December 2009

We’re really proud of what we do and we like to show off our work, but at conferences and presentations we only get to reach out to a small audience. Henceforth, we will be putting up videos of projects we have been working on whenever possible so everyone can see what we’ve been up to.

Hope you enjoy this video!

If you’ve arrived here after clicking on a link in a Twitter message, welcome!  Please read on.

Historically, providing developer-level access to any features of a mobile network has been tricky, to say the least. Even with the relevant service provisioning completed, you’re still stuck with a myriad of interfaces, standards, web protocols and security methods. And that’s just with one operator. As soon as you hit your second there’s usually a whole new set of enabler access methods to implement.

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Designing for mobile is a constantly evolving art, and we’re thrilled to have on the Locatrix team one of the best Interaction Designers in the business: Sherwin Huang. I recently sat down with Sherwin for a Q&A on what makes for great mobile design.

Sherwin Huang, Interaction Designer

Sherwin, briefly describe your role as an Interaction Designer.

In brief, I find creative solutions around technological boundaries, guiding and participating in production by balancing aesthetics with functionality to create a visual package that fosters user delight.

What do you think are the key issues in designing for Mobile Devices?

Uandme user experience

Applications – including the ones we create here at Locatrix – are increasingly feature packed and complex.  There is always the temptation to create user interfaces that display information equivalently to what one would find on an application designed for the desktop.  All this is done with the best of intentions thinking that it will allow users to have all the information at their fingertips.  But doing this on the mobile is sometimes akin to trying to squeeze an elephant through a door!

The mobile differs from the desktop in that often visits are purposeful. Users to go a site on their mobile because they know what they want (and there is a context to their requirements), whereas on the desktop users follow trails and search results to a site. So in designing for mobile you aim to fulfil this contextual need as quickly and easily as possible.

We often see different mobile applications that aspire to do similar things. How do you evaluate a “good” experience compared to a “great” one?

On the desktop, we can quantify this kind utility by looking at factors like learnability (how long it takes users to reach a given level of experience), clarity of structure (time taken to find a piece of information) and satisfaction from the overall experience. On the mobile this is even more important, because users are on the move. They are distracted, they need information quickly.  The equipment is often uncomfortable (small) and quite unforgiving (a slip of the thumb will take them out of the browser).

The most important questions to ask when designing for the mobile are: How will this be used? What will the users want in order to achieve their goal? How can we take the user to what they want in the shortest possible number of steps?

Answering these questions lets us produce an application with a goal in mind. The goal is to produce an application that a user can get into and use right away. Minimal learning curve. Minimal questions. Maximum results. That’s how we know we’ve got a great mobile experience!

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Our recent win in the ACS Queensland IT Awards is covered in this month’s Business Acumen magazine. An excerpt is below.

Gavin's feet

The Locatrix team held an “offsite” event this week at the Toowong Bowls Club. Our Barefoot Bowls afternoon was enjoyed by all – thanks to Sherwin for the photographs, and to Gavin for logistics (and cooking!). Here’s a few photographs.

Watching his ball go into the gutter probably.

Saqib discovered a talent in lawn bowling.

Gavin on the barbie.. how Aussie is that!

Great BBQ by Gavin!

Gavin doing a dance for us. We are not amused.

A couple of months ago we were meeting with a product manager for a European mobile operator, who confessed he had a big problem with mobile social networking. His manager had done a “link deal” with one of the big social networks – you can probably guess which one – and with much fanfare, a new link and logo appeared on that operator’s mobile home page.

At first glance, this initiative had a tremendously successful outcome for the MNO. Their mobile Internet usage saw double-digit percentage growth overnight. And kept growing.

A week later, the operator announced increased usage caps for all of its data plans. No great problem here, as subscribers rapidly became new mobile social networking enthusiasts, often in their thousands each day. But certainly less revenue per MB.

In fact everyone was terribly pleased until later in the month they discovered that while overall mobile data was substantially up, their on-portal traffic had actually decreased, by more than 30 percent. And adding to that dilemma, ARPU decreased for nearly every VAS product they offered to their subscribers.

So while the social networking traffic was increasing, the mobile operator had become a dumb pipe – and found themselves dramatically exposed to churn in a competitive market. Because “m-site” social networking on network A is an identical experience on network B. And C. Or even D. Popular social networking sites are attracting millions of unique visitors to their mobile portals every month, and while mobile data usage rises, the ARPU curve – from data usage alone – is trending ever downwards. What should be an opportunity for mobile operators can very quickly become a massive problem.

To help mobile product and VAS managers meet this challenge, we devised the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops. Our thesis is this: mobile operators don’t need to “introduce” social networking services – their subscribers are already there. Instead, they need to formulate and execute strategies which provide a re-engagement path, via and through existing social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and Friendster.

Delivered in either half-day and full-day seminar formats, our (Re)Engage Workshops help mobile product managers and network executives better understand the demographic mix of social networking users, and teaches them how to create a subscriber engagement strategy by working within the social networking paradigm. Creating, for example, a framework for injecting your mobile brand and VAS solutions into social networking portals, and helping your customers promote their favorite services to their friends. And while we of course present engagement examples based on Locatrix solutions and services, there is no ongoing commercial obligation from the (Re)Engage workshop – just an opportunity to learn and refresh your strategies for leveraging mobile social networking within your subscriber base. And (Re)Engaging with your customers!

There’s more information about the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops on our website, but for a limited time we are offering a free half-day (Re)Engage Workshop to qualifying operators who are readers of this newsletter: simply mention “Position Update” when you contact us, or use this special e-mail link.

Most developers writing web applications for mobile devices decide to:

• Develop for the most common devices.
• Develop so that it looks “kinda ok” on most devices.
• Use hacks to get it to work on a couple of other devices.
• Somehow use the WURFL database.

Several of our solutions revolve around displaying maps. We want the maps to fit to the width of each device. We also like to know what an acceptable base font size is. We want to know as much as we can about every device, so that our solutions work perfectly regardless of device. We run Salamander behind every major (and minor!) solution we develop here at Locatrix Communications to solve this.

Salamander lets developers write layout code for all devices at once. By allowing any service to get any attributes about any device. Mobile applications no longer have to look “kinda ok” on some devices. Applications become tailored to each device. For example:

• Display size
• Supported WAP version
• Supported Java version
• Official support by an MNO
• Default font size.

The web-based front end of Salamander also allows us to instantly change and/or rollback changes on any device-specific attributes across all our solutions. Additionally, it automagically pulls community updates from the WURFL database.

To call Salamander, we simply create a new Salamander object and then query the attributes we need.

if (!isset($_SESSION['device'])
{
    require_once('/include/Salamander.class.php');
    $salamander = new Salamander("http://salamander.me");
    $_SESSION['device'] = $salamander->getSalamanderDevice($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
}

The Salamander class handles all the communications with the Salamander server. It returns an array of various required attributes for applications to query.

We then query attributes such as:

• $_SESSION['device']['baseFontSize']
• $_SESSION['device']['imageType']
• $_SESSION['device']['imageWidth']
• $_SESSION['device']['imageHeight']
• $_SESSION['device']['is3G']

From there we resize images, set font sizes, enable/disable bandwidth intensive features, etc.

Want to try out Salamander with your applications? Want to send feedback? Send me an email!

Robert Clark wrote a great opinion piece in last month’s Telecom Asia magazine, entitled “Mobile’s over-confidence problem”.  In it, he suggests that operators are currently doing okay – not great, but okay – leveraging the rise of mobile broadband, but are falling behind in the innovation game that will drive their future.

Clark’s argument is that the mobile and mobile Internet players – Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Nokia and particularly Apple – are the ones driving innovation in the industry, so any confidence derived by mobile network operators from their current position is dangerously optimistic.  As an example, Clark cites that any satisfaction operators derive from growth in mobile data use needs to be tempered by the knowledge that this growth largely results from devices like the iPhone, plus the applications and content they consume.   From which, ultimately, the operator receives nothing other than ever-commoditised data revenues. Ultimately, Clark sees this as a cultural problem:

“Carrier leaders need to recognize that the industry culture has evolved to deliver scale and reliability. Even among young and small cellcos, it isn’t geared to innovation.”

One of the challenges generally faced by “innovation units” within mobile operators – those teams chartered with driving application and services growth – is getting beyond corporate risk aversion. In the Internet world, companies can try, test, and measure new services and features easily, quickly and cheaply – Google’s “Lab” products are great examples of this.  In the mobile world, service offerings and VAS business cases face reviews by multiple committees, take months to deploy and often get launched as overly-sanitised versions of a once-original idea.  In a way, any service “innovation” gets watered down by internal processes.  Which is fine, if you are launching or upgrading multi-billion dollar network infrastructure.  But not if you just want to see if an idea works.

This month we’ve launched a new section on our web site: Locatrix Labs.  In it, we’re profiling in real-time projects and works-in-progress from the Locatrix engineering team, ably led by Andrew Eross and Johnson Page.  Of course the innovations featured all leverage or extend Locatrix/XLF, our VAS applications framework, which is exactly the point: we can provide mobile solution product managers a “safe” – in terms of both cost/capital expenditure and deployment risk- means to define, test-launch and measure new service ideas, and indeed mashups between services: perhaps Uandme supported by mobile advertising (we know one operator already is already considering this), or our entertainment/engagement application Nine with branded Facebook marketing.

By showcasing the Labs solutions we hope to provide our customers and partners a view of what cellco service innovation could look like, in an environment which allows them to (as Clark suggests):

“…marshall their strengths in network reach and enabling systems, and be the best channel partner for the broadband mobile internet.”

Which is precisely where they need to innovate!

Please check out Locatrix Labs and let us know what you think.

Brisbane-mobile location-based software developer Locatrix Communications has taken out a 2009 Australian Computing Society Queensland ICT Award for the Whereis® Everyone system they developed with Telstra.

Locatrix Communications CEO Mark White said they were delighted to win the Telecommunications Award for the Whereis® Everyone web and mobile phone application that allows friends to locate each other and find places to meet using their Telstra mobile phones.

“The system really is fantastic and allows people to find friends and convenient locations where they can catch up,” Mr White said.

Locatrix, which operates from Queensland Government owned i.lab incubator at Toowong, first developed the mobile Whereis® Everyone application in 2006 and last year helped Telstra launch the web-based version of the application. 

i.lab Chief Executive Officer Anne-Marie Birkill congratulated Locatrix on receiving the award.  ”i.lab works closely with all our client companies to grow their innovative ideas into strong and sustainable businesses and Locatrix is a perfect ambassador for our program,” Ms Birkill said.

“In their three years at i.lab, Locatrix has developed and commercialised their product and established a fantastic partnership with one of Australia’s premier telecommunications companies,” she said.

Ms Birkill said by providing flexible office space, mentoring by industry experienced professionals and entrepreneurs, skills development and networking opportunities and business development support, i.lab was encouraging investment in new technology-based companies and creating knowledge-based jobs for Queenslanders. 

Mr White commented that the success of Whereis® Everyone was down to the exciting range of uses for consumers including being able to share locations with friends and family, help them connect and share experiences as well as find nearby places to meet, like at a coffee shop, restaurant or bar. 

“Whereis® Everyone can send you alerts when your friends or family members are near, and allows you to see any or all of their locations on a map, either on a single mobile screen or from the website,” Mr White said. 

He said the application works on any Telstra Next G^TMmobile.

Mr White said winning the award was fantastic recognition for the Locatrix team and was also evidence of the rapidly growing interest in mobile social networking applications beyond sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Mr White said that unlike tracking applications, Whereis® Everyone gives subscribers full control over whom they share their location with.

“Locatrix and Telstra take the privacy of users very seriously,” he said, adding that safeguards were used to make sure no mobile user is located without their consent.

For more information about Locatrix visit www.locatrix.com and for more information about Whereis® Everyone visit http://everyone.whereis.com.

ENDS

For more information contact i.lab CEO Anne-Marie Birkill on (07) 33279802 or 0419 789 401 or Locatrix CEO Mark White on 0438 900 880 or email mark@locatrix.com.

2009 ACS Qld Telecommunications Award