Posted by Jason on Sep 24, 2008 in
Consumer Advice |
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Last week I was invited to speak on a panel at Om Malik’s Mobilize conference. The topic was “What creates good mobile user experience?” and other speakers included Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku (now at Google), Jeff Taylor from the carrier “3″, and UX expert Rachel Hinman from AdaptivePath. Moderator Dylan Tweney from Wired wrote a great summary of the panel and you can watch the whole discussion at the Mobilize site. (That link doesn’t take you directly there; click “Thinking Experientially” in the column on the right of that page.)
My advice to the audience? Remember that in mobile there are lots of factors that are both outside your control and unreliable: the connection, the device, how your service is delivered and provisioned. If you want to create a superb user experience, you need to control every part of the process as Apple and RIM try to do, or you need to have complete confidence that the parts that you do not control work very well – which is why so many application developers are concentrating on the iPhone.
Can a startup emulate Apple or RIM? Yes, especially if it focuses on simple, single-purpose devices. Think of the Flip camcorder – not wireless, but mobile – or the new Peek email device, or even the original Blackberry.
Another approach is to build software and services for carriers and handset manufacturers to help them improve the user experience on their devices. Aricent is a very successful Valley startup that built the Celltop interface for Alltel, and Ontela makes cameraphones much easier to use.
Skydeck has so far dodged the problem of how to build great applications for your phone by building applications for the web that complement your phone. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to the phone.)
What won’t work is building an application that has a gorgeous user interface, but that takes half an hour of work by a skilled technician to install on your user’s phone. Unfortunately, most mobile startups keep trying this approach.
Posted by jaked on Aug 28, 2008 in
Announcements,
Programming,
ocaml |
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At Skydeck we use ONC RPC to communicate between parts of our server infrastructure. ONC RPC is an old, simple, reliable remote procedure call protocol. It fits well with OCaml since it deals in values and functions, rather than objects and methods, and it has a good implementation in Ocamlnet. However, since all of our ONC RPC clients and servers are written in OCaml, it is a little annoying to have to write interfaces using the somewhat clumsy ONC RPC specification language. It’s nice to be able to stay in the OCaml type system from end to end.
(more…)
Posted by Jason on Jul 29, 2008 in
Mobile Market |
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On Friday TechCrunch invited me to speak at their Mobile Web Wars roundtable. You can view the webcast, or read Dan Farber’s summary for CNet.
The most interesting thing that I learned was how many more people are willing to experiment with applications on the iPhone compared to any other phone on the market. Skeptics like to point out that of the 3 billion mobile phones on earth, fewer than 10 million are iPhones; they account for only 2% of the phones in America. But Loopt CEO Sam Altman said that the iPhone already accounts for 25% of his users, even though his app is available on every Verizon, Sprint, and Boost phone. And Pandora CEO Tom Jordan claimed that more people downloaded his app for the iPhone in the first few days that the device was on sale than have tried Pandora on any other AT&T phone – and Pandora is pre-loaded on every other AT&T phone.
Posted by Jason on Jul 28, 2008 in
Announcements |
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Tell your friends – Skydeck is now in public beta. Anyone in the US can now sign up for Skydeck at http://skydeck.com/signup
Skydeck is no longer restricted to Firefox either. You can use any browser running on Windows XP or Vista, in particular Internet Explorer. (Mac users still have to run Firefox for now. We hear the cries of Safari users and will get to you as soon as we can.)
We announced our public beta at last week’s MobileBeat 2008 conference, where Skydeck also won its first award: Boldest Idea.
Thanks to VentureBeat for organizing a great event, and thanks to the judges for recognizing that what we’re doing is very bold indeed. We want to help everyone in the world keep track of their phone calls, their text messages, and all the people that they call and text. As one of the judges pointed out, while lots of companies say they can help you to lower your phone bill, Skydeck wants to make every call more valuable – by making sure that you never forget a call, you know who you need to call back today, and you know who you really ought to call when you have time (hint: Mom).
And thank you – Skydeck beat more than 50 other companies to qualify for MobileBeat, because you voted for us.
Posted by Jason on Jul 14, 2008 in
Announcements |
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Today we’re launching several new features that make Skydeck useful every single day: daily data, so you can check who called you yesterday and who you need to call back; an easy way to share contact information with people in your network; and the ability to search your network for people that you don’t know.
As always, we wanted you to be first to know. Thanks again for your great feedback and support during this private beta. We’ll be announcing our public beta very soon!
Daily Data
You’ve told us that you love being able to see and sort your calls and text messages in Skydeck, but you’ve also asked us where are the calls you made yesterday, or last week? It’s our most requested feature.
(more…)
Posted by jaked on Jul 1, 2008 in
Announcements,
Programming,
ocaml |
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The Skydeck API had only been out a few days when someone began a Ruby binding for it. We’re thrilled that there’s been so much interest already, and look forward to some great applications built against our API.
Of course, we like OCaml here, so we are pleased to announce the release of an OCaml binding to the API. You can find it on our developer downloads page.
As part of our API design we decided to use OAuth, so you can allow applications to access your data without giving away your Skydeck username and password. We are also pleased to announce the release of ooauth, an OCaml implementation of OAuth.
Ooauth implements both the consumer and service provider parts of OAuth (we use it in our server and in the API binding above), so you can use it to implement your own API or to consume the many APIs that use OAuth, such as the Google Data APIs. It is also available on the developer downloads page.
Posted by Dan on Jun 19, 2008 in
Announcements |
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Skydeck is happy to say that we are a nominee for MobileBeat 2008: VentureBeat’s top mobile applications competition. Help us win!
If we get enough votes, we’ll be invited to speak at their upcoming conference on July 24, 2008.
VentureBeat is a top technology blog, and an appearance at their conference would give us a great opportunity to promote our service, bring more users to the site, and continue our mission of helping people get the most from their phone and phone bills.
Here’s what you need to do to vote for Skydeck:
1. Click here to register for a voting ID.
2. Once you’re signed up, click here to vote for Skydeck. Skydeck is listed under the “Infrastructure / Service Companies” section.
3. You get 5 votes, but you can only vote once every 24 hours. Please vote today and every day until June 24th, the cutoff.
Thanks for your support!
UPDATE: Skydeck has been selected to present at Mobilebeat! Thanks for your votes, we’re looking forward to the event.
Posted by Jason on Jun 14, 2008 in
Mobile Market |
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Every few years the Valley gets excited about the potential for location-based applications. This time I think the excitement is justified, because of the iPhone. VentureBeat invited me to write a column to explain why.
Posted by Jason on Jun 11, 2008 in
Announcements |
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If you’re curious about how we came up with the idea for Skydeck and what we’re planning to do next, the tech blog ReadWriteWeb published an interview with me today that answers those questions and should raise a few more.
Posted by Jason on Jun 10, 2008 in
Mobile Market,
Phones |
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I don’t write about the iPhone that often – Skydeck’s goal is to support every phone in the world – but it has had an extraordinary impact on the industry and I have a few predictions.
Lots of people have predictions though, so let me review my past performance before I ask you to take me seriously.
Jan 10, 2007 (the day following the launch):
“Forget about the specs, this is all about the user interface.”
Check.
“Don’t blame Apple for going with Cingular instead of Verizon. Blame Verizon… The iPhone and products like it will ultimately force Verizon open.”
Check.
“Fred Wilson thinks that the iPhone will have no impact on sales of the Blackberry and that the market was wrong to sell off RIM. I disagree.”
Check. The two companies are now competing directly. (more…)
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