Taken from my notes originally posted to my blog:
From Jordy: these are some slides that I didn't actually present but I probably should have just to set the stage a bit. Anyway here they are now for your viewing pleasure: \"If it doesn't work on a billion phones, don't bother\"
led by: jordy, social games at digital chocolate, bebo.com
skyhook - company in boston, makes a firefox extension (loki) - senses nearby wifi networks, tries to triangulate your location based upon SSIDs that it can see (they built a DB that maps SSID to location)
standards in mobile
- WAP is pretty much a standard
- SMS is finally a standard (as of like 2 years ago)
if you get embedded on the phone - you're golden. People don't download java apps to phone (too hard, poor experience, etc)
barriers to entry
- downloadable apps - have to do engineering per phone
- barriers on cost side - costs money sms (e-mail to sms gateway works for hackers)
- distribution - have to find ways to get people to find your app
- usability - if it isn't sms or wap, people probably won't figure it out and use it
admob - mobile ads, works in wap browser; can target ads per country, operator, handset, etc.
- any hacker dude can add admob to their mobile site
- also, can buy ads, to help distribution
wurfl - open source mobile device db
Papers and other sources:
twitter is another great example of what can work in mobile - so stupid simple, which is key to their success
mobilemonday.net - tracks mobile industry news, has pointers to lots of other good stuff
