Paul Poutanen

I just found out I am going to be an improv panel for MobileJam in Las Vegas Mobile Jam

How does the Improv Session Work?
Based on Mobile Jam Barcelona – they work well! See the photos.

Chairs are placed in six (6) circles around the room, with each topic designated to a circle. Each group has it’s own flip chart for discussion and to mark down comments for later.
Each topic area has 2-3 discussion leaders.
Participants choose which circle to drop in to.
Every 45 minutes the discussion stops, and participants move to another circle.
Discussion leaders start each session by introducing themselves and some brief commentary on the subject based on their expertise, experience, opinions. The participants introduce themselves too! The leaders answer questions and facilitate discussion ensuring everyone gets an opportunity to participate.
Why the Improv Sessions Work?

This is a chance for developers to get up close and personal with industry leaders and experienced developers, something often difficult at big conferences.
It’s driven by developers – what they want to hear, who they want to talk to, what they want to say. It’s no secret that the industry needs the emerging companies to lead with innovation, to leverage resources and to help change the game. With the right beat, let’s get ready to listen!
It’s like a box of chocolate, each session is different based on who joins in, so you never know what’s going to happen!

IMPROV SESSIONS
1:00pm 4:30pm – (45 minutes / session – choose 3 too attend & Final Wrap Up)

1. Mobile OS and Platforms

Discussion Leaders: Mobile Distillery - Vincent Berge

2. Mobile 2.0

Discussion Leaders:

AOL- Jai Jaisimha
CellSpin – Vince Laviano
Rococo – Sean Sullivan
Idean - Santtu Toivonen

3. Testing & Certification

Discussion Leaders:

GetJar – Bill Scott
Accenture – Jeff Wang
Mob4Hire – Paul Poutanen
Device Anywhere – David Marsyla

4. Getting to Market / Channels

Discussion Leaders;

Cellmania- Peter Baldwin
AORTA- Chetan Sharma
Astraware/Handmark – John Philips

5. Development – JSRs, MIDP3 and more

Discussion Leaders:

Aplix – Stanley Kao

6. Open Source in Handsets

Discussion Leaders:

Motorola - Asokan Thiyagarajan (Ashok)
Funambol - Greg Gamp

Should be a good session.

I thought the Mobile Jam was the best event at Barcelona!

I look forward seeing you there!

“Google Inc. has seen an acceleration of Internet activity among mobile phone users in recent months since the company has introduced faster Web services on selected phone models, fuelling confidence the mobile Internet era is at hand, the company said on Tuesday.”

Google sees surge in Web use on hot mobile phones

I think we are going to see a move to more internet traffic as handsets and infrstructure gets better.

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.

Testing of handsets to make sure they make the grade can be tricky and political.

From business week this morning..

For starters, Verizon Wireless will need to test any new device model before letting it connect to its network. The degree of openness will hinge on how difficult Verizon Wireless makes it for products to get a green light. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu, a leading proponent of wireless open access, points out that the old Ma Bell-era phone companies often used testing requirements as a way to control their networks. “There’s testing requirements and there’s testing requirements,” says Wu. “One is routine—and there’s another thing of deciding what products they don’t want on their network. It can become a black hole from which products never emerge.”

Developers have to have a clear picture of what will be accepted and what will not be accepted. If a developer spends 6 months on a project and then finds out a carrier blocks them on a technicality because it does not meet their business needs, this will further close the whole system.

Further more if the delay in testing handsets amounts to months, the same objective has been fullfilled. 

Openness is like being pregnant. There is no half being pregnant.

The problem with too many choices is sometimes you do not make any.

Take the existing mobile marketplace right now.

Do you want a smart handset?

Do you want a cheap handset?

Do you want emails on your  handset?

Do you want music on your handset?

Do you want to go to websites?

Do you want to only make calls?

Then what combos of the above do you want? How much are you willing to spend?

Then put yourself in the world of the mobile developer. They have to decide what the market will buy and choose as to what has been given to them. If they are selling to Verizon, the code better be in Brew, at Sprint J2ME.

If you are a Nokia handset you will likely need to crank out Symbian. Every type of handset is different.

Here is a synopsis of what is available

XHTML/Wap family
the iPhone mobile browsing family with native and objective C
Symbian
Windows Mobile
FlashLite
J2ME

Google has just announced Android While some people are heralding the
new SDK, others are not so sure.

One thing we know for sure right now, is it will take years to hit any kind of critical mass. There are too many manufacturers and software developers with their own special interests to make this happen too soon.

However do not underestimate Google. They have cash and they have power. What they do not want however is to be bullied by carriers….They want to be the carrier. They know the frustrations of the average user. And they want advertisements on the phone.

The Android Developer Challengeis interesting as it is a good way to jumpstart some developers. I think the more seasoned professional developers will wait until wait a while until there are more developments in the mobile space before proceeding. $10 million is a start but not enough to stop a paying gig. I think $100 million would have made a major splash.

Below are the categories that Google is suggesting…

Social networking
Media consumption, management, editing, or sharing, e.g., photos
Productivity and collaboration such as email, IM, calendar, etc.
Gaming
News and information
Rethinking of traditional user interfaces
Use of mash-up functionality
Use of location-based services
Humanitarian benefits
Applications in service of global economic development

One thing is for sure, things are not getting easier in the mobile space… They are getting more complicated.

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.