and tools to program responsive applications. They don’t support convenient asynchronous programming models or easily multithreading your application code without stumbling into all the dangers of traditional multithreading.

iPhone is not an exception in this case. Its libraries are good, but don’t really push the boundaries of UI programming. It’s just that OS and most of the apps seem to be carefully programmed and stay responsive better than their competitors. For example, Nokia’s flagship touch UI phone N97 has very sporadic responsiveness, which totally kills the experience.

Simplicity of the UI design

When iPhone was released, its UI design was outrageously simple compared with competing smartphone UIs. For example, the application menu, or SpringBoard as it’s called, was a super-simple flat representation of your apps without folders or other hierarchies.

The curse of desktop interfaces is their menus. Menus basically offer unlimited slots to dump functionality. Menus are common in many smartphone platforms and in my opinion the main culprit of bad UI design. iPhone doesn’t really have menus of unlimited items; you can usually just have max 4 items on a menu-like popup. This is wonderful as it forces every average designer and developer to think in terms of less, not more. If you add a new feature to your application, on iPhone you really need to think about how to surface it on the UI as there aren’t any functionality dump yards like menus.

Touch UIs that are operated with fingers have an inherent character that drives UI design towards simplicity: your finger can hit only large-enough areas. Although screen resolutions will increase with advances in technology, you still need to be able to operate UIs with your finger. On a mobile phone screen, this means that there are usually fewer than 10 possible selections visible at a time. This drives all designs towards simplicity.

Apple’s new device

Apple is going to release a new device today. Rumours are indicating that it’s a tablet device for casual computing. I’m not personally super-excited about something that sits between a phone and a laptop. A phone I can carry anywhere in my pocket and use for casual computing, and as a programmer I’m going to need a full-powered laptop for work-related tasks. But I’m super-excited that whatever Apple is announcing today is probably a new step towards the next generation of computer UIs. Laptops as we know them are going to change and touch interfaces will play a central role in this revolution.

We don’t carry our mobile phones for a search of information, but to communicate with people.

It seems that Facebook has become one of the major drivers for growth of mobile internet usage. It was last year when mobile operator ads in London Tube started to highlight Facebook instead of Google search as a reason to use mobile internet. During 2009 Facebook’s mobile usage has grown from 20 million to 65 million monthly active users.

Google has reported 5-fold mobile search volume growth during the last two years. In contrast, if Facebook’s mobile usage continued it’s stellar growth, Facebook would have 420 million mobile users at the end of 2010, 23-fold increase in two years. Of course, this won’t happen. Growth has to slow down, as the total amount of Facebook users just flew past 325 million monthly actives.

Facebook Mobile Usage by Platform

It’s interesting to see if Facebook’s mobile usage gives any
insights about internet use on different mobile platforms. Following
graph shows above mentioned 65 million active users, split by the platform.

The highest bar of 27M users is shared between Facebook’s two mobile-optimized web interfaces (m.facebook.com – the standard mobile-optimized site and x.facebook.com for touch-enabled phones) and a few platforms that doesn’t show up as a separate apps, mainly Nokia’s S60 and Windows Mobile.

Facebook for iPhone has over 16M monthly active users, a formiddable number as it means that about 30% of all iPhone and iPod Touch owners (56M) use the application actively. iPhone-owning Facebook users starts to be an interesting market segment of it’s own.

Facebook for Blackberry has about 10M monthly active users. Given that there are about 50 million Blackberries sold, 20% of penetration of Facebook app tells about a thriving mobile platform.

The Java-based Facebook Mobile has around 10 million monthly actives – a small number of over 1 billion Java-enabled phones, but it’s still one of the most downloaded Java applications ever. GetJar reports about 20 million downloads in total for it. In comparison the other top applications, super-popular chat and browser apps eBuddy, Opera Mini and mig33 are around 30M, 22M and 17M downloads, respectively.

Use of Facebook for Android is ridiculously small, under 10000 monthly actives. I haven’t tried the application myself, but I’ve got the impression that it’s rather limited compared to other implementations. Am I correct assuming that Android users typically use Facebook via Android’s web browser? Or are third-party apps like Asurion’s Addressbook popular?

It would be the most interesting to see how the highest bar is further split between mobile web interfaces and Nokia and Windows Mobile. Unfortunately both QuantCast and Compete report suspiciously low numbers of monthly unique visitors for m.facebook.com (between 300K and 1.2M) and x.facebook.com (between 100K and 200K) so further analysis would likely to be incorrect.

Part 2: The future of Facebook Mobile

This introduction to Facebook Mobile stats was the first part of my look into Facebook Mobile. I’m going to post my thoughts about the future of Facebook Mobile and mobile web soon. So if you are interested on the topic, please subscribe to my blog feed here or follow me on Twitter here.

In short, App Store and it’s rivals are solving a distribution problem so that it’s very cost-efficient for a small startup to test an idea, reach users and try to get traction in mobile. This wasn’t possible just 3 years ago, when we started Jaiku. Only reasonable way to get a mobile application to users was through operator or device manufacture deals.

Another interesting opportunity is that new App Store in iPhone OS 3.0 is providing a small payment solution in a user-friendly way. You can build and test business models that have been very difficult in web services as there hasn’t been widely adopted solution to pay few bucks in user-friendly way.

Now, very interesting future possibility is that Apple and others are not actually building application stores, but more general small payment systems. What if iPhone OS 4.0 would provide JavaScript APIs to App Store in-app payment system?

• startups
• protopunk
• Brixton, London
• Customer Development
• trekking in Lapland
• all things mobile: social networks, payments, gaming, lbs, …
• functional programming
• The Mission, San Francisco
• neuroscience
• german-style boardgames
• Upplands Väsby, Sverige
• molecular gastronomy
• hard drinking
• early stages of human civilizations
• booty funk

On Friday, I’ll be working and hanging around Stockholm. Tips for interesting restaurants appreciated! You can reach me privately via email: teemu.kurppa@iki.fi.

Talk discusses an important changes that happened in a mobile business in 2008. It discusses what problems iPhone’s AppStore solves – namely distribution and payment problems – and what it doesn’t – marketing. Compared to a talk gave in Slush Helsinki, this version doesn’t include a part discussing mobile web and HTML 5.

There’s at least three good reasons to attend in addition to the fact that event is free of charge.

First, Google’s Android Team just sent an Android Dev Phone 1 as a grand prize for the afternoon Hackathon event. Dev Phone 1 is a fully functional SIM unlocked phone running Android operation system. You can read more about the device from the Android web site. I’ll be in a jury who will give a prize to the best application presented at MobileDevCamp Hackathon.

Second, the day starts with a bunch of interesting talks. I’ll give my Platform = Stage – How to choose a mobile development platform? talk that I gave at Slush event in November. It’s a non-technical talk that tries to get you thinking about mobile platforms from the different points of view than just sold units of phones or technical possibilities of a specific platform. I’ll discuss about distribution models on different platforms and other facts that are crucial for your application’s success. I’ve updated the talk with a couple of new insights.

Other talks cover different platforms in more detail. I’m especially waiting a talk by Niklas Wahrman who have developed Asterope game for both Android and iPhone platforms.

Finally, there’s a BarCamp event after the longer talks. You can freely give a short presentation or a hands-on hacking session. I expect BarCamp to be both fun and useful.

I’m planning to give a short technical presentation targeted for novice and intermediated iPhone programmers. Talk is called “Leaks and Zombies” and it’s about memory management in iPhone programming. You might think that that’s the most boring topic ever, but anything that involves zombies can’t be boring! It should be useful too, it seems that even experienced programmers have trouble of getting iPhone’s memory management right if their background is in garbage collected languages. And if you don’t know why zombies are involved, you should come to listen.

Sign up to MobileDevCamp here.

However truth is that App Store is nothing short of success. In January Apple announced that there had been 500 million downloads from App Store. Let’s put this into perspective. There are about 17 million sold iPhones. Apple lumps iPod Touch sales together with other iPod sales, but estimates are that iPod Touch sales total 25 million, which means that there are about 40 million sold iPhone OS devices. Thus on average there are over 12 installed apps per device. That’s an astonishing number. On average on every iPhone and iPod Touch 12 applications have been installed just in 6 months.

How many installed applications a PC has on average?
I haven’t done my homework, but my guess is something between 0 and 1. Your guess?

How many sold games there are per a game console?
My guess: 5. Answer: about 6 over a 2 year period.

Heck, how many bookmarks is saved to browser’s bookmarks on average?
My guess: something between 5 and 50. Heavy users with thousands of bookmarks are likely to skew this a bit in a way that no heavy user of mobile applications can skew App Store stats.

Compared to these, 12 installed applications is a very vivid proof of a working ecosystem. Granted, most of the installed applications are free, but the number proves that App Store has connected application publishers and users like nothing before. And this on a mobile device. Just a year ago, a person who had installed a mobile application was either a geek or  16-year-old gamer with too much time on his hands.

The most successful mobile application store before App Store is probably GetJar.com, that has about 370 million free downloads since 2004. Other successful stores have hit about 100 million downloads each over several years. With a success of App Store, mobile applications market is quickly catching mobile advertising as a business model.

Nokia is rumoured to launch it’s own application store at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Currently Nokia has a crappy Download! service on S60 phones and N-Gage market on selected models. If Nokia would unify these and duplicate ease of use of App Store for both publishers and users, it has a huge potential. Nokia sold over 100 million devices last quarter. Think if every new S40 and S60 model would have an application store baked in.

N-Gage Market has a silly restriction that games sold through it should be developed in native C++. On N-Gage Industry Insider a potential game developer is proudly challenged: “Think you’ve got what it takes?”. Pardon me, but who the fuck cares in which programming language a game or an application is developed if it’s fun or useful? Nokia has gone to great lengths to support several development environments on both S40 and S60 platforms: Java ME, Flash Lite, browser technologies with Web Runtime and S60 native C++ development. It should leverage this work. Think how many publishers and users Nokia could connect with a well-made appliation store that allows all these technologies to be used.

It would be interesting to see an analysis on reasons why people buy Touch. Do they buy iPod Touch first and foremost as a music device or do they see it as an internet device?

An updated graph of manufacturer shares is below. Nothing new there, Apple’s stellar raise of share continues.  It should be noted that AdMob has been running an iPhone focused campaign for advertisers, which is likely to skew stats towards iPhone. However they probably have business reasons for this. Maybe more ads are viewed and clicked on iPhone than on other platforms?

Fortunately, a mobile ad provider AdMob releases monthly reports that contain device statistics and other juicy tidbits of information about ads they have served. AdMob serves ads for over 6000 mobile web sites around the globe.

What is interesting is that this data is about real worldwide mobile internet usage. It’s not sales numbers of internet capable models that don’t really tell how people use their phones. Although it’s heavily skewed, it’s also not limited only to a specific geographic region or a single site. This kind of data is scarcely publicly available outside of big internet companies thus big kudos goes to AdMob for making it available.

iPhone is growing fast

I compiled the below graph of trends in manufacturer shares of mobile internet traffic from AdMob’s reports to investigate how iPhone fares currently. The graph gives further proof  of iPhone becoming a formidable player in mobile internet despite a lower amount of sold units than many competitors.

The real share of S60 3rd edition

Personally, I’m most interested in comparing different mobile operating systems and how people use internet on them. Unfortunately Symbian-based OSes are usually lumped together, although in a native development it’s a considerable development effort to support both S60 2nd edition and  S60 3rd edition phones. For this reason, I examined AdMob’s top device charts.

In a worldwide top 20 devices, there are three S60 2nd ed. devices. I knew that 5 year old Nokia 6600 had been a hit for several years in many countries, but I was surprised to see it still in top 20. All in all, S60 3rd ed devices account for 37% of Nokia devices in top 20. Using 40% as a crude estimate for 3rd ed. devices gives 13% share of worldwide mobile internet traffic is originating from S60 3rd ed. devices. That’s a very different impression than a quick look would give (In AdMob’s reports the overall share of Symbian of smartphone originated requests is 49%). It is also in line with illustrative math games that I gave in my Slush talk in last November.

If you study reports carefully, you can’t miss the small share that Windows Mobile has. According to July 08 report HTC devices account almost half of Windows Mobile usage. Using that as an estimate makes Windows Mobile’s share max. 4% of all traffic in November 08. That’s especially poor given that AdMob’s stats are skewed somewhat towards US market. This unimportance of Windows Mobile as a mobile platform was earlier pointed out and analyzed by Russell Buckley (via Tero Lehto).

It will be interesting to follow how Android fares during spring. November 08 report shows already 2% share in US traffic. Another interesting perspective is to keep eye on the importance of mobile web in Asian and Latin American countries. For example, I’ve personally witnessed Indonesians as heavy SMS users in Jaiku and they are also one of the biggest user groups in the virtual mobile world Mini Friday (the little brother of Habbo Hotel). AdMob’s October 08 report reveals that iPhone is a dominating player in two huge Latin American markets: Mexico (25.0%) and Brazil (31.8%).

Shortcomings of AdMob’s data

To understand how skewed AdMob’s data is it’s informative to inspect other changes in the graph. In May 2008, a big Indonesian advertiser joined AdMob network and we can see noticeable raise in Nokia’s share and a similar drop in BlackBerry maker RIM’s share. Indonesia is a strong market for Nokia (63.7% in Nov 08) and RIM is non-existent there. This just shows that AdMob network is still too small to give us a really representative sample.

Other fact worth noting is that Europe is clearly underrepresented in AdMob’s statistics. Following table, taken from November 08 report, shows geographic distribution of requests.  Africa on the other hand is overrepresented which is explained by AdMob’s strong foothold in South Africa.

Despite these shortcomings, I find AdMob’s data very valuable as it describes actual mobile internet usage. Let’s hope they keep publishing and improving it, after all it’s a great advertising strategy to offer this kind of valuable data for free when their main income is ad serving.

A topic of my talk was the current shift that is happening in mobile platforms and how developers and entrepreneurs should think about a choice of platform that they develop on. Developers are often excited about technical possibilities that enable us to do cool things. But I emphasized that we should think what kind of audience we can reach with our platform choice. Think about distribution mechanisms and the initial user experience that is dictated by platform. In the latter half of the talk, I explored mobile web as a platform and new possibilities that HTML 5 is going to bring to the table.

I also revealed the name of my new venture – Huikea. It’s way too early to share details, but if you want to hear about us later when we are ready to tell more, leave your email address on huikea.com.

Slides of the presentation are below.

The illustration above describes challenges facing practical autonomous mobile robotic solutions. Original is apparently by Rodney Brooks – the Bad Boy of Robotics – shown to first year students of artificial intelligence. Given it’s audience, the illustration makes it point vividly: no matter how fancy AI you develop, there are more mundane problems you need to solve first, before you can make anything useful.

I’ve worked in a mobile software business for 6 years now. Before that I studied autonomous mobile robots for a while. Surprisingly autonomous mobile robots and mobile phones have more than one thing in common. Both have sensors – cameras, accelometers, compasses, you name it. And both are supposed to do useful things even when you are not keeping eye on them. But one property is of a special interest here:

They are both mobile and thus wireless.

And why is this interesting? Because currently there’s no practical solutions to charge batteries without a wire, remotely over the air.

Both robots and mobile phones run out of juice over extended period of use unless charged. Under heavy use current crema de la creme of mobile phones are guaranteed to emit their last desperate beep just before you were about to call your special one to inform that you are late from the anniversary dinner.

Better battery life

I’ve seen a good share of mobile phone user surveys in my past. Most of them have a section where people were asked either what they want to improve in the current model they had or what kind of device would be their ideal phone. These surveys are in many ways of limited value, but they give you some understanding what kind of things users appreciate. In every survey I encountered, a modest request for “better battery life” hit Top-3.

Mobile phones have become an integral part of our modern lives. They are our main and one of the most intimate communication medium. They have replaced alarm clocks in our bed rooms. Many use them as daily cameras and notebooks. The more adventurous of us are already relying their navigation abilities on these little devices.

Running out of battery is becoming as paralyzing as running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

The suckers

Who then is sucking the life out of our batteries? The main culprits are network usage, bright big displays, GPS location fixes and heavy computing. Most of the mobile applications are not computationally heavy, so displays and using sensors like GPS for a longer period of time constitute a significant power drain.

However, in coming era of connected apps, the network usage will be the main culprit. The power consumption of network usage is especially bad when it happens periodically even with small amounts of data. For each request, a phone’s radio changes itself from an idle, low power consumption state to higher power usage state to enable 3G data traffic. This is very common pattern of network usage, for example it happens every time your email or chat application polls for new messages. For this exact reason, Apple is trying to create a user controllable and understandable shared model of notifications for iPhone.

Some people have succinctly expressed that all these extra bells and whistles are causing the poor battery performance. And they are right. But I bet that in five years time, teens won’t hesitate to wonder “How could you ever survive without maps in mobile phones?” or “You facebooked from a desktop? Your life must have SUCKED!”. Being able to find your way or communicate with your friends easily are instruments of high value.

The solutions

There are 3 ways to deal with the battery problem:

• make longer lasting batteries
• consume less battery
• charge more often

Making longer lasting batteries

Just make batteries that last longer, right? You can bet that people have tried, but it’s one of the technologies where the basic laws of physics prevent fast progress. Batteries are quite simple technology and there’s not that much you can do to improve them. There is progress, but it’s of an incremental nature. And we are much faster at inventing new useful things that consume power.

Consuming less battery

There are two ways to try to consume less battery: a hardware way and a software way.

Instead of making ever more powerful processors, innovators try to make processors that do a bit less, but with a lot less of power. Transmeta, a company doing exactly that, was made famous overnight in 90s by a fellow Finn, Linus Torvalds, by a mere act of joining them. I haven’t heard much about them lately. I hope they were overrun by competition, not drought of ideas.

On the network side, things are not looking pretty. 3G is a battery sucker, and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, because 4G networks seem to be even worse. Even if the battery problem would be aggressively approached by network manufacturers, lead times of network deployment are in order of 10 years.

The software approach is to make software more clever, so that it consumes less battery. Nokia has provided instructions on how to make energy efficient applications and also provides an energy profiler tool for S60 phones. Apple is taking another approach by limiting capabilities of applications – applications can’t run on background – and providing a common shared push notification model.

Mobile phones are most of the time in your pocket, you use them in 4-10 second bursts. The concept of background processing is essential for many mobile innovations. Applications on Android will provide more seamless experience compare to iPhone just because of the background processing and I think Apple has to deal with that somehow.

A problem is that even if you know how your application consumes power, there’s not necessarily much you can do about it. You can reduce your polling frequency, but eventually this will render your chat application useless. Current network APIs don’t provide ways to lower a quality of service for better battery life.

Charge more often

As two other ways of dealing with the battery problem are not going to provide any short term solutions, I’ve been thinking about the third way: how to make users charge their phone more often.

It’s a very interesting user interaction design problem. Charging is something no one really wants to do. It isn’t anybody’s goal to charge a phone battery. On the other hand battery power is a critical resource for many daily activities. It’s like money. If we make it easy for people to ensure that they have enough battery life to do tasks they need to do and enjoy their mobile life, they can appreciate this and avoid frustrating moments. Even if it takes some effort from a user.

One solution is what I call accidental charging. You connect a phone to a wire for a totally different reason than charging and charging happens as a side effect. A prime example of this is iPhone. To sync your music, calendar events and contacts, you need to connect it to your computer. While iTunes is syncing, your phone is being charged. Other great example is small iPod docks in audio systems: you connect your iPod to a dock to play music from it, and as a side effect, it’s charged.

The second approach is related to the accidental charging, I call it physical affordances. Palm hand-helds and some older phone models used to have a separate charging stand. Some people frowned upon them and saw them as unnecessary, ugly things. However, those stands, located on your bedroom table or next to your desktop, were visually inviting you to put your phone to a charger. They reminded you about the fact that your phone is not charging by their empty presence.

Why not provide charging stands that are truly beautiful design objects that you can keep visible in your home and at work? Couple them with some useful functionality – syncing, playing music, showing photos in a photo frame – to enable also accidental charging.

Third, improve users mental model of power consumption. As battery power is a valuable resource for users, it’s important to get the mental model right so that user can make educated decisions how and when to save battery. Running a simple chat application might appear innocent compared to a capturing of a video.

My Nokia E65 has 7 power bars. When phone reaches 4 bars, I have no idea how long can I safely web surf with it, because those last bars always seem to go too quickly. Either visualization is not linear, or I’ve bad mental model how much surfing consumes the power. If I have a bad mental model of the useful battery life, I just wonder how people who have never seen power measurement graphs in their life can map those 7 bars to useful battery life. One way to improve mental model could be to visualize the current power consumption with some simple animation or colors on battery indicator. People would learn to understand that certain applications consumes a lot of power and it’s better to be avoided, when you want to save your last 2 bars for important calls. Without extended usability testing, I can’t say if this really a good idea or not. But in a way or another mobile phone industry have to educate users to get their mental models of power consumption right.

Fourth approach is smarter battery notifications. Don’t you just hate that running-out-of-battery beep? It always come too late and in the middle of important call. Why don’t phone suggest charging when I’m 50% way done? Of course it would be annoying if phone beeps when I’m at that anniversary dinner. But phone knows where you are by cell towers, wifi stations, Bluetooth devices and GPS location. It could easily detect your daily patterns as most of us have very predictable lives. Home. Work. Somewhere else. Home. The phone could remind you to plug your phone to a charger, if you forget to do it when you come home.

And why it needs to make irritating sound to remind me of charging? Retro geeks can keep their beeps, I want my phone to imitate Reginald Jeeves: “If you would charge your phone, sir. It helps you to get through a busy day tomorrow.”