Mobile 2.0: Panel Discussion on openness

Moderator: Matthaus Krzykowski, VentureBeat

David Wood, Symbian

Jacob Lehrbaum, Sun

Andreas Constantinou, VisionMobile

Pat Phelan, Cubic Telecom

Christian Sejersen, Mozilla

MK: What is openness to you at 8am on a Monday?
AC: There was a big splash around openness 2008/2007 when Android came along.
DW: It's a culture change, around getting trust from the community.
CS: Most communication takes place in the open - wiki, newsgroups and IRC.
PP: As a semi-MNO we've had to go in and build APIs. Carriers are quite closed in general.
JL: I came from a hardware background (where open was about systems), then into software (which had its own definition), then mobile, where open means "you can install an application on your phone".
AC: We have open application SDKs, communities. Android is open source, but can you influence its development. Governance models cover everything a source code license doesn't: can I influence the source code, who arbitrates between contributions, can I get nightly builds.
DW: Is Open just marketing? No, we're in the middle of a 2-year project to open the Symbian source - we wouldn't do this for marketing brownie points. There are companies that have done a good job with a tightly controlled stack, but over time we think that open standards win out. Look at Firefox, it's not downloaded because it's open source, but because it's a good product.

...

JL: There's a balance between giving people to ability to change anything they like, and keeping compatibility (particularly across devices).
PP: 50% openness is like being half pregnant

DW: Alongside any drive to openness is a drive to ensure the system isn't corrupted from within.

Q: I own mean. How do I get access to systems which have been closed for a long time?

DW: Symbian will open two new websites for participation from customers: not just developers, but gadget enthusiasts too, requesting features. And we want to lower the barrier for easier programming: Python, Flash.

Q: Isn't an open platform one that doesn't charge $1500 to get source access (Symbian)?

DW: It will be free ASAP, by June next year or maybe sooner. We can't open it up immediately because it currently contains entangled 3rd party software code.

Q: What do you think of operator-owned app stores? Are they not a walled garden?

JL: Many to date have been closed. If you're selling something you need to take responsibility for its quality - even if it's free. So there's a level of closedness you need as a vendor.

CS: There has to be a check in the app store for it to have credibility.

DW: OSS needs some help to avoid the problems Christian has highlighted - avoiding fragmentation.

Q: 10 years later we need to talk about openness and making money. Where have we gone wrong.

CS: We don't charge for products, we do rev share on search partnerships.

Q: How can open be safe?

AC: It's not about safety, it's about blame. Who pays the bill for fixing it? With Java, you ask the user to take on liability for installation by asking them regularly.

CS: Open source is one of the best vehicles for making secure products - it rules out security by obscurity.

Q: Who pays for the cost of policing the apps ecosystem?

JL: Carriers often feel responsible because they own the customer relationship. Anyone who the consumer feels they have a relationship with has to take on some of the responsibility.

PP: Apple have a competitive pricing model, and that includes the cost of their organisation to police it.

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Ted Morgan, Skyhook

"We're the guys who put the dot on the map". Preinstalled on iPhone, iPod Touch. Number of LBS apps growing - now 3000 across devices, tho vast majority on iPhone.

Mainly travel/navigation apps, but social (not including FB, Myspace or Twitter, none of whom natively do LBS), lifestyle, fitness, are next categories.

Average user requests their location 6 times/day (more than typical number of calls/day): totally 200m requests a day via Skyhook (compare to US Google traffic of 5-600m searches/day).

Two examples: Trulia and Taxi Magic.

Trulia: house-finder showing where nearest open houses available for viewing are nearby (instead of showing all sales).

Taxi magic: one button ordering and paying for taxis.

Last Call: track your drinking, know when to call the cab, find the nearest lawyer.

Geocade: location-based leaderboards for multiplayer games - narrowing down leaderboard by people around you. Lovely.

License plate finder, where you get scored on how far away you are from the state in question, cute.

UFO finder: find sightings near you for the last 40 years.

Average price of location apps: Apple $3.60, Android $0.84, Blackberry $13.60, Ovi $3.18, Palm free.

Mobile 2.0 Europe: Context Panel

Moderator: Raimo van der Klein, SPRXMobile

Gregr Skibiski, Sense Networks

Tommy Ahers, Vodafone (ex-Zyb)

Felix Petersen, Nokia Berlin

Ted Morgan, SkyHook

Xavier Carrillo Costa, Digital Legends

XCC: we spend a lot of money simulating the real world. Now we're connecting with the real world, and it's changing the game paradigm.

TM: Have difficulty figuring out some behaviour. We see some locations which have huge numbers of lookups, but can't work out why. One of our heaviest location users on the iPhone is the RIM HQ.

FP: We have a successful mapping product. We realised a couple of years back that we didn't need to license traffic data, we could gather it ourselves from looking at behaviour of users with our product. Google built a product on the back of inferring meaning from links between pages; we can do the same with geographic links.

TA: Heading up location team at Vodafone now. When I promised to change Vodafone from the inside, I didn't realise how big it was :) Enabling location apps through the web framework.

GS: We get lots of data from carriers around location. 4-5% of people will use an app 15 times on the iPhone. So can we use combinations of location and other date to predict which apps people will use? There is a link between historical location usage and app usage - e.g. for directory applications, someone moving around a lot is more likely to use one.

Q: Where do you get the data to predict churn, age, sex?

GS: Direct from carriers. Usage of the data is tightly regulated, but for an internal purpose like churn measurement is allowed. External stuff like marketing has to be opt-in.

Q: The US is not very regulated when it comes to privacy. Can you give us examples of data extracted for LBS in Europe, compliant with DPA and Privacy laws?

A: (TA) Latitude. (FP) At Nokia we opted against doing a friend-finder product. The issue is tracking vs publishing; Latitude seems a little naive.

RVDK: Location updates are social behaviour - when people update their location manually, they're saying something.

FP: Manual location updates are more interesting and more relevant.

Q: How far can prediction go?

GS: We take a group of people, a year of behaviour, crunch the data, then work out if they e.g. like rap music, go out at night, and can see we've accurately predicted what they like.

FP: I have to make an effort to physically go somewhere - so it has a lot of meaning. Dopplr are doing interesting stuff with location and the social graph; I tried it and they predicted places I'd like with surprising accuracy, based on very little data.

TM: Most advertising is based on your home, which is where you spend very little time.

FP: But this doesn't matter. We used to derive intent from demographic data, now we can predict it from real behaviour.

XCC: In the console world we manually mine data.

Q: The location visualisation and predictions are fascinating. Can you say anything about apps that generated swarm behaviour?

GS: Talks about taxi visualisations; these bring a feedback loop which modify behaviour.

TM: We've not seen anyone build swarm behaviour, but don't have access to the data in realtime so it's hard.

Q: Context is more than location, it's about a network too.
FP: We've seen lots of interesting examples... we can derive more than location from the phone. We form social graphs every day by interacting, the explicit "we are friends" of Facebook is very raw. If we could mine your everyday life we could be more subtle.

Mobile 2.0, Carlos Domingo, Director, Internet and Multimedia Lab, Telefonica: Open with care or care to open?

Revenue growth in traditional broadband and mobile is diminishing. New revenue sources are being collaborated over and fought over. Telcos can't capture any of the new growth using traditional methods.

The industry used to be a chess game (controlled and predictable). Now it's poker (living with uncertainty, requiring investment to see what happens next).

To get there we need a number of things:

• Open conversations with customers, "get naked"; be transparent on tariffs, billing, claims; have 2-way communication with customers; speak their language or risk a disconnect with them.
• Establish open innovation networks, work out how to collaborate with small companies, universities and large corps. For Telefonica they invested in Kyte, Loomia, Eventful, FestureTek and Amobee.
• Open innovation doesn't mean killing internal R&D. Get ideas from across the organisation.
• Open networks: become an open service platform to reach a long tail of developers. Telcos own lots of unique/useful assets: service delivery, call control, device access, infrastructure, SMS, QoS, identity, charging, location. Network resources are not the only interesting thing for developers. Knowing a customers social context is useful - imagine an API to tell you programatically if a customer is working or is at home.
• One API; we've loads of standardised APIs: OneAPI, Bondi, W3C, device/OS, network-specific.

But it's not enough to standardise: we need to be making money.

• Nice video interview with Mike Cohn, including some lovely advice on how to start getting your Scrum on. I'd thoroughly concur - try it and do it strictly for a reasonable period of time before you start to adapt it;
• I'm sure I'll have posted this before, but it's worth repeating - Jeff Patton's 12 best practices for UX in an agile environment;
• Google Bets On Big 5 - old news as this dates back to last month, but I'm reviewing it after watching the Google IO Keynote video. Very interesting indeed, but I'd take issue with their presenting this technology as "all there" - a few experiments on Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the mac seem to show that some bits are present and correct on each, others lacking. Still, very exciting stuff whatever...
• Wave. Wow, double-wow for the demo of live translation at the end.
• A study on the effectiveness of using personas in product design. Really nice to have some evidence for this stuff, though the study involved giving participants pre-prepared personas. My take would be that personas are a useful tool when based on research, but as a catalysed form of assumptions about a target audience, they can be dangerous.
• Another study, on how price affects perception.
• Interesting presentation on digital inclusion in the UK, and preconceptions we may have. "It's a case of social equity: 93% of people under 70 who have a degree are online".