Tag Archives: Innovation

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.