by DaveLaFontaine on August 30, 2010
I’m still not sure if this will take off or not – but I have so many bookmarks, plugins and other junk that I’ve accumulated over the years of tweaking Firefox that the prospect of being able to port that user environment over to my mobile device is intoxicating.
The release is codenamed Fennec, and one of its coolest features is that on touchscreen phones, when you swipe from side to side on the screen, that will bring up the menus for tabs, bookmarks and settings. Which has long been one of the thorniest issues for me on mobile browsers – I’ve gotten spoiled with the real estate on desktop web displays (well, ever since I upgraded to a Dell 24″ monitor), and the narrowness of the mobile web has meant for a lot more poking and pecking at tiny buttons with my 2XLT fingers.
This Fennec logo looks kinda like one of the logos you'd see on a cheesy 70s superhero show, where some batwing-eared alien race is secretly plotting world domination. Which is actually kinda cool, really.
From Mozilla’s release:
The main focus of this release is to increase performance and responsiveness to user actions. This is being implemented using two major technologies, “Electrolysis” and “Layers.” This Alpha release includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive JavaScript is running. The upcoming beta release will start taking advantage of Layers to greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video.
(snip)
developers have the power to use the latest Web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to to build fast, powerful and beautiful mobile apps and add-ons that can reach many millions of devices.
The other exciting prospect for designers is that if you are able to design for Firefox’s quirks on the desktop web, you should (if there was a way to make that should stick out even more without invoking a blink or marquee tag, I would) be able to just downsize a bit for the mobile browser. Or, given the rapid rate at which screen resolutions on handhelds is increasing, maybe not even have to change the layout all that much.
by DaveLaFontaine on August 18, 2010
“This is the year of location”
All the pundits & usual techhype suspects have moved on from the Greek Chorus-like droning of “This is the year of mobile,” to the new barely comprehensible marketing meme of location-based mobile … well, mobile whatever. Swing a search engine by the tail and you’ll quickly run across a plethora of articles claiming that the Next Big Thing is geo-aware search. Or geo-aware social media. Or GPS-enabled hyperlocal BT-enhanced in-app advertising. Or geo-aware NFC-fueled m-commerce with an iTunes preference-recommendations twist that also locates all the socks that somehow went missing in the dryer.
(*deep breath*)
OK. One thing at a time. The business opportunity for developers looking to launch their own pet projects and start generating positive revenue looks a lot more do-able when the potential to start snarfing up ad revenues (even if they are rather slim for at least the next couple years) is added to the mix. Apple’s increasing move to start leveraging the m-commerce possibilities of its iTunes store (currently 500 million strong) are, or should be, a real wake-up call to retailers.
The task for designers is figuring out how to incorporate the Geolocation API into their new HTML5 designs (hey – you got this far into a post before you saw the words HTML5 – must be some kinda record). Here’s a nifty little Javascript to play around with:
<script language=”Javascript”>
if (navigator.geolocation) {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {
ZoomToLocation(position.coords.latitude, position.coords.longitude);
});
}
else {
if (document.getElementById(“GeoAPI”)) {
document.getElementById(“GeoAPI”).innerHTML
= “I’m sorry but Geolocation services are not supported by your browser.″;
document.getElementById(“GeoAPI”).style.color = “#FF0000″;
}
}
function ZoomToLocation (mylat, mylong) {
if (document.getElementById(“GeoAPI”)) {
document.getElementById(“GeoAPI”).innerHTML = “mylat: ” + mylat + “ mylong: ” + mylong;
}
}
</script>
If you want to see a live example of how the GeoLocation API tag works on an HTML5 page, check out this demo.
Here it is on an iPhone (quite accurate):
And here it is on a Firefox browser (only very generally accurate – dunno if this is because it’s homing in on my server, or if the designer made it less accurate so it wouldn’t be so creepy):
by DaveLaFontaine on August 17, 2010
News Corp. announced that they’re launching a “national newspaper” that will be distributed only on digital platforms
This is part of an overall rush to the tablet platform on the part of newspaper & magazine publishers, who are hoping that the willingness of the public to pay for content on this new platform will help them offset the dramatic erosion of ad revenues. If this succeeds, it will be the first big tablet-only news launch, designed from the ground up to deliver news, entertainment, gossip & Fox Undercover/When Animals Attack-style videos. According to an excellent LA Times article,
The initiative, which would directly compete with the New York Times, USA Today and other national publications, is the latest attempt by a major media organization to harness sexy new devices to reach readers who increasingly consume their news on the go. The development underscores how the iPad is transforming the reading habits of consumers much like the iPod changed how people listen to music.
Oh, if only that proves to be true.
Love 'em or hate 'em, the Fox News screamers do generate an audience. The new national newspaper will have content generated by the New York Post ... which may put it into competition with other sites like TMZ or Gawker.
On my Sips from the Firehose blog, I’ve written extensively about my efforts to help newspapers and media organizations find reliable revenue streams for their news & entertainment content. While the models for news going forward are starting to come into focus, the process has generated more than a little controversy, anger, despair and suicidal depression. Not that these emotions are all that unusual these days, given the generally dismal state of the world economy, but they are happening to a class of people who are not only exceptional whiners, but who have the language skills & high-speed internet connections to share their bilious opinions with the rest of the world — journalists.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the immediate vitriol heaped upon Murdoch when he announced this latest digital news product. Many in the news industry have long regarded Murdoch with mingled loathing and disdain (full disclosure: I worked for Murdoch early in my career and was once personally reamed out by the man. Read my book if you really wanna know more). But the gratuitous shots from TechCrunch were unexpected:
Surely no-one, not even a dyed-in-the-wool newspaperman like Murdoch, would be stupid enough to launch a new national title in the current climate.
(snip)
Murdoch, however, is nothing if not delusional. … To say that’s a bold move is like describing the Charge of the Light Brigade in similar terms. Except that 278 people paid for the Charge of the Light Brigade.
No, this is way more than bold: this is the last gasp effort of a man who knows the end is nigh.
Jeez, I guess the old coot oughta just lie down & die. Maybe the writer was so incensed by the Fox News coverage strategy that he just hates Rupert and wishes him ill.
Look, here’s the deal: I know that a national newspaper is a counterintuitive move right now. Most people on the internets are working the revenue from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. That is, like AOL’s “Patch” or TBD.com, they are starting with hyper-local coverage to tap into the 85% of the ad market that ISN’T national brands, and then looking to scale up from an established base. And yeah, I know that Murdoch’s last attempt at generating a product that appeals to younger readers was … um, less than successful:
Thelondonpaper (hey, that's how they spelled it) published its last edition in 2009. There was a brief surge in free dailies in the late 'Oughts, but the collapse of the global ad market hammered them into oblivion.
But I have to give News Corp. credit. They’re at least trying something new, rather than churning out shallow shovelware versions of their existing print products, crippled with crazy DRM schemes and “Look at me! Look at me!” designs that bring back visions of the Bad Old Days of Web 1.0, with blink tags, marquees and animated GIFs everywhere. Rupert does have a history of hiring capable people and then just setting them loose in a far less bureaucratic atmosphere than exists at other great big media megacorporations (I’m looking at you, Time-Warner-AOL-Disney-Comcast-Universal-NBC). You don’t have to play the tired old “Captain, may I?” game all that much in the House of Murdoch. The man made his billions by being a daring (reckless?) entrepreneur, and the organization reflects that spirit.
Which, come to think of it, is very much akin to the spirit you find in most tech startups.
by DaveLaFontaine on July 23, 2010
$8 billion a year to POTS; “we are no longer on the right track”
Anyone who’s traveled around the world has probably noticed what Janine and I have these last couple of years: we can usually access the internet much faster in other countries than we can here in the good ol’ US of A, where the internet was invented (take a bow, Al Gore!). When we were in Costa Rica, even in a hotel lobby, web pages just zoomed into view; we attributed the speed to the massive online gambling infrastructure that’s been built in Costa Rica recently. (It’ll be interesting to see what happens long-term to Costa Rica; it’s my hope that the law of unintended consquences will kick in, and the somewhat sordid gambling biz will actually result in more legit businesses using that bandwidth to grow & flourish.)
Anyway, a report this week from the FCC is, in the suble-bordering-on-inscrutable language known as “Bureaucratese” a cattle prod to the backsides of all the various carriers, cablers, telcos and gougers currently charging fat fees for puny bandwidth. Herein a sample:
“The report points out the great broadband successes in the United States, including as many as 290 million Americans who have gained access to broadband over the past decade,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. “But the
statute requires more. It requires the agency to reach a conclusion about whether all — not some, not most — Americans are being served in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
That’s not happening, he added.
Additionally, it appears that the revenues from the tax on long-distance service that we all grit our teeth and pay each month, and that was supposedly earmarked for improving service just like this has been instead diverted to Plain Old Telephone service (POTS).
More and more, we’re seeing governmental agencies starting to recognize that bringing high-speed internet to communities is an essential ingredient to lifting the local economy. This might have particular impact in the rural areas of the U.S. where coverage is lagging (and where the challenges are most severe), because the farmers/loggers/fishermen might be able to circumvent the supply bottlenecks that are eating up any hope of profits.
Still, I am reminded of the statistic that was widely quoted early last decade, where AT&T got the “gulp-adjust-your-collar” number of $90 billion just for the landscaping costs of stringing fiber-optic in the Western U.S. So what’s the solution?
Well, an interesting experiment was featured on Scobelizer – and the genesis was the big skyward-pointing light atop the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas. As I understand it, a giant laser system in the purple band could provide more than five (5) times the bandwidth than even the fiber-optic lines (Fiber To The House or “FTTH”) that are the fervent dream of all us techno-nerds still being held captive by Time-Warner Cable/Adelphia/Comcast/whatever. Basically, the information is streamed up into the sky, and
A purple laser which is almost invisible to the human eye and which is
inexpensive to buy (they are the lasers inside every Blu-Ray disk player
— the lasers are actually purple light, the “blu” in the name is
marketing) is aimed at the sky and an array of sensors reads data from
the beam of light. Readable due to scattering of light due to the
atmosphere. He showed me how this works: you aim a laser at the sky and
everyone can see the beam. If your human eye can see it, sensors can see
it too and due to some tricks can get massive amounts of bandwidth out
of the laser.
What would this mean for mobile bandwidth? Plenty. The problems I’ve seen with cell coverage in rural areas have less to do with the bandwidth coming from the towers than they do with the capabilities of the radios in the handsets to make the connections. Or, to put it another way, if you make the transmitter in your mobile strong enough to send a signal to a tower 4 miles away, it’s also strong enough to make the hair on the side of your head warm from the microwaves (anyone else remember this phenomenon?). Or to cook your retinas.
But if the bandwidth/connectivity issues can be solved by having some cheap Wi-Fi routers spaced around, connected to sensors pointing at the purple laser beam, then all of a sudden, we have a lot faster, cheaper and more reliable coverage. Even having a little Blu-ray laser integrated into the various existing 3G antenna arrays would be a massive improvement (if their various whitepapers aren’t just hokum).
This could really have an effect in some of the more rugged countries that I’ve done work in – I’m thinking of the mountainous regions of Chile, Colombia, Kazakhstan, and most recently, Georgia. The upstream bandwidth is probably still pretty limited, so in a certain sense, this is just a variation on the DirecTV/satellite internet service paradigm, but still, most users tend to download about 1,000 times more information than they upload.
