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May 30, 2005
Heat wave's over
Well we had a mini heatwave this week. Temperatures up in the high 80's and into the 90's on Friday. I was really worried when I rented our offices that it would get very hot when the temperatures got up there, because we have western exposure; but alas not so much. There is a huge building across the street that blocks the direct sun after about 3, and since we are on the ground floor, it stays nice and cool. My apartment on the other hand gets REALLY hot. Thursday I went down to Costco and scored a swamp cooler. Basically a fan that blows air through a water evaporator. Works like a charm. I get a lot of grief from my friends in Florida and California when I complain about the heat; but hey guys, you've got AC! You try sleeping in an 87ยบ room.
Back to rainy and cool tomorrow. Ah spring in Seattle.
Posted by David Adams at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2005
There is a solution to every problem
Problem: One of the big problems we are having profiling all these phones, is coverage. We get pretty good coverage for T-Mobile in our office, but the Cingular and AT&T(Cingular Blue) coverage is awful. It is so bad that Charles has moved his desk up by the front windows. Our office is on the bottom floor set into a hill and our back walls are cement bulkhead walls. Not great for PCS reception. This makes profiling the phones and making/receiving calls very difficult and it has been getting very frustrating.
Solution: The Model 150 In-Building PCS Amplifier from CSI.
This is a PCS amplifier that amplifies incoming and outgoing mobile band signals. This one has a 50dB gain uplink and downlink. Nice.
I bought one of these from CellAntenna last week and it arrived yesterday. The kit comes with an outdoor antenna, indoor antenna, amplifier and power supply. I went for the more expensive 150 model that handles all PCS frequencies so we can increase our signal for CDMA as well as both Cingular and T-Mobile GSM bands. They have a seperate model for iDEN, and we'll cross that bridge if we need to.
The first thing we did was just connect everything together with the included outdoor coax cables and run the outdoor Yagi antenna out to the sidewalk. We put the indoor omnidirectional antenna up towards the ceiling and plugged it in. Seven bars (out of 7 on my Nokia 3230). Wow! That is at my desk about 17 feet from the antenna. Definitely a good purchase.
After making a paper drilling template, hunting through all my (still packed) tools for the right drill bits, holesaw, drill, and driver, I was up on a latter drilling through one of the aluminum wall panels where the power comes in so we could mount the external antenna outside the door to the office.
Up on a ladder. My favorite place.
It's very important not to drill into the 220 lines.
YAGI Antenna discreetly installed ouside the office.
So now we are set. We are getting really good coverage in the entire office. No more missed mobile calls.
Posted by David Adams at 03:56 PM | Comments (2)
May 18, 2005
Safe To Say at this Point, Harry Truman* Probably Didn't Make It
Twenty-Five years ago today at a little after 8:00 a.m. Mount St. Helens erupted, sending 1/3 of it's mass into the atmosphere as ash. I was 11 years old and was standing on the porch of my family's beach house near Port Townsend Washington, when we heard three very loud explosions. My grandfather was in Eastern Washington (Tieton), hundreds of miles away from Mount St. Helens, and when the ash started to fall, he went out and put an empty bucket in the front yard. So much ash fell that it nearly filled the bucket.
If you know anyone who needs 5 gallons of Mt. St. Helens ash (Version 1.0); let me know. =)
Google Satelite Image of Mt. St. Helens
*http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/mountsthelens/hary11.shtml
Posted by David Adams at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2005
Monday, May 16
Well, I was sick all weekend. Not good for my productivity. I took it easy and slept a lot. I was planning on getting our new firewall configured for the new corporate/dev/research network. Looks like I will have to get that taken care of this week. That is something that has to be done during a weekend or at night so we aren't all offline during a workday.
I tried to post more last week but ended up spending all my spare time working on Seattle Mobile. I put up a new website that is a little clearer. It is based on Movable Type by Six Apart. That is the same blog server software that I use for this blog. It is working out very nice. It took me a while to get all the stylesheets and templates done and debugged. I think it turned out nice. You can check it out here -> http://www.seattlemobile.org .
We had the May meeting of Seattle Mobile on Thursday. It was a great meeting and we had a good turnout. A lot of regulars didn't show up, but we had a lot of new faces. We had 30+ show up, and hopefully June will be even better. The word is starting to get out and the meetings are starting to get really good. We had some great presenters from Loudeye and Real Networks, and we have some really good presenters lined up for June as well.
Posted by David Adams at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
Seattle Mobile Meeting Tonight
The May meeting of Seattle Mobile is tonight. This month's topic is "Mobile Music" and we have some great presenters from Loudeye and Real Networks lined up. If you are in the Seattle area and work in the mobile industry please come by. We've also got a new website up for Seattle Mobile.
Posted by David Adams at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
Day 100 of Mobile Research
A lot has happened in the last 99 days of Mobile Research. I am really amazed at how much we have learned about mobile devices. The three of us new a lot about developing for mobile phones going into this but the scope of what we have found has suprised us a little. And we were anticipating it a well. Still suprised. The good news/outcome of this is that our product is going to be a very comprehensive set of data of mobile phone data.
We are still narrowing in on a launch of our "Mobile Device Data" product. We have expanded the scope of the product quite a bit, which obviously takes much more time, be we and our customers are going to be a lot happier with it.
We've been putting our corporate/dev network as well as our data center together, buying more phones, writing test cases and test tools, use cases, customer documentation, and profiling a lot of phones iteratively. Lots of work done, but still a lot of work to do. We could sure use another 3 or 4 guys.
On the business development side, things are going great. We've had a ton of interest, both locally and internationally. I get 5-6 unsolicited requests a week for information just from Europe. We have had a ton of interest from UK companies who want to know when the database will be available for the UK. The plan right now is to start profiling phones for the UK in late June. Hopefully that will be complete sometime in July. It's looking like it is going to be a busy, yet fun summer.
Posted by David Adams at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2005
Mobile Phone Virususii
There has been a lot of hype lately about virii (viruses) on mobile phones. Symantec has been making a big stink lately about the impending problem. Turns out that it is really
not that big a problem. Which is pretty much what everyone I know in the mobile industry has been saying for a long time.
However...
My friend Mario was in Heathrow yesterday and got a bluetooth message asking him if he would like to install some sort of Heathrow "information for tourists" application. He chose yes, the yes again when it told him that the application was unsigned and "would he still like to install?". A few hours later he starts getting messages from a lot of his friends. Turns out the application had MMS'ed everyone in his contacts list a URL to some website. I didn't get one because I guess there is no MMS interoperability between the old AT&T Wireless network (Cingular Blue) and regular Cingular(Orange).
I really don't consider this a virus because it asked him if he wanted to install it and he chose to even though the application was not certified and he could not authenticate where it came from. It is more of an hostile application. However, a lot of us with smartphones do this a lot because most application vendors aren't signing their applications yet. This is going to have to change in the future. I know that Symbian is already moving towards requiring application signing in their next version of Symbian OS.
The cool thing about this is app is that I suspect one installed, it tries to send itself to other devices within bluetooth range. You could write an application and send it out to anyone who excepted it and that application could continuously propogate itself from handset to handset forever in a place like Heathrow with a lot of people, and probably a lot of smartphone/Symbian users.
This gives me some pretty interesting ideas for some cool (non-hostile) applications.
My mind is a raging torrent flooded with rivulets of thoughts cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. -HL
Posted by David Adams at 10:34 AM | Comments (3)
May 10, 2005
Seattle Mobile meeting this week
May's Seattle Mobile meeting is this Thursday night. If you are local to the Seattle area and are in, or are interested in the mobile wireless industry, please come to Thursday night's meeting.
Posted by David Adams at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
Sunday Morning Coming Down
What a hectic couple of last weeks. We've been really slammed working on product. I've had some comments about not updating the blog this week. To which my response has been that I've been swamped with work. Which usually provkes the repsonse "what are you working on?". So as I sit here this morning in the Zoka UW coffee shop (free WiFi, great coffee, close proximity to the Apple store), I thought I'd just share what we've been working on at Mobile Research.
Our products and services are based on having a super accurate database of device metrics, and data. So we have spent most of our time since we started, developing tools and a process for profiling mobile phones to research the information and put it into our database. This is a very large task. The amount of relevant data about a mobile phone is staggering. Our potential customers are mobile content creators, content publishers, game developers, enterprise application developers, publishers of mobile web sites, mobile technology enablers, etc.. So to provide everyone with everything they need, we have to really create a comprehensive profile of each device, and it has to be accurate. Right now we are profiling 120+ devices for the North American market. On top of that we are continually updating and maturing our research/profiling process for speed and accuracy as well as expanding the scope of data as we learn more about our potential customers
So along with running the day-to-day operations of a company, ( you wouldn't think there was that much paperwork; there is!), putting together our data center and dev network, handling calls, and working on the product, I have also been working on a couple of development projects for the profiling process. One is our WAP Push/SMS profiling tool. This is a tool that allows us to send SMS messages and WAP Push to mobile phones so we can test the phone's functionality. This is probably the biggest data request that we have been getting from potential customer's that we have spoken to. Basically the way you send a ringtone or image to a phone is, you send a URL to a web page to the persons phone. They then go to that page and download the ringtone or image. The problem is, every device handles this differently, and a lot of them not so well. So we have a whole suite of tests we are running to profile this experience for each device, and I am building an application that allows one of our profilers to run these tests quickly and accurately.
The other dev project I am working on involves mobile phone fonts. Basically fonts are a nightmare for WAP (web) page designers as well as application developers because each device or platform will have different fonts. So when you write and application that prints something to the screen, it can looke much different on different phones. This can get really out of hand when some devices do funny things with font sizes, etc. The spacing gets all messed up, and developers end up using some lowest common denominator (if there is one) or they have to port the application to each device. This goes for WAP (web) pages as well, as the browsers use the device's system fonts. Also, when you use PC based development tools and emulators, they look nothing like the actual device because they use PC fonts and not the device fonts. So in an effort to help solve the font problem at some point, we are attempting to collect a very accurate set of font metrics for every device. We are actually trying to replicate each font for each device. This entails measuring each character for each style, size, and type, for each language the device supports. Now for a Java application alone there are 72 different fonts, multiplied by ~130 ISO-8859 characters (to start) and you end up with a LOT of characters that have to be measured. Include the kerning (the spacial relationship between characters) and this is a LARGE set of data for each device. And we are doing a lot of devices.
So how are we attempting to collect all this font data? Well since every device is a little different and none of them support all the same technologies as the others, and you can't get the font data (or the image data in MIDP 1.0 !!!) we are doing it externally. We are using video capture. We've got an application that runs on the phone that iterates through each character for each font, and a video camera pointed at the phones screen that capture the character. We then process that character image on an external computer to make a programmatic copy. What we end up with is enough data to create a set of bitmap fonts for each device. It is not an easy proposition, but I am having a great time working on it. I'll post more on it later as it progresses.
-David
Posted by David Adams at 10:45 AM | Comments (3)