Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

Perhaps you’ve heard a lot about ULC (Ultra Low Cost) cellphones in the industry (many companies are aiming this market, see The Motorola F3)…but they are targetted to new markets, where text rendering/input is really more complex than our relatively simple alphabet: it is mandatory if you want to reach the mass of Indian users, Sri Lanka, Cambodge, Hebrew, Arabic, Philippina , Chineese…and you want cause “texting (smsing)” is a big thing: else your new emerging market will be limited to eastern Europe or South America, and be sure that text messaging will continue growing bigger. Look at the buzz around hotxt (read this mobHappy article about this new service, even if it is all but positive about it or at SMS Text News, please check the comments on this one… ) or Berggi (Berggi GigaOM article, I’m not sure about the business model of such an offer, 10 bucks a month to send sms!!). IM is perhaps the next text heavyweight champion (check this techCrunch article about the next bif ideas around IM)
So Text IS big and will stay big…so emerging markets have to have the tools to leverage this potential!

Two different issues to be fixed araise:

• Text Rendering
• Text Edition

In fact text edition is not so diverse and different accross the languages: the T9 you know is not so far from Chineese input. At the end you only have two kinds of predicitve text input methods:

• One for alphabetic languages, the one you have on your phone today. For those languages multitap is also of course heavily used
• One for “ideogram” languages (hum, only in China/Taiwan and Japan (kanji) in fact ), with Pinyin, Strokes, Bopomopho input being some variations

And after having implemented both in real life here at Open-Plug…the alphabetical one is in fact more complicated!
Two companies have the lion share for the predictive engines:

• Tegic (now AOL) and its T9 offering, more Western countries oriented
• Zi corp (eZiText, eZiTap), more Eastern oriented

Both have great products and large and complete languages databases, for me their biggest IP. Cause once you have a predicitve engine the real pain only begin…the UI and user interaction around those dictionnaries is really really complex:to give you an idea, the specification of text entry methods and use case represents more than 25% of the whole UI specification! and of course, for each phone/vendor/carrier it changes, so integrating T9 or EZiText really means if fact tayloring YOUR existing text entry framework for a given specification, the predicitve engine being only a little part of the whole thing. We ended up, in collaboration with LiPS to create a real “Text Entry Framework”…

So let’s move to the text rendering part…
Many companies are developping solutions to render text…so why such a fuss? After all it is only about drawing characters on the screen no? For us, with our simplisitc alphabet european languages, it sounds like something trivial…IT IS NOT, cause complex languages are REALY COMPLEX.

• First you have the magic around Bidirectional text (for those crazy men that are writing from right to left, Hebrew, Arabic…I’m sure they say the same for us writing from left to right )… you will say it is only printing in reverse….you couldn’t be more wrong, simply look here for the full specification of the bidirectional algorithm, hum, simple isn’t it? How to insert left to right text in a right to left paragraph, how to wrap in that case?
  
• Then you enter the brave new world of GSUB, GPOS ans co. In some languages some characters are mixed together and inversed to form a new character: the logical ordering (in memory) is really far from the display ordering. Champions in those kind of games are Devanagari, Indic, Thai…
  

So to handle all those languages, a solid text layout framework (for character clustering, reordering, wrapping) is needed, and a good font renderer. The open source community has developped Pango for the layout and Cairo for the rendering. ICU, from IBM is also a well known open source text layout engine.
Anyway those projects are huge, a big linguisitc knowledge is needed (try to debug a devanagari string…) so to have a quick working solution the industry offers you partners…and many exist, showing that this is a real issue!

• nCore :a little finish company that has a full Layout+rendering engine and a rich text editor, we are working with them already : their solution is really great, fast, light, etc, plus they are darn good at what they do. Their core busines is not font, but rendering.
• Tegic (T9) has a solution (seems to be based on nCore technology), adding their own features and a good integration with their text input solutions
• ZiCorp has also a solution that can be integrated with predictive text input solution
• Monotype, a 100 years company that invented the Arial and Times New Roman fonts…they know well how to render texts , their market is more toward the fonts themselves
• Arphic a taiwaneese text rendering vendor, I don’t know much about them
• Bitstream, a US text rendering vendor, with a solid technology. Also more “Font oriented”, and vector based
• Microimage, I’ve heard of them thanks to 3GSM Asia, but for now I don’t know much about their technology

So to play seriously in the ULC field the phone software needs a very solid text solution…and really it doesn’t come overnight! And be careful when designing/implementing/choosing your solution/partner: it won’t run on smartphone but on ULC phones, so no extra RAM nor CPU, and here CPU IS a challenge. Aslo don’t pass on it, people are really not willing to simply learn english

Mobile devices are, at least for me, some kind of “data gathering plateforms”. I want to take photos, record sound, take short notes and have everything well organized with as less as possible work to do to organize this data and find it.

It’s why PalmOS has been so successfull in its time: it was easy to get and find your data, and it was well integrated with your PC, where your real data is at the end of the day.

With the addition of Photo/Video capture in mobile phones, data gathering can be brought to a next level: thanks to GPS data/ time data/ recognition software it may be a snap to recognize a place, a shop, a good you want to buy and compare it in real time to online retailer, etc.

Seen at GigaOM » Nokia’s Blue Sky Ideas great Nokia’s experiment, that may go further:

The Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project explores utilizing camera equipped mobile devices as platforms for sensor-based, video see-through mobile augmented reality. The project also investigates new and exciting applications enabled by this technology, and UI solutions and paradigms motivated by the restrictions of the mobile devices.

NRC – MARA

A raw photo is at least better that nothing, but is is really a pain to find one when you have thousand, to find this christmas photo of your baby boy … it’s why Picasa (from google) or Adobe Photoshop Elements exist : easily add and use a photo metadata. For using Photoshop Elements, and trying to tag manually each of my photos, I know it’s a pain…and everything that can automatically add meta data to a photo worth it! Date is the obvious one, location is a great one, data recognition another.

There is room here for great services, web 2.0ish, using goole maps, some place repository, etc … and update on flickr .

Local search engines like google desktop , Copernick or Windows Desktop search come here to the rescue by indexing those metadata.

Something I use a lot in my day to day work are whiteboard photos, after those brainstorm/Architecture meetings, the added value is nearly always on the black board with scheme, annotations and so on…and the easy way to go is taking a snapshot, and if this snapshot could use OCR (good one) and become searchable, I would use it in a heartbeat!

An example of a “mix” for data gathering is 2D barecode, see this news to go further:

Microsoft adopts QR Code as standard for Windows Live Barcode October 27, 2006 on 12:51 pm | In Technical, Standards, Web 2.0, Applications, Mobile Phone, 2D Barcodes, Situated | It seems that Microsoft have discovered the 2D Barcode. Expect to see a proliferation of mobile 2D Barcode products and services in the next two years, now that Microsoft have just released Windows Live Barcode (still in Beta).

Mobile Learning » Microsoft adopts QR Code as standard for Windows Live Barcode

Data sharing is another beast and get a lot of buzz recently. I’ll quote some of the blog I read about the phenomenum:

Told You So: Social Networking on mobile EXPLODING, worth 3.45 B dollars in 2006 We love digital communities and social networking, obviously, as we set up this blogsite – Communities Dominate Brands – and wrote the book of the same name. And in the six hundred or so blog entries at this blogsite we’ve discussed just about every significant social networking site and digital community from eBay to Skype, from MySpace to YouTube, from Habbo Hotel to Worlds of Warcraft, from Flickr to Ohmy News, from 2nd Life to Twins Mobile. And on and on and on.

Communities Dominate Brands: Told You So: Social Networking on mobile EXPLODING, worth 3.45 B dollars in 2006

With the growing popularity of sophisticated telephones, Informa forecasts that globally, operator revenue from such services will rise to more than $13 billion by 2011 from $3.45 billion this year. Asia is the most active region, with revenue from “mobile community services” of $1.8 billion this year, followed by Europe at $721 million, according to Informa. Leading the way are companies like Cyworld in South Korea, a creation of SK Telecom that allows cellphone users to share pictures, clips, music, ring tones and games.

MOBILE user generated content and social networking worth 3.45 B this year

This seems to make a lot of sense. Recent reports are showing that social networking platforms made for mobile applications are generating a global net of 3.45 billion dollars. This is more revenue than the other social networking otherwise known as Web 2.0. Not bad.

mopocket

GigaOM » Up Next, Mobile Created Content

According to Telephia three percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, representing nearly eight million consumers, say they use their cell phones to take personal videos. That isn’t that high, but that percent jumps to 6% for consumers that have purchased a new handset in the last six months — particularly those that bought the Razr V3 series. In Europe, Telephia says the numbers are even higher with Spain at 15%, Italy at 14%, and the U.K. and Sweden at 12% and 10% respectively.

GigaOM » Will Goobe Go Mobile?

So yes, people are really collecting data, and are sharing it … but the added value of those sharing services seems to rely on data recognition, automatic categorization, easy search, promotion and access …(see veeker for example).

Let’s see the new automatic meta-datas!

Update: Look at http://www.like.com/ and its “father company” Riya this is really a picture search engine by similarities (found via Techcrunch) … like the recent buyout by Google of Neven Vision to add face recognition to Picasa: so it is coming!

Update 2: look at this about qwerty keyboard :

Is hardware QWERTY really overrated? Have you noticed how some new smartphones from Nokia have given up on hardware qwerty on their devices?

SmallDoses » Blog Archive » Is hardware QWERTY really overrated?

For me and for now … the full keyboard has really changed how I use my smartphone (I was a graffiti champion before ), for me the best compromise.

YouTube – MIT sketching
enjoy:

I have coded an application on palm that was able to tranform sketches in geometrical forms … but this one is really great, mixing physics and so one, nice touch! (ie : I have to work in those areas someday )

MEX – the strategy forum for mobile user experience – Zi makes progress with Qix

I’ve missed this one … even if we are working with Zi as an IP provider for predicitve text input, I’ve never heard about Qix (see the Zi Qix Web Sit).
It really looks like the Palm Treo Initiate launcher : use any bit of information to quickly access the data … errrr everything is about data those days (see my 3 to 4 previous posts). In the case of Qix it is only text, but for initiate it is also voice,… google search on the phone anyone? coupled with applications to display and use the found data…: THIS is interesting, and a good alternate way to the menustrees.
I am a convinced defensor to the all-flat-search-by-content organization oposed to the classical folder trees (perhaps because I’m NOT organized , see my post about desktop search engines ). It should be pushed a little more to also launch actions, etc. Definitively something to keep in mind for user interactions!

they also bought Decuma it seems, a very powerfull text recognition engine for stylus input (found an the defunct Sony Clié PalmOS devices).