Android for the people

Originally uploaded by ante10pe

There’s nothing like the mall at Christmastime. Especially when that mall is on LONG ISLAND.

Saw this huuuuge advert hanging from the ceiling of Roosevelt Field shopping mall. There’s the little Android dude in the lower left hand banner of the banner. Is there a comparable iPhone app?

Interesting for a couple of reasons:
*Suite of services (money mgmt, advertising, location) bundled into one application.
* Brought to you by a financial services company, which, assuming you have a visa card, actually has a pretty good understanding of your spending habits (can i buy you a gigante starbucks, big brother?)
* Huge ad! Do people (normal people) see this and say “Sweet app! I definitely need to download this for my device which runs the Android operating system.” ?

Advertising of mobile phone apps is a pretty non-existent thing. Of course Visa’s got the bucks to do it. I suppose I’ve seen BofA advertise their iPhone app as well. But will other companies (not finance-related) start? Interesingly, one of Apple’s latest ad campaigns showcases off individual iPhone appsm concluding with the tag line “That’s iPhone. Solving life’s problems one app at a time.” Different approach. Will Google start mass-marketing individual Android apps?

And who’s really the audience for this? My guess is, if Android goes the way Google wants it to, most people who own a phone running Android wonlt even know or care that their phone runs that operating system. Just as now, no one can tell you that their RAZR runs linux or whatever.

G1 is an exception to this, a novelty. People don’t own an HTC device, they own a T-Mobile phone that has the new Google OS on it. iPhone is different too, because the hardware is tied so tightly to the software. Anyone with an iPhone knows that it can download apps.

Surely there was a time when people were jazzed at the prospect of a phone that ran Windows, and for which applications could be downloaded OTA and installed. Android is indeed infinitely more powerful than WinMo, and mass adoption will only make it stronger and more robust. Something about WinMo never generated the third-party development buzz that iPhone, and now Android, has.

But I think that there will always be something about the notion of downloading an application to one’s phone, that will limit its appeal to a certai demographic. And as the mass adoption of a platform increases, the total overall percentage of this adopter population decreases. As the leading edge of adopters get their information elsewhere – blogs, social networking, etc. – the efficacy of advertisements such as this one becomes highly limited. Especially when they are hung in places such as shopping malls. On Long Island

That being said, it would be neato to include a 2D barcode on there so I could download directly from my device. Easy way to track impressions, effectiveness etc.

I think it’s easiest to think of it as glue between a voice call and a server-side application. So I call up an assigned, and my called is ‘handled’ by a script written in TwiML (Twilio’s custom markup) language which can gather information from me, in the form of keypad inputs, and then send this information (via POST) to an application running somewhere on the web.

TwiML defines several tags that your application can use:

<Say> <Play> <Gather> <Record> <Dial>

which can perform actions such as rendering text as voice, playing an mp3, gathering keypad input, recording the user’s voice, or ‘redirecting’ to another number.

At it’s core, this seems like a brilliantly simple, elegant system.  I also think that the potential here is huge, especially for markets in which data access on device is not ubiquitous. Given the single mode of communication (i.e. voice), there’s certainly not the same level of sexiness associated with iPhone or Android applications which can have lush visual representations, engaging interactions etc., but I still think that there is tons of potential here from a utilitarian perspective. Also, I can see some interesting things coming out in the Assistive Technology domain.

But that’s just my small mind trying to make sense of this all . The most exciting thing about innovative platforms is that there’s no way to predict what people will do with it, or how it will be adapted, appropriated, tweaked and twisted to do things never thought possible. I’m really excited about this new realm of ‘voice applications’ and will definitely keep an eye on how things progress …

Even though it’s been out for more than a year now, I’ve resisted the urge to buy an iPhone (this hasn’t been easy), but I recently had the opportunity to borrow one from work for a couple of weeks to get a better, longitudinal feel for how it works as an everyday phone (as opposed to a fancy iPod, or standalone app-player).

Getting things set up, one of the first applications I downloaded was called Ocarina. For those of you who aren’t up to speed on ancient wind instruments and who never played The Legend of Zelda as a child, an ocarina is basically a flute:  you blow into it and cover/uncover holes to make sounds.

I downloaded this app because:

1. I heard someone talk about it previously, and it sounded kind of cool, and
2. It was the first application staring me in the face when I opened up the app store on the iPhone, and
3. It was only $0.99. Are you freakin’ kidding me? That’s like five Munchkins. Or a quarter-latte. I can go day without.  

I’ve played with the app probably for a total of half-and-hour and have found it fun, engaging, easy-to-use. The map view is especially compelling to me.

This post isn’t actually so much a review of the application itself, how it works, how it looks, it’s features. There are plenty of good reviews of that nature already out there on the web. And this isn’t really a commentary on how popular it’s become or why, shooting to the #1 selling app after only being in the store for a week. There’s a great analysis over at TechCrunch for why this is so.

Instead of delving into that level of detail, I just wanted to take a step back and convey a vague, intangible sense of holy shit the future is here and it is fucking incredible.

A couple of years ago, this would have been a pretty impressive conceptual art / new media project for some university student.

A decade ago, probably the realm of technology research labs. Do-able, certainly, but requiring specialized equipment and not at all scaleable. And not on a mobile device.

A century ago, this would have been lumped into notions of a shiny, metallic future along with flying cars and personal robot servants.

Further back than that …. wizardry?

Even with the magic of the internet that we have come to take as a commodity: the ability to shift time and place, to talk with anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, or to call up any minutiae of information in a fraction of a second …. this teeny little bundle of Cocoa code still evokes in me an immediate and visceral sense of wonder and amazement.

Fry plays the Holophoner in Futurama

I’ve had the chance to spend some time fiddling with the new Kinoma Play Mobile Media Browser, and I’m pretty blown away. This product delivers on the promise of being a mobile media powerhouse to the maximum extent that any device with a 2.5″ screen clunking along on a 2.5G network can deliver a “powerful” multimedia experience. Sorry iPhone users – Kinoma only works on Windows Mobile 5+ (Oh come on …. stop whining …. like you don’t have enough to be psyched about. Can’t I have just this one thing to feel special about? Just this one?). It’s not free, but at $30, it’s well worth the investment.

Overview

Basically,  Kinoma Play is an aggregator for all the multimedia content you care about, including content you’ve captured with the device, your content you’ve uploaded to web-based services, content that’s stored on your PC, and the whole universe of other content out there in the form of YouTube videos, podcast directories, and streaming internet radio. The breadth and depth of content accessible from this one application is really impressive.

And it manages to deliver this huge amount of content in an intuitive fashion, making it easy to navigate through, and providing search across an individual service (i.e. Flickr) or an aggregated view mixed-type content from different sources (via the Kinoma Guide). The information architecture of the app is very clean, elegant, and easily understandable, as it’s visible from the first screen you see when you start up:

 
The Kinoma Play home screen

So you’ve got your own media files (My Media Files), a curated list of podcasts, radio stations, books, etc. organized by genre (Kinoma Guide) , the ability to search any individual service or the guide (Search), a list of services each with their own landing page and special features (Services), and (not shown) access to a history of items you’ve viewed (History) and things you’ve earmarked as a favorite (Favorites).

Kinoma Guide 

The Kinoma Guide, as far as I can tell, is an aggregated portal which provides access publicly available podcast directories scattered across the web. In addition to bringing it all to one place, Kinoma does a good job of organizing these podcasts by theme, which makes it much easier to browse and discover new feeds you didn’t know about:

Kinoma Guide organized by theme

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts from throughout the guide. Sometimes the streaming can be a bit choppy, but if you catch it in a good mood, it’s very smooth.

Local Media Files

How does Kinoma handle my local media files?:

My Media Files 

The first time you start the Kinoma, it scans the device for movies and pictures and indexes these for search. Why is this useful? Because the Kinoma media player is better than the native one on WinMo. It’s got a really nice pan and zoom interface that indicates what part of the photo you’re zoomed in on:

Zoomed in photo with overview showing focused area

Uploading Content

Also, Kinoma enables seamless upload via services you’ve registered  with the device and via email accounts you’ve registered with Windows Mobile’s mail application:

Kinoma lets you send content to a specific service, or via an email account registered with Windows

Kinoma Flickr upload interface provides an throughtfully trimmed down set of options

Kinoma has it’s own mail UI, and doesn’t even punt you to you to the system’s mail UI. Talk about full vertical integration!

Service Integration

Kinoma supports lots of different services, making for a really rich ecosystem of  content comprised of user-generated content, literature, recorded lectures, public radio,  commercial radio … you name it, they’ve got it. Included in the services screen is Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb, Shoutcast, and YouTube.

A list of services accessible from Kinoma

Note that you can actually search a superset of services which are listed in the “Services” screen shown above:

Search different services

Pop-up search box is used consistently throughout the UI

 
 Example: Flickr Support

For example, Google Images appears as a search-able option, but doesn’t appear in the “Services” tab. I think this means that it’s ‘read-only’; you can’t register your Picasa account with Kinoma the same way you can register your Flickr account and upload to Flickr directly from within Kinoma. So let’s see what accessing Flickr is like from the Kinoma client. Here’s what happens after I’ve registered my Flickr account with Kinoma (b.t.w. it automatically issues a request to Flickr and pops up the mobile browser for you to authenticate – convenient!):

Flickr control panel

It’s possible to search right from a pop-up box, or I can access my account on Flickr: photos I’ve uploaded, groups I belong to, photos I’ve favorited, etc.They’ve done a good job of paring down all the possible use cases to the ones that would be most important.

I can access all the public feeds available on the Flickr site (and accessible through their API):

Leveraging Flickr’s public API

Here, I’ve dug through “My Photos” to get to my photo sets, which Kinoma dynamically queries Flickr for and pulls them down, displaying them in a format optimized for my device:

My Flickr sets

And now, in slideshow mode, looking at multiple photos in a set:

Browsing through photos in full-screen mode

The cool thing that comes out of Kinoma knowing all about Flickr and what it’s capabilities are, is that I can edit my photos’ metadata on Flickr right from within the Kinoma app without having to visit the Flickr web page. These are accessible from a content menu (right soft key):

Context menu lets you perform Flickr-specific operations

Responsiveness and Feedback

Now, in the course of drilling down from Flickr -> My Photos -> My Sets -> <Some Set> -> <Some Photo in Set>, there is a lot of network activity going on. Although Kinoma does a good job of caching content (I’ve noticed some performance increase the second time i perform an operation), to provide the best possible experience, it is dynamically pinging Flickr’s API to get the most up-to-date info. This is not as seamless as I’d like it to be (can the internet ever be fast enough?!? ), as my device is running over T-Mobile’s data network … yet  don’t get nearly as frustrated as I would get, if Kinoma didn’t do an incredible job of providing feedback to the user as to what is currently going on.

From an interaction design perspective, I find it phenomenal that they’ve (i.e. the Kinoma developers / designers) given as much attention as they have to providing user feedback for each and every operation that the user requests. The use a semi-transparent status box at the bottom of the screen to relay information to the user, and a series of  informative status messages (”Buffering 70.2K”, “Loading”) make sure that the user is not left scratching their head in confusion or worse, banging their phone in frustration:

Fetching the full resolution photo  

Connecting to Google Photos to find an additional page of friggin’ adorable puppies

I don’t even know what this one means, but it makes me feel good that Kinoma is doing it for me!

 
 

Placeholder indicates there is one more puppy invited to this party

Navigation and Context Menus

I want to spend a bit of time talking about  navigation through the Kinoma app, and the contextual menu system. As you can see in the screenshot above, the left soft key (LSK) is mapped to back. It always goes to the back screen. One thing Kinoma does nicely is to provide smooth transitions between screens, so that you don’t blink, then all of a sudden forget where you are. This is a very subtle effect, but well executed, aesthetically pleasing, and useful: 

One screen slides out, the next screen slides in. Fancy stuff.

The RSK brings up the options menu. As options menus tend to work, the options displayed are contextually relevant. One thing Kinoma does nicely that most mobile OSs don’t do, is that the options are grouped not with horizontal dividers, but actually physically seperated into tabs, based on scope and function:

    

Context menu tabbed interface

While my mental model of how the options menus are organized isn’t fully baked, here’s my working assumptions. Actions in the first tab (Media) are media agnostic; they can be performed on media no matter where it’s from and what it is. Stuff in the second tab (Settings) has to do with overall settings of the Kinoma app. Stuff in the third tab here (Flickr) is specific to whatever service the content is hosted on (see Flickr menu above which shows Commenting and Add Tags). Stuff in the fourth tab has to do specifically with the media type and how it can be used locally on the device (”Set as Background”, “Set Contact Picture”). In addition to this thoughtful organization scheme, the context menus have a nice animation; they seem to spring out of the RSK and also do a 3D-rotatey-thing when you swap between tabs. I appreciate this kind of gratuitous fun (I’m easily amused)!

Conclusion

I’ve only been using Kinoma for a short amount of time, and haven’t had very many problems so far. Sometimes the network is slow, and podcasts fail all together or come in choppy, but this is probably T-Mobile’s fault and not Kinoma’s. One problem I do consistently run into though, is that when the network fails once (i.e. when I’m in an elevator), the Kinoma app won’t be able to get a handle on the network, even if the phone does have reception, and I continually get a “No Network Interface” error until I restart the app. The ironic thing here is that when you receive this error, the RSK is mapped to what looks like an ‘envelope’ icon. Pressing this will automatically format an error report of what went wrong and send it presumably back to Kinoma. Great idea, but doesn’t work so well when the error you’ve received is “No Network Interface.” A+ for effort though – great idea, and I’m sure that over time this will result in a higher rate of bug squashing.

Something else I’m concerned about is the battery life. It seems to degrade more rapidly than normal when Kinoma app is running (taking up 7 or so MB or RAM!), even if it’s not actually playing anything. To compound this, I don’t see a way to exit from within the application; instead I need to go to Task Manager and “End Task” from there. That seems rather klugey, especially if battery life is an issue, as it always is on a mobile device. 

All said, this is a great product, well-worth the cost, and I look forward to filling all those ten-minute spans of downtime in my days with TED Talks, This American Life, and whatever meme happens to be bouncing around YouTube at the time.  

There’s tons of exciting work being done using mobiles to tackle health-related problems in thedeveloping world (Technology, Health and Development is a great resource for news on this), but there are plenty of people right here in the ‘developed’ USA who could benefit from a mobile device and companion service that provided real-time monitoring and instant access to information or health-care providers. There is certainly a market for such offerings, and given the collective health of our population, unfortunately, it’s not only the aging baby boomers who stand to benefit. For example, the GlucoPhone (shown here), developed by HealthPia America at least a year ago, incorporates a blood glucose meter on top of an LG 5200 chassis, and provides the ability to transmit information in real time to an online database or via SMS to a recipient of the user’s choice. I’m not sure if/when it actually shipped, as I’ve never seen one in the wild.

An MVNO implies some kind of ecosystem which includes custom hardware, software, and a service component, all working together to provide an optimized experience to the user, be it in  social networking,  music, or health. Given the high mortality rate for MVNO’s, I hope this can manage to work out a successful business model. It will be interesting to seehow they marry hardware + software + service to deliver what cannot be delivered solely by a third party iPhone app (i.e.software only), a glucometer (i.e. hardware only) or a direct line to your physicial (i.e. service only). I’m especially excited to see the potential for gaming here (a la GlucoBoy), with ubiquitous access to one’s health information via a mobile device creating heretofore unexplored, casual (and fun!) touchpoints with one’s health. 

Another thing that’s somewhat disconcerting in all this is the implications for personal privacy and the extent to which I may lose control over my health-related data. If my device is connected all the time, and it knows about where I am, what my blood pressure or heart rate is, or what my blood sugar levels are, I want to be unequivocally sure that this data isn’t silently being uploaded to some server somewhere, where it can come back to haunt me when it comes time to file a claim with my insurance company!  Are there going to be any dodgy clauses lurking in some dark corner of my LifeComm EULA that compromises my exclusive ownership of my health data? 

(”Well, in retrospect, Mr. Greenblatt, it looks like you should have opted for the small order of french fries at Epic Burger last week. Given your existing condition and your recent behavior, insurance won’t cover this bypass surgery. So how would you like to pay? Cash, credit or should I just add this on to your next LifeComm bill?“)

While he was, of course, referring to having green skin, the same adage holds true today, though the meaning of green has changed since then. If the zeitgeist of our time is not “being green,” then I don’t know what it is. More than ever, individuals seem to be trying to take environmental factors into account when fulfilling their wants and needs, and corporations are painting themselves as being eco-friendly to exploit this sentiment.  But buyer beware: while many companies are indeed making strides in earnest to lessen their impact on the environment, others resort to greenwashing in order to trick consumers into buying their products or services on account of environmental friendliness. Many great sites exist to help consumers evaluate the validity such claims, but as we all know too well, the mobile web isn’t always there when we need it – e.g. when I’m at the grocery store – and it is at these points of decision that such information is most valuable.

A notable example (and I’m sure there are others) of  technology usage for aiding consumers in acquiring information at critical decision points is Stonyfield Farm’s collaboration with ClimateCounts.org, which provides information via SMS about companies’ practices w.r.t. climate change. Neat idea, though their directory seems to be pretty sparse. Try it!! Text “cc” and the name of a company to shortcode 30644.

Update 8/12: The company whose sms platform technology enables the ClimateCounts service, Mobile Commons, is also used by other environmental-minded organizations, such as FishPhone (SMS ‘FISH’ followed the name of a fish to 30644 to get instant information about the sustainability index of that fish) and Bon Apétit (SMS ‘LCD’ and the name of a food to 69866 to receive a carbon emissions score for that growing/transporting that food). Innovative use of SMS, and very cool, useful services for getting this kind of information in a mobile context. I’d love to see more of these. 

I know that there is a growing body of academic work devoted to leveraging technology in unique ways to support health-related decisions. Part of my Masters thesis work was about helping individuals afflicted with Diabetes make better decisions about their daily activities, by actually capturing photos or recordings of questions at the point-of-decision (e.g. “is it bad to eat this granola bar with my blood sugar so high?”), and then communicating this to their nutritionist. 

I think that the always-on ubiquity of mobile phones provides a perfect opportunity to apply this same kind of model to decisions about environmental health. I often find myself in the grocery store wondering what the heck are the shades of difference between “free range,” “access to pasture,” and “organic.” And I think that many people would do good by the environment if they were empowered with the correct information to do so, even if it did entail spending a couple of dollars more. And what better way to get unbiased information (at least from a corporate perspective), then to ask other people who have been in the same situation as you? Why, crowdsourcing, of course!

Twitter is all the rage these days, but I have a hard time believing that other people actually care when I go to the bathroom, what I had for breakfast this morning, how cute I think my cat is, or any number of other whims I may be tempted to pick up my mobile phone and tweet about (though, given the insane popularity of the service, I’m obviously wrong about this ). Where I personally think that such a service can be useful, however, is in tapping the knowledge and experience of other Twitterers in getting instant answers to these kinds of questions. Unfortunately mobile browsing is not the most optimal experience when it comes to getting quick and easy answers to targeted questions. But being able to tap into the Twittersphere, to reach tens or hundreds or even thousands of others who may be able to answer, in real time, burning questions like “Is it worth paying two dollars a pound extra for beef from cattle that have been sung to?!?” This … is a powerful thing. 

Now, Twitter is really based on a one-to-many model of communication: someone posts a tweet, and multiple people receive it. It is not set up for those multiple people to tweet directly with one another via a broadcast model of communication. Enter a nifty little service called GroupTweet which serves as a relay, broadcasting direct texts from a Twitter user who follows a certain account on to all the followers of that account.

I’ve been long wanting some kind of mobile-accessible service that will let me ask these kinds of questions and receive real-time answers, and the combination of Twitter and GroupTweet seems like the perfect combination to achieve this. To this end, I’ve set up a Twitter account, called inagreenpickle, which I’ve also registered with the GroupTweet service. Here’s how it would work:

1. If you run up against the same kinds of green pickles as I do, and are a Twitter user, then you’ll register on Twitter as a follower to the user inagreenpickle. I’ll also follow you (this is necessary for GroupTweet to work).

2. When you have an appropriate question,  send a direct text to the Twitter user inagreenpickle. You can do this via text message using the syntax “d <user> <insert question here>” For example:
   d inagreenpickle Accck! No bags! Buy new tote, paper or plastic?”

3. If you receive a tweet that raises a question that you can provide some intelligent insight into, then you can either send a direct message back to inagreenpickle with your comments to respond to the whole group, or do an @reply to the user who sent the message. I’m not sure if GroupTweet supports broadcasting of @replies, but I’ll update this when I find out. 

Update 8/12: The options here seems to be either (a) direct message back to the person for a private conversation, (b) direct message to inagreenpickle to have your answer bounced directly to the group, or (c) @reply to the person who asked the question to have your answer register with Twitter as a reply. Since inagreenpickle is following you and the person you replied to,  I believe that the reply will show up in the public timeline. Option (c) seems to be the best one, as it will create a sense of threaded conversation.

4. While it’s nice to have people from all over the place chime in with their experience, one of the tenets of the whole environmental movement is to act locally. So tweet local. Whether it’s soliciting local businesses or buying local produce, leverage the collective knowledge of green-minded people in your community by starting a local group to address these little green pickles. 

See Twitter’s excellent help pages for more information on accessing Twitter from your mobile phone.

Any feedback/suggestions on how to mobilize this , or pointers to any existing forums which attempt solve this problem, would be greatly appreciated!

Update 8/12: There is, unsurprisingly, much interest and many requests and proposals out there for implementing groups in Twitter. LazyTweet is essentially an aggregator of Tweets sent to the Twitter username lazytweet. It is premised on the idea of the LazyWeb, which is the idea that if you’re too lazy to look something up yourself, you can just ask the web and maybe someone who knows the answer will respond. There is also a very thoughtful proposal for IRC-style channels on Twitter via the use of hashtags (i.e. #chicagogreenpickle) to create “ad-hoc assemblages of people with similar interests” who can follow a particular conversation via that hash tag.

Some may argue that adding this kind of support may violate the primary Twitter ‘rule’ of simply answering the question “What are you Doing?” but I’m a firm believer that technology is merely an enabler and should not be bound by such philosophical constraints. Like the internet itself has, I hope that Twitter will organically grow to fit whatever niche its users find it most suited to, even if this represents a variation from the framers’ original intent.

To give some context, I’m currently 27. My first cell phone was a Nokia candybar (most likely at 5110) which I got when I was in high school (mid 1990’s). Motorola invented the cell phone in 1973, but they didn’t become economically viable, reasonably sized, or widespread until some time after that, so the current crop of late twenty / early thirty-somethings are the first generation to actually have grown up using mobile phones.

(And for the record, I think that the coolest phone I ever owned was my Motorola Timeport, circa 2001. This was like the StarTac’s crazy futuristic cousin. Something about the three-colored LCD screen was really nifty — far niftier, in fact, than a full color screen, which, if you’re not using a multimedia phone, seems like overkill (as much as I love seeing animated calculator icons!). However, much to my disappointment, this device had no features to support porting through time.)

So now, our parents, who didn’t grow up using mobile phones, have them, and aren’t afraid to use them, no matter how inopportune or inconvenient for the poor recipients of their paranoid-fueled, yet well-meaning, parental wrath. The question is, when we grow up, will our own parental instincts prevail, or will we be able to successfully subdue them, thinking back to our own childhoods, and honoring our children’s sense of privacy (e.g. “I told you not to call me on the ship phone, Dad!. Yea, I’m with Timmy. No, not in orbit yet. Yea – I know … no robot prostitutes.  We’re just going to go pick some space beer and hang out at our Moon cabin – did you leave the keys?”).

There are two ways that this whole thing could go down. The first, as I’ve described, is that, as parents, we remember how often we were forced to press “Ignore” or shut our cell phones off because we didn’t care to be bothered with what was surely a gratuitous call from our parents. Alternatively, our comfort (and indeed reliance) on this technology could make things even worse for our kids. Because not only will their parents have cell phones, but for a better part of their adult lives, their grandparents had cell phones, too! That’s two generations worth of random questions which just came to mind, all-too-frequent “check-ins”, unsolicited calls “to say hi,” and of course a barrage of calls without even any purported purpose (”Jeez, Grandma, what is it now?!? Yes, I know. The birds on your windowsill do have such lovely little feathers. Have they gotten lovelier since yesterday? OK, then. Bye.”)

It was the perfect setup: a gorgeous day, a long weekend ahead of me. There, on the corner of Wabash Avenue and Lake Street, I was finally presented with an opportunity … and I excitedly Accepted it. But after a short, awkward interaction, I walked away from that street corner feeling not proud and confident, but feeling cheated, filled with a regret, and unable to shake a sneaking suspicion that I may have contracted some nasty virus that i didn’t have before this whole thing happened.

I am, of course, talking about finally getting advertised to over Bluetooth. As far as I can tell, I didn’t pick up any virus, just a crappy .3gp video promoting a game version of  ”The Bourne Conundrum” or  whatever the latest installment of that movie series starring Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio is called.

I’m not quite sure what the set up was. There was a highly non-trivial physical advertisement for the game that spanned about three or four plate-glass windows and was about seven feet tall. Perhaps there was just a PC behind there with a server pushing this file out? When I was there, I didn’t see any one else being ’solicited’, so I’m not sure if they had one or multiple bluetooth radios. I had my Moto Q9h with me, and I guess my Bluetooth was set to ‘discoverable’, so out of the blue, this notification popped up and asked if I want to “Accept” or “Decline”  ’bourne-video.3gp.’ Being the consumer whore that I am, I gladly accepted. Also … I was just a bit curious! Don’t judge me just because I walk around town with my Bluetooth all ‘discoverable’ like that. I don’t judge you for keeping your WiFi network unsecured, or never bothering to change the password from ‘default’.

Now should be the time when, I, glowing, call up all my friends and tell them that it finally happened. I should be throwing around all manner of hi-fives and receiving all kinds of congratulations:

“What?!?,” they’d say. “Dude, you got a video of it?!? You stud!” And I’d smile, and nod my head, and show them the video, and we’d all agree that it was “freakin’ sweet.”  

So why am I feeling so blue?

Well …. I guess …. I’d been waiting for this my whole life. Or, at least my professional career, having spent time working in the mobile industry and patiently waiting for this bright, location-based, social-networked, contextually relevant future to finally come. I just wanted the first time to be perfect … you know? There I’d be, walking along on a hot summer day, thirsty as a dog, just famished, and ‘beep!’ My phone notifies me that the Starbucks I just passed is offering a free Iced Fattyccino with the purchase of any loaf-based cake product. Sitting there inside, on a couch, listening to Norah Jones and Nick Drake singing a duet from the “Happy at Home”album, I smile, confident that technology really is making my life better, and enjoy my lemon loaf and ‘free’ beverage.

I’ve never even seen any of the Bourne series of movies. I’m not a big video gamer. So why the heck did I receive this advertisement?

As with any technology, it seems that advertising-over-bluetooth (’bluecasting’ or ‘bluevertising’) has to start somewhere, and this is where it starts. At some point, people figured out that you could offer free services or content over the web by supplementing income with technicolor, epilepsy-inducing banner ads, and look how far web-based targeted advertising has come (I’m not a big ad-clicker myself, but obviously someone is, because people are making lots of money from this). 

I have no doubt that bluecasting will come into its own in due time and reach some sort of level where it’s seen as beneficial to enough people and making enough money for companies to be seen as a viable form of advertising (after all, AFAIK, this has been around in other countries for quite a few years now). There could potentially be other, non-commercial uses of such a system, but the inherently push nature of bluetooth technology — as opposed to say, the more passive, pull, interaction required for near-field communication (NFC) technologies such as RFID — are quite well suited to advertising.

So …. listen up advertisers. If I’m going to get ads pumped to me through yet another medium, here’s how you can make it less bad:

Make it relevant

Don’t bluetooth me ads I don’t want, otherwise I’ll just get annoyed with you. If I barely play video games and don’t find Jason Bourne a particularly interesting fellow, then don’t send me an ad about the “Bourne Colonoscopy” game.

Also, don’t bluetooth me just to say ‘hi’. What do I get out of it? $20 off dinner at a nice restaurant? A free coffee? Notification of a sale that’s going on right now? Device manufacturers: make it easy for me to save advertisments to my device and use them at my convenience. Maybe I just had a latte and don’t much care for one now but I plan on picking one up on my way in to work tomorrow.

Put your money where your radio is, advertisers, and make this worth my while, otherwise I will just get annoyed and make my Bluetooth non-discoverable. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?WOULD YOU!?!? I’m not opposed to being sold-up. I’m just opposed to being needlessly pestered.

Regulate it

If I say that I don’t care to receive ads about clothing (all my stuff’s custom tailored), then I shouldn’t receive any ads from clothing stores. Whether this is managed on the device or more centrally (think a ‘no call list’ for bluetooth), I believe it’s possible to maintain some semblance of order and effectively prosecute those companies who violate the laws. For example, if I make some setting on my device that says I want to keep my bluetooth on and discoverable, but don’t want to receive any ads, and some store subverts this by masquerading their ad as a file transfer or headset connection request, then I think the appropriate legal infrastructure could be put in place to catch this behavior and punish accordingly. Advertising is regulated in magazines and on television, so it should be able to be managed here as well. 

Make it social

Social recommendation engines have done wonders for companies like Amazon or Netflix, for social bookmarking management sites like del.icio.us, and for music services like last.fm …. and I think that there’s some element of advertising that could benefit from this trend as well. My device has a Contacts list in it. I’m on a couple social networks. What’s to say that I can’t recommend an ad the same way I’d recommend a song or a video to a friend? What if the only advertisements, or class of advertisements, I elected to receive were those that had been recommended by someone in my Top 5? Social networking can’t solve all the problems inherent in the hornet’s nest of privacy issues associated with bluecasting and associated technologies, but it certainly can help improve the user experience, and even make it a (*gasp*) beneficial one.

So the next time you’re on the corner of Wabash Avenue and Lake Street, be careful, and please …. keep your device in your pants. It’s really not worth it. 

I have to say, though, there is some weird perceived privacy issues around all this very personal information, which I’m used to seeing on a 3.2 inch screen, being up on my 15″ desktop monitor. I’m sure it’s just as safe as any other secure site, but there’s something subtly unsettling about seeing SMSs, (as opposed to, say, emails) accessible in this manner. Why is this?

Currently the only supported platform is Windows Mobile, but it looks like support for S60, Samsung, Blackberry and LG are in the works. It’s like MobileMe for the rest of the rest of us (well, those of us with Windows Mobile phones, at least

What I find most impressive about the whole system is the simplicity, especially in the mobile application. Of all the features and options and settings that could have been crammed in there, they’ve really kept the set to a minimum (the only thing you can do, really, is set photos as public/private, name them, or share them), and I applaud them for it. They’ve done a good job of leveraging the device ecosystem, understanding that the ‘heavy lifting’ is best left for a web-based interface, and not trying to mirror the web functionality on the mobile.

Simply being able to take photo on the device and know that it will reliably and automatically uploaded to a place on the web where I can do more with them, is a huge benefit, and [sadly] a big improvement over a lot of mobile devices that I’ve used on the market today. I can’t even count how many times I’ve failed at getting content off a device. MMS doesn’t work (does it ever?). Emails fail to send. The appropriate bluetooth profiles are not supported (thanks, carriers!). It’s the most bitter of ironies that it can be so difficult to get content off of a connected device.

Dashwire is a great example of a system that provides so much benefit for so little effort on the user’s part.