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.

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):

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.

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.

On the other hand, if you’re a designer trying to figure out if your site will work on a Blackberry 8350i on Sprint in Kankakee, a Samsung SGH-F250L on Brazil’s VIVO carrier network AND a Sony K550im on France’s Bouygues network, then DeviceAnywhere is a dream come true.

Playing with all the various devices they have is addicting.

DeviceAnywhere maintains a network of mobile devices on racks with trickle charges of electricity feeding into them, just waiting for you to check them out. You can use them to access your mobile web page to see how it looks on the device — the screen actually is a pixel-for-pixel output from the video output on the device, not a camera pointed at the device’s display. Makes geting a decent screenshot of a mobile site a helluva lot easier, I can tell ya.

So far, you can only test about 30 phones in Brazil, but they are adding more all the time.

You can also load an application into the phone and test to see how it works. Of course, using your mouse & cursor to click, twirl, press or tap the control surfaces on the phone is not the most intuitive or real-life test of how the app responds. I spent a couple anxious minutes trying to figure out if my mouse was broken when trying to get the Blackberry Storm to check out this blog; it turned out I just had to be a bit more patient.

Anyway, to use DeviceAnywhere, you have to download its proprietary application and install it locally on your computer (Mac or PC), and establish an account. They give you 3 hours of test time to start out with, and it’s measured out in 6-minute chunks, kinda like how a lawyer bills.

You can also use the phone to send and receive SMS messages, play multimedia content, and even make calls. I can’t help it – my mind immediately went to some “Bourne Identity” type scenario, where you could use the phones to make calls that make it look like you’re calling from Germany or Spain … although anyone savvy enough to use a service like this one to “launder” their user information would be more than sharp enough to figure out easier ways.

Anyway, to use the phones, you right-click on the handset that you want to check out, and choose “Acquire Device” (see below).

You can also click to bring up a window with all the data about the phone in it, such as the OS, memory, processor speed, whether it runs Flash Lite, etc.

It’s kinda addictive to put these devices through their paces – for anyone who’s got a real curious streak, DeviceAnywhere warns that the quickest way to run through your trial minutes is to check out a whole bunch of phones at once and get so caught up with toying with them that you forget to keep an eye on the little taxi cab meter.

To me, one of the cooler things is the little broom that appears after you’ve “hung up” the phone when your test session is done: the DeviceAnywhere guys basically run a script (and how many hours it took to grind out something that will do this across all the thousands of handsets they have on file) that wipes the memory and OS free of whatever programs you’ve uploaded or sites you’ve visited. Dunno why this strikes me as so cool, but it does.

Lastly, check out the DeviceAnywhere blog. Good stuff there, such as this recent post on trends in the mobile development world – particularly revealing are the shift in numbers in what people are working on in mobile. A couple years ago, most companies were focusing in on games or ringtones, because that was pretty much the only way to make money from mobile content.

These days, the mobile web is blowing up (a 100% jump YOY), and mobile banking/payment is hot on its heels. There are twice as many people working on mobile web sites and apps, well, pretty much because a couple of yo-hos in a garage can dream of hitting it big with an iPhone app, while not everyone can set up their own bank (the antics of the various players involved in the subprime mortgage mess notwithstanding).

Or a sale on something that’s been on your Amazon wish list. Or the Amazon wish list of your wife/husband/kids. The phone, with GPS enabled, near-field sensor technology and a compass, leads you through the maze of merchandise like Daedalus after the Minotaur, and as you pass the garden hoses and stacks of denim onesies with the “Anarchy” symbol on them (evil designers: 2-year-olds are inherently like Sid Vicious, why reinforce this?), your phone buzzes in your hand and a big arrow appears, guiding your around the corner, and face-to-face with…

Man, you can just see the iPhone/Verizon/T-mobile commercials coming, can’t you? If there’s one thing that will tantalize our modern society of shopaholics, it’s the thought that somehow we’re going to be privy to inside information that’ll give us a special deal that nobody else will get. Because we’re faster, we’re there first, and our technology is superior! Fear our shopping powers, we shall chortle as we push the wobbly carts through the parking lots. We are clearly the evolutionarily superior hunter-gatherer, and our mewling offspring shall gorge themselves on the 2-for-1 bounty of Baconnaise that we have procured through our use of space-age technology…

Greg Grunberg of Yowza!! on Dowsing for Deals from Artesian Media on Vimeo.

Greg Grunberg, co-founder of Yowza!! mobile coupons, talks about how retailers want to build Minority Report-like capabilities in their stores, to track where you are and deliver personalized come-ons designed to get you to buy more stuff. Will we come to accept this, as we are accepting the gradual erosion of any semblance of privacy on Facebook? What happens when we link Facebook with mobile with our shopping habits through coupon services?

There are obviously some big issues lurking here beneath the surface, and it’s likely that we’ll never really have a society-wide debate about them. So you might as well just enjoy the spectacle of a famous guy getting all excited over being able to tell you that you can save 8 cents on the can of tuna fish, next aisle over…

Actually, what Grunberg said at the OMMA Mobile conference was:

“You’re walking through a store and you get an alert on your phone, based on your buying habits. We’ve been approached by huge retailers that have said, ‘We’d love to set up that system in our stores.’

“I said, I’d love to, too. We have no idea how to do it.’ But it’s the future. To geo-locate in the store itself, that’s exciting. That’s you walking around, just fishing for the best deal on something that interests you based on your shopping habits.

“The information we’re gathering, again we’ve only been in existence for four months [but to track] if a person has looked at a coupon and then driven five miles to actually use that coupon – that’s powerful.”

This starts getting into “Minority Report” territory, of course, that being the tried-and-true paradigm for explaining how behavioral targeting (BT) and location-aware ad delivery will combine to send you stuff that is absolutely tailored to dovetail with your history, habits, interests and credit limit.

How ’bout if you can use your phone to enter a contest and win a coupon for a free bobblehead?All you have to do is show the phone to the guys at the concession stands…

Are you willing to give up your privacy for this? Because that’s what you’re doing. When you use a mobile coupon, the person who takes that coupon is also taking your phone data. As in, what phone you have. When that coupon was sent to you. Where you were when you got that coupon. How long it’s been since you got the coupon before you were motivated to act.

Greg Grunberg of Yowza!! on Mobile Coupons from Artesian Media on Vimeo.

Greg Grunberg, co-founder of Yowza!! (yes, it has two exclamation points, and yes, he’s “the mind-reading guy from Heroes”) talks about the challenges for small business, and what kinds of ad/marketing campaigns you can run in real-time using mobile coupons.

This took place on a panel at the OMMA Mobile conference at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in October 2009.

And if we start tying that into your mobile browsing activity – say, if you were to SMS your vote for who struck out the most batters on cold Tuesdays in May in (and by so doing, agreeing to the TERMS OF USE that you probably didn’t bother to read), and then browse to a web page where you see the entries accumulating in real time …

Then the site owner (i.e. the baseball team or the hotdog manufacturer, or both, or both plus the ad agency and the cell carrier, and the phone manufacturer) can put a little tracking cookie on your phone.

You willing to let that happen? Would you even be aware of it, if I wasn’t talking about it right now? Check out the other video of Grunberg talking about mobile marketing and geo-targeting at OMMA Mobile. Yeah, that Greg Grunberg. The one from Heroes.

Apparently, before he became the mind-reading psychic cop who can also trap you in a fantasy world in your own head, Greg owned a chain of yogurt stores. And now he’s the co-founder of Yowza!! because he met a couple of guys on Twitter. The man is eloquent, well-informed, and obviously a competitor with Ashton Kutcher for Unexpected Celebrity Deep Geek Genius. On the show, he mostly looks anxious and conflicted, and frowns at people a lot as the camera zooms in dramatically at his eyes…

Anyway, I recently wrote a case study on mobile marketing for the NAA, and I took a look at the location-based couponing of companies like Yowza!! A lot of people are saying that location-based companies are going to blow up in the next year; if that’s true, then Yowza!! is one of the companies to keep an eye on. Obviously, Greg is something of a Renaissance Man, and if he is able to blend the ad/marketing power that he has from his celebrity presence, with what seems to be some fairly decent understanding of technology and media trends, he could really build this company into something huge.

I had heard rumors of this last year from some real alpha-nerds at a tech conference.  I was immediately intrigued, but ultimately dismissed it as “vaporware,” because of all the problems I’ve heard from professionals just trying to deal with 3D when using projection equipment the size of a pickup truck.

This going to make for some compelling advertising. Also games. Videos. Photo galleries.

Well, it looks like 3M is going to be demonstrating a 3D display at the SID Symposium next month. From the tech diagram on their site, it looks like the 3D effect is achieved by using an LCD equivalent of the old “Viewmaster” parallax eye-trickery. That is, projecting a slightly different image to the right eye than to the left eye, and the image-stitching that our brain does to reconcile these views is what gives us depth perception.

I know that the CES show in Las Vegas in January was full of all kinds of 3D-TV whizbangery, all of which got a “meh” response from most of the tech journalists in attendance … mostly because the cost seemed prohibitive, and evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) developments in displays seem not to be getting much traction (if the court please, enter “Blu-Ray sales figures” as Exhibit A). And from a common-sense perspective, this seems to be about right – most people I know are still integrating their plasma/LCD HDTVs into their lives, so there’s not much love about these days for the prospect of ripping those bigscreens out and replacing them with something for which there is even less dedicated content than HDs.

But the mobile display market? People are accustomed to swapping out their phones every two years or so (or whenever we can get out from under whichever abusive, gouging carrier contract we put up with), so a mobile phone with a 3D screen might just be able to get quicker adoption than its bigger brethren.
The skeptical part of me is already trying to poke holes in this, figuring that the 3D tech is going to require you to hold the phone at precisely the right distance from your eyes to make the images reconcile in a way that looks good, rather than blurry; kind of like a farsighted guy trying to read a restaurant menu in dim light, bringing it forward and back, trying to find the right focus plane.

But even if that is the case … holy freakin’ Minority Report! Imagine using the camera+display tech that cutting-edge advertisements like the Doritos Late Night Chips virtual concert with Blink-182 only now it really pops out and plays in the palm of your hand.  Or a virtual-reality map overlay of a city that you’re doing a tour of, where you can walk the streets of ancient Rome and see the Coliseum and the Fiats rolling by you in the street are morphed into chariots… or how-to videos showing you to reach around the toner cartridge to clear the paper jam.

I predict a lot of people walking into lampposts, and cars being driven into ditches. It’ll certainly bring some extra oomph to “sexting.”

Here’s the Doritos alternate-reality app, for those of you who want a glimpse of the future:

It may have had something to do with the recent announcement that Facebook had surpassed Google in popularity … I’m not sure if that means that the ad budgets will be swinging Zuckerberg’s way from the Ever-Victorious Google Army, but it certainly had a lot of people buzzing. And hoping to find some magical formula for extracting value from people just, y’know, rapping. Dude.

Laura Lang to OMMA Global: Why Social Media is Important from Dave LaFontaine on Vimeo.

Laura Lang, CEO of the Digitas advertising agency, opens her keynote speech at OMMA Global with some examples of why social media is important.

The speech is titled: “People are expecting everything, everywhere, downloaded, uploaded, in their hands, in an instant – are marketers keeping pace?”

Best use of classic fiction and modern cross-platform multimedia: “What do Robinson Crusoe, Castaway and Lost all have in common? They all wanted off the island. Why? There weren’t enough people there to interact with. Or not the right kind of people.”

Not sure what to make about this notice I got out of Korea today, that said that manufacturers there just got orders for touch-sensitive displays in much larger sizes than they have ever tried to deal with before.

According to Displaybank, this spring will see the rollout of touchscreen devices in 10.1, 13.3 and even 16.1 inch diagonal sizes, and this summer will have screens in the 21.5, 23.6 and 27 inch sizes.

Of course, the other news that was interesting is the projection that within the next three years, more than 30% of the cellphones in the world will be using touchscreen technology.

That looks to be about 500 million units; as we’ve seen from the iPhone, one of the key results of having a touchscreen User Interface on mobile devices is that it makes browsing the web actually possible.  Yeah, yeah, the Blackberry had the trackball, and some people still swear by it – but I’ve tried it, and it’s just not as intuitive or useful as pointing and tapping on a link, to say nothing of using the pinch/pull multitouch functions to make items contract/expand.

So having the global market expand with devices whose main strength is that they make browsing not only do-able, but fun – means that there is going to be this big & powerful driver pushing people to the mobile web in the next few years.  Even more so than the “there’s an app for that” meme taking root with the public, the fact that all the other handsets are going to be iPhone-like, is going to be a huge change.

Meanwhile, I wonder if the larger die sizes for the touchscreens means that there are going to be “upgrades” to the tablet market? One of the most insightful things I heard last week at OMMA Global in San Francisco was that “it’s not the iPad itself that’s the revolutionary change – it’s the 30, 40, 50 other tablet devices that are going to follow in its footsteps that are going to be disruptors.”  I can see the thinking in some quarters of unimaginative Corporate America – that they’ll be just like the iPad – ONLY BIGGER!!11!!eleven! Kinda like the Kindle DX, I guess – although I really can’t make much of a use case for hauling around a 27-inch tablet device. Damn thing would weight about 15 pounds, and the battery life would be maybe 10 minutes.

But you could watch some really nice high-def videos in that time, I guess…