TomSoft

Web2.0 outsourcing humour

From Techrunch:

3 comments January 9th, 2008

CTO Handbook — How to care for and feed your CTO

A great piece of reading  (discovered through AboutMobility weblog): CTO Handbook — How to care for and feed your CTO
He defined three types of CTO:

• The Technical Founder - the person that wrote the code that got the
  company off the ground. Has sweated to give the alpha/beta/product life
  and as a result any criticisms are effectively received/interpreted as
  “Your baby is ugly! Now where’s your Corn Flakes so I can piss in them
  too!” Is never far from code.
• The Visionary - sometimes seen as the flake without any “real”
  deliverables. Is never far from a whiteboard. Can write code but
  shouldn’t.
• The Figure Head - parachuted in, probably did or was associated with
  something impressive in a semi-related industry. Doesn’t know most of
  the company but is on a first name basis with most flight crew. Is
  never far from PowerPoint.

The next game, just like CEO is doing, is then to think which part of these description fit in your profile!

1 comment January 9th, 2008

Yahoo opens his mobile widget SDK

According to Techcrunch, Yahoo is the latest entrant in the mobile widget race. Basically, the “big” part of Yahoo!Go 3.0 is the support of widget, and the availability of an SDK for developpers.

So it will be interesting to see this. Yahoo!Go was already huge and slow, so let’s hope that 3.0 won’t be too big this time.

It’s also interesting to notice that MyYahoo does not seems to allow (unless I’ve missed something) third party widget development, while Yahoo!Go mobile allows it….

Let’s wait tommorow, and “a few weeks”, to get an access to the SDK. In the meantime, if you want to experiment mobile widget now, don’t forget to check webwag: http://webwag.com/mobile and http://api.webwag.com

Identificateurs Technorati : mobilewidgets, yahoo, yahoo!go

1 comment January 7th, 2008

Mobile Widget roundup

Last week was “LeWeb3” week, with several interesting announces around widgets.

First, Goojet, the last entrant in that space announced his beta at the event.

Orange also showed an iPhone version of there own portal, BubbleTop, and a preview of their mobile client. Nice UI but not yet available….

Also, some first info about the future iPhone Webwag version. Here is a short video (in French):

This version is in beta test, more to come soon!

Add comment December 19th, 2007

Androïd and the iPhone?

Would it make sense for Google to provide an Androïd version for the iPhone? Of course, not the complete stack, but just the development framework. Most of the people and especially developers don’t really care about the full stack, but about the interesting part which is of the development framework, as long as it’s well integrated with the rest of the phone.
I am not an Androïd expert, but it seems possible for me to adapt this on the iPhone.

Why:

• It could be the first Androïd platform
• It could provide an easy way to develop applications for the iPhone
• This would solve one of the fragmentation issue

Why not:

• Because Apple don’t want it?
• Because Google don’t want it?
• The google and Apple gadget are not the same. They both choosen different look and feel for the UI (which is understandable). So which one should we choose for an Androïd on IPhone?
• It might be not possible to reach the same level of integration between the application framework and the core system.

This seems possible to me from the technical point of view. First, google could do it. If it’s not Google, some external developer could do it. Of course, we don’t have detailled spec of Google Dalik VM, but it’s not a big issue: we could use an open source JavaVM, and just run some plain Java Code with the Android Framework? It seems that people already started to work on standard VM  porting, with this VM porting on iPhone. A good first step, but Androïd on an iPhone could be the toy of 2008 for developprs…

Identificateurs Technorati : android, iphone, java

Add comment December 16th, 2007

Google Chart API

Not the announce of the year, but very useful API when you want to draw a graph very quickly: Google Chart API

The only annoying thing: no way to autoscale datas, and no input from a data file……

Through C.Enrique Blog and Google Code Blog

Identificateurs Technorati : google, chart

1 comment December 11th, 2007

Webwag Mobile V1 announced

Might be already old news for some of you, but I’ve forgot to put it on my blog, so here it is: we have released Webwag V1 version. The official news is here: Webwag mobile V1 release, API is open!

Here is a non exhaustive list of new features you will find in this release . And we are heavily working on other improvment on other part (web and…?), that will be out very soon!

• End user space
  • Faster: We increased start speed, network accesses, widgets opening by a factor from 5 to 10
  • Automagic widgets arrangement: Now widgets can be automatically arranged while you move them with no need for pixel adjustment (the old free mode remains availab
  • 140 handset models: We’ve grown the handsets compatibility from around 10 to 150 over many new brands. We’ll showcase some of them on this blog in the coming weeks
  • Parlez-vous Français? You’ll be happy to learn that Webwag mobile now detects your language and is available in French. Many other languages will come.
  • Link to original article in Blog posts: You can now view a mobile adapted version of the web site’s article page for any information (RSS) feed.
  • More room for Widgets. The bottom bar has been replaced by two elegant soft keys, giving even more room to widgets.
  • New widgets including eBay, French Traffic conditions (very useful these days), a new discovery from mobile…
  • Many many bug fixes…

• Developers: A new shiny Javascript API is available at api.webwag.com that makes it easier than ever for any web and mobile developer to create widgets using a standard subset of Javascript, XML and other standard oriented tools.
• Brands and content owners: Webwag mobile is a very addictive and simple way to create a positive relationship with end users by giving them a useful service linked to a brand or a specific content. You can contact us at partnerships@webwag.com for more information on how to mobilize and monetize your brand and content in the Webwag mobile ecosystem

So let’s talk a little bit about the developer part: yes, now the scripting languge is a subset of JavaScript. So need to learn a new language. So new, you can have an object orientation for the script, this will simplyfy some form, especially for callback, as function can be associated to objects:

var myObj=new Object();
myObj.showMe=function(){
alert("Hello World:");
}

myObj.showMe();
is now a valid code. So check the api.webwag.com for more info (and do not forget to register to have access).

We also added a lot of functionalities for developer, like the ability to create “form” for better input parameter.

We will prepare some tutorial and samples in the coming weeks….

Update: The http://api.webwag.com does not require anymore you to register…

Add comment December 10th, 2007

Two extraordinay iPhone apps…

Just played with these two great apps, showing the potential of the iPhone and especially the multitouch screen and the accelerators.
The first one is in fact a multi touch demo, quite simple, from cedsoft: it allows to play with a satellite picture and zoom it, move it and rotate it. You could say that GoogleMap is already doing it on the iPhone, but the rotation add a lot of novelty. It pave the way to more complex application, like photo editing tools, or productivity tools with a different UI.

To install it, use the http://prog.cedsoft.free.fr/ repository

The second one is iPhysics (a port of CrayonPhysics). It’s a very simple idea, but hard to describe. The objective is to push a ball to a certain place, but based on physics interaction. You can not move the ball directly, but you can create object by just drawing them on screen, and then these object interacts with the world. Very addictive and innovative
.

To add it, just add this repository in the installer: http://iphone.r4m0n.net/repos

Some remarks:

• Hopefully the iPhone has been unlocked, and will be soon officially. Without this, I think that such app would have been really hard to exist
• Sometime, it’s good to exit from the “Ajax” reign. It would have been if not impossible quite difficult to create these app with a browser only.
• The development chain for iPhone is -in my view- way too complicated! So I give full respect to these early pionner, but I would like to see an easy way to develop complex app for iPHone. I think that Java would have been the best candidate for this. I am dreaming of an Androïd port for iPhone…

There is a lot of potential for iPhone games, thanks to the combination of nice things:

• multi touch screen
• portable device
• High surface screen
• Connectivity
• Sensor
• Camera

For instance, I am dreaming (or hoping that people will port it) some of this games:

• Catapult , a game originally created for the Gizmondo, a cool augmented reality game
• Some nice billard game
• A marble madness port with acclerometer

Identificateurs Technorati : ipho, e, augmented reality, games

Add comment December 8th, 2007

Selling my new iPhone (unlocked)

Yes, I’ve got two of them. Less than one month old, fully unlocked, 1.1.1 software…
See it on eBay: iPhone 8GB unlocked

3 comments December 3rd, 2007

TwitterDroid Public Alpha

  Congrat to FredBrunnel, who just released one of the first app for Android: TwitterDroid

As Fred said, not very usefull while there is no real handset yet, but interesting anyway. Fred, one suggestion: share with us (developers) your though on developping on Androïd…

Identificateurs Technorati : androïd, java

1 comment December 3rd, 2007

How to never be late….

Mobibase seems to be ahead of everybody in the mobile industry: they already attended or participated to future events…Impressive

Add comment December 2nd, 2007

First thought on Android

So Google finally released not a gPhone, but a development platform: Androïd. I’ve spent some - little - time to play with it, and here are my thougt:

- As a user it’s obviously much better and polished UI than Symbian or Windows Mobile. But in the iPhone days, it’s quite poor. The most annoying thing is the usage of menus, on a touch screen. The menus are not visible once closed, and does not seem to have a way to open them just with the touch screen.

- As a developer, it’s both very cool, and a nightmare: very cool, because the Java API seems quite complete and useable, there are some nice UI effects and it facilitate the integration of applications within the phone, and a nightmare because this is now a new platform to support. It’s not J2ME compatible, but supports partially some JSR.
Let me summarize the development landscape these days. We have:

• XHTML/Wap family
• the iPhone mobile browsing familiy
• the iPhone native/ObjectiveC
• Symbian
• Windows Mobile
• FlashLite
• and of course J2ME

and now we can add Androïd with probably native/C++ Androïd and Java Androïd. Not sure that we should thank Google for this one!

What are Androïd chances of being successful?

Can the OpenHandsetAlliance make the difference? In the mobile industry, we probably have more consortium than an any other industry. Consortium for handsets, for platforms, for games,…. But usually, once a consortium is created, it’s the beginning of the end: most of them never released something interesting.

Can the applications make the difference? I am sure that you can easily create very cool and powerful application with Androïd. But I also see many great application on windows mobile or Symbian (and it’s probably 10 times more difficult to create them on these devices) but very few of them reach a critical mass.

Can Google make the difference? Of course, it’s backed up by Google but this could be a good or a bad thing. More and more people in the mobile industry are afraid of Google power. Third tier manufacturer, some Taiwanese and Korean will probably deliver a few Androïd devices, but is it enough to capture the market?

So, let’s wait and see. This sounds more the equivalent of Microsoft first attempts on mobile: not as good as it should be, but with deep pockets, you can afford several attempts before being succesful.

You can also check Fred post on Android 

Identificateurs Technorati : android, google, wireless

3 comments November 16th, 2007

9 Month later: is Yahoo pipes a success?

Microsoft Popfly has been publicly released two weeks ago, I’ve played a little bit with it: very impressive graphically, but it’s hard to do something really useful beyond the usual “get flickr pictures and show them in a cool way…”…

I was wondering is it because of the limitation of such tool, or because I’ve just not see them. So I made a little bit of research on Yahoo!Pipes.
 First, I must admit that even if less impressive graphically, Yahoo!Pipes seems much more useful at a first step. Maybe it’s more programmer oriented, but connection and the rest seems easiest to manage.
But then, I’ve tried to find some  interesting pipes: I’ve been through the list of Pipes, and hardly find something really useful. The most used pipe seems to be the ‘del.icio.us flavored web search”, by PashaSadri, which was run 45610 times. The second one, Badger, has been run 25654 times….

But for a so visible service like Pipes, by one of the top three internet companies, seems relatively low numbers, especially regarding the excitement generated at the launch time.

But the worst thing, is that it’s quite hard to find really useful stuff. Two options:

• It’s not possible to do “real” innovative things using such technology
• Service did not found his users yet. It’s just a question of time (and eventually user interface), and Microsoft Popfly could eventually take over this space.

My guess, it’s a little bit of the two: users don’t really interested by these, they already have plenty of tools, to do search, etc…So what is the value (fort them) to spend time to learn such thing?

1 comment October 30th, 2007

Another good physical widget platform: a touchscreen ADSL box

From a manufacturer named Westell. Another evidence of the apparition of more and more screen, beyond the traditional PC , that can support advanced features like web browser, and…widgets…Seems in the direction of what Orange plans to do with their LiveBox V2. Exciting times ahead….

Through  Multiroom

3 comments October 19th, 2007

iPhone ‘not so open’ SDK?

So Apple announced the availability of the iPhone SDK for February next year.

Seems to be a good news, but a few sentences makes me feel unconfortable: there is a big paragraph about virus, malware and so on :

“There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network.”

I don’t think that there are such virus yet (I know that on Symbian phones, there are some Bluetooth viruses), so why are they putting so much empathis on this? It seems the “good reason” to block third party developpers:

We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

Let me guess: if you want to deploy on an IPhone, you will have to be “Apple Certified” developper? Or may be “Operator Certified”? We are back to the good old security issue on mobile, where independent third party application will be so restricted that it will be impossible to make it run on a mobile.
 May be I’m wrong, but wait and see…
On the same topic, read Russel Beatties “Third Party Applications on the iPhone…Translated“

Add comment October 18th, 2007

Webwag seed funding announced…

We’ve finally announced the seed funding of Webwag that was kept silent since some time. The press release is here.

And finally, Techcrunch finally made a reference to us (ok, Techchrunch fr only but better than nothing).

Also, we’ll be in the states in the coming weeks, in the bay area: for the Web2.0 Summit,  and WidgetSummit conference, Mobile2.0 Event where we are speaker, and at the CTIA where will be announcing (let’s cross fingers) some interesting things.

2 comments October 15th, 2007

MobileBarCamp in Paris

I will be in the next “Mobile Bar Camp” in Paris, Saturday the 13th of October, organized by Philippe Jeudy and Louis Van Proosdij. Will be in French, but imprevissive list of participant. If you want to chat with me, drop me an email.

Add comment October 3rd, 2007

Widgets creation made magic….

Beginning of this year, Webwag introduced the “Wod”,or Widget On Demand, that allows you to create a Widget on any web site. The process was quite easy, but it’s now even easiest, thanks to Webwag FireFox extension: a click and you’re done…How? Install the toolbar, find a site you love but don’t have widget? Press “Create a Wod button”, select the area you want and click “Done”…That’s all….You now have a new widget! There are of course limitation, but in most of the site, it works perfectly. Demonstration:

A wod in two steps

Go to your favorite website (example: http://boursorama.fr)
Press “Create a Wod” in the Webwag button and select the area you are interested in:

Then press ok, and….miracle, the widget is on Webwag:

And this works for many different site, including live site: the update is done real time. Try it yourself!

The extension contains also other features, like the ability to add directly an RSS stream from a page.

Final reminder: the tool bar is here

Identificateurs Technorati : webwag, firefox, toolbar

3 comments September 27th, 2007

Facebook and privacy

Just discovered a VERY interesting post about Facebook and privacy:
Facebook Isn’t Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know.

The most interesting part, is this one, the number four topic:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

So Facebook can do what they want with content posted on Facebook! Including picture, your profile (your CV?), etc…. A perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable license….

Think of this before creating your own private group to discuss the next big thing, or before posting your perfect pictures… Seems to be the reason why a group named “the Grasshoppers” moved from Facebook to Ning…

Through Widgify

Identificateurs Technorati : faceook, ning, privacy

1 comment September 9th, 2007

Lua, Java and a little bit of history

Browsing the web I’ve discovered that LUA reached a popularity of 15 in tiobe rank. This is incredible, but also very interesting. Lua is a very simple but smart language that was designed to extend existing applications. Typically, to add scripting capacities in existing programs. This is a not a new idea, and a lot of technologies where available at that time, but most of them where not easy to implement.

The key differentiator of LUA was the integration simplicity. LUA is now very popular, but when I’ve first discovered it, it was not the case. I’ll do an “historical post” of what happened in the early days of In-Fusio regarding LUA, mobile, and Java.

In 1999, when we started In-Fusio, I’ve created the first connected game embedded in Mitsubishi device. At that time, the most advanced mobile game was snake (V1!) and we were delivering console quality game on mobile, but even more, we introduced connectivity with SMS. User was able to download new game levels each week through SMS….These games (BrainDrain, Push, Crazy Pet) also contained some hidden part, but obviously very hidden as not so many found them: there was the first 3D real time demo on a mobile phone, done using Vector Ball, a reminder of my early Amiga days

Some snapshots of Push, a Sokoban clone, embedded in Mitsubishi phones

But the issue was that the game where embedded, and not downloaded. User was not able to change his game. We started then to think to a way to download games.
Technically, it seems that it was possible, even with limited resources of the phone. We could expect around 16 to 32kb of available writeable flash memory for game. But due to security reasons and cross platform issues we needed to find either a scripting language, or a VM based engine.

So I started to evaluate the various technical solutions for this: from Python, Tcl/Tk, Java, JavaScript and of course Lua. Even Perl! I also looked at some alternative solution, mainly used in SetTopBox.

Rapidly , it appears that Python, Tcl/TK, JavaScript where really too heavy in terms of code size to fit into a mobile. Perl…no, definitvely not Perl for game!

So the remaining two where Java, and Lua. Remember, it was in 99 and MIDP was not yet even discussed. I’ve evaluated a couple of the “light java “implementation, like Waba, and another one that has been used in some lego engine.
But Lua looked great also, and was compliant with our requirement:

• small footprint
• easy integration
• simple to understand and to use

I made a prototype of an integration with a “kind of” R-Type game on a Mitshubishi phone that worked well.But my godfeeling was that Java will be here for long time, and strategically speaking, it was better to follow the Java path. The KVM on Palm was also presented in JavaOne’99, the first JavaOne I’ve attended!
So we look deeper on the Java side, and found a nice JavaCard implementation by Schlumberger. It was really an amazing implementation, tailored for highly constrained JavaCard, so it could feet easily in mobile.
At that time we also discussed with Sun about Java licensing, but fee were really beyond expectations (Sun started by talking of a 10$ per handset license!). We decided to choose the VM implementation, a clean room implementation so no fee for Sun as long as we did not put any Java logo on the mobile. So we decided to use Java instead of LUA.

The first implementation took some time, but when we had the first real handsets, we had a big surprise: it was ssoooooo slow, and unusable for games! Was hard to go beyond a simple minesweeper game. So we decided two things:

• improve the speed of the VM, by working with Schlumberger
• create high level game API

So we created Sprite, Layer component, animation, etc…to speed up things, a complete game api. We also added a raycast engine that could be used to create 3D effects with processing power of mobile of that time. In fact, all the rendering and the animation was done natively, while Java was used more as a scripting engine. And that’s where the MIDP2 game API came. Here are a few snapshot of the first black and white created for the platform:

Some of the early Exen games….

The first prototype was demonstrated in September 2000. Even internally, the game developer team was not convinced with the ability to create arcade quality game on mobile. But the first game produced externally on this platform, by Kalisto, “Tinies Farter” (yes!) was a great and really playable arcade games, and gave us confidence in the ability to create more cool games.

With a launch early 2001 with D2 in Germany, closely followed by Orange in France, and more operators later on.
Since day one, the system has been conceived with an ecosystem for game developer, operators, and us, so we started to make revenue from day1, while it took years for J2me to reach maturity. We thought that we had a 6 to 12 month windows of opportunity with Exen, but it appears that the window was more 24 to 36 months, with a total deployment of more than 50 millions of handsets….Not bad for a small window of opportunity.

The story is not yet ended, but we will write this another time….
Identificateurs Technorati : java, j2me, exen, in-fusio

5 comments September 3rd, 2007