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July 29, 2005
Inc.
Mobile Research is now officially Mobile Research Corp. as far as the Secretary of State of Washington is concerned. One more thing to check off the "startup list".
Posted by David Adams at 03:03 PM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2005
.COM
I've been dancing around aquiring the mobileresearch.com domain for about a year and a half. Right now we are mobileresearch.net . The .com domain was being held by BuyDomains and they had it listed as a Premium domain (read expensive). So I was waiting for it to expire in July with hopes that they wouldn't renew. Unfortunately they did. So I was planning on contesting it with ICANN (which costs $1700) after I trademarked "Mobile Research" post launch of the product. Well it turns out that BuyDomains started listing prices next to available domains and they had mobileresearch.com listed for $1180 . Sold American! So I bought it yesterday and today it's live and pointing at my DNS. So we now have mobileresearch.com just in time for our launch next week. W0ot!
Posted by David Adams at 11:08 AM | Comments (1)
July 25, 2005
Crackberry
Well I finally broke down and bought myself a blackberry. I figured it was about time I was able to get my spam 24 hours a day. Actually I am in and out of the office a lot and it is a real life saver to be able to just respond to an email quickly. Also we have our launch coming up and I don't want to be out of reach. Especially since for the next month or so I am going to be pulling tech support duty on call 24 hours a day if there are any problems at the data center. I don't anticipate any though as we have some really good hardware and are using gentoo linux on our servers.
It is amazing though how much spam I am getting. I use the spam filter in the Mac email client and I was not really aware how good a job it was doing until I started getting a new spam message every 2 minutes (literally) on my blackberry. I have to turn the vibrate alert off at night or I can't sleep. Looks like I am going to have to install Spam Assasin on the server in the not too distant future.
I used to have a Good but I really didn't like the clunky little box form factor. This blackberry is much nicer, lighter and sleeker.
Posted by David Adams at 10:28 PM | Comments (2)
July 21, 2005
Six Months Status
We are just shy of our six month mark at Mobile Research. As of last monday our headcount is officially 6 people. That is fulltime employees, not counting the consultants. We are so close to launching the product I'm starting to get really anxious. Right now everyone is really heads down and cranking on getting the product launched. Everyone is working a ton of hours. Most days when I arrive at work, I fell like I just left. The mood is good though. Everyone is focused and working hard but I think we all know how what we are working on individually fits into the grand scheme of the product.
I've got great guys working for me!
It will be really nice to launch the US product, but then we are going to go straight into starting on the UK, and after that we are looking towards asia. Probably Korea first. We are really going to have to staff up for that because it takes a trained person about 2.5 days to fully profile a phone. Going into a market and having to tackle 140 phone to start can take some time. I'm pretty sure that we could keep 30 people busy full time profiling devices for the next year.
"I'm ready to launch"
Posted by David Adams at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
Mobile charging station
There was some discussion on Russ Beattie's site yesterday about mobile charging stations. I took these photos a few weeks ago at the SeaTac airport in Seattle. $3.00 sounds reasonable if you are really in need. Half the price of one of those disposable charging batteries.
Posted by David Adams at 02:32 PM | Comments (4)
July 18, 2005
6682 coming soon to Cingular
According to the manager of our local Cingular store, they are going to start selling the 6682 within the next two weeks. I know a lot of people have the 6680, but it doesn't have 850 MHz and with Cingular's network the way it is, I wanted to wait for this version.
Posted by David Adams at 03:23 PM | Comments (2)
July 14, 2005
Opera for Series 60 released
Opera has released Opera 8.00 for Symbian, Series 60 2.x today. Should be very nice to use a real browser on my phone since the WAP browser that comes on my 3230 really sucks. They have downloads available for all the Series 60 phones it looks like. I'll post a review as soon as their download mirrors are back up.
Posted by David Adams at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2005
We're growing
As the scope of the product has grown, so have we. I've hired two new full time people just to profile phones. One started about 2 weeks ago and I just hired a new guy today. So now I have to add a trip to Ikea to my list of things to do this week.
Posted by David Adams at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2005
Seattle Mobile meeting tonight
The July meeting of Seattle Mobile is tonight. This month's topic is "Mobile Startups" and we have some great presenters from Picostation and SNAPin lined up. If you are in the Seattle area and work in the mobile industry please come by.
http://www.seattlemobile.org
Posted by David Adams at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2005
Photos
I've had some requests to see some of the device photos so I thought I'd post a few. These are some of the web-ready (72 dpi) images.
Motorola V300
Nokia 6610
Posted by David Adams at 10:52 AM | Comments (2)
July 06, 2005
"It's was a bad summer for cheese".
Newsweek is featuring my brother's company in the business edge section for the next month.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8476602/site/newsweek/
Posted by David Adams at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)
July 03, 2005
Product photography
One of the elements of our mobile device database subscription is web-ready images of all the devices. So as we get ready to launch the service, we are knee deep in product photography. We are actually creating "print ready" quality images of each device, but only distributing web quality (72 dpi) images with the subscription. We may get into selling the print ready stock photographs as an additional service later.
We've got a little product photography studio set up in the office. We are using a Nikon D2X professional camera with a macro lense / macro flash setup. This is a truly amazing camera. 12.4 megapixels with some really nice features such as automatic hotspot reduction, multiple focus zones (with the digital lenses), etc.
We've got a nice lighting setup for the phones. We have an infinite horizon diffusion background set against a light diffusion tent. This sits on a light table, and we light from the front on both sides. Using daylight bulbs this allows us to illiminate almost all shadows around the device without almost any glare at all. Mobile phones are really tricky to photograph because they have lots of shiny plastic and chrome faces, so we have to really diffuse the light down to the point where we aren't getting any glare. We do this by using some flash diffusing umbrellas and some diffuse material over the other lights, and a light diffusion tent for the backlight.
Nikon has some nice software capture software that allows us to set the entire profile for the session on a connected (USB2) computer (apple) and control the entire camera from the computer. We can even control the focus. So once we get the camera position set up, we can take as many pictures as we want, changing the levels, balance, speed, aperture, lighting type/temperature, etc. without ever touching the camera. It's pretty amazing. And no need to fuss with downloads/multimedia cards; the software saves the image right to our portable drive.
Once a device is phtographed, the photo has to be photoshopped. We've brought in a pro to photoshop all the images. They have to be color corrected if need be, touched up (the downside of taking the photos AFTER we've been using them) and all the trademarks have to be removed.
Our product photography studio setup. That thing next to the phone is a grey card used for setting levels.
Posted by David Adams at 01:12 PM | Comments (4)
July 02, 2005
Everybody's working for the weekend
We are really trying to get everything wrapped up for our launch. This means I have to spend most of 4th of July weekend working. However thanks to modern science, I can now work a lot of different places. My Dad put an internet connection ( and WiFi shortly thereafter) at my family's beach house in Port Townsend. So I can go spend the weekend with my folks, stop at the Indian reservation on the way up and buy copious amounts of Ill Eagle fireworks and enjoy the 4th; AND get a ton of work done. The coolest part is that the Washingtone State Ferry system now has WiFi on the boats. I am currently in the middle of puget sound on a ferry writing this. Too cool.
Side note for all you Pacific Northwesterners: They have food on the ferries again. Finally. The downside is that it is pretty basic stuff and the prices are insane.
This chicken sandwich and a Gatorade cost me $8 bucks! This is sub-par 7-11 food.
Posted by David Adams at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)