Symphonious

I had two of our keen young developers (Dylan and Suneth) email me overnight to ask my CTO-ish opinion of trends in the mobile space and how they might apply to Ephox. It’s a very good question - with the advent of BlackBerrys first and now even more so with the iPhone, mobile internet is finally moving from “the future” to “the now”, even if it’s not evenly distributed yet. Of course, Ephox is squarely placed in the enterprise content creation business so no matter how popular the mobile world becomes we’re very unlikely to bring out a mobile phone game or a tip calculator. So here’s my take one where the mobile world is with regard to enterprise content creation.

Content Creation vs Content Consumption

Firstly, it’s important to realize that there are two quite distinct areas to content - creation and consumption. There is a huge amount of content consumption on mobile devices - on the go access to email, websites, notifications, twitter etc are probably the most common uses for mobile internet. However, nearly all of this is just content consumption. Most people read their email but don’t reply until they get back to their desk and have a full keyboard. People receive notifications on their phone and then take action via their computer. When people do respond to these things, it’s generally a very short note because of the limitations of the input mechanism. After all, even with a physical keyboard, BlackBerrys are still a very slow way to write long emails.

What this means for content creation is that the input tools are generally extremely simple - usually if not always just plain text and maybe a photo or video from the onboard camera, but it’s rare to find formatting functions etc. For a company that creates editors like Ephox, it’s not looking like a particularly lucrative market.

Other Content Types

One area that is picking up on phones is the creation of non-textual types of content. After all, if you take away the full size keyboard and replace it with video and audio capabilities it’s pretty obvious that text isn’t going to be the most popular medium. Again though, the features required are actually pretty minimal - when you’re on the go, you really just want to quickly grab the photo and move on or record your audio or video and either publish it immediately or upload it somewhere so you can edit it later on your full PC. The physical device constraints simply make it too hard to edit the content on your phone directly so it makes far more sense to use a full PC for that, or just not bother.

So Are We Done?

If it’s the physical constraints of portable devices that are dictating their usage, does that mean that software has done all it can? Definitely not. There are two key aspects of the mobile content puzzle that to me seem largely unsolved, finding the content you need and annotating it. Plus as I mentioned in my previous post, synchronizing content.

Finding the right content is usually a hard problem on full PCs, but with the physical constraints of mobile devices it’s even harder. Search obviously plays a big part in this, but so does notification systems. Having your phone tell you that you have important information waiting for you, or even just interesting information for when you have time, is a huge knowledge sharing opportunity. That’s why reading your email on the go is so popular - it delivers generally useful information straight to you so you can use your travel time to stay on top of it and ready your thoughts before you get back to the office to type an email. There’s a lot more information out there that’s being created throughout the enterprise that you probably should be made aware of though and it’s not all suited to email.  New sales leads, updates to support cases, updates to intranets, wikis and blogs etc would all be useful to have delivered to you either with a notification get your attention or to just sit there for when you have time to look at your phone and find out what’s new.  I expect RSS and Atom to play a huge part in this but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are content specific or area specific applications that come about as well.

The other aspect is annotating content. Quite often you have a few brief ideas you want to jot down on the go and the flesh out later, or perhaps you just want to proof read existing content etc. There are actually very few existing tools that allow you to do this. You can read content, you can often write new content or reply, but annotating existing content is quite rare. What I want to be able to do is read an email and add little notes to myself on it - preferably attached to specific points in the email but even just a generic notes field would do. For PDFs, RSS entries and web pages that could be even more useful as it would allow you to capture your thoughts on the spot so you don’t forget them.

Summing Up

There’s a huge potential for innovation in content in the mobile space but it’s probably not just porting more and more of the desktop applications to mobile devices. The key is to take advantage of the “on the go” nature of mobile devices without forgetting their inherent limitations and inefficiencies. Combining mobile platforms and the desktop is the key to creating genuinely useful applications.

Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.

…

Which is why I’m more than a little bit at sea with the iPhone development experience. Getting beta testers is a technical and legal challenge. And I’m used to having hundreds, not just a few. Discussing development and design issues with other developers is usually a valuable thing, but there’s an NDA in the way.

That’s basically what I meant to say. The iPhone development model, the secrecy and the timelines imposed by Apple have effectively prevented any of the developers from creating a truly great iPhone app. To create truly great apps you need user feedback. Apple itself has enough people internally that can try the iPhone and give that feedback, but the smaller developers can’t get that feedback without releasing publically.

Sadly, in my last post I only managed to get one sentence that actually reflected this, despite the fact that it was intended to be my main message:

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development.

Mike Gunderloy provides an overview of the terms and conditions from three of the popular online office applications and questions who owns your documents? The more important point that comes out of it though is who is backing up your documents? When people move data into “the cloud” the often forget that ultimately having backups is their problem and they should only trust themselves to do it.

One thing that’s clearly missing is any sort of backup guarantee. While you may feel more secure storing your documents on Google’s or Zoho’s or Adobe’s servers than your own, that security is not something that you’re promised. Any of the three can lose your documents or terminate your ability to get to them at any time for pretty much any reason, and you’re out of luck.

That’s precisely why I ensure that any data in a hosted solution of any kind is also backed up locally. I’ve already been through the experience of hosts going broke, or just plain stuffing up their backups and having to restore from my local copy and in time everyone will.

Vendors providing these services need to start thinking this through better too - how are your users going to get a full backup of all their data? In most systems it means going in a manually exporting each individual document and in many systems it’s just not possible at all.

It’s really amazing how many web sites have broken shopping carts in one form or another. It’s the ultimate form of stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. The favorite is always shopping carts that time out. Nothing like throwing your customers out of the store after they’ve decided to purchase from you.

British Airways seem to have perfected the art of displaying an error page just when you were pulling out your credit card. Bonus points for reporting that their systems aren’t responding as if that actually means something to the user who just got a response from their systems - the error page.

Recently though I’ve come across a few more creative ways to not make money. It turns out that Google Checkout, at least as implemented for Google Site Search is just a tad bit buggy - instead of taking you to a page to fill in your details it refreshes the current page. So you select your product, click checkout and are asked to select your product again. Pure genius!

Oh and reporting it to Google won’t help - they don’t answer emails, even when you can find the contact us form.

Paul Kafasis has some good questions around how the iPhone App Store will work. I found the last one interesting though:

What about other pricing concerns?
Currently, we have a coupon system in our store, we can offer upgrade pricing for users who've purchased old versions, we can offer volume discounts for large purchases, and much, much more. All of these things, and more, help our bottom line. We'll want to do them with iPhone Apps, but will we be able to?

and the final comment:

The initial App Store launch is certain to have rough edges, as Apple just doesn't have any experience in being a software publisher for other developers.

Apple may not have experience being a publisher for developers, but it has a lot of experience being a publisher and it’s heard these kinds of questions, very loudly and very forcefully before.

I believe the answer was 99 cents.