For content producers, those who generate content, code, create – this seems more effective an answer to touch screens.

A touch screen is useful when you consume. When you play, when you read, when you interact passively, more or less. Yes, drawing on a touchscreen looks cool, but resolution is probably an issue.

ANYWAY, the main problem with touch screens when you actually work, is simply lifting your arms. Reaching out. It takes time, removes you from the keyboard (yup, no voice controls yet). That slows you down. 

What Apple did with the trackpad is to put that touch capability right next to where your hands are. So yes, it is not that cool or innovative. And unlike touch screens you will have the learning curve of getting all the gestures right. It's worth it. For now, it appears pretty darn practical. 

For example:

iOS 5.1 Safari

Android 4.x Chrome:

But sadly, the native Android 4.x browser is not compatible.

I say, use it!

Posted from Westborough, Massachusetts, United States.

What I noticed is that United appears to bring you to a mobile ‘text’ website, as shown below:

It looks like a generic mobile website but intrigues you with a link to the ‘smartphone version’. When you click the link the page transforms itself to…

…the exact same thing.
Great job, guys.

NFC, short for Near Field Communications, is a technology standard and communications protocol. It specifies and enables devices to communicate without any configuration to exchange small bits of data. To communicate devices need to be near each other, normally to the point of touching or tapping. The main uses devised for NFC include things like train and bus tickets, payment systems (Visa PayWave, Google Wallet), billboards that send you to websites for additional content (Samsung), and even devices that talk to each other to spare you the configuration.

Google is a big believer in NFC and made it simple for device makers and software developers to build smartphones and applications that use its Android operating system. Google’s first NFC initiative had to do with payment – which is where most of the attention around NFC resides. Its Google Wallet service lets you pay with a credit card (presently just a Citibank credit card) by tapping NFC-enabled payment devices. But the Nexus Q brings into the fore something that is closer to Google’s bread and butter – advertising.

If you were unaware of this, Google is primarily an advertising company. The search engine lets Google make billions of dollars selling ads and placement to companies who want to be found when you search for products and services. While search makes Google huge amounts of money, the company always sought to expand on that base. Google’s forays into newspaper and radio advertising failed, yet its television advertising offering is still around.

With smartphones in every home and nearly every pocket, advertisers are looking for ways to activate consumers beyond showing them the television commercial. Commercials are meant to get you off the couch and into the store, online or the phone to buy the stuff brands are pushing. TV commercials are expensive but in most cases it works. Problem is that so far it was difficult to build a bridge between the television and the smartphone (or tablet).

Some attempted to use QR codes, square barcodes app can read using the smartphone camera, in television commercials. This was cumbersome as you had to make sure the TV viewer was ready, had an app that could read the barcode and you had to show the barcode for several seconds. All in tall that’s a lot of work.

Another angle is to use Shazam. Shazam is a popular smartphone app that identifies the artist and song by ‘listening’ to a short bit of music. Shazam is currently used to identify commercials using their soundtrack. The advertiser flashes the Shazam logo on the corner of the screen and hopes that you can get the app ready in time, that the room is not too noisy and that the audio is playing loud enough. It is also assumed that the app is installed on your phone and that you actually identify the icon on the screen. Again, quite a list of assumptions and a tall order for viewers to follow.

The hurdle can be summarized into awareness, activation and transmission. You need to be aware you can get something from your television – a link to a website, a coupon, an offer. You need to be activated – be able to react to a signal – an icon on the screen or some message in the television commercial. Finally, somehow the data or content needs to be transferred between the television and the smartphone.

NFC in the Nexus Q accomplishes two of the three tasks easily. With the Nexus Q Google can now activate viewers with smartphones with minimal effort. The bookcase example, in my opinion, is coupons. Imagine yourself watching a Tide laundry detergent commercial on television. A light turns on the Nexus Q, a message or an icon show up during the commercial to invite you to tap your phone on the Nexus Q. The tap sends your smartphone to the website where you can get the coupon. No apps necessary. It just happens, because that’s what NFC is: tap and go. 

This can be taken a step further into instant commerce. With Google Pay or Wallet you can even order products from a TV commercial right to your home. You tap the Nexus Q, and with Google knowing your account information, an order can be made instantaneously.   

Like with coupons, the Nexus Q can drive you to content that enriches your engagement with the currently playing TV show. Things like an app or a website, elements that extend your viewing experience. Transmedia (http://j.mp/LRFnAj) will become easier to accomplish for creative producers and visionaries.

Technically this Nexus Q NFC capability is very feasible. The main challenge will be to identify what you are presently watching. Companies are already doing that (http://j.mp/MZhpAB) which means that Google can develop its own technology or buy one of the players. Knowing what you are watching then enables Google to sell the NFC extension capability to advertisers and producers. These will in turn set up trusted web services that will communicate with Google’s own services to identify or just provision content to the Nexus Q owner. Sounds easy, right?

In summary, the Nexus Q brings NFC to television. Television makers do not have the vision or the motivation to put NFC in their sets, mostly because advertising is something they do on the demand side, not on the supply side. Google saw the opportunity and it is now coming. It is now only a matter of cost and adoption. And hopefully you also know that all of this is just conjecture and prognostication. I’m just really eager to see NFC do something meaningful. Beyond payments.

Posted from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Apple recently released the iOS 5.1.1 update to its mobile devices. Sounds minor and it probably was. But 5.1.1 also signaled the end of life for using OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for developing for newer OS versions. Snow Leopard supports devices with iOS up to 5.1. Yup, not 5.1.1. Just 5.1. Not much of a heads up but well – time to move on to Lion. So I do.

Today came another surprise. The most current release version of Xcode – 4.3.2 – did not appear to enjoy my iPhone and its iOS 5.1.1. Organizer saw the device, added it to the provisioning portal team (removed, added, removed, added, etc.) and added and removed the provisioning profile for the app. Still, Xcode would fail to recognize the device and stick with the blank 'iOS Device' in the execution scheme.

Finally, I stumbled across this post in Apple's Developer Forum:

"The latest Xcode for Snow Leopard is 4.2 and that appears to be the highest it will go. 10.6.8 is required for iOS support.

The latest Xcode for Lion as of 5.7.2012 is 4.3.2, which requires 10.7.3 and is needed to work with iOS devices at iOS v5.1.x – v4.3.2 is an application that will be installed to your /Applications folder. Xcode 4.3.2 comes with 5.1 SDK and supports iOS 5.1.1…connect your device and let Xcode download 5.1.1 symbols."

The part I seemed to be missing seemed to be the "let Xcode download 5.1.1 symbols".

Further digging on StackOverflow had the answer: essentially power cycle your iOS device and THEN reconnect it to your Mac. Let iTunes start up and finish its scan of the device. Then close it and start Xcode. I ended up also restarting my machine. I then created a NEW project and had it detect the iOS 5.1.1 device successfully.

Still, I am unable to get projects that were created before 5.1.1 came out to detect the device. Luckily nothing is major there but this is clearly a rather grim bug in Xcode.

Companies and organizations that make such huge investments in their brand suddenly realize their website, often times their core offering, looks bad or does not work on mobile devices. In a world where budgets are almost always tight, they look to do something out of nothing to address this problem. They want to be available to the growing smartphones and tablet-using masses. They need something. 

Something like a mobile version of the website that drive wads of new business in. That something will work like the existing web application with minimal changes to the existing infrastructure. This something should be cheap enough to look good on the financials and make management happy by launching in as short a time as possible. That something will hopefully not rankle the feathers of the folks in IT. Meetings will thus ensue to initiate the search for options on how to bring that mobile something to life. 

The first direction, possibly the priciest, is to rewrite the user interface of the existing site or application using responsive design principles (HTML5 is the term frequently used). That way no matter what browsers and devices are used to access the site, the site will scale its user experience and look good. Aside from its cost, this approach is also likely to be time consuming and risky. The company will be messing with existing, stable, working technology that may be mission critical. The required testing and verification processes will therefore take time, cost money and, well, we don’t want that. 

The second direction would be to build or commission a new mobile web application on top, or alongside, the existing core application. Instead of seeing the regular, or desktop, website, mobile device users will be shown this dedicated version. This approach will likely take a fair amount of time, and still cost a substantial amount of money. The site would look great and work quite well. Again, taking a while and still requiring a noticeable financial investment are not what we are looking to do. 

The third option is UsableNet, NetBiscuits and services like them. UsableNet is a great fit for brands who want something mobile relatively quickly and without overspending. Instead of developing a new website, UsableNet acts as the go-between on your application’s behalf. Suppose you are Amtrak and want to give mobile users the ability to reserve tickets to your trains. You start out by letting UsableNet take on all mobile traffic to your website. UsableNet then builds the webpage and also connects, or integrates, with your existing application to make the functionality happen. If you’re Amtrak, that means your reservation system. And after some integration work, voila, you have a mobile something. 

Now don’t get me wrong. Doing all that is definitely impressive. UsableNet is also nothing else but usable on virtually all connected devices, even those 5 year-old flip phones with a browser. Pretty nifty. And IT is happy because they do not need to deal as much with deviating from the status quo or take on a lot of risk. The crown jewel of an app the company depends on remains safely untouched.

There is just one problem with UsableNet. It looks really, dramatically, plain. Some would even venture off to say it looks quite awful. The desire to support as many mobile devices as humanly possible leads to compromises in looks, sacrifices in user experience. This would be especially jarring to smartphone users who are more accustomed to polished experiences.

It's just a room for a night.

And when things do not look too good, when the application may be a bit slow or even clunky to use at times, brand suffers. The brand’s constituency – users, clients, consumers, partners – all have expectations that arise from the brand. The company invested in making those constituents believe in brand values. Does such a UsableNet experience really deliver on those values? Is having a mobile site that is slow and sometimes aggravating, one that is just unpleasant to use, better than not having one at all?

I would contend that no.

While some constituents may bear with the clunky UsableNet experiences, others will just go elsewhere. Worse, they may even get angry in the process. Instead of booking with a mobile device on Amtrak’s UsableNet version, they will go to a mobile-friendly booking site to reserve. This will cost Amtrak commission, a cost borne out of the need to have a something out there. To others, especially in areas like luxury where brand building investments are considerable, a decision to go with UsableNet can be even more harmful. 

Tablets make matters even worse for those who make such a compromise. Tablet users often prefer to see the desktop site. Our ‘something mobile’ works on flip phones but all too often ends up making tablet users give up and feel the brand is just cheap. Those users will head on over to the competition or to an upstart capitalizing on the opportunity to do mobile right. Nothing is clearly becoming a better choice. 

Suppose you skip UsableNet. What about the flip-phone wielding masses? Doing nothing may leave them out in the cold. That may be true but is increasingly no longer the case for a growing number of brands. The mobile market is experiencing a rapid bifurcation between Internet-enabled and voice-oriented devices. Smartphones are exploding in popularity while a plain mobile phones remain popular. 

Devices known as ‘texting phones’, as well as RIM’s Blackberrys, are ceding market share. They are being replaced by lower-end Internet-enabled alternatives. Internet-enabled Android smartphones offered by prepaid carriers like Cricket and MetroPCS lead this trend along with the older, more affordable iPhone variants. This new low-end has capable browsers that can render most mainstream, or desktop, experiences. 

Consumers with voice-oriented devices – the flip and candy bar phones – will not normally look to access the web on their devices. There will be less of an expectation to have web browsing capability on the devices’ small screens. Users will also look to minimize costs and as such, not have a data plan associated with their device. The bottom line is that the number of users who access the web on such devices will be minimal. The conclusion: UsableNet’s rich device compatibility list no longer matters. You will not leave anyone ‘outside’ by not leveraging UsableNet. 

Usablenet is quite aware of this situation. In the last year the company made strides to make its mobile web solutions more brand aware. American Airlines, Delta and US Airways – all clients – have now substantially different websites on the Usablenet platform. Other brands, though, appear to be more at ease with one size fits all. Hotel chains Hilton, Starwood and Fairmont are just the same site experience. It’s a room you rent, right? How about clothing brands like PacSun and Garnett Hill? The same.

So what direction should one adopt in looking to get something mobile out there? Accept the reality that it will most often cost a bit more in time and money to accomplish.   You can finally take a sigh of relief and stop caring about devices with limited capability and aim high. Smartphone users are worth the investment. If you build it and they find it (i.e. invest in traffic generation), they will come and they will spend. It’s a fact. And if you cannot do it right now, maybe do nothing. Taking the middle ground, the compromise may just end up hurting your brand more than helping it.

Yup, you see it right: the desktop store comes through inside of the iPhone app.

Lesson:
If you embed a web page, do make sure it’s mobile friendly.

Hope it’s an error.

Does anyone use the iPad on the go like this? Is the iPad truly passing onto the realm of Moleskine notebooks where you carry the thing around in your hand (it’s just too heavy for me)? If I was creating a commercial for Samsung’s new Galaxy Note – which actually comes with its own über stylus – I’d look at this.
Otherwise, very neat app indeed…