Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

After reading a product description of what Abaxia is doing with its MobileTag – What is a Tag ?. I dug a little and found a really great and fast moving technology.

Did you know that nearly everything in Japan is tagged with QR Codes – two dimensional Matrix codes – these days? Okay, I guess you don’t, but believe me, you have to know about these funny codes. ^_^…Whenever you see a QR Code just take your phone out of your pocket, point with it’s camera at the QR Code and let the QR Code reading software decrypt the QR Code. That means: The QR Code reading software turns your phone into a mobile scanner for QR-Codes. Cool, right?

Robert Peloschek aka Unic0der: Free QR Code Readers for your Cellphone

CHeck this Video fora realife example:

Many formats seem to compete today, Code 2D (in French) gives some examples:

MobileTag

Data Matrix

QR Code (The most deployed, especially in Japan)

Shot Code

SemaCode

Basically you have two kinds of storage: either the data is directly embeded in the matrix (like in QR Code or Digimatrix, few KiloBytes of data) or the code is “only” a redirection to an URL where the content is stored and can be read (MobileTag is working on that principle).

What really buzz me is the concept of “physical world hyperlink”, as described by the pondering primate :

Physical World Connection Companies
When a display was added to the first mobile phone, a new media was created. Since then, Internet connection and a camera have been added that have created a new way to interact with the physical world.

Soon speech recognition will allow an additional way to browse the physical world too.

Every physical object will have a physical world hyperlink

That means every physical object will allow connection to a designated website and the mobile phone with it’s physical world browser will be able to surf the “real world”, the physical one.

The Pondering Primate: Physical World Connection Companies

(This vision seems to be shared also over at barecodemobile)

This can be strongly related to augmented reality where the “web world” is augmenting the “real world”. Even microsoft is taking the bandwagon as described in the always good Mobile Learning
Really getting an address from an advertisement right into my cellphone by taking a snapshot, or storing an appointment for a movie or a special event by taking a photo of an ad seems really valuable to me: today even with my glorified Treo with its big keyboard, I’m reluctant to loose my time entering those snippet of information.

This sounds exciting! … and for now all the generators and readers seem to be free of charge, I only wish we have more of this tagging in Europe….

Here is a “Joel on Software” analysis of the MS Vista menu .. and its, hum how to not say something rude, surprising number of available user choices .

The real fun comes just after, when Moishe Lettvin, that was in charge of the developpement of this feature
gives its explanations!…Lenifiant, and “ubuesque”,

…24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

moblog: The Windows Shutdown crapfest

Really really something to go through…cause it seems that all kind of organizations may tend to those limits. And it is a good list of what NOT to do, or try to not do when your business is growing bigger….

But things can be different, look a little at Google:

From a high level, Google’s process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include:

- there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

- developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

- developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it’s not their main project.

- there aren’t very many meetings. I’d say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead. – it’s quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

- there aren’t Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I’ve ever seen.

- even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don’t work insane hours unless they want to.

These are generalizations, sure. Old-timers will no doubt have a slightly different view, just as my view of Amazon is slightly biased by having been there in 1998 when it was a pretty crazy place. But I think most Googlers would agree that my generalizations here are pretty accurate.

How could this ever work?

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile

And read the whole article also cause it is a refreshing rant about Agile … and a good insight at Google success…and why everyone wants to work there!

All this Ajax/Web 2.0/New Application Framework/Google are all about a big change in the CPU power repartition: Today PC is king, so CPU power is, defacto, at the network periphery…. But … as it was the case years ago, before the PC era, this power is coming back near the “center”, and this exellent article from Wired Magazine, found via Open-Gardens, depicts it pretty well:

The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..

Wired 14.10: The Information Factories

A verbose wired article as per link above speaks of the ‘Internet cloud’. It can be summarised as

The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age.

The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..

And what to say about those Sun and Google “overnight datacenters” like mini-CPU power plants, autonomous, you put like vampire s(hum I disgress, I disgress) on the net backbone to bring computing/memory power anywhere:

Google’s Global Super-structure

Cringely breaks the silence on the rumors of a major Google innovation – worldwide datacenters in a box (actually a shipping container).

Got Ads?: Google’s Global Super-structure – Google AdWords and Overture PPC

At the end all of this may have a HUGE impact on mobile computing, quoting the last Mobile Opportunity entry about Smartphones and PC overlapp:

No, the realistic scenario is that PCs and smartphones (and other mobile devices to come) will prosper in parallel for years, each doing its own thing increasingly well. There will be some overlap at the edges, but the core usage of each product will remain very distinct. Meanwhile, the web apps platform will continue to gradually eat away at both operating systems, transforming them into commoditized plumbing that few people care about.

Mobile Opportunity: Will the smartphone kill the PC?

Yes I fully agree on this, and I share also the following point of view with Michael Mace:

The development tools for creating web apps, and the features of the web platform itself, are not currently as sophisticated and powerful as the traditional programming environments like Windows and Mac OS. So you can’t create a fully functional clone of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop with the current state of the art in web tools. This is shielding the big software companies from immediate competition in their core businesses, and often produces a false sense of security.

However, the web platform is evolving much faster than the old-style operating systems. At some point it is inevitable that the web platform will become mature enough that web apps can challenge the established software standards. At that point, the swarming little web 2.0 application companies will fall all over themselves to take bites out of those lucrative franchises.

Rubicon Consulting, Inc. – Our Thinking – Newsletter – Understanding the full impact of the web

And this is precisely where I really see things evolving, see my post about those new “modern” frameworks. Some key elements are still missing, like micro formats, data standardization, behaviour abstraction for easy application deployment and mashup, but once reached the Holly Grail of complete uncorrelation between representation, control and data (hey MVC again), it could be possible to have applications written “in pieces”: I’m not an advocate of the “write once run everywhere”, in the Mobile space applications have to be so much taylored, adapted to the hardware, customizable and so on, that being able to have a common part, “written once, run on a server” and a customized one for each kind of device/Operator may be of high value…and those new frameworks may be the key (hum the beginning of the key to be exact ).
So next generation Mobile frameworks may have a very clean MVC abstraction, based on a standard that still doesn’t exist:

• The representation (View) should be optimized for the hardware, cause representation has to run locally. Javascript is not a good candidate, perhpas xml or even binary description are better suited
• The Control part is also really tied to the available user input/output and a part has to run locally
• The other part and the Data model should be of course on the server, with the big algorithms and processing

Of course everything will work smoothly if the network lag/answer time reduces greatly, but for sure it will come with next gen wireless networks.
A good example of such a modern application, appart from the today basic web 2.0 widgets, would be a Mapping/GPS appliction where the card and route computation are on the server and the data display and GPS infromation are on the device …hum Orange is already providing something like that with Webraska….let’s move on with other example! Do you have some? Any Comments?

Update: Thanks to AC/OS for the Sun data center link. Check those Sun prototypes…wow.

Update2: I’ve managed to found the article talking about google plan, looking like the Sun one.

To be fun, hype and cool today you have to read your news throught RSS feeds (ok not sure it will bring you a lot of sex apeal, or any social success in big garden party … a geek can dream). Simply going on cnn.com to get your daily dose of news, then to slashdot is sooooo old fashionned. Google and Yahoo were already aggregating many things for you, but as a technology overlord you need something less common here come the rss and blogs are coming to your rescue. Yahoo, slashdot, and many other “corporate” web sites are offering feeds, plus many individuals via their blog: it is now possible to make your own news aggregation, choosing your sources, and at a glance, you can visit all those sites in few minutes staying in your feed reader without opening your web browser … thus missing the beloved “side links”, best path to discovery.
It may sounds paradoxal, but choosing the news we will read on an “a priori” basis has a strange side effect: we only read the same things, on the same subjects/topics, forgetting the rest of the world knowledge.
I have around seventy (70!!) feeds in my agregator, and, as a glorified geek, 30 are toward technology/hardware/Palm, 20 for GTD productivity, 7 for comics … and only 10 for general news, and to be honest the later ten are many time left unred.
So OK, I loose less time wandering around the net searching for fun and cool news … but I always read the same kind of things, missing the great discoveries that can only happen jumping from link to link: my point of interests are more radical, more focused … but really less fun and rich, it’s time to react! Let’s go back to web wandering …

Thomas