Nathan Eagle's Forum Nokia Blog

Android / Symbian Merger Predicted

natecow — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:03:03 +0300

Analysts at J. Gold Associates are predicting a merger between Symbian and Android in the next three to six months. While I'm not convinced these guys have much more insight into this market than we do, I think it could be great news if they turn out to be correct. An increasing number of my students are becoming avid supporters of mobile open source everything and I don't see much downside of a unified, open source mobile phone operating system. Will a Symbian / Android merger change life as we know it?

http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209600592

from Engadget

SIM Apps: A single application that will run on all 2+billion phones??

natecow — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 13:18:17 +0200

Here’s the problem: I live in a country (Kenya) where millions of people have extremely low-end phones (most phones don’t even have WAP browser, not to mention Java-support). I need another way to develop applications for these millions (1+ billion globally) phones besides building standard SMS-based applications that depend on the user remembering the relevant phone number and keywords to text...

After talking with Ken Banks and others at the W3C Symposium on the Mobile Web for the Developing World in Bangalore, we stumbled upon another option which I know very little about: SIM-based applications.

Now back in Kenya, I’m finally noticing that Safaricom has loaded up each of their SIM cards with applications that provide the user with real-time information about traffic conditions in Nairobi, news, sports information, etc. And the kicker is that my six-year old Nokia 3310 seems to run these SIM apps just as well as my E61.

So my questions to the readers out there:

1. How do these SIM applications work?

When I send a request for traffic information, does that simply send a SMS to the service provider with the relevant keywords? Or is it a service request – like dialing *144# to check your balance? Or can it be either?

2. How do we develop our own SIM applications?

There seem to be a couple of SIM application toolkits out there. Which one should we use to develop our applications? What are the differences? Tips/pointers/advice would be very welcome...

3. What methods can we use to deploy these applications across Kenya?

Service providers seem to pre-load their sim cards with these applications. However, if I had the green light from Kenya’s two service providers, it seems like I should be able to instantly have my SIM application on every phone in Kenya using the over-the-air (OTA) system already in place. This looks like an extremely powerful way to roll-out an application. Has anyone had any experience with OTA installations of new sim apps?

Unfortunately, the most likely case is that I won’t be able to get any cooperation from the service providers to install my application on their sims. In this scenario, what other ways can I get a SIM application deployed in Kenya? Can I implement my own OTA service with my own SMS gateway?

I know phones can read and write data to the SIM card – is it possible to get a mobile phone application that will install a new service directly on the SIM card? That way it could be possible to get the tens of thousands of local entrepreneurs who sell scratch cards to also offer a service involving putting a customer’s sim card into their own phone and writing the desired application directly to the card.

Would love to get some feedback from the developer community about the validity of this rather low-tech concept... Thanks!

Who Owns YOUR Location?

natecow — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 13:25:35 +0200

I recently finished serving as an expert witness in a court case in which I had to provide my opinion about the possible locations of a mobile phone given cellular tower IDs and base station positions. While this information had to be subpoenaed from Verizon as part of the litigation, it may be disconcerting for some to acknowledge that in databases distributed throughout the world, mobile phone service providers are storing records of location and social network data for one out of three people on Earth.

Besides the data’s obvious utility in courtroom trial cases like the one I was testifying in, I’m curious about the long-term consequences of commercial companies recording a time series of locations and communication events for billions of people. Who legally owns this data? Because carriers like T-Mobile & Sprint now publicly disclose the locations of their towers, base station locations are no longer the corporate secret they once were, and subsequently can’t be used to prevent customers from obtaining the location information collected about them. If I ask my T-Mobile representative to provide me with my call log history, they don’t seem to have a problem with disclosing my communication events to me. However, when asked to provide me with an approximation of the locations associated with each of my calls, they still claim this is prohibited. So, empirically at least, it doesn’t appear that the customers own the location data collected about them. And if the customers don’t own this information, then I imagine by default, the mobile operators are the ones who own the records of movement data for all of their customers.

What guidelines do mobile operators have to abide by when using this data? Can it be sold to a 3rd party? How much would a detailed time-series of my locations over the last five years go for on Ebay? Who would be the highest bidder? Urban planning consultants interested in public transportation usage? Companies working on developing the next census? Wall St traders interested in where I’m doing my grocery shopping?

This data clearly has value. Already carriers are selling real-time location information to companies who use this information to extrapolate the location and speed of the individual and use this data to offer road traffic updates and forecasts. As the major carriers’ billion dollar networks turn into a commodity infrastructure, mobile operators are going to be ever more interested in monetizing the location data generated from their customers. (“This speeding ticket has been brought to you courtesy of <insert your mobile service provider of choice>.”)

So here is an exercise for the interested reader – call up your own service provider and ask for the location information associated with your call logs. Let me know if you’ve had any luck.

EPROM - Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles

natecow — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 13:44:08 +0300

Wanted to spread the word that we will soon be launching EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research On Mobiles) jointly at MIT and the University of Nairobi. The premise behind the project comes from the fact that today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of mobile phone users worldwide (1.4 billion mobile phone subscribers live in the developing world!). We believe the adoption of new technologies and services within this vast, emerging market will drive innovation and help shape the future of the mobile phone – and we want to help make this happen. We have focused on Africa because it is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, and I’ve moved to Kenya for the year to get the project off the ground.

What Kenyans are starting to do with their phones is amazing. Today, in my small town of Kilifi, I can buy milk, pay for a taxi ride, even check the local vegetable prices on my mobile... I describe this phenomenon in more detail here:

http://web.mit.edu/eprom/whyafrica.html

One of the key activities of EPROM is to this facilitate the development and deployment of these new mobile phone applications through the creation of a mobile phone programming curriculum for African computer science students. In Kenya, only 200,000 households have electricity, which has not seemed to have deterred the almost 6 million Kenyan mobile phone subscribers. Having an infrastructure of devices that have the computational horsepower of the PCs from a decade ago while not being dependent on a steady supply of electricity makes exclusively teaching Western PC-centric computer programming in African universities increasingly misplaced. At such a critical point in the evolution of computing technology, Africa’s adoption and innovative use of custom mobile phone applications confirms the need to equip African computer science students with the skills to develop mobile phone applications specifically for African users. More information on the curriculum is here:

http://web.mit.edu/eprom/courses.html

Cheers from Kenya...

-Nathan.