April 02, 2006
CTIA Wireless 2006 - Las Vegas
We'll be at CTIA Wireless 2006 in Las Vegas this week. We have a kiosk in the iLoop booth in the North Hall #4423. Please come by and say hello if you have a chance.
-David
Posted by David Adams at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)
March 31, 2006
So Typical
So this is a pretty typical startup story. We are going to be at the CTIA show in Las Vegas next week and needed to have some materials printed up. We submitted them Monday and paid for 2nd day air to make we would have them this week, with time to spare. So the show up today, and instead of our materials, we received a box of someone else's business cards. I called the printer, Overnight Prints, and the best they can do on a reprint and ship is next Thursday.
This is the kind of stuff that just eats up your time. Some days I feel like I haven't accomplished anything. This is the reason; right here.
So I called the guy on the business cards and hopefully he is going to be receiving my stuff. He agree to fedex them to the hotel where we are staying in Las Vegas, so it might work out. It'll be close if it does.
What's the moral here? I have no idea.
Posted by David Adams at 01:46 PM | Comments (2)
March 06, 2006
Not Fooling Around
One of the problems that we constantly run into profiling phones is poor coverage. Where we are located, we get good CDMA coverage, and T-Mobile is good, but Cingular is very bad. We tackled the problem last summer by purchasing a PCS signal amplifier. I posted about it at the time. The one we bought last summer is small and gives us pretty good gain for CDMA and GSM (Cingular is still pretty bad though), but doesn't handle iDEN. Well this has been a problem for us this month because we have started in on the task of profiling Nextel phones and we get absolutely no coverage inside our office.
So this time when I bought a BDA (bi-Directional Amplifier) for iDEN networks, I made sure I got one that had some serious gain to it. I ended up picking up a used Dekolink which has 60dB of gain. What's really nice is that is has separate gain control (manual and automatic) for uplink and downlink. So after switching to manual and cranking the downlink gain up, we are now getting 3 bars our of five in the middle of our office. Also, this BDA has the same standard antenna connectors so I didn't have to install another YAGI antenna. We just switch between them as we test.
Posted by David Adams at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
January 06, 2006
New Year - New Moleskine
I've been using the same two (pocket and large) Moleskines for the last year. They are both pretty filled up at this point but not too worn out. I've been through about 6 of the Cahier books for small projects that called for something disposable this year. They don't hold up as well due to the binding. I've been using these amazing notebooks for about the last three and half years, and wouldn't want to live withouth them. Paper is SO much better than a PDA. I use a large one for detailed business planning, etc. and the pocket Moleskine for day-to-day things. It does fit very nicely in a pocket.
I have an extra large one already, but since it's a new year I am going to treat myself to a new Pocket Moleskine to track my day-to-day appointments, notes, ideas, etc.
Posted by David Adams at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)
January 01, 2006
Happy New Year
Should Auld aquaintance something something ...
May 2006 bring you good fortune.
Posted by David Adams at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2005
Flotsam, Jetsam and Boughtsam
We buy a lot of phones from eBay on a regular basis. We get probably 5 or 6 packages a week from eBay sellers; all phones. One of the interesting side effects of buying all these phones from different people on eBay is the interesting "stuff" that comes in the box. So I've come up with a new word: boughtsam. "Boughtsam" is anything that comes in a package from an eBay seller, in addition to what you've purchased. This can be packing materials or anything else the seller thought to put in the box.
We get some really interesting packaging materials with some of these phones.
"Thanks for sending our $300 phone wrapped in your recycled garbage."
Today we actually got a band flyer and two CD's from someone trying to promote their band.
When you have to resort to eBay sales as a promotional channel for your band, you are seriously scraping the bottom of the barrel.
We've received some religious materials in the past and a Lance Armstrong Livestrong bracelet; child sized. What the heck am I supposed to do with that?
Posted by David Adams at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2005
Mobile and Barcodes: Part 1
I had a discussion today with someone from a local mobile content company about the possibilities of reading barcodes from a mobile display. We're not talking 2D QR codes here, I just mean reagular old barcodes. Is it possible to scan one from the display of a mobile device? Any one want to place a bet?
I played around with this a few years ago, but don't think the results represent todays phones, so I am going to load up a few different feature phones with a barcode today, hit em with a scanner and see what the results are.
Stayed tuned.
Posted by David Adams at 12:51 PM | Comments (4)
October 22, 2005
What do you do when you get burned out?
I've been working 90-100 hour weeks for the last 4 weeks. Last week it started to really wear me out. No energy and I could feel a cold coming on. I slept in on Wed. (I think) and worked from home. Took a couple of hot showers, a nap, and drank tea all day. Really worked. I got the rest I needed and still got a lot of work done.
Mentally, I just get a cup of coffee in me, read 2 chapters of any Tom Peters book and I'm focused and motivated, and my mind's going 100 MPH ( 160.93 KPH) again.
Right now I am working on marketing materials; and I REALLY need to be motivated to get that done.
Posted by David Adams at 03:09 PM | Comments (2)
October 04, 2005
Blue Book
We announced a new publication today called the Mobile Device Blue Book. It is essentially a listing of all available devices in the US market (on major carriers and the MVNOs), pricing, and features/functionality. We are tracking device availability on all the carriers and MVNOs daily along with their prices, and at the begining of the month we publish the list along with listings of all the devices by carrier, network, data bearer and features. The features we are tracking are Java (MIDP/CLDC version), BREW (Versions), WAP (Versions), Video support, Music support, Camera phones, Bluetooth, Screen dimensions/colors. We are also tracking the smartphones and their OS's.
This grew out of a lot of requests we have received for data about what devices are available on what carriers and what devices have been discontinued. Because we are tracking all the devices availability on all the carriers/MVNOs sites daily, we are also able to provide dates of availability and discontinuation.
The Blue Book is at this point 200+ pages of device info for what is going on with devices monthly.
We are also sending out a CD with the Blue Book that contains all the data and lists in tab delimited files so they can be imported into a spreadsheet.
Here is a link to the press release.
Mobile Device Blue Book Press Release
Posted by David Adams at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2005
Pre-show run up
Well as usual before a tradeshow, I've got 3 days worth of work to do before I leave in 24 hours. We are going to be announcing a new product on Monday so I have to have the website updated and write a press release on top of all the other things I need to do to get ready. Got a lot of stuff checked off the list though so I feel like I am cranking at a pretty good pace.
Still have to get a haircut, buy some new shoes, pack , and tie up the week's loose ends, then get to the airport an hour earlier than usual because some rocket scientist at Homeland Security (could they have come up with a more Orwellian name for that super-agency? Perhaps Ministry of Truth) put my name on a the airline no-fly list.
Looking forward to a week in San Francisco.
Posted by David Adams at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2005
Cursed Force Majeur Clause!!!
"Do to extensive storm damage" our 1-877 number "may be unavailable for an extended period of time." I'm not complaining; certainly in the scheme of those who have been affected by hurricane Katrina, I am an irrelevant blip. I've just been doing a lot of contracts lately and this is the first time I have had a "Force Majeur" (or "Act of God" for those franco-challenged/non-legal tyypes among you) enforced against me vis-a-vis our carrier. Just goes to show you.
Posted by David Adams at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2005
Startup Status
I thought I'd post a little about where we are as a company and what's going on since I haven't posted much in the last few weeks.
First off: We're hiring! We are looking for researchers. I guess I should probably put a "jobs" section up on the company web site. We're hiring people with testing experience in mobile wireless. Also we've just hired an in-house photographer to do all the device photos. With the number of devices we are profiling and the new markets, that is a full time job. He starts on Tuesday so I've got to get the new iMac all setup for the photo studio.
Since we launched a month ago we have had a really great response. We also have customers now which is a big step. It is not a suprise, but it is very interesting all the different companies from different parts of the industry that have the same needs when it comes to mobile devices. This is a really pervasive problem. Also in the last month there have been 15+ new devices hit the US market, so we have been aquiring them and funneling them into our device profiling process. This is going as planned which is nice. No hiccups so far. The only issue is going to be staffing up for new markets. Those initial devices are a sizeable hump to get over and take a lot of man-hours to get through in a timely manner.
We are starting to build out our offices. If you've seen the previous pictures, you can tell we've been operating in real startup mode for the last 8 months. Now that we've launched and we are starting to grow and mature as a company, I thought it was time we had some walls. So we have started framing the walls out in the office. Hopefully this will all be done in about a month. It will be nice to have an office, a conference room, and a kitchen.
We are also busy getting ready for CTIA Wireless IT in San Francisco. Getting meetings set up, trying to get invited to all the parties, and getting everything ready so Brad and myself can be gone for a week. It always feels like these things are way off in the future, then they have a way of sneaking up on you. We are flying out Two weeks from today. If you are interested in Mobile Research and want to meet us at CTIA, drop me a line. Or if you are one of the great people I've met in the last 8 months and would like to grab a beer, send me an email. We'll be there all week.
Posted by David Adams at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2005
Back to it
I've taken a two week hiatus from writing here after our launch. The last two weeks have been pretty nuts and I've just been head's down trying to get loose ends wrapped up as well as get our new VP of Business Development up to speed with the company. He's working out great and we are expanding again. We are currently trying to hire 3 more people, and we've got a new profiler starting on monday. Hiring the right people is definitely the hardest thing to do. We really need to get the positions filled, but making sure we get the right person for the job and the culture of the company are critical. I strongly believe that if I as a manager have to fire someone, 98% of the time (the other 2% accounting for cleptomaniacs and other un-detectable weirdness) I have failed. I have failed in either hiring the right person for the job, or in enabling, positioning, or communicating direction to that employee. Also it is REALLY costly, in time and money, to have to rehire for a position. So, we are deliberate and we grow at the best speed we can.
Here's a great tip for anyone interviewing for a job: when the HR person, or whomever asks you if you have any questions about the company; ask them what their turn-over rate is for the year. If you get an answer, it will tell you a lot about the way the company is managed.
Posted by David Adams at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2005
New Exec
Mobile Research has hired a Vice President of Business Development. Brad David (previously of Dwango Wireless, ZTango, Sprint) started today and is already busy helping flesh out our sales channels here and abroad. We are all really excited to have Brad here. Three of us have previously worked with Brad in the past, and he is the right guy at the right time. So we got that going for us; which is nice!
Posted by David Adams at 03:32 PM | Comments (1)
August 14, 2005
Stock options an incentive?
I'd like to hear from anyone who has ever had a good experience (as an employee) with stock options or other employee incentives. I am in the process of moving Mobile Research into the next phase of a startup , where I need to start attracting greate people at a pretty good pace. To do this I need to be able to offer competitive pay and benefits (as well as interesting work and a good environment and culture). So naturally the topic of stock options has come up. Mobile Research is going to start offering benefits to it's employees next month; health insurance, parking, vacation, etc. , and I am considering what kind of incentives I want to be able to offer to be able to attract more people of the calliber of the current employees.
I've had some experience with stock options as both an employee and and employer. From an employer perspective, they are a pain to administrate, and frankly after the dust settled from the collapse of the Internet bubble, I am not sure that stock options are so much of an incentive. From an employee point of view I know they didn't incentivize me at all. At the last company I worked for, the criteria for options wasn't very clear. I also had a very large chunk of options from the sale of my company to that company. If I had excercised those options when I had the chance , I'd be $58,583 in the hole right now. So at some point that becomes a dis-incentive for the employees. I think if you work at a company like Google, that is public and you can compare your strike price to market price, it might work. Although I know you quickly get into a situation where there is a very large amount of time wasted by employees watching the stock price every day and focusing on that, instead of focusing on growing a successful company. Since Mobile Research is not going to be going public any time soon , I don't think stock options, with some arbitrarily assigned strike-price would be much of an incentive to the employees.
I believe very strongly that my employees need to have some stake in the success of the company and need to be able to directly see how their work affects the company. To that end we are going to implement profit-sharing, starting next month. Every quarter, a percentage of the company's profits will be divided among all the employees. This isn't money that the company is giving the employees or something that they are entitled to; instead the employees get a percentage of how well the company performs.
I've had a lot of great input from my brother who runs a 200+ employee company and has a similar program in place. I'd love to hear input from anyone who has had good/bad experiences with profit sharing, especially in technology companies.
Posted by David Adams at 11:47 AM | Comments (3)
August 06, 2005
Thanks!
I want to thank everyone who posted and emailed all the positive comments this week. It was a tough week. I've been slammed with emails since the press release went out and we were mentioned on a few blogs I've had a lot of tough questions, which I don't mind at all, but some criticism as well. It was a bit of a roller coaster this week and it was nice to get the positive feedback from people. It really kept me motivated.
So thanks, I really appreciate it.
-David
Posted by David Adams at 01:27 PM | Comments (1)
August 02, 2005
Launched!
Six months and a day since we started Mobile Research, we have launched our first product: The Mobile Device Database.
You can check it out on the website:http://www.mobileresearch.com
This product is targeted at larger mobile development companies and content publishers that need a database of device info that they can use programmatically to format, deliver, etc.
We will still be launching the KnowledgeBase product later this year, targeted at individual mobile application developers, etc.
Big thanks to Charles, Ryan, David, Jacob, Tyler and Brian! These guys really busted their butts. And for everyone else out there, the trick is to bang the phones together guys.
Here is the press release:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mobile Research Launches First of Its Kind Mobile Device Data Service
SEATTLE, WA (Aug. 3, 2005) - Mobile wireless tools and services provider Mobile Research today announced the launch of their "Mobile Device Database" service for the North American market.
The "Mobile Device Database" is the first commercially available solution that provides mobile developers and content publishers the data they need to address the problems associated with mobile device fragmentation. The "Mobile Device Database" is a comprehensive database of device data for each device on every major carrier. The "Mobile Device Database" contains over 500 data per device including supported APIs, media support, markup language tag support, WAP Push characteristics, messaging, and much more.
"Device specific information is crucial to developing mobile games and applications, formatting mobile media, providing customer support, and the delivery of mobile content in a mobile market where there over 100 unique models of mobile device available to subscribers at any given time" said David Adams, CEO of Mobile Research. The "Mobile Device Database" is launching initially for the North American market but will be expanding into European mobile markets this fall. The "Mobile Device Database" service is available on an annual subscription basis.
ABOUT MOBILE RESEARCH CORP.
Mobile Research develops tools and services that enable mobile application developers and mobile content publishers to overcome the technical challenges of the mobile wireless marketplace. Mobile Research is located in Seattle Washington.
For more information please visit www.mobileresearch.com
Posted by David Adams at 10:06 AM | Comments (7)
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 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 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)
June 19, 2005
Scope
People I speak with about what Mobile Research is doing are always surprised when I tell them how long it takes to profile a mobile phone. As of now it takes approximately 13 hours to profile a mobile phone using our process. It takes quite a while, and a lot of that is using automated testing tools. I have been working this weekend on putting our list of device data into a PDF file so I will have something more than a word doc to share with prospective customers regarding what data we profile on the handsets, and the pdf is currently at 12 pages and I'm not done yet. So what takes so long? Well we are compiling a very accurate database. That means that when you test if something works or not, you have to be able to verify that your answer is correct. If we get a negative result for a test, we have to know what a positive looks like on that specific phone. Therein lies the rub. These mobile phones are so flakey that it takes a long time not only to run a test but to verify that the data is correct. Example: Digital Rights Managements tests. The first DRM test we test is for forward lock. That is, when you download say a ringtone, that you can't forward it on to someone else. OK sounds simple enough. Well, can you forward an unlocked ringtone on this device? Have to have a positive to compare a negative too. If so, then the test is pretty easy. Just two ringtone downloads, and try sending the two different ringtones (locked and not). However, if you can't forward an unlocked ringtone, how do you know if the DRM is working or if it is just the phone. And if we can't tell, we have to change how we are recording the data. Instead of yes/no, it has to become yes/no/device doesn't support forwarding. This kind of problem can crop up on any of our huge list of test cases, so we are conitnually updating our database and test cases when we run into weirdness with an individual device.
Anyways, we've gone through this for months and now are down to just re-testing a lot of devices and making the push to finish the testing on the rest. Get's tiring though looking at a mobile phone for hours at a time. The results are well worth the effort though. Each datum is known to be correct because we've tested it on an actual device against an actual carrier's network. You can't get that kind of assured accuracy when you get lazy and start taking shortcuts, like grouping phones together by platform/vendor.
For all those who have asked: Yes we are profiling the Motorola Brick. Here is it's Profile:
Manufacturer: Motorola
Model: Brick
Network Type: AMPS
On/Off switch - Yes
Antenna length: 5.25 inches
Weight: 2.45 pounds
A Mobile Research researcher demo's profiling of a Motorola "Brick"
Posted by David Adams at 05:57 PM | Comments (1)
June 07, 2005
24 Hours in California
Just got back from a quick one day trip to SF and Silicon Valley. Just quick one day turnaround. It's suprisingly easy to get down to San Jose and back; and quick. I was able to coordinate business with the June Mobile Monday. Mobile Monday is a group similar to Seattle Mobile. There is a somewhat loose affiliation of Mobile Monday meetings in several states and countries (off the top of my head: San Francisco/Silicon Valley, L.A., Helsinki, London, Tokyo, Milan/Rome, and a new one in New York). Our good friend Brian Fling was giving a presentation on mobile usibility and had some meetings in S.F. so we hooked up and did some traveling together (mostly I think because I had a rental car).
So for an extra $10 I was able to "Biggee size" my rental car. Check out the beast that they rented to me. That's a bonefied 2005 Canyonero.
Twelve yards long, two lanes wide,
Sixty five tons of American pride!
Canyonero! Canyonero!
Brian Fling had a couple of late meetings in SF so I headed over to Cafe de la Presse to get some food, a cup of coffee, and do some work. Horror, of horrors; they are closed for remodeling. Ok. Crap. So 45 minutes of driving around downtown SF looking for WiFi signal near a cafe. Then some more time doing 1-way street loops looking for a place to park. I found a cool looking cafe called "Caffe Espresso" on Powell, and there was some free hotel WiFi nearby. Caffe Espresso is perfect. Good Panini and good coffee (Illy Caffe, my favorite), and decent Wifi. I was starving too. A little out of it because it was like 3:30 and I hadn't eaten all day.
Brian walked up to meet me after his meeting and we hung out and did some work until 5.
Apparently I was out of it enough from not eating, flying, and not having had any coffee all day, that when I parked the rental car, I neglected to see these signs at the end of the block.
Hey, where's the truck? Apparently the city of San Francisco has a tow truck large enough to tow a Canyonero!
Doh!. Ok, find me a cab, we've got 2 hours until the Mobile Monday meeting in Redwood City.
So about 30 minutes, a trip to the Hall of Justice (no really that's what they call it), and $180 later and we get the Canyonero back.
We made the Mobile Monday meeting with a few minutes to spare, so everything worked out ok. The topic was Usibility and it was hosted this month at OpenWave in Redwood City. Great turnout for the meeting. There were probably 70 people there and OpenWave had a big spread. It was a great meeting. I met some really interesting people who are doing some very interesting things in the mobile space. There are some pictures of the meeting on Flickr tagged with mobilemonday.
Posted by David Adams at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2005
Check that off the list
Well instead of taking Memorial Day off, I spent 9 hours in the office reconfiguring our network. Finally moved from an old OpenBSD firewall to a newer all-in-one firewall/VPN solution. The OpenBSD box has served me well. I've been using it for years. However the firewall/NAT software (ipf/ipnat) are old and not supported anymore and the VPN software that I was running (ISKAMPD) is really hard to configure and I have never been able to get a Mac client to work with it.
So now we have separate networks for corporate, research and development, and a DMZ. All the boxes have new IP addresses which freed up a couple of static IP's for us. The WiFi routers are outside the firewall where they should be, and everything is working smoothly. I had to buy some VPN client software (VPN Tracker) for the Mac boxes, because the VPM client on the Mac is too user friendly to configure if it doesn't work the first time. It is nice to finally be able to send mail and access the dev boxes from anywhere securely over a VPN. My only problem now is that I can't print from my iBook over the VPN. So I've got to get that straightened out; then we are set.
Posted by David Adams at 08:28 AM | 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 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
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 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)
April 16, 2005
Busy Busy
We've been really busy the last week working on the product so I haven't had much time to blog. Not too much to write about either since it's mostly just hours and hours on a computer writing code, profiling phones, etc. So I thought I'd throw some images up.
Posted by David Adams at 07:35 PM | Comments (2)
April 13, 2005
New Data Center
We are in the process of getting our data center set up for launch. For the non-techies out there, we need to host our servers for our database, web site, applications servers, etc., etc. somewhere where they are secure, have redundant power, redundant internet connectivity, fire detection, security, etc. So we are going with Savvis. Savvis is a very large providers that has aquired all the assets from Exodus, whom you'll remember as one of the stars of the Internet boom. So we've leased a very nice cabinet in what used to be Exodus Seattle #2. This is an amazing facility that I've done some work in, in past lives for other companies. Got a great deal from our sales rep and I am generally very impressed with their whole operation. One of the very nice things is that Savvis has their own OC-192 backbone (they purchase Cable & Wireless) and are multinational. This means when we go into Europe and Asia, we are going to be able to have our servers on the same backbone.
Posted by David Adams at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2005
Wow
The article in the Seattle Times yesterday really generated a lot of interest in what Mobile Research is doing. Lot's of phone calls and emails. I've got some great feedback from potential customers regarding what types of data they are looking for and how they want to use it. Very enlightening and it is really helping me develop our ongoing product path. The almost unanimous request seems to be for data from the European market. Looks like we'll be heading to Europe this summer to profile a lot of phones and carriers. Tough job, but someone has to do it. Actually it is going to be a LOT of difficult work to purchase and profile all those devices in a foriegn country quickly.
Posted by David Adams at 12:40 AM | Comments (5)
April 02, 2005
Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and rental car buses
The trip down to the Bay Area/Valley was a thrash. I was late to the airport, tried to use the terminal to check in and as usual was not able to. Two reasons it turns out. First the flight was cancelled. This is a pretty common occurance going/coming to/from the Bay Area on Alaska according to friends who commute a lot. There is a second reason, which is why I have not been successful using a terminal to check in for a while. Apparently my name has made it onto the TSA watch list. Super. So now when I want to fly, I need to leave an extra 30 minutes for the Airline attendant to take my ID and look me up in some government database. They gave me an 8th generation xerox form on how to contact the government and get this fixed. Yeah, that'll work. After this post I'll probably go on some other list.
So I was able to catch a flight into San Francisco but my rental car was waiting in San Jose and they were out of cars in SF. Plus the drop-off fee is $100. So I ended up taking BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) over one stop and hopping on CalTrain. $3.00 and 45 minutes later, I'm at my destination in Sunnyvale. Sure beats fighting the traffic on the 101. When I was done, I hopped back on CalTrain, got off at Santa Clara and caught a free bus to the airport to pick up my rental car.
It was like 80 ° in the valley Thursday. I was half tempted to stay. The weather in Seattle has been so bad this last week, that the ski slopes have finally opened the ski season.
Posted by David Adams at 09:48 PM | Comments (2)
Busy Week
It's would be great to be resting this weekend but I just have too much to do. I had a really busy week. Flew down to the Bay Area Wednesday to meet with some prospective clients as well as attend a Nokia developer conference on Thursday. Had a couple of great meetings and the Nokia thing was great. I got to meet and talk with the people at Nokia who are responsible for the development tools. I got a great idea of where they are headed and saw a cool demonstration of Python on the Series 60. Python is going to be an outstanding prototyping language for the Series 60. They are basically wrapping all of the Symbian API's in Python. Fast, easy and powerful. Awesome. Back Thursday night Alaska "sorry that flight has been cancelled" Airlines and back to work. I was interviewed yesterday for the Seattle Times "Business Technology" section. More on that Monday.
Posted by David Adams at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2005
Goodbye T-Mobile, Hello Cingular
I made the switch from T-Mobile to Cingular today. It was a breeze. Took about 5 minutes. I signed up for their all-you-can-eat data program since my new phone is an EDGE phone. Can't wait to check out Virgin Radio on a fast network. I drove back to the office after I left the Cingular store and within about 15 minutes got an SMS telling me that I was all switched over to Cingular andcouldnow make and receive calls on my old number. Nice. The only downside is that we don't get great reception in the office on Cingular. That problem, however can be solved with of these .
Posted by David Adams at 05:00 PM | Comments (2)
March 23, 2005
Employee #3
It was brought to my attention that I neglected to post a photo of our newest developer, Ryan. Ryan started last Monday while we were in New Orleans. He is a great Java developer with a lot of experience with mobile services, J2ME, WAP, etc. I was lucky to be able to hire him.
Posted by David Adams at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
First 50 Days
Today is the 50th official day of Mobile Research. A lot has happened in the last 50 days. Started, opened a bank account, got company checks, found office space, moved in, bought some computers, got our phones installed, hired two employees, got business cards, purchased 90+ mobile phones, bought office furniture, been to two trade shows, got business cards again, written a bunch of code and posted 46 blog entries.
By the end of the next 50 days, I hope to have a real income stream from the first service. We are on track for the product launch in April. We are being diligent to our dev process and project plan and we aren't going to try to launch this product until it is complete and of the quality that it needs to be. Having said that, we are in a rush to get it done.
Here's looking forward to the next 50 days.
Posted by David Adams at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2005
Shots of New Orleans
These don't have anything to do with the startup or mobile, but I wanted to share some pics with friends. So click on the pick if you want to see what we were eatin' in New Orleans.
Posted by David Adams at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Gotta love FedEx
The company that printed our new cards and didn't have them by Friday (no names) FedEx'd our new cards so we should have them in the morning. One moreitemchecked off the list. Good thing too, because I have almost given away all the cards I brought with me.
Posted by David Adams at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)
Day One - CTIA
Great day today. We walked into the convention and smack into Sean P. Diddy Combs. That guy is really pretty short.
Walked the floor and checked out the new devices. There are some pretty cool new phones. DoCoMo has a big floor presence and are showing some amazing devices. They had a cool QR code display/demo. I guess iMode is really taking off in Europe.
Only did the show for half the day. The good tracks are all tomorrow. So we came back the hotel and worked the rest of the day. We're on our way out now to "Mother's" which is supposed to be a great local place to eat. Then on to the Fierce Wireless and OpenWave parties to meet some people.
Posted by David Adams at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2005
Arrived New Orleans
We're here. Great flight out of Seattle. Not thrilled that SeaTac doesn't have free WiFi. Paying for it is like using a pay toilet. It would be great if they would figure that out sooner than later.
Got into Dallas early and our flight out was late. Charles mentioned that that always seems to happen at DFW. So I got a little work done and caught a haircut in the airport. That's something I meant to get done before we left. Check that off the list.
Into New Orleans, scary-as-hell ride from the airport in a cab with NO suspension at about 95 mph. Arrived at Le Pavillon Hotel and got a free upgrade to the Governors Suite. Nice! Can't beat that. Quick shower and we are off to a party at Pat O'Brians.
Check out the room. Sure beats the place I stayed last time I was at CTIA in New Orleans
Bonus: Someone in the hotel has their iTunes shared out on the hotel network and it has some great music. Right now I am listening to "Fire on the Bayou" by the Meters. One of the best New Orleans bands ever.
Posted by David Adams at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
Up and gone
Up, packed, caffienated, and off to the airport with Charles. Got about 4 hours sleep. Didn't get much done on the web site and still have some other things to take care of. I can't send email from my laptop unless I am in the office; so that might be a problem on this trip. I guess I'll have to deal with this stuff on the fly.
The good news is that for some reason they put us in first class from Seattle to Dallas. That means I will actually be able to get some work done on the plane.
I'll be blogging some of the trip, but might have to store-it-and-post-it-later when I can't get on the net.
Off to the Big Easy.
Posted by David Adams at 06:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2005
This is Why I am not a Systems Administrator
I've been trying to get everything done by tommorow so I can leave for CTIA in New Orleans without having to worry about it later. Fat chance! I've spent all day trying to get our network working. I bought two different Netgear VPN boxes, and neither of them are working. After about 12 hours of fiddling, ROM upgrades, and tests, I am still at where I started this morning. On top of that, I have disassembled the entire network trying to get the VPN working so I could access our servers remotely/securely.
On top of the network problems, I've got a new employee starting Monday morning, I've got a bunch of other work to do, I need to write the copy for the new website and I leave for the airport in about 8 hours. Well, not every day is going to be a winner.
Posted by David Adams at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)
March 11, 2005
Hectic Week
WellI got back from San Francisco and am slammed trying to get everything checked off my list of things to do before we leave for New Orleans on Sunday. Had trip and met some great people at the Mobile Monday Meeting.
I've spent absolutely toomuch time trying to get payroll on track. My original plan was to use QuickBooks' payroll service. Quick, cheap and it plugs right into your QuickBooks; Unless... you have the Macintosh version. None of the payroll services work with Mac. So on to Plan B.
So I called up ADP, which I've used in the past and got an account set up. Took a while since Ihadn't received all my Labor and Industries paperwork yet. Yuck.
Anyways we are set to go now, cut the second payroll this week. Did the first one manually without deductions so those are getting made up in the second round.
Starting to feel like a realcompany.
Now back to that list...
Posted by David Adams at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2005
San Francisco
I'm in San Francisco just for 2 days to hit the Game Developers Conference (big mobile track this year) as well as coincedentaly hit the Mobile Monday meeting which is tonight.
In my never-ending quest to find great coffees shops with free wifi, i've wandered into the awesome "Cafe de la Presse" near Union Square. So a couple of hours work on the pending web site then I'm off to get a beer somewhere and onto Mobile Monday.
I'd forgotten how great San Francisco is. I could live here easily. It is sunny and 65° today. It's a nice change from Seattle's sunny and 45 °
Posted by David Adams at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2005
The Upside of a Startup
It's nice to be able to work from anywhere. The great side of being in startup is that the signal to noise ratio is really high. Not a lot of B.S. meetings that just eat up a lot of time. Since we aren't tied down to being in the office (and we get antsy after a few hours coding), and since we have laptops with WiFi, and mobile phones, we can work from just about anywhere where we can get on the Internet. So to break the monotony of the office we work out of our favorite coffee shops quite a bit. Today we spent the morning at Top Pot Doughnuts. If you live in Seattle and haven't been to Top Pot, do yourself a favor. They have the best Doughnuts you've ever had. It's on Fifth downtown under the monorail.
Posted by David Adams at 04:37 PM | Comments (1)
March 01, 2005
Up to Our Ears in Dried Cranberries, Smoked Salmon, and Russian Tea Cakes
Our landlords sent us a gift basket to welcome Mobile Research to the building. That was so nice of them.
Posted by David Adams at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)
February 27, 2005
And then there were three
I've hired another developer. A great dev that worked for me at my previous place of employment, left a few months ago to go to another startup. I've been trying to hire him since he left but the timing wasn't right. Well it looks like the timing worked out after all because he is looking to get back into the mobile spaceand has agreed to come work at Mobile Research. He starts in 2 weeks. I wish it were sooner.
Posted by David Adams at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2005
1-800-@#$-@#%&
We have been buying a lot of devices from Amazon.com this week. I accidentally selected "free shipping", which is not good when you are buying 18 phones. So I hit the finish button and it came back up and told me that the phones would be arriving in about 4 weeks. Turns out if you elect to go with the free shipping, they ship them all at once and that takes a while for a large order of phones. Unfortunately, the user experience for "undoing" a purchase on Amazon is not a good one. We tried for about a half an hour to make sense of their "cancel an order" page (which does not allow you to do much, especially cancel an order). Customer support? Sure , send an email. Not good when you want to cancel a BIG order and need to get the stuff sent ASAP. So after MUCH hunting and googling, I finally found the elusive customer support number that they don't post anywhere on their site.
Here it is. Write it down because you will probably need it in the future.
Amazon.com Customer Support
1-800-201-7575
Posted by David Adams at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2005
According to Weather.com it feels like 42°
They turn the heat off (old remodeled wharehouse with radiators) at 5:00. That makes it tough to work late nights when it is only 45° here tonight and dropping. It has been really beautiful this week but cold. Well a quick trip to the closest Bartell's Drugs and I'm back to coding with my newly aquired portable oscillating ceramic Honeywell space heater under my desk.
Posted by David Adams at 08:19 PM | Comments (3)
February 20, 2005
My Kingdom for a Nokia 6620
The first service that Mobile Research is going to offer; the one we are crunching to get finished for launch by CTIA on March 14, requires a LOT of mobile phones for development. So Charles and I went out today to buy a bunch of phones. We are in a time crunch so the plan was to just start buying phones and find a better/cheaper model down the road after the launch.
So much for Plan A. We went to 3 Cingular stores and they wouldn't sell us the phones. Full price retail (as advertised) and the wouldn't sell them to us. We got several different reasons, but basically it comes down to the fact that they are not in the business of selling handsets; but airtime.
I understand that, but I am a subscriber and they won't sell me the great smartphone with killer graphics and nifty features for full price. How do they expect that they are ever going to get any revenue from the higher end services and applications if they'll only sell you a new phone if you've waited a year since your last one?
On to Plan B ...
Posted by David Adams at 05:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2005
Three Things
When I decided to start a mobile wireless company, I had three basic requirements for the business model that had to be met.
1. It had be challenging, creative and fun. I'd been working at a company that had a ton of potential but wasn't doing anything very challenging.
2. Global market. Of course any idea I was going to have would be in mobile, but I wanted to make sure that the addressable market for thhe products/services was International if not potentially global. There is just so much going on outside of the U.S. in mobile I wanted to make sure I had a chance to be a part of it.
3. I didn't want to rely on carriers for revenue. The carriers can not be in the revenue stream anywhere. The last two mobile companies I've worked for, we were beholden to wireless carriers for our channel. That situation was frustrating and as the mobile markets heat up it is going to get maddening for content and application providers who need deck placement.
With mobile development tools and service company I've been able to do all of these things. I'm very excited about where the mobile industry is going and the opportunities that are coming with the increased speed of the market and the networks.
Posted by David Adams at 04:32 AM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005
First Employee - Charles
Mobile Research's first employee started today. Charles is a guy I worked with at my previous employer. For starters, Charles in going to be spending most of his time aquiring a LOT of mobile phones and setting up accounts.
Posted by David Adams at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2005
Countdown
Today marks the one month point until the launch of the first product.
I've decided that the benefits of launching the product during the CTIA Wireless 2005 show in New Orleans in March outweigh the difficulties of trying to get it done by then.
The next 29 days should be a real thrash. I've got my first employee starting on Thursday so that will help, but it is still going to be an interesting month.
In the next 29 days, I have to:
Move into a new office space
Finish the product application
Test the product
Buy a whole ton of mobile phones
Create a corporate website
Start a new employee
Set up a data center
Write the press materials
...Plus all the day-to-day operations
Beats working for someone else =)
Posted by David Adams at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
"Things are going to start happening to me now!"
Qwest showed up and installed my phone lines today. I was pretty lucky with the numbers. I got an old Seattle prefix (282) and the numbers for the voice hunt group and the FAX are sequential. I also got a 1-800 number that is one prefix digit off from matching the main number.
The space is old and has a ton of old phone cables that I'm going to have to clear out. I had the telephone guy just drop the lines to the demark; I'm going to do all the line installation when we build out the space. Meanwhile, we'll just run some cables and duct tape em to the floor.
Posted by David Adams at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2005
Business Cards
Now we're cooking with gasoline. I've been champing at the bit to get my cards printed for weeks.
I just picked them up; just in time for the Seattle Mobile meeting tonight.
I am of the school of belief that you really shouldn't go cheap on business cards. So I payed a designer to come up with a design, and we went back and forth on the design for a few weeks. I am very happy with the way they came out. We had a short run done at a local printer and bindery on a digital press. I'm glad we did the short run so I could see what the cards would look like. You really can't get the right effect until you see a card printed and cut to size. Incidentally I am not wild about the digital printing, so for the next batch we are going to go with an offset printer.
Posted by David Adams at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2005
Milestones
Well, today is my 36th Birthday. I was born at the begining of the Nixon administration. Man that makes me feel old.
So I had a very busy day today. Thought I'd take the day off but I was slammed with meetings and errands all day. The biggest thing though, is that I signed on some new office space that I have been looking at. So that is a huge milestone for a startup. Now I have a place to keep all flotsam and jetsom that companies aquire. I'll post some pics of the new space as soon as I figure out how to get them off of my phone withough paying T-Mobile.
Posted by David Adams at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
Mobile Research
The name of the startup is "Mobile Research".
Here is the new logo.
Created by my good friends at Fling Media.
The URL for the website is
http://www.mobileresearch.net but right now there is just a placeholder there until the launch in March.
Posted by David Adams at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2005
The Big Idea
So the first question I get when I tell people I am starting a company is something along the lines of "What is the Big Idea?". So here is it :
"To help mobile application and content providers to develop their products cheaper, faster, and better."
The demand: As anyone who works in mobile wireless can tell you and anyone who gets into the industry finds out very quickly, There are a lot of roadblocks to developing and launching an application or mobile content chanel. Most of the roadblocks stem from the problem that in any given mobile market, there are numerous carriers, each with their own requirements and specifications as well as multiple device manufacturers and hundreds of different devices (handsets). Now multiply those numbers of carriers and handsets times the number of different programming languages, audio formats, network types, screen sizes/color depths, browsers, etc., and you start to get an idea of the scope of the problem. And it is all details.
So the focus of my company is to make tools and provide services to mobile application developers and content providers to help if not solve the problem of developing and deploying on multiple devices, on multiple carriers, in multiple mobile markets.
Sounds simple enough...
Posted by David Adams at 03:19 PM | Comments (4)
February 03, 2005
Virtual Office
Well, I've been working on the business plan since about October 2003, but really diligently since I left Dwango last August. I have been doing most of my coding on my dev box in my apartment, but most days I spend a lot of my time working at my office-away-from-home; Zeitgeist Coffee in historic Pioneer Square. They have great coffee, Top Pot Donuts (mmmmarghgghhg Top Pot Donuts!!!), great sandwiches, and FREE wifi.
Posted by David Adams at 02:23 PM | Comments (1)
February 02, 2005
Some Background
Some Background - I'll keep this pretty short. I got into the Internet pretty early (1992) and worked through the 90's in the Internet space. Had a software contracting company through the late 90's that focused mostly on server-side database drivenweb applications. Got into mobile wireless data when the first WAP enabled phone came out in 1999 (The NeoPoint on Sprint). Spent 2000 doing WAP and after a trip to Scandanavia in early 2001 got very interested in SMS and downloadable ringtones/images/vCards etc. (Thanks Jan!) In mid-2001 I started (with a partner) a company called Over-The-Air Wireless which provided monophonic ringtones to carriers and other partners. We built the company for 2 years and had 6 smaller carriers that we provided ringtones, screensavers, downloadable images (operator logos), along with billing, tracking, web interfaces, etc. We were copying the Scandanavian model. This was really early on for mobile data. We are talking about the Nokia 8290, etc. phones. Also, this is right after 9/11 and things were pretty slow in the U.S. for entrepreneurs.
We sold OTA Wireless in 2003 to Dwango Wireless, and I went to work as VP or Research and Development, later VP of Technology.
August 2004 I left Dwango and have been doing some consulting and working on the business plan for my next Big Idea.
Posted by David Adams at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2005
MobileStartup.com
Welcome to MobileStartup.com . My name is David Adams and this is my attempt at journaling my experiences starting up a mobile software company. This is the start of my 4th company in 11 years and I thought it might be a good idea to get it down for posterity's sake. Also, in the past, my friends and family have always asked about how the company/work are going and it can be hard to relate the experience and what goes on in a startup to those who are outside of it. So this is an attempt to share some of what I go through as I try to build this company.
Also, since I aminvolved in the mobile wireless industry (and that is the focus of the company) I will probably be posting news/opinions about what is going on in mobile wireless.
Posted by David Adams at 10:34 AM | Comments (1)