Jumptap does personalised ads with Openwave

New mobile ad play from Openwave and Jumptap

08:45, Feb 13th by Tim Green at 3GSM

Openwave and JumpTap have combined to offer media brands a new mobile advertising solution based on both context and profile.

The two companies claim this hasn’t been done before in mobile. They say the collaboration will allow advertisers to target individuals based on deep personalization significantly. The system uses Openwave’s ‘Profiling and Personalization System (OPPS)’, which creates a profile based on user behaviour across applications and networks. It combines this with JumpTap’s ad and search solution to build a platform that can deliver relevant and contextual advertisements to the end user.

“While mobile data traffic continues to grow rapidly, the increasing uptake of unlimited data plans among consumers poses new challenges in monetizing this growing data traffic. As mobile consumers increasingly travel off-net, operators are looking for ways to more effectively monetise this traffic,” said Nara Rajagopalan, vice president of product management at Openwave.

Adam Soroca, vice president and general manager of Search at JumpTap comments, “Our search engine generates a wealth of information about what mobile customers want. We are using this data to pick the best advertisement for a particular moment in time, and Openwave brings an unmatched level of mobile Internet inventory where we can place those ad spots.”

NOC (barely) rewrites Robert Andrews 3GSM report

Different mobile advertising models on show during 3GSM. Sector is still being talked up

2007 has been hyped as being the year mobile advertising models take off, however, it was clear from announcements and discussions taking place in Barcelona last week that no consensus has emerged on how to serve up ads to mobile users without incurring their annoyance.

While everyone at 3GSM was at pains to show they understand how to respect the user experience by not intruding on users’ personal space, there is little consensus on the best way to achieve that. Instead, a plethora of ad services were on offer interpreting that key rule differently.

“At the end of the day, you can say ads are good,” said ex-Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietila, CEO of Blyk, a free and ad-supported mobile service launching in the UK this summer. “It is not anymore “[this is just an] ad; it is [now] something that is useful, extremely enjoyable or surprising. Therefore the [notion of] spam or intrusiveness can be pushed aside.” Zed CEO Vijay Sundaram said: “Simplicity sometimes is extremely appealing. We have been surprised how good SMS ads can create positive reaction.”

But Rhythm New Media CEO Ujjal Kohli, who claimed to have signed up half of the top 50 biggest-spending TV advertisers, suggested reproducing TV-like ads on mobile was the only sure-fire way lucrative enough to make the medium worthwhile. “Mobile operators collectively generate half a trillion on the planet - if the revenues are [just] 600m, it’s noise,” he said. “It has to be 20 or 30 billion for it to be relevant from their CFOs’ point of view. So we have to come up with advertising models that are scalable. Television is brilliant because it’s very simple and highly scalable. In that lies a massive opportunity for mobile.” Rhythm has therefore hired producers skilled in repurposing television content for the small screen, Kohli added.

One company, Aditon, is even delivering advertisements to handsets’ screensaver-like idle screens. Content acquisition manager Margaret Gold said however, that determining the value of a screen that consumers are usually not watching was a tough sell to ad buyers (Aditon ads flash up on phones whilst idle twice a day), required some empirical evidence on effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the carriers are not buying into analyst hype about mobile advertising. O2 is yet to begin a three-month trial of ad-supported services, ending May, while Orange is currently polling consumers for their opinions, representatives of each company told a 3GSM session on the topic. They will not forge ahead until they are certain on how not to upset subscribers.

Which really just leaves Yahoo, whose aggressive push into the mobile search marketing space shows the heavyweights with internet experience already bring track record and inventory to this emerging space.

NOC report on mobile advertising

How can broadcasters make up for falling ad revenues by utilising more mobile digital services?

It’s been a tough year for broadcasters from an advertising perspective. Increased competition for advertising spend from online and direct marketing initiatives, the arrival of DVRs and PVRs etc has reduced the number of eyeballs watching commercial breaks. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers ITV’s 2006 half year advertising revenue slipped by eight per cent, with its share of commercial adult impacts — that’s viewers to you and me — falling to 32.7 per cent, while the advertising price remained the same. Less viewers for the same money: not good.

Channel Five, meanwhile, reported less than a one per cent decline in revenue, but its share of commercial adult impacts fell to 9.9 per cent. Channel 4 increased its share of impacts to 17.3 per cent — and saw revenues fall to such an alarming level that it might not be able to up its investment in programmes next year.

This raises a number of key questions for all of the players in the TV advertising industry: How long can the price premium last for TV broadcasters? How can they maintain reach in the new media landscape – alone or with partners? How do broadcasters and media buyers develop and use a common measurement framework across media? And how will regulators refine their reviews and investigations in light of there being a wider market in advertising?

2006 was a year when ‘digital’ moved in to the mainstream advertising industry. As the landscape shifted from the traditional ad-based TV business model towards something new, media and advertising agencies have restructured, re-branded and a host of new players exploded onto the market. Online has established itself as a key plank in any campaign but many believe that the real potential for brands to reach targeted consumers is via the mobile phone.

This belief is central to the strategy behind Mobile Interactive Group (MIG), a global multimedia mobile services provider that works with brands, broadcasters, operators and ad agencies. MIG has been working with ITV, Fremantle and Celador for the past two years on programmes such as X-Factor, I’m a Celebrity, The Brits and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. MD Barry Houlihan says he is creating technical and creative play to cope with changing advertising landscape. He believes broadcasters have to look across all available platforms to provide their clients with value for money in these changing times.

“Broadcasters have to create a value-added proposition for their clients today. One where consumers can interact with the brand in a number of ways that will feed
back into their CRM and marketing processes,” says Houlihan. “Brands are looking at ways to take consumers on a ‘digital journey’ which is initiated by on-screen interaction triggered by the mobile phone.”

According to Houlihan, around 40 million people in the UK voted by text message last year to a TV show. The X-Factor now holds the record for the biggest number of votes cast for one show – 20 million in total, or 10 percent of each UK mobile operators’ customer base.

“We managed the SMS voting platform for the second year running but we were also responsible for delivering the pin code facility that allowed users to download an exclusive MP3 track for the winning song by Leona Lewis. The single was downloaded in excess of 60,000 times on night of the final,” Houlihan says.

Statistics like these demonstrate how mobile interactivity can trigger access to a host of other services provided by media companies and brands. “The key is to start simple and take small baby steps,” says Houlihan. “Most consumers are low-tech savvy and they wouldn’t know what a WAP page looked like so you use text short codes which guide the user to a WAP entry point where the journey begins.”

Melissa Goodwin, head of mobile at ITV, says the broadcaster is serious about mobile but adds that any package of products offered to advertisers must be able to cross all available platforms.

“We are the brand that advertisers think of when they consider a programme like Coronation Street. Our mobile portal, online and red button facilities enable viewers to interact with the programme in a number of ways and obviously banner advertising and sponsorship play and important role in this,” says Goodwin.

But ITV has begun to look at other ways in which advertisers can gain additional bang for their bucks. In January it became the first broadcaster to launch a new interactive service initiative which will allow advertisers and retailers to send mobile coupons to its viewers which can then be redeemed at High Street outlets. The service and technology, created by mobile specialists Eagle Eye Solutions, offers brands and stores the ability to directly link their advertising spend to sales generated, via data provided by the coupon system.

The plan is to place mobile short codes in commercials that allow viewers to get a 'mobile coupon' that can be redeemed at retail outlets, says Eagle Eye Solutions MD Julian Reiter.

“Where a till or chip and pin machine is normally used to take credit or debit card payments, we have created a platform allowing the till operator to redirect the till from the banks to our database, enabling the till to redeem the coupon in real time,” he says.

Reiter claims that although the system is Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) manufacturer-dependent, Eagle Eye has partnered with leading EPOS providers and system integrators to link retailers’ systems with minimal hardware upgrade for almost 70 percent of the UK’s top High Street shops.

ITV’s Goodwin says the initiative will be great if retailers can be persuaded to adopt it.

“We want to be involved with this and give it a try because it’s a fantastic opportunity for advertisers to open a direct dialogue with customers and provide instant ROI data while retailers will get additional footfall in store. We need to trial it first though and make sure all the integration works.”

Over at BSkyB, Paul Wright, head of business development for Sky Media, says that advertisers are looking for opportunities to target consumers across all platforms, but he believes that mobile has the potential to appeal the most.

“We’ve always been very proactive in putting our content online but mobile is becoming a key part of the strategy for advertisers. A lot of the advertising out there at the moment is transaction-based like Text2Win campaigns. Going forward this has to change because companies like Ford who advertise with us do it for branding purposes rather than selling cars. We want to be able to use mobile as an access point for branding and buy-ins from agencies. The problem is that the variety of handsets to which adverts have to be rendered and the operators’ data charges remain a big challenge for the industry,” Wright says.

One initiative BSkyB has been trialling an advertising campaign based on the drama ‘24’. Fans of the programme can find codes embedded in online and offline advertising which they enter via the web enabling them to embark on a ‘24’-style ‘mission’. The website asks for viewers mobile numbers so they can be sent text messages and video outlining the terms of their mission. Naturally, these messages carry advertising for brands who want to be associated with the show.

According to Wright, 56,000 user registered their data prior to the show airing and a further 52,000 visits were made to the website destination after the first show went on air. “To date, however, 166,000 users in the UK have interacted with game – a great result for the team here.”

Advertising agencies have started to think in joined up terms, says Wright, but digital is often separate to the main agency which makes cross-platform campaigns difficult to make happen quickly. “I think the media owners themselves are further down the track than the agencies,” Wright says.

MIG’s Houlihan agrees with this point. He believes that media owners have a clearer understanding of how to utilise brand contextualisation. “It’s crucial that you position the call to action in a context that the consumer perceives value in for themselves. The promotion has to fly off the back of the programme the viewer is already engaged with, for example, inviting viewers of a celebrity cooking show to enter a competition to spend a day in Jamie Oliver’s kitchen.”

But where does the point of interaction start? Ofcom’s advertising rules forbid a direct call to action during the programme so, Houlihan argues, the call must be wrapped around the show and this is where advertisers can seize new opportunities. “You have to do a lot of creative work around the TV show product. Executing this is the challenge and this is why MIG is launching a digital agency to overcome both technical and legal challenges.”

Mark Brandon, COO of Siren TV, a company that develops and manages telephony services for broadcaster Five, says advertisers and sponsors are starting to realise how much value there is in from collecting CRM data via mobile interaction. “To make this market rock the brand benefit has to be evaluated from the mobile experience. We’re activating this market by convincing brands over time what is and what isn’t of value to them. Helping them navigate the complex interrelationships between traditional and new media channels will deliver revenues back to the broadcaster in the end.”

Will mobile newspapers introduce ads?

Newspapers, Publishers Gear Up for Delivery To Mobile

• Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
• Mon 19 Feb 2007 04:49 AM PST

The Guardian reports that the Daily Mail, a leading U.K. tabloid, has tied up with Microsoft to launch a downloadable digital version of the newspaper, paving the way for the publisher to deliver the daily paper to mobile phones, palmtops and personal media players. The offer is closely modelled on the New York Times Reader, which was launched last September.

According to the newspaper’s new media arm Associated Northcliffe Digital, the stories are automatically resized to fit whatever size screen. The Mail eReader (as it will be called) also automatically increases or decreases the space given over to text, pictures and advertising. Alan Revell, Associated’s COO is quoted as saying: “We absolutely don’t see it as being cannibalistic; research shows that people use the two things in a complementary fashion. We want the eReader to slide in somewhere between the printed publication and the website.”

Meanwhile, The Jerusalem Post has teamed up with Odiogo, a provider of software for mobilizing content, to launch of a new podcast service: The offer lets users listen to The Jerusalem Post’s online edition information streams directly on their iPods, MP3 players and mobile devices. Users can choose among feed categories including: Front Page, Middle East News, Jewish World News, Editorials and Opinion. Press release

MocoNews covers the 3GSM mobads panel

@ 3GSM: Ad Services On Parade For Boom Still Longed-For

• Posted by Robert Andrews
• Thu 15 Feb 2007 11:18 AM PST

The mood so far this year, that 2007 would be a banner year (literally?) for mobile advertising, carried through into Barcelona. I was optimistic that, gathered at the congress here, the industry would have noted consumers’ own view that straight-to-handset marketing is annoying and struck gold with a formula to justify some of the recent huge valuations for the emerging sector. But, whilst everyone here was at pains to show they understand how to respect the user experience by not intruding on users’ personal space, there is little consensus on the best way to achieve that. Instead, a plethora of ad services interpreting that key rule differently.

“At the end of the day, you can say ads are good,” said ex-Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietilä, CEO of Blyk, a free and ad-supported mobile service launching in the UK this summer. “It is not anymore “[this is just an] ad; it is [now] something that is useful, extremely enjoyable or surprising. Therefore the [notion of] spam or intrusiveness can be pushed aside.” Zed CEO Vijay Sundaram said: “Simplicity sometimes is extremely appealing. We have been surprised how good SMS ads can create positive reaction.”

But Rhythm New Media CEO Ujjal Kohli, who claimed to have signed up half of the top 50 biggest-spending TV advertisers, suggested reproducing TV-like ads on mobile was the only sure-fire way lucrative enough to make the medium worthwhile. “Mobile operators collectively generate half a trillion on the planet - if the revenues are [just] 600m, it’s noise,” he said. “It has to be 20 or 30 billion for it to be relevant from their CFOs’ point of view. So we have to come up with advertising models that are scalable. Television is brilliant because it’s very simple and highly scalable. In that lies a massive opportunity for mobile.” Rhythm has therefore hired producers skilled in repurposing television content for the small screen, Kohli added.

One company, Aditon, is even delivering advertisements to handsets’ screensaver-like idle screens. When I asked content acquisition manager Margaret Gold whether the screen that consumers are usually not watching was a tough sell to ad buyers (Aditon ads flash up on phones whilst idle twice a day), she acknowledged some empirical evidence on effectiveness was required.

Meanwhile, the carriers are not buying into analyst hype about mobile advertising. O2 is yet to begin a three-month trial of ad-supported services, ending May, while Orange is currently polling consumers for their opinions, representatives of each company told a 3GSM session on the topic. They will not forge ahead until they are certain on how not to upset subscribers.

Which really just leaves Yahoo, whose aggressive push into the mobile search marketing space shows the heavyweights with internet experience already bring track record and inventory to this emerging space.

John Wilson's comments on the Aditon momo demo

Mobile Monday London 14 Jan 2007

Tonight's theme was bubble 2.0 and is the mobile/tech space overheated?

Azeem Azhar of Reuters had little to say other than cite Library House findings that reckons startup & series A funding in Europe was £24m in 2005 & already 84m in UK in 2006. He did suggest in response to a question on non-execs that they should be forced to invest; not receive any salary and paid in options. Whilst I endorse the sentiment, entrepreneurs have to recognise that if they want talented individuals to assist, not all not execs will be attracted to these terms of trade!

Sam Sethi of Vecosys pointed out the mismatch between entrepreneurs who only need small amounts of capital and VCs who are only interested in big deals in order that they can invest the huge sums they've raised. Sam picked on a skills gap as being a real issue in the space presently.

Madhuban Kumar of Doughty Hanson Tech Ventures endorsed Sam's point about the funding requirement from tech companies often being below the VC radar on starting threshold.

Jan Kuczynski of Wireless World Forum had nothing to say & spent 5 mins saying so. Didn't manage to refer to the topic once which left most people confused.

The evening's Demos were by:

Aditon
An ad funded mobile content discovery service. Free to consumers who select categories to have content served up & it claims to be "self learning" in what each consumer likes. Data charges are borne by aditon, who deliver pre-canned content overnight to your phone. Content manufacturer can deliver their content free as well, at least initially. Advertiser pays for everything!

This service looked good and I liked the idea of using network quiet time to deliver content down to the mobile. I'm cautious about the service acting as a screen saver on your phone - when you're not using the phone, why would you be looking at it? Also this could quickly eat up your battery life.

Juniper research report on Mobile Sport & Leisure

Mobile Sport & Leisure Essentials

Juniper Research

05 December 2006

This Whitepaper is an extract from: Mobile Sport, Leisure & Information Content Opportunities & Markets, 2006-2011 (3rd Edition)

Mobile leisure and information services, especially sports-related services are emerging as key elements in mobile entertainment market development. Mobile phones are now widely used to access various types of information such as news, financial, traffic and weather updates; sports services are proving popular content services, particularly those associated with soccer; wallpapers and graphics remain core mobile downloads for consumers; and community applications are also developing rapidly as delivery platforms move to the next generation.

Advancement of network technologies and the improving availability of content in various formats are stimulating the growth of mobile leisure and information services and on the horizon is an explosion in demand for Mobile TV services, which will give an added impetus to the take up of other mobile leisure services. Moreover, the inexorable advance in mobile subscriber penetration rates, particularly in developing markets is also contributing to the growth of the global sports, leisure and information content market. As a result, operators are focusing on providing users with a wide assortment of fun, leisure and information products ranging from wallpapers and news alerts to mobile soap clips, live commentaries, video replays, navigation and tracking services, in order to provide enhanced customer satisfaction and generate data revenues.

Big events such as the FIFA World Cup provide additional on/off boosts to the take up of mobile leisure services – in this case sports services. The challenge for operators and service providers is to retain those new customers and migrate them to regular sport and leisure content services. The evidence from the 2006 World Cup is that despite creating substantial increases in messaging traffic and attracting a significant number of new users to sports services, the jury is still out on how many of these new users will purchase other sports content services, or similar content services in the broader entertainment world, in the immediate future.

Find out more about the associated report, visit the report homepage

Hearst goes mobile - MoCoNews

Hearst Magazines Revamps Mobile Sites For Lifestyle Titles, Embraces Ad-Funded Approach

• Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
• Wed 07 Feb 2007 12:16 PM

Ad Age reports on Hearst Magazines' renewed push into mobile, launching fr*ee, ad-supported mobile sites for its Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Cosmo Girl magazines. The sites will replace earlier (and much simpler) paid-subscription destinations. They will showcase content, including advice, downloads, blogs and teases to the print edition of the magazine, as well as interactive features like horoscopes, quizzes, beauty tips and ringtones. Cosmo Mobile, for example, will offer Lust Lessons and a Bedroom Blog. Hearst hopes to have mobile sites for all its brands -- including Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Esquire, Popular Mechanics and House Beautiful - by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Hearst and Verizon Wireless have joined to make Seventeen Mobile available to Verizon users via Mobile Web 2.0-capable handsets. (Mobile Web 2.0 is a service package available to Verizon users for US$5.00 per month, plus airtime, if purchased as a standalone service.) The Seventeen Mobile service gives users access information on health, fashion and beauty reports, horoscopes, daily tips and daily traumas -- a popular section in the Seventeen print magazine. The mobile site also suggests movies to see, books to read and things to do. Seventeen joins Hearst’s CosmoGIRL! as the leading teen information sites on Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Web 2.0 service, the company said in a statement. Press release

Why MVNOs are hard to launch.....

MobileESPN To Relaunch As a Content App Exclusively With Verizon; Dumps Sprint; MediaFlo Channel Too

• Posted by Rafat Ali
• Wed 07 Feb 2007 10:10 PM

The day is was announced that former head honcho Manish Jha left to join Vantrix as CEO, comes the news, via AP, that MobileESPN is relaunching, not as an MVNO but as a content application, exclusively on Verizon Wireless in a multi-year deal. The deal has not been finalized, this story says, but would be announced tomorrow, the story says.

This means ESPN has dumped Sprint, its MVNO backbone/network provider, or more likely, it went the other way around.

The multiyear agreement giving VZW exclusive U.S. rights to offer the MobileESPN application on its V Cast phones....also, the companies will also announce the mobile TV channel launch on its soon-to-come MediaFlo service on Verizon.

I guess ESPN put so much money into building the custom apps for its MVNO service, so it makes sense to modify and port it onto another network...though I am surprised about the exclusive-deal part. It had a big chance of finally going D2C in a big way, but seems like it won’t, unless a variation will be offered to other network and handset users. Also, the MedaFLO service launch might have also influenced ESPN’s decision.

Details:
-- It is to be included fr*ee as part of the $15 a month or $3 a day charge for VCast’s assorted multimedia offerings
-- The Mobile ESPN application will be adapted to all phones compatible with VCast, starting with perhaps a couple of models at the outset.

Updated: Also, looks like Verizon already has the ESPN details up, here, unless this is an older promo. And some more details on MobileESPN’s old site, here.
For everything MobileESPN, read our dedicated category.

Related:
-- ESPN’s Mobile Licensing Deals Soon
-- The Mobile ESPN Patent

Manish Jha Leaves ESPN Mobile; Joins Vantrix As CEO

• Posted by Rafat Ali
• Wed 07 Feb 2007 09:56 PM

Manish Jha, the high-profile head of the MobileESPN MVNO forays from Disney, as well as later the SVP of ESPN Mobile (the publishing arm) after that, has left the company, and has joined Montreal-based mobile content applications firm Vantrix as the CEO. The company enables delivery of rich media content to mobiles, including messaging, advertising, and live video and audio streaming.

Jha was at ESPN since 1991, and has various roles in new media at the company. More in release. This is not the first high level defection from that team, besides the layoffs that must have happened: Vladimir Edelman, the VP and GM of Mobile ESPN Publishing Worldwide, joined last year as the CEO of Soapbox Mobile, a mobile marketing and content solutions firm.

P.S.: Will find out tomorrow who is heading ESPN’s mobile efforts now....see the story above about Mobile ESPN application in an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless. Interesting timing co-ordination on both announcements.

Related:
-- Manish Jha On The New Mobile ESPN
-- It’s Official: Mobile ESPN To Cease MVNO Ops Dec. 31; Will Seek Licensing

Roughly Drafted on Symbian, OS X and the iPhone

Readers Write About Symbian, OS X and the iPhone

Responding to Origins: Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn't Symbian, sources from Sweden and Finland offer a revealing look inside Symbian development and how the OS is regarded at Nokia, and what that means for development on the iPhone.

One developer writes, “In most regards, Symbian's reputation as a modern, robust, stable and advanced OS for smartphones is not well deserved. Sure, Symbian works, it has a very long feature list, and it's probably even the best smartphone OS available today. But it's mostly because the competition is pathetic than anything else.

“I have a done several Symbian projects and have a thorough knowledge and low-level understanding of Symbian. And I just hate it. It's a very bad and uninspiring OS even from a programmers point of view.”

Sources close to Nokia say that Symbian is secretly regarded inside the company--even among high level senior executives--as a "peace-of-shit-OS," explaining that “Finnish people usually have a very coarse language.”

A Symbian developer explains, “Nokia is more or less stuck with Symbian since it doesn't have the competence nor the time to make a new OS from the ground up. Its only alternative, in practice, is to go Linux, which it is of course experimenting with, but it's still not an easy path to go.

“That's one of the reasons why Nokia is investing so much in the S60 middleware used on top of Symbian. S60 is so large and complex today, that I would regard S60 an OS itself, with Symbian as the kernel. It gives Nokia more control to add and change things on its own.

“Sony Ericsson, as one of the other large Symbian owners and licensee, just bought UIQ in November last year to get control of its own flavor of Symbian. UIQ is quite similar to Nokia's S60 and should also be regarded as its own OS with Symbian as the kernel.

“From one point of view, there are no ‘Symbian’ phones in the market, but rather three incompatible and diverging OSs: NTT DoCoMo's Symbian MOAP for Asia, Nokia’s Symbian S60, and Sony Ericsson’s Symbian UIQ.

“To make it even worse from a third party developer's point of view, Nokia and Symbian made the new S60 version 3 binary incompatible to previous versions of S60. So none of your old Symbian apps will work on any new phones (i.e. if you actually bought any :-).

“And of course UIQ has never been source code nor binary compatible with S60. But still you get the impression from analysts and media that ‘Symbian’ is one stable OS.

Symbian Signed

“For S60 version 3, they have introduced a new security model where it's necessary to sign all apps with VeriSign to even get them to run. Something that costs several hundreds of dollars per year, just for the certificates, and makes shareware and hobby programming almost impossible from now on.

“Some operators are requiring the phones to be locked for any apps not carrying a ‘Symbian Signed’ certificate. Which means, you have to pay for a certification process where you are checked by Symbian, why you developed the application and why you want to use certain capabilities on the phone, e.g. read and store user data, using the telephony APIs, or the WIFI capabilities etc.

“All in the name of security, but of course it will be very tough to make programs, independently, that use functionality that's not in the interest of the operators, such as non-operator controlled Voice over IP.

“So much for independently third-party software development on Symbian compared to the ‘closed’ model used on iPhone. In practice the difference is not that big. Apple will, of course, allow close partners to develop apps like they do with iPod Games today.

Symbian Design Issues

“When it comes to the myth of Symbian being a modern and robust OS, I have several objections. Symbian is severely limited by design decisions made in the beginning of '90. The design decisions were maybe okay at that point in time, when the target was Psion's EPOC and EPOC32-based Series 3 & 5 with extreme memory and resource constraints compared with today's devices.

“I could make a very long list of the problems but I'll just summarize a few key areas:

1. Crippled C++ support. Symbian is C++ based—at least on the surface. When EPOC32 was designed (about 1993-1994 I think), there were very few good C++ compiler with full support for the newest C++ features like exceptions. Exceptions is the main feature in C++ for correct and efficient error handling. The other alternative is to use error codes like most operating systems use in their C APIs.
   
   Symbian chose to select neither technique. They made their own home-cooked version of exceptions called Leaves. With an exception in C++, any memory or other resources in allocated objects are deallocated automatically in the correct order (deterministic destruction by calling each object's destructor). This makes it (relatively) easy to make correct programs in C++ for both small and large projects.
   
   In Symbian when a error is signaled with a leave (‘throw an exception’) no objects are deallocated. They just leak, if you don't manually record each object allocated to be cleaned up. This process is extremely tedious, error prone and boring. The result is that it's very hard and time consuming to make correct programs in Symbian, on the verge to be impossible in many cases.
   
   C++ is a great language because of the advanced features, like exception handling with automatic cleanup (search for RAII, Resource Allocation Is Initialization), the standard C++ library (formerly called the STL library with lots and lots of support code for handling of data in containers-like lists and maps and tree structures, strings, algorithms, support for template code and last but not the least—all the standard patterns, practices and idioms all experienced C++ programmer are using on all design problems they are faced with.
   
   If you remove the foundation for standard C++ development, it all falls together. Every design decision means the programmer has to think from the ground up to make a completely new architecture for the design because the normal way of thinking and the normal guarantees C++ and experience gives, doesn't apply anymore. It really turns an experienced programmer into almost a beginner with lousy tools. It's a nightmare for both programmer and development managers.
   
   
2. •Confusing and limited string handling. There is no real support for a proper string handling. To use strings on Symbian you have to use a home-cooked and strange system of ‘descriptors.’ Every new programmer to Symbian spends the first weeks struggling just to understand how (and why) this system works.
   
   The reason was apparently to save a few bytes on each string. But of course, today, that's not even close to being relevant. Maybe a small point but, it's yet another point that makes Symbian hard to use, hard to understand and hard to port programs to/from other platforms.
   
   
3. •Limited support for multi-threading. An important technique used on all other platforms but is not used on Symbian. They do have limited support for threads, but it's strongly recommended not to use threads since it ‘takes to much resources.’ That was hardly even a relevant argument in 1993 but it meant that Symbian uses ‘active objects’ instead of threads in almost all applications.
   
   Active objects are just a very complicated variant of cooperative multitasking, where each object runs in sequence (unnaturally split into small subtasks) and are not able to preempt each other. It takes a lot of code to make this work, just to give the result of a system that is not very responsive, hard to program and port to/from other platforms. All for the aim of saving some CPU cycles in 1993.
   
   
4. •Bad development environment. The development environment and SDK for Symbian (S60) is very strange and difficult to use. It can take several days to just make a functional installation of the SDK and development environment. My first installation a few years ago took over a week to setup and was very fragile. On the Nokia forums there are postings with recommendations on how to make a correct setup. If you do just one step in the wrong order it fucks up. You cannot use the latest version of Visual Studio but need to install Visual Studio 2003 to make it work. But everyone that does Windows programming have VS 2005 installed. Nokia also provides several commercial alternatives, ‘Carbide,’ that is based on Eclipse etc. But it is generally a very bad situation if you compare with Xcode/iPhone or other platforms.

Analysts Wrong on Symbian

“I realize the arguments above are quite technical, but they are nonetheless real and makes it very slow, error prone, and generally difficult to make applications on Symbian.

“This is just one of the reasons I believe the analysts and media are very wrong about the outlook for iPhone. Most media in Sweden (and elsewhere) have reported that the iPhone is nothing new at all. It's mainly a nice package with limited/bad hardware and nothing particularly new on the software side.

“However, if you look at the speed and effort needed to make new applications on iPhone compared with other platforms it's two completely different worlds. You have all the Cocoa frameworks that make it possible to create applications on a level not even available for most desktops today.”

“Most people don't realize the huge difference in development speed (time to market), ability to make more advanced and useful applications with a greater user experience (read: Core Animation and other Leopard frameworks), code quality and maintenance ability—when you have full support for modern high-level languages and frameworks.

Existing Mobile Platforms vs OS X

“Of course, this is the same for most embedded programming projects: set-top boxes, mobile phones, stereo equipment, industrial equipment. But with phones, you are beginning to think about them as a small desktop computer and everyone tries to put in real applications in them.

“With Symbian (as well as WinCE, Palm OS, and I suppose also the Linux phones because they probably have a very limited number of Linux frameworks installed because of memory restrictions etc) you have a big problem to deliver on the marketing hype and media expectations because of all limitations. This is one of the reasons all mobile services are failing to badly—it's simply to hard and complicated to deliver the market expectations with today's platforms.

Five Years Ahead

“OS X and iPhone don't have these limitations. It's one of the reasons I believe Steve Jobs is more or less right in iPhone being 5 years ahead of the competition--of course there is slight marketing hype as well, but not that much an exaggeration as the media and analysts think. Making high quality, advanced applications with a superior user experience will be fast and easy with OS X. On other platforms it's like competing with a small Fiat car in a Formula 1 race against Ferrari and Williams.

“OS X is probably only programmable in Objective C instead of C++, because of the Cocoa frameworks being used. But Objective-C is famous for being easy to program and you can freely mix Objective C and C++ in the same program. In Leopard Apple also introduces Objective-C 2.0 with garbage collection and lots of new stuff that makes it even better than C++ in some respects. And the Cocoa frameworks are world-class on desktop computer—they were even famous in the NeXTSTEP versions.

“So when you put all this together, Apple has sharp weapons and shining armor to compete with lesser equipped competitors for future smartphone apps and wireless services. Most analysts and media don't have enough technical competence and knowledge to realize this.”

E-Plus's Cartoon Channel - MoCoNews

Germany’s E-Plus Beefs Up Portal Content With Cartoon Channel

• Posted by Peggy Anne Salz
• Thu 01 Feb 2007 06:52 AM

German mobile operator E-Plus has added a new cartoon content channel to its WAP portal. CARTOON CITY will feature clips and episodes of shows, including Happy Tree Friends, Peanuts, Mr. Bean, Joe Cartoon and Cat Bastard, as well as Suicidal Squirrels, a series owned and created by Mobile Streams, a content producer and service provider. E-Plus tied up with Mobile Streams to manage the channel and editorial, as well as supplement the mobile TV offer with related content, including games, wallpapers and animated screensavers.