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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Nokia Maps 2.0 -Location Detection without GPS


Nokia announced on May 12th at the Where 2.0 Conference in Burlingame, California, that they had released their Nokia Maps 2.0 beta, with a raft of upgraded features and web linkage to its Ovi.com site.

Ovi is a Nokia Web portal for Internet services such as content sharing. Maps on Ovi will let people use and mark up maps on the Web and then upload their changes to a cell phone. This is all part of Nokia new gambit into the world of software development and its desire to extend its reach beyond its own hardware.

However, the interesting part is a not-as-yet-reported initiative by Nokia to make Nokia Maps truly mainstream by eliminating both the need for GPS and the need for the Mobile Network Operator.

How? Simple...by investing over the last few years in building up its own database of cell IDs matched to geo-cordinates, and then building functionality in Nokia Maps that allows for an estimate of the user's location based only on cell ID.

Gone would be the days of waiting up to 5 minutes for GPS fixes, 'indoor blackspots' and battery drainage... Location Based Services would truly be able to achieve the ubiqitous status that both Navteq and Nokia are placing their strategic bets on.

The implications of this development are truly dramatic and it will not be long before the impact is noted by companies operating in this space...

Monday, May 26, 2008

Future of Location Based Services...according to Navteq


BARCELONA -I was at the Forum Nokia Camp in Barcelona today and attended the presentation by Tom Tierney, Developer Alliance Manager at Navteq, based in Chicago.

Here are some tidbits from his presentation:

  • Referring to the difference between PNDs (Personal Navigational Devices) and mobiles, Tom described the mobile device as being the 'navigational ringtone' for the user and sees the PNDs and mobiles to be complimentary instead of competing for the same audience

  • Some new technologies not everyone has heard of yet were discussed -namely P-Cell Technology (developed in Korea) and TV-GPS Hybrid Positioning...I will investigate and report back if there are interesting developments in these areas

  • According to Tom, the use of audio, touch screens and voice interactivity will eliminate the need for banner ads in the future

  • Unsurprisingly perhaps, Tom stated that LBS's will be ubiqitous in the future. Also, according to Navteq's own research, consumers principally want 3 things from them -for them to be cheap, accurate and easy-to-use

  • According to Navteq, consumers will pay for navigation and gaming applications but not for social networks and search (in line with internet trends)

  • To put figures to the growth opportunity we are talking about here, in Q1 2008, 43% of all downloads on mobile phones globally were for Location Based Services..accounting for 62% of total revenues...a sizeable pie which is clearly growing as we see LBS being demanded for Resource Management or Asset Tracking, Entertainment (including Location based dating) and Security (Child Finder features etc.)

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Startup 2.0 Winner Declared -Zilok


BARCELONA -After a heated round of presentations (most of which were amusingly interrupted by the erratic functioning of the slideshow remote control), the 3 top European startups in this year's competition were announced.

In third place, to some surprise, came ifoods.tv, a cooking community with emphasis on video feeds based in Ireland. The company declared having only 3000 active members despite launching over 6 months ago and also competes in a densely packed market segment dominated by The Food Network. However, I did like their idea of awarding brownie points according to the type of contribution made by community members and the fact that this then entitled members to enter into prize draws.

In second place came socially responsible Unltdworld, a social network for do-gooders around the world attempting to redistribute wealth from the over- to the under-privileged elements of society. The concept was sound, though (like other attendees I was discussing this with) I failed to see what was unique about their proposition.

The clear winner was Zilok, a Franco-Belgian enterprise leading the way in the new market of P2P renting. With a strong management team, unique proposition and well-executed strategy, it was difficult to fault this company though some attendees did tut-tut at the fact that maybe they were not so much of a startup anymore...this old chestnut always pops up at some point, as the definition between a true startup and an established startup is not always clarified and the more entrepreneurially-minded would tend to prefer prize money to go to the startup that needs it the most..

Though not shortlisted for a prize, I believe that Talicious, a Hamburg startup established in 2007, deserves a special mention for most innovative concept, providing an online matchmaking service between talented people and talent scouts (and already breaking even, an achievement in itself)..check them out at Talicious.com.


Overall, a great event with heavy emphasis on web startups and with plenty of room to let in mobile startups in the future as the convergence trend from web to mobile becomes more prominent.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Startup 2.0 Finalists Announced




BARCELONA-After several weeks of online voting, startup 2.0, a European-wide competition of web 2.0 sites, has entered its final phase.The competition, organized by Alianzo Networks and La Caixa, has the objective to promote and reward European startups involved in 2.0 technologies.

Over 300 companies applied online for the contest, this now having been whittled down to 10 finalists who will be giving 5 minute elevator pitches in front of a prestigious panel of judges including Martin Varsavsky, Loic le Meur and Luca Conti.

The finalists are:

- iFoods
- UnLtdWorld
- Bubok
- Geospace
- AllRise
- Planetaki
- Talicious
- Learnit
- Zilok
- Wolpy

From a personal point of view, I'm particularly keen to find out more about Geospace, who offer a Location-based service via web and mobile...their website is in Hungarian, so it will be a case of discovering what services they have during their presentation.

The other startups have (mostly) websites in English, and are an eclectic mix of socially-minded enterprises to social travel networks and talent communities....I recommend you take a look and see what is boiling in the European startup pot for yourselves....

Monday, May 19, 2008

AndroidGlobalTime

We are pleased to announce that a new open source sample application—called AndroidGlobalTime — has been added to the apps-for-android project.





It's a 3D world clock developed by an engineer at Google and may serve as an illustrative example of how to use the OpenGL ES APIs in your Android applications.



Just a quick word on how to use AndroidGlobalTime. When you launch it, you'll see a spinning globe showing day and night regions. Pressing the space bar will overlay an analog clock with the time corresponding to location you're currently examining. The arrow keys allow you to spin the Earth and traverse through different time-zones while the clock is displayed. Pressing the center key in the emulator toggles between a 3D and 2D view of the earth. Pressing the L key will turn the city lights on or off. You can also zoom-out by pressing 2 and zoom-in by pressing 8.

Hope you find this helpful!

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Best of Barcelona-Mobile Startups to Watch:Codilink


BARCELONA -I'm starting a new initiative this week, where I'll be highlighting local mobile/web companies based in Barcelona and track their achievements and future plans.

First off the starting block, is barcode scanning experts Codilink, set up by Ben Chesser and 2 other partners 4 years ago and now operating in Spain, UK and Mexico.Their main line of business are M-coupons, M-loyalty schemes and M-ticketing through the use of 2-D barcodes and count among their clients Audi, L'Oreal and Heineken. The company can now lay claim to having rolled out over 34 million barcodes worldwide.

Barcodes come in 3 formats, QRs (mainly used in Japan), Datamatrix and Bidis (the common name used in Spain). Bidis differentiate themselves by having been specifically designed so as to be scanned from a mobile phone screen, so are seen by some as being the more sophisticated solution.

Codilink prizes itself on its technology that allows its scanners to read any format of barcode, thus reducing investment costs for marketing campaigns.It also believes that developments in the Mobile Wallet concept (see earlier post) will accelerate the demand for barcode-based ticketing and vouchers. Already, Codilink established an agreement in Mexico with large scale cinema operator Cinepolis to replace paper tickets completely with an on-screen mobile barcode.

The future? Codilink is looking to expand rapidly in new markets and is eyeing India with particular interest (it has already conducted market tests there) and at the same time is attracting interest from OEMs looking to buy into barcode technology. Rumour has it that an offer from Motorola was rejected but that new deals could be in the pipeline...

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Android Developer Challenge Judges and Top 50 Details

It's been a busy few weeks here as we've wrapped up the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. We'd like to share a couple pieces of information with you:

  • The full list of judges is now available. It was fun to work with such a diverse group of judges from different companies all around the world.
  • A slide deck of the Android Developer Challenge prize recipients is also available. The deck includes descriptions and screenshots of the 46 recipients who consented to sharing their information and is a great way to get a feel for the quality of apps submitted.

The prize recipients' entries were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of great applications submitted, and we'd like to thank and congratulate everyone who entered the challenge. We look forward to seeing all of the application in the hands of consumers with Android devices.

Location-based music











CrunchGear announced today that Sony Ericsson is patenting technology that would essentially allow your digital audio player to determine where you were located and then offer you up a list of downloadable tracks that have been tagged to that location.

The idea is that certain music works well in certain locations, like tagging “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head” to all the gas stations in my neighborhood and “Livin’ on a Prayer” to the local bank branch.

Apparently, "many people associate a physical location or a place to songs or pieces of music. In visiting or arriving at the place, they may remember the songs or the pieces of music and wish to hear them. They may also appreciate being supplied, automatically or after a request, information about the songs or pieces of music associated with the place.”

This is a nice idea, but even better would be someting akin to a Geo-Pandora, whereby the music player actually recommends songs to you as you move around the city by remembering your personal associations between place and music...could this be a new patent for some creative genius out there to start working on?

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

A Challenge in More than One Way

Well, the submission deadline for the first Android Developer Challenge has come and gone, the apps are in, the judges are finished, and the waiting is over. We got a lot of great submissions, and I can tell you personally that the competition was fierce. I didn't see all 1,788 submissions, but I saw quite a lot of them, and I uttered more than one wail of despair as some of my favorite submissions didn't quite make the cut, by razor-thin margins in some cases. But, the judges have spoken.


Speaking of the judges...we'll soon publish a list of who the judges are, but I know many of our developers are still curious: what were all those judges doing? Well, the short answer is that they were judging applications using a custom laptop configuration that we provided. But we thought some people might be interested in the "long" answer, so we put together this blog post. If you're not interested in the gory details of the judging, you can stop here; but if you are interested, read on!


How We Got Started


Making the Challenge fair was by far our primary goal. We knew we had to do whatever we could to make sure that the judges' scores are based solely on their review of the application. We automated as much as possible, to make it easy for judges to focus on judging, and not on administrivia or complicated setup.


The first thing we realized was that we were going to have way more submissions than any single judge could look at. No one could review all 1,788 submissions in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, we definitely needed more than one judge reviewing each submission. Our goal was to have each submission reviewed by four different judges, with a minimum of three.


The big question was then: how many judges would we need?


For 1,788 submissions, a panel of 4 judges per application meant that we needed a whopping 7,152 reviews to be performed. Since our judges would have to be crazy to agree to do more than 75 reviews, we needed at least 95 judges. In the end we recruited around 125, including backup judges.


Making Order out of Chaos


The next thing we realized was that judges need to be able to actually review the submissions. Since the judges came from our Open Handset Alliance partners and many are not engineers, we knew that we couldn't send instructions like "run the M5-RC15 emulator, open a terminal window, and run the command adb push geodb /data/misc/location—and don't forget the --sdcard option!" They'd think we were quoting Star Wars.


Besides that, we also knew that once we gave the judges their assignments, what they did was out of our hands. We couldn't control how the judges review the applications, but we could certainly make it as easy as possible for the judges to do a thorough review.


So, we built a program in wxPython that automates judging. This application launches a clean emulator for each submission, supports emulator features like SD card images and mock location providers, and allows judges to launch multiple emulators and simulate calls and SMS messages for applications which need that functionality. We asked our friendly neighborhood Google Tech Stop for 140 laptops, installed Ubuntu Linux and our software on one, and then cloned that installation for use on all the others. We then had a huge shipping party, where we imaged, boxed, and shipped 115 or so laptops in one day.


An important side effect of these custom laptops is that they are all identical. This means that each judge's experience of the submissions was the same, which eliminated the risk of one judge rating an app poorly just because it ran slowly on his personal computer.


Managing All that Data


Once we sent 100+ laptops all over the world, we needed a way to get the data back. Another goal was to eliminate as many sources of human error as possible. With 7,152 reviews to complete, and 4 categories per review, that's 28,608 scores to keep track of. Mistakes would be bound to happen, so filing paperwork or transcribing scores by hand from one file to another was out of the question.


Our solution was the Google Data web API for accessing things like Google Spreadsheets and Google Base. Here's how it worked.


  • We wrote a Python program to randomly assign applications to judges for review.
  • Using the Spreadsheets API, that program generated a Google Spreadsheet for each judge, pre-filled with that judge's assigned submissions and space to enter scores.
  • The program installed on the laptops also used the Spreadsheets API to fetch a given judge's assignments.
  • When the judge scores a submission, those scores were posted back into the spreadsheet.
  • After the judging period concluded, a separate program walks over all the judges' spreadsheets, computing the final scores.

This approach had two great things about it: first, it didn't require any new server infrastructure to make it work. Second, our "database" had a built-in rich "admin" UI for managing the data — namely, Google Spreadsheets itself. If any of our judges ran into problems or needed help, we could simply open that spreadsheet in our browser and review or fix problems.


This approach worked quite well, and I'd bet that the judges didn't even know the Spreadsheets API was being used, unless they actively poked around.


Tying Up the Loose Ends


Of course, our work wasn't done once we retrieved all the submission scores. We couldn't just average up the scores, you see. First, judges could recuse themselves from scoring specific submissions; perhaps they were assigned an application similar to one their own company is working on, or perhaps they realized they knew one of the authors. Second, despite our best efforts there was a chance that some judges might have a problem — for instance, if one judge had a poor network connection but reviewed an application that requires the network, then that judge might have scored the application unfairly poorly.


Here are the major outlier scenarios that we were concerned about:

  • Cases where judges recused themselves.
  • Submissions where one judge reported a problem with the application, but all the other judges reported good scores. (It seems odd for only one judge to have a problem.)
  • Cases where one judge's scores were an outlier compared to the other judges' scores.

For the first two cases, we simply discarded the outlying data points, if we had enough. For instance, if three judges reported good scores and one recused herself, we simply dropped that fourth score. If dropping the conflicting score would have brought the application below three reviews, we sent it back for review by a new judge to bring it up to our minimum number of judges per application.


The third case is more subtle. Just because a judge rated an application differently than others doesn't mean that that review is invalid, so we can't simply discard outliers. Instead, we took the highest and lowest scores in each category and gave them half weight. The effect is to bring the average scores a bit closer to the median scores, which helps minimize the impact of unusually high or low scores. This process was applied to all submissions (not just "suspicious" scores) since it has a minimal effect on submissions that don't have a large outlier.


We actually ran the whole process above twice: first we ran it to choose a first cut of the top 100 submissions from the original 1,788, and we then sent those 100 to a second group of judges for selection of the final 50. (Actually, the "top 100" were really "top 119", since we added a few more submissions to accommodate scoring ties in the first round.)


Wrapping Up


Now you know what we've been spending all our time on, and what's been keeping us up at night (sometimes literally)! Throughout, our key objectives were to keep the process fair, let the judges focus on judging, and give applications the benefit of the doubt in cases of scoring outliers.


What's next? Well, the 50 submissions that were awarded a prize now begin the refinement process for their Round 2 submissions, which will award the final, larger prizes to the top 20 applications. I also hope that the developers of the other great apps that didn't receive prizes will consider the second Android Developer Challenge, which should begin later this year.


To everyone, I'd also like to say thanks for participating, and congratulations on your hard work!

War of the Social Networks

I'm posting this humorous video short from current.com that illustrates in a fun way how saturation has arrived to the world of traditional online social networks.

Hope you enjoy it!

Monday, May 12, 2008

The Top 50 Applications

As you may have heard, the results from Android Developer Challenge Part 1, Round 1 were announced to all the participants late last week. We're still working on pulling together a more extensive listing for each application that made it into the top 50, but in the spirit of releasing early and often, here's a list containing the name of the application and its author(s):

  • AndroidScan - Jeffrey Sharkey

  • Beetaun - Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov

  • BioWallet - Jose Luis Huertas Fernandez

  • BreadCrumbz - Amos Yoffe

  • CallACab - Konrad Huebner and Henning Boeger

  • City Slikkers - PoroCity Media and Virtual Logic Systems

  • Commandro - Alex Pisarev, Andrey Tapekha

  • Cooking Capsules - Mary Ann Cotter and Muthuselvam Ramadoss

  • Diggin - Daniel Johansson, Aramis Waernbaum, Andreas Hedin

  • Dyno - Virachat Boondharigaputra

  • e-ventr - Michael Zitzelsberger

  • Eco2go - Taneem Talukdar, Gary Pong, Jeff Kao and Robert Lam

  • Em-Radar - Jack Kwok

  • fingerprint - Robert Mickle

  • FreeFamilyWatch - Navee Technologies LLC

  • goCart - Rylan Barnes

  • GolfPlay - Inizziativa Networks

  • gWalk - Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus ten Hagen, Christian Klinger, Marko Modsching, Rene Scholze

  • HandWx - Weathertop Consulting LLC

  • IMEasy - Yan Shi

  • Jigsaw - Mikhail Ksenzov

  • JOYity - Zelfi AG

  • LifeAware - Gregory Moore, Aaron L. Obrien, Jawad Akhtar

  • Locale - Clare Bayley, Christina Wright, Jasper Lin, Carter Jernigan

  • LReady Emergency Manager - Chris Hulls, Dilpreet Singh, Luis Carvalho, Phuong Nguyen

  • Marvin - Pontier Laurent

  • Mobeedo - Sengaro GmbH

  • Multiple Facets Instant Messenger - Virgil Dobjanschi

  • MyCloset - Mamoru Tokashiki

  • PedNav - RouteMe2 Technologies Inc.

  • Phonebook 2.0 - Voxmobili

  • PicSay - Eric Wijngaard

  • PiggyBack - Christophe Petit and Sebastien Petit

  • Pocket Journey - Anthony Stevens and Rosie Pongracz

  • Rayfarla - Stephen Oldmeadow

  • Safety Net - Michael DeJadon

  • SocialMonster - Ben Siu-Lung Hui and Tommy Ng

  • SplashPlay

  • Sustain- Keeping Your Social Network Alive - Niraj Swami

  • SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry

  • Talkplay - Sung Suh Park

  • Teradesk - José Augusto Athayde Ferrarini

  • The Weather Channel for Android - The Weather Channel Interactive Inc.

  • TuneWiki - TuneWiki Inc.

  • Wikitude-the Mobile Travel Guide - Philipp Breuss

  • Writing Pad - ShapeWriter Inc

Those of you following along carefully at home (or who bothered to read this far) will notice that there's only 46 in this list. 4 winners opted to continue their efforts in secret and so while we congratulate them too, we can't list them here.

Regardless, congratulations to all those who made it this far!

Friday, May 9, 2008

Android Developer Challenge: Round I Results are In

The last few weeks were both extremely intense and rewarding. Based on feedback from the judges, it was apparent that large number of applications were compelling, innovative and well implemented. The quality of these entries clearly reflects the creativity and hard work that developers have invested in building their apps.

In addition to developers' participation and contributions, over 100 industry judges around the world spent weeks reviewing these submissions. I want to thank all the developers and judges who have worked incredibly hard over the last few months, making the Android Developer Challenge such a success.

Many of the top submissions took advantage of the geo and social networking capabilities of Android. These applications allow friends to share their personal experiences and favorite content such as vacations, photos, shows, music, cooking recipes, restaurants, and much more as they relate to certain locales. I've also seen applications that connect people during emergency situations and others that allow users to share information on how they can reduce their carbon footprint. One developer even turned a real city block into a playing field where gamers can role-play and chase after villains.

Furthermore, some of these applications provide rich interactive experiences by combining web services and mash-ups to bring together data that's on the web with data that's on the mobile device. One application combined weather, pollen and allergy information in the context of a map that is relevant to a user's location.

Though many applications use a traditional "download" model for data, many also enable users to publish content, such as photos or even voice memos, for others to use on other mobile devices or the web.

This is just a brief snapshot of the many impressive applications I've seen. The 50 highest scoring applications will receive $25,000 each and go on to compete in the final round. We plan to publish a list of these applications as soon as we receive the developers' consent. The real winners, however, are the consumers who will benefit from the work of these talented developers.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Facebook Personal Details at Risk?


A report by the BBC yesterday highlights that personal details of users on Facebook could be 'harvested' with relative ease by using mailicious code hiding behind any one of the numerous applications available to users.

This potential privacy scare comes on the back of a string of identity theft concerns facing Facebook and other social networking sites. The BBC already made a claim back in February that Facebook users sticking to the default settings may be targeted by fraudsters and expose their personal details to misuse.

The scare relating to malicious applications is a real one, given that most of these programs access the user's personal details stored on their profile whether this is required or not by the game, joke or other type of application.

An expert interviewed by the BBC stated that Facebook needed to tighten up its security to prevent members from being exposed to identity theft.

Facebook responded that it 'has an entire Investigations Team that watches the site and removes content and third-party applications that violate Facebook's Terms of Use. Facebook users also police the site and use the "report" button if they come across violators of our Terms of Use'.

Will this mixture of self-patrolling and In-house investigation be sufficient to stem the flow of privacy issues facing Facebook and other communities in the light of an ever more open Web and Mobile 2.0 ecosystem?
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