The SXSW Interactive Mobile Thriving Guide (iPhone)

The snow today is making me really look forward to SXSW Interactive in Austin. 2010 will be my 3^rd time attending so I wanted to write up all of the mobile services that I will be leaning on to schedule, network and keep my battery going all week…and I do mean *all* week.

Rules

SXSW is a game. It’s about doing everything you want but not wasting your time planning and confirming, getting everything done, meeting up with everyone you wanted to see. Potentially you won’t remember any of it, but you’ll have lots of new connections and warm feelings for people who are showing up in your stream all year as a result.

Austin is your playground. It’s where all the new mobile services that help us accomplish our SXSW plans.

There are 3 areas which you must master if you are to fully free yourself of your laptop @ SXSWi:

Advance Scheduling: It is imperative to look at the schedules and try to comprehend everything that is going on so you don’t feel the dread of missing out on anything. This plan will fail miserably, but these tools will make the experience better for you and better for those who follow your example.

1) Tungle Tungle lets you schedule with people without a lot of back and forth. It looks at your outlook or ical powered calendar and lets you paint your availability, or even shake to schedule from it’s iPhone app. This is for real meetings with people that you cannot miss.

Here is the tungle demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQ9O4Rycc

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Some], Requires Download [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Fast]

2) Plancast http://plancast.com/toms I’ve been told I use this too much already, but I’ve been very excited about it’s potential for spreading the word about your particular panel or workshop at SXSW. They've created a SXSW splash page with a suggested follower list and useful SXSW channel profiles to follow like "Badgeless SXSW" which tells you all the events you can attend without a SXSW Badge. BTW @Leahculver please skip the Owen Van Natta party and finish up the iPhone app b4 SXSWi, drinks on me, kthxbai.

SXSW calendar [Yes, via profiles], Social Features [Yes], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Slow]

3) My.SXSW iPhone Application This official app loads all of the event schedules at once (which takes a good amt of time the 1^st time) and is integrated with the my.sxsw.com schedules and your official SXSW profile, which on the iPhone app is easier to set up than on the desktop. You can upload your photo and add social networks. However, this app is not connected for sharing panel links on social networks or even via email.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Fast]

4) Sched.org http://sxsw2010.sched.org This was the best mobile web calendar last year with full description of panels and great use of JavaScript overlays to minimize page loads, still a bit heavy for AT&T

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Medium]

5) Sitby.us http://sitby.us This may replace Sched.org for me this year. A quick loading mobile website with really easy navigation for the full SXSWi calendar and ability to check-in and share on twitter WHERE YOU ARE SITTING in a particular panel! How’s that for real-time? Really well done.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes], Requires Download [No]

Contingency Planning: Planning The panels, movies, drinkups and music in Austin start out like spores and grow based on community distribution of event details and checkins from attendees. The battlefield of SXSW will look nothing like your pretty calendar. So SXSW has already tested Twitter and Foursquare in this capacity, but there is a new entrant to the fray and it is specifically designed to facilitate conversation at an event without junking up the feeds of people who are not attending, and it’s called HotPotato. All panels at SXSWi 2010 should start by pointing their audiences to the associated HotPotato event.

1) Twitter and Twitter Connect Sites/Apps Status updates and hashtags still rule the day, it will be interesting to see if that changes in 2010. Tweetie 2 is my choice of app, and its seamless ability to manage more than one account is quite helpful when on the go. Sitby.us like many other apps lets you Tweet

Reach [High], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Hashtags], Noise [High]

2) Facebook and Facebook Connect Sites/Apps Facebook events are underlying a lot of the Plancast links and is currently the glue behind HotPotato

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [Low], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Full Service], Noise [High]

3) Foursquare Foursquare has picked up where Twitter left off, as now people find out which party to go to based on the stream of Foursquare check-ins. Badges specifically designed for SXSW were a hit last year, e.g. the Porky badge for checking in at Stubbs. Too crazy for you?... Check-in off the grid like tiger w. be

Reach [Low], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [People Tab], Noise [Medium]

4) HotPotato HotPotato lets you attend, watch or follow events based on your proximity and makes the chatter in each event relevant by 1) defining the event 2) offering more than just commenting e.g. posting photos and links for making references and analogies to the event 3) giving you a view to whom within your network (currently powered by Facebook Connect) is commenting on what events 4) tuning your feed based on location

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [Full Service], Noise [Low]

Battery Life!

What I will bring to stay connected 24/7 from Thurs-Wed.

1) Just Mobile | Gum Pro: this little power grenade from Just Mobile is supposed to carry 2-5x iPhone charges and power up fast, 90% in an hour, and it uses both a 5-pin camera cord power up and and the iPhone cord to charge the iPhone, with a switch to turn off the juice if it is not being used.

How people will make fun of you: “Why do you have an iPhone cord coming out of your pocket? Are you plugged in right now?”

2) Griffin Tune Juice: the un-green little AAA battery pack that takes 4 batteries and charges without requiring a wall socket. Which means you don’t have to stand under the stage at Stubbs or hit on hostesses to have them charge your phone if you forgot to charge your extra battery pack.

How people will make fun of you: “batteries? srsly?”

3) Kensington Mini: This bottom feeder is good for a small charge at the end of the day, light, small, no extra cords while carrying. Charges with a 5-pin camera cord into USB. The fact that it plugs into the bottom could be a problem if you put it in your front pocket and sit down. L

How people will make fun of you: “gee you have a really long phone.”

4) The Mophie Pack: Mophie gets a colbertian wag of the finger. Once my battery pack of choice, until the weird jack that plugs in a weird non 5-pin cord broken into the device and has rendered the Mophie pack useless.

How people will make fun of you: “is that really an iPhone, it looks so big and bulky.”

It will be a showdown for sure, but at least I’ll be prepared.

What I’ll be doing:

http://plancast.com/a/if1 Moderating UX of Mobile Panel, Friday March 12^th @ 11am with Kyle Outlaw (Razorfish), Scott Jenson (Google) and Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design)

http://plancast.com/a/11r0 Organizing HTML5 vs. Flash Discussion, Monday March 15^th @ 11:00am with Richard Ting (R/GA)

http://plancast.com/a/if3 Organizing the Mobile Advertising Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 3:30pm with Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Justin Siegel (MocoSpace)

http://plancast.com/a/if4 Organizing the Mobile Social Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 2:00pm with Michael Sharon (Facebook) and Justin Shaffer (HotPotato)

http://plancast.com/a/if5 Organizing the Mobile Commerce Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 5:00pm with Francesco Rovetta (PayPal)

Is anyone writing up a guide for Android?

Ping me @ SXSWi on your service of choice.

foursquare

tungle

plancast

twitter

The iPad and the Blue Lego

You've read a lot this week about the iPad, but I wanted to share what I've seen on twitter as a mounting protest in the past couple of hours.

It begins with the Blue Lego. For anyone that has used an iPhone to surf the web in mobile safari, it is likely that they've come across the Blue Lego of Flash-less-ness. When you go to the NyTimes' regular website on an iPhone you will see a webkit standard 32x32 pixel blue lego in the middle of the Video section.

John Biggs says that the iPad might run flash because the Apple iPad demo video had a NYT restaurant section show up instead of the Blue Lego, but demos can be deceiving. Update: Wired says the screenshots were fake.

Joe Hewitt pointed out that Adobe looked pretty defensive with this recent blog post, because they predicted that the Blue Lego will be everywhere when the iPad launches. Lee Brimelow photoshopped the Blue Lego (aka the NullPlugin...thanks Chris Messina) onto many of the sites and web games that we hold dear, assuming that the Blue Lego will be used to comfort iPad users in the same way it has served iPhone users. What will be the response? Will Steve Jobs lobby the webkit standards bureau to make the icon a 64x64 pixel square?

Already, Keith Peters has started joking around and has replaced his Twitter avatar with the Blue Lego, and flash developers are starting to rally. And, update: Kendall Helmstetter posted a response on Flickr, and Ryan Cooley posted to Twitpic to fan the blue flame war with 15,700+ views.

So, for me this started last night just before I left the office. I asked my Twitter following if they knew how to find a high resolution version of the ubiquitous, yet tiny 32x32 pixel Blue Lego Icon. I have to send a big thanks to Yiying Lu who I worked with to make the Failwhale big back in 2008. She sent me her enlarged Blue Lego design before I could even ask her!

And here it is, your SXSW 2010 t-shirt, the Blue Lego!

Banned by Lego on Zazzle :(

http://thebluelego.spreadshirt.com/


Also, a big thanks to Lee Brimelow the platform evangelist and blogger from Adobe whom I metioned earlier - he has already retweeted the zazzle link!

Update: There's now a Chrome extension that shows you the web on the flashless iPad! https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ilejdkfldemlafkeebadjppfhdiimbfd?hl=en-US

Google China: no servers, big mobile aspirations

I learned three very important things from my trip to China last May when I accompanied Sarah Lacy and met with startups and VC and lots of old friends in Beijing. Her post earlier this evening that second guessed the motives for Google's proposed exit, and whether or not human rights concerns played a significant role made me rethink what was going on, particularly in the mobile industry in China.

1) Google does not host personal data on servers in China. UPDATE: I initially thought Google had no servers in China, learning from Yahoo, who was first in China subject to Chinese jurisdiction and forced to hand over information from dissidents. But I've learned from a more credible source on China, Jeremy Goldkorn from his Guardian Post that Google apps like Gmail are specifically the ones not hosted in China because they carry personal data which if they were on Chinese equipment would be subject to confiscation at the whim of the Chinese government.

2) Google's strategy for music streaming partnerships in China pre-dates the recent launch in the US. In October '09, US Google users gained access to streaming Lala and MySpace tracks in popups from song title searches. After meeting with Gary Chen of Top100.cn (part of Orca Digital) I saw that Google's attempt to not be evil and continue to compete pushed them to use 3rd party hosters who had Chinese servers and therefore the Chinese 'rights' to serve up questionable content like free music. This strange relationship was the precursor to the US, cloud-based, music partnership strategy, because in China, Google needed mp3 search to effectively compete with Baidu. The reason the fight between Google and Baidu over mp3's was so much bigger than Google and Apple's (and Apple's purchase of Lala) in the US over cloud-based music access is that all of the tracks accessed on Baidu or google.cn in China are free to download, so this was one of the main battlefields for China's biggest search engine - not for biggest music licensing market share.

3) Google spent something like 2-3 years negotiating to become China Mobile's default search engine on mobile phones. I thought initially that Google could have opened up g.cn for mobile phones to include mp3 search, and thereby create a huge advantage over Baidu. I thought Google Listen + Android would let users download free songs like they do on the desktop. However, Google was interested in keeping the China Mobile search deal, and they now had a way to keep China Mobile happy, by giving them a free, customizable mobile operating system in Android that would let China mobile charge for mobile music downloads (see my coverage in Business Insider here).

I have no idea how the mobile landscape will change without Google in China. Android is at the precipice of taking off in China, but is there a way for those devices to still win market share without Google apps? Will Baidu get Google's China mobile search deal by default?

Also, and more importantly, is Google giving up the good fight? Will human rights be best served if mobile devices, already a great liberator of tyranny in Africa and the best hope for clearing up the opacity of governance in Iran, lose their default search and software provider, Google in China?

Twitter and Mobile Web

Twitter just released a preview to it's own, improved mobile website and I couldn't be happier. At a time when it seems like mobile web is the like the whale that everyone's forgotten @leland 's preview site is a happy reminder that while apps are cool, web is core.

Mobile web grows quickly and steadily every day but for a while there it seemed like Google was the only company that cared.

Up to now my two favorite mobile websites that leveraged the Twitter API have been:
1) dabr.co.uk dead simple interface that has support for lists but not optimized for touch screens
2) hahlo.com which was on fire, snuffed out on mobile web and then flew out of the ashes via the app store

When Twitter cuts over permanently from the beta URL http://mobile.twitter.com and redirects all mobile traffic to the new preview style, I'd assume we'll see support for lists. But for all the Lisztomania, what I'm even more excited about is seeing a mobile website that supports Geolocation (adhem..Ryan, meet Leland, Leland meet Ryan).

O Safari, I have a question. Even though you've just woken up, I know you can recognize location, and I'm not talking about Google Latitude's persistent Location, rather I'm talking about the more useful points in time (which is what Foursquare and Dodgeball have taught us) where comments, pictures, videos and hashtags are being posted for the spiders to crawl all over. Is there a specific value for having a mobile web interface that lets people tag the location of what's happening? Well Safari hasn't made a sound yet, so I'll keep thinking it over.

And did I mention Leland's attention to detail is impressive?























Now that's how to run a beta :)

Here's Leland's blog post on Twitter:
http://bit.ly/62ULEQ

I saw it, Up in the Air #uita

I hate movie reviews. I'm going to see the movie anyway and all the review will do is possibly delay my chance to see it or spoil some of the good parts. What I love most about movies is the conversation around them, and last weekend instead of just chatting about movies around a table, I boarded the conversation, Up in the Air.

It started on November 10th when Stephanie from American Airlines said I needed to follow her so she could send me an exclusive invitation. After having Direct Message spam issues weeks earlier I was leery, but I went ahead and followed her twitter profile and later received an email that said Paramount and American wanted to fly me to LA so I could watch a sneak preview of Up in the Air.

At a time when we are aching to tell people on the ground that we are connected while flying, 'The story of a man ready to make a connection' makes a lot of sense. For a man that gets miles for firing people, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) the philosophy is 'The miles are the goal'. While we struggle to put a value on the points we get for checking in, whether we are looking at corporate miles, or weekly foursquare points, or activity in our facebook and twitter streams, it's something that we all have to face as points become a currency to replace human connection, and the more connected you are, the less likely you are to require a human connection.

Our evening up in the air on November 14th however was a time to make human connections. This was an entirely new experience for all of us, and since the plane was only to take 60 people, it was one of those times when it made sense to talk to everyone, roam the aisles and butt-in where the single-serving friends of Fight Club fame would not dream of intruding.

The night before our flight I checked into the 59th street apple store and bought a Kensington auto/air inverter so I would be able to plug in my laptop and iPhone on the plane. Having extra power on a blogger junket that was like being able to pass out bottles of suds in shawshank prison, because I immediately made friends with Just Jared, The Product Guy, and Samantha Ewers from I'm not Obsessed. They have all done great reviews of Paramount and AA's service, the food, the free WiFi from Aircell and even photo-blogged the whole experience from JFK to LAX. Also, Sherri Smith who sat behind me will soon do a proper review of the Bose Noise Canceling QC15's that were supplied to us by Coca-Cola. I've been wearing them around the city all week and feel like I haven't landed yet.

I chose to wear my gnome tee shirt on the flight, which was fortuitous, because Jason Reitman's Up in the Air creates an homage to Amelie's faux-photo gnome-napping meme. Up in the Air added a crowd-sourcing element to it where the cutout of Danny McBride (who you know as kenny powers) and Melanie Lynskey's is scaled across a massive network of nearly notable spots across the US.

I was inspired tonight to post just such a faux-photo where I've added Jody and me in front of the Up in the Air billboard in Times Square.

To make sure we were all seated for landing, they had to cut the blogger interviews down to a minute, so here is my best impression of "Between Two Ferns" with Anna Kendrick, star of Twighlight and now Up in the Air. I'm now a fan of hers because she confessed a love for Karaoke, and in fact fought for her favorite karaoke song, Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper.




and now with English, Dutch and Chinese Subtitles!



The conversations with the movie crew and the AA crew were great, I learned all about the culture of miles, the perks and we discussed the card with Ryan Bingham's #7 that he's awarded in the movie for elite mileage status. I thought that the coolest way to commemorate the movie would be to pass out Ryan Bingham #7 cards that were MiFi enabled. I checked on Linkedin to see if there was anyone offering white label MiFi cards that could be personalized, but seems from the answers like that's a bit too early of a technology to turn into tchotchkes :)

After the movie Sad Brad Smith who performed some of the songs on the soundtrack sung for us. Once that was over we continued to chat in the aisles and I wasn't paying attention and was still standing while we landed, a first for me. It was kind of like surfing. As we headed for the Hilton LAX our gracious AA hosts indulged us as we took photos of everything we saw and did, and I couldn't resist staging this one with the AA cutout and Chris Vary. A big thanks to Chris, as he is the one who helped me get the above interview with Anna from Betamax format to something youtube-able!

Up in the Air debuts December 4th in select cities - go see it and check out the chatter on Jason Reitman's site, Up in the Air Tweets. Or if you're really cool, check in on opening night in HotPotato.

Leland's Huge Talk about Android, Twitter and Mobile User Experience

I just saw a great presentation by @Leland at Huge tonight in a UPA series event called "Put your iPhone down! A Discussion About the State of Mobile Services."

This was the first talk I've been to that looks beyond the iPhone in terms of user experience, and there were some key points that will become clearer as we approach 2010 and since there will be a lot of new android devices in market on sprint, t-mobile and verizon.

Leland Rechis was impressive for two reasons:
1) He worked with Twitter in Japan, which is where they've done intensive mobile testing, and twitter is a platform agnostic service, which treats SMS, Mobile Web and Native Apps all as viable channels for interaction on mobile
2) He worked at Google on the development of the Android platform, which is the most open platform for OS development

Leland explained that Apple has created an architecture that deals very well on AT&T's network, because iPhone economizes energy and data usage by putting activities into app silos. However, Apple pre-sets the activities you can initiate for their apps. The best mobile experience would enable you to take a photo and pull up whichever service has the capability to post. Android can generically say 'share' and pull up any application on the phone that has sharing capabilities (email, MMS, twitter app, facebook, tumblr etc.).

iPhone instead picks static features that you might want to use, e.g. for photos you get 1) email, 2) assign to a contact, 3) use as wallpaper. Android does not pre-bake these features, it offers 'intents' which means anywhere within any application on Android it is possible to call up an activity, rather than fully load up another app. That really makes the picture of the three suggested options of what to do with a photo on iPhone look pretty silly.

I think it's possible that the next wave of mobile behavior will be that the most popular apps from iPhones will make their way to Android, but then those popular apps will be addressable in standard apps like the camera, video player, email, and the mobile browser.

I also think that the framework for Android that Leland explained makes content potentially more viral than it has been on the iPhone 1,2, and 3.0 OS because getting to your preferred apps faster means more sharing of photos, videos and links.

I asked Leland what's next for HTML 5 after Geo-Location, and he said it's 'app store' and clarified, 'not THE app store, but application data storage' for the mobile browser, which is why Apple and Google who initially worked together in their contribution to the webkit standard mobile browser are now competing to create the fastest and best JavaScript engines.

What's Leland's favorite Android app? He seemed pretty fond of Twidget Lite which from a design standpoint is breakthrough, it offers today what the Motorola Cliq seems to be promising, which is an interface where the widget provides information but does not take up the whole screen.

Over the Air Updates...kind of a big deal

I'm posting an update to my Business Insider piece in July which outlined how subsidies could set China's mobile market on fire, with the launch of Android oPhones on China Mobile.

There are not many weaknesses to combat iPhone world domination. The longer iPhones are on the market and people get used to touch screens, we are left with three glaring issues.

1. Great, cloud-based music players
2. Great, cloud-based push-email providers
3. FOTA or Firmware Over the Air Updates
   

I had forgotten about #3. Since I've had iPhones for my last 3 phones, I had forgotten that over the air updates were even possible, since Apple does not support them. Although my music purchasing has migrated exclusively to mobile, I've resigned myself to side-loading software updates, via iTunes.

However, I read two corporate posts from Red Bend today, the first of which states that their FOTA software will be shipping with Android phones because of their partnership with Borqs in China so that software upgrades from China Mobile will come over the air. The second post gave background on mobile software updates in general and how Apple has made software upgrades a strategic advantage, at least over RIM and Windows mobile in the US.

Apple however has not made any statements about over the air upgrades. Consider that right now effectively no one uses iTunes in China, and grey iPhones do not even have iTunes or the App store. If Androids enter the market with over the air software updates and iPhones launch with their usual sideloading updates iPhones may not look so cool by comparison. If the user does not have a laptop, they may be in trouble, as their company may not allow an 80mb iTunes download during work hours or at all on a work computer, and maybe mom and dad's computer isn't where you want to back up all of your pics and other mobile media.

Over the Air updates... that's kind of a big deal. The link directly to the left there is for Anyclip beta users only...email me for an invite, as I have 1! Youtube clip below for everyone else :)



Note: I didn't mention multi-tasking as a weakness. I only see that as a short term weakness for Apple. You can quasi-multitask while you iPod is on, I think it's just a matter of time before apple enables that OS enhancement both for it's own and 3rd party apps.