Paul Poutanen

One of the difficulties re mobile testing is trying to determine what a handset can do.

The people at WURFL (the Wireless Universal Resource File) have compiled an amazing database of handsets from around the world. (from their main page)

The main scope of the file is to collect as much information as we can about all the existing mobile devices that access WAP pages so that developers will be able to build better applications and better services for the users.

This project is open-source and is intended for developers working with the WAP and Wireless. All the information listed here has been collected by many different people from many different countries. You are allowed to use WURFL in any of your applications, free or commercial. The only thing required is to make any modification to this file public, following the original spirit and idea of the creators of this project. This will help WURFL to grow better and better every day.

Mob4hire is a proud contributor of data to add to the database. We have already found multiple examples of new handsets that we have added to the database.

We are using the WURFL database to identify handsets and will be using the database for the beta version of Mob4Hire which will be ready soon.

I salute the people and contributers to WURFL!

If you are a mobile application developer, please check it out.

I have been a member of Cambrian House for over a year now. If you look me up, I am fish99 and I am 6th on the leaderboard. (ie most glory points…a ranking system for doing stuff on the site)

In February, after lurking on the site for a while, I decided to add an idea.

The orginal name of the idea was “Mobile Phone Application Testing Service” (probably the most unsexy name I could think of….but it told what the idea did)

When I was at Blister Entertainment, I knew the difficulties in testing mobile applications. The cost was enormous… I estimated that each handset we tested on cost us between $1500 and $2000 depending on the cost of the handset and the data plan we needed. We needed to test in the countries, where the applications were to be launched, so we had to send testers, usually developers and technical people, to test with added cost. 

Working at Cambrian House, I loved the whole crowdsourcing concept.

In brainstorming, the ideas come out of putting two or more concepts together, to come up with a mashup. The idea of crowdsourcing and mobile sounded like a good fit, so I started thinking about it. Where were the problems in mobile and how could crowdsourcing help?

It kinda came to me slow but eventually the idea of crowd sourced mobile application testing came to mind. I found in the mobile space there were difficulties and cost with testing.

Tester bias was also a problem. If you send your developers out to test, you are going to get skewed results. If the person who wrote the application is testing, they tend to follow the same pattern in testing. For example, looking at a help screen in the middle of an application, does not happen if you wrote the code.

So the idea went up, and there were responses immediately. Some people loved it. Some hated it. There were suggestions. I did not know all of the answers right away but on thinking on responses helped me form the simple idea into a legitimate idea.

The bottom line is that the crowd helped me with fine-tuning the idea and the business model behind it.