My first app ships for mobile!
Update: Time has started running print advertising promoting the MySI mobile application. A quarter-page ad ran on the 12th page of Time Magazine this week. With a 4-color national release, that’s about $85,000 in advertising dollars spent.
Update: Sports Illustrated has started to distribute the executable! You can download it from their website: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mysimobile.
I have worked in the software development universe for just about going on 9 years total; first in desktop software for 5 years, then in mobile software for the last 4. Just a week ago I experienced something that is a nice milestone in my experience: I actually shipped an application for a mobile phone (my first). Please help me celebrate the world debut of Sports Illustrated Mobile, exclusively presented on Windows Mobile devices! (Some time around July the plan is to release versions for Mobile Java, BREW, RIM, iPhone and Android devices.)
It sounds funny to say it, but in software most of the time actually getting your job done can be quite a feat. An unbelievably high percentage of all software projects fail — a percentage so high that sometimes it’s actually better to quote the number of project that have succeeded — and at last educated guesstimate, the success number was something like 34%. As a result, I’m very elated that getting this project to ship has come to pass. I can’t take much of the credit, in all honesty, there was a team of a developer, two testers and a dedicated project manager doing the day-to-day work of the project. My title here at Action Engine is “Senior Technical Creative Architect” so my role focused on developing the core user stories, writing the initial feature definitions, building design wireframes and handing the initial work with the customer, Time Warner. Still no mean feat, but I give deference to the folks who had to be in the office until 3am to make the ship date.
The total development timeframe from start to release to market was pretty tight, my original statement of work estimated the time as being around a 6 week development effort (even with a reduced feature set from my original thoughts) but in actuality we had to turn the app out in a few days of 4 weeks. Partially this was because of lost time from holidays, and partially this was because of a days we needed to remove from the development schedule to assure logo certification for the application. Needlesstosay, cutting time from a software project isn’t the way to guarantee success, but the team really knocked this out of the park. We’re already planning a feature pack to reinstate some of the things we needed to remove so that we could make the RTM date … I’m hoping that we ship the feature pack by the first week of March.
Here are some of the original wireframes and screen captures of the SI Mobile application as it is today:
Worst Whistler ever …
Last weekend Bill and I made our way up to Whistler in British Columbia for the 2008 WinterPride ski week. We’ve never really been into “community” activities — we actually did attend an IML one year in Chicago, but entirely on accident; the sight of a crowd of leather-clad men kept us amused for hours — so WinterPride is actually something unusual for us to attend. The fact that the Whistler / Blackcomb resort area has been nominated the best ski area in North America (besting Aspen, Vail et al) for the past few years is an added bonus.
It was our second year. Last visit we had a ton of fun: hanging out at the apres ski get-togethers, crowd watching at theme parties like the “BearTrap”, meeting some interesting folks.
No so much this year. Sigh.
This year I had to make the trip up with a bad headcold. A headcold which degraded into a lovely sinus infection, and a few days after that a nice bout of bronchitis. It was everything you hate about winter sickness: sweaty fever / icy chills, dripping nose, hacking cough, unstoppable sneezing. Except this time, it was in a 4-star hotel, with a 1 minute walking distance to the gondola for the best skiing in town.
I took Friday off as a day of rest to hopefully kick the bug enough from my system. I woke up Saturday (whether by force of will or adrenalin or the fact I knew I pre-paid $75 for a lift ticket) raring to go up the slopes. I would not be denied.
One of the things that makes WinterPride so cool is the fact that there are a big number of ski groups (ranging from Slow Green to Fast Double Black) and they’re all a good number of skiers; generally no more than eight. Ghim and I got into a fast blue group and set off. The group was really good — I was the slowest amongst them — and the group leader Peter set us down some really great powdery runs. The trouble was, I couldn’t breathe let alone exert myself to actually keep up the pace of the group. I took one tumble into an 18-inch bank of powder and got the wind knocked out of me. From that point on, I was basically done for. Ghim skied down the mountain with me, I stopped to get a beer in me at Dusty’s cafe and took the shuttle bus back to the village.
Sigh. There’s always next year. This time with Zicam and lots of echinacea.
Second ski of the season
Headed up to Crystal again this weekend, this time solo by riding on the express bus. The temperature was bitter cold — in the high teens — and it kept snowing the whole time the mountain was open. These conditions mean a few things: a) the visibility will be questionable, b) the crowds on the mountain will drop off as people get too cold and c) there will be a fresh layer of powder the whole time you’re on the mountain.
True to form, all three came to pass. Since this was my second trip I thought I would step it up a notch (the first trip up of the season is really to get my ski legs back). I looked for the blue runs I haven’t been on before or the runs that i thought looked good from a chairlift. From there, I would really focus on speed and technique and go to town on the mountain. This time up I found a whole set of runs that I’ve never been on before (the Green River Valley runs). The whole area had at least 12 inches of sticky powder everywhere, and since the crowds were low, nothing was tracked to pieces.
I was having such a good time that I decided to step it up a notch even further. I saw a face off to the right of the Green River Valley chair with only a single person and absolutely pristine snow. From the chairlift this looked like a great place to be, the only problem was you had to traverse off the beaten path to get to it. Now, in skiing when you go off the beaten path this either means you’re in the “backcountry” or “off piste.” (Things sound so much better when they’re in a different language, no?) Well, this face was definitely off piste.
Way off piste in point of fact. Of course one could only discover the full breadth of its off-pisteness once you were staring down the face. To be clear, staring down the steep tree-packed face to your front and with a sheer rock cliff behind you. A cliff festooned with safety flags and warning orange signs saying: “EXTREME DANGER — CLIFF FACE.” Understatement is really a fine art when it comes to warning signage, in my humble opinion. The signs would be most noticeable by someone plummeting past them on their way down to make a cruel introduction to the boulders below.
Now the ski face was more extreme than I had realized. There were a number of trees in basically every ley down the mountain, and because it had never been groomed, falling over or sitting down meant you sank a good three feet into powder. I sat, snapped some pictures just in case I needed to prove an insurance claim (always thinking ahead here) and made a very slow descent. All in all, it was really a great ride but following that I opted to be far more boring for the rest of the day… and, when in doubt, not ever go off piste evah, evah again.
Pictures from the day:
The furniture fiasco
Anything that can go wrong …
If you work in or are connected to the sales profession, you know that the start of the new year generally coincides with performance bonus season. This just so happens to be right around the time that most sale-y folks go out and start going household upgrades. We’re no exception to this rule.
For the past few months Bill has been antsy about replacing our living room furniture. We bought a big sectional from Room & Board in Chicago around the autumn of 1999. Set us back a few thousand dollars at the time, but we were having a friend of ours do a major design renovation of our house in Chicago so we sprung for it. In the intervening 7+ years, that sectional hasn’t fared too well with three major moves: Chicago->West Coast storage, West Coast storage->Lower Queen Anne Seattle, Lower Queen Anne Seattle->Magnolia, Seattle. The topper was when the chaise lounge fabric started become threadbare and developed a 14-inch tear right where your feet would rest. The sectional had to go. We’ve also been sleeping on a bare mattress for about the same time, so it made sense to buy an official bed set at the same time.
Personally I hate shopping for furniture — actually I hate spending large amounts of yet-to-be-deposited money — so Bill did all the research and running around. He likes that kind of stuff. He picked things out, I didn’t particularly hate any of the selections he made, so just this morning he set out to buy the new furniture while I ran around town doing some errands. Fast forward to noon.
Bill (on cellphone): “Omigod. I can get the new living room furniture today from Dania. It’s a total coup! They have the furniture in the warehouse and we can get it today. They wanted to charge us $150 to deliver the furniture (can you believe that!) but we can do it now with the rental truck.”
Me: “Rental truck?”
Bill: “But we can get the furniture tooodaaaaay.”
Me: “Uhhhh”
Bill: “And, at the same time, we can get the bedroom set at Far Fetched. They wanted to charge us by the stair to deliver!”
Me: “Well, does that mean I have to lift heavy furniture today?”
Bill: “I’ll be home in 5 minutes.”
Rental truck in hand we made our way up to the Lynnwood Dania where the helpful warehouse staff picked the new living room set (couch, loveseat and chair) carted it out with a dolly and loaded it into the U-haul. We then drove down to Seattle to the Far Fetched warehouse where they also helpfully picked the bedroom set out and loaded it into the now completely full U-haul. We drove home, it’s now around 4pm.
First things first at home, we have to get the old furniture out. We move all the intervening furniture (two tables, a tall glass curio cabinet brimming with tchotchkies, three heavy granite end tables) and stow the kitties. Takes about an hour. Just outside, it starts to rain and the temperature drops. We pickup and move all the old sectional pieces one at a time down the hallway and into the garage, getting rained on the whole time. After that’s done, Bill calls up one of his employees and sells her the old furniture sight-unseen (he’s a good salesman, that Bill). It’s now about 5pm.
I back the rental truck up to the garage as much as I can and we go about unloading. Only the helpful warehouse staff have managed to successfully wedge all the furniture into a perfectly interlocking puzzle of sofa dimensions. Highway jiggling haven’t helped matters either. We pull, pry and push the bedroom set out of the mix. About 15 minutes to get that one piece out. It’s huge, unwieldy and heavy as hell. We opt to slide it into the garage rather than carry it in the house. It’s still raining.
Right about now, something my best friend Chris calls “a boy fight” starts to brew. It’s cold, it’s dark, we’re getting rained on and we’re moving huge, unwieldy and heavy as hell furniture about. The bickering starts.
We move on to the living room set, which is carefully wrapped in layers of protective plastic and pale blue padding foam. Protective plastic, which, when wet, provides next to zero gripping to move the furniture. It continues to rain. These pieces are curiously heavier and bulkier than we thought they would be, but we continue undaunted. With breaks every 10 feet or so, we carry the furniture up the two flights of stairs and into the house. It’s now about 5:45 and we’re fairly soaked, grimy from warehouse dirt and tired from hefting furniture around.
Triumphantly, Bill starts to unwrap. I start to clean the layers of sticky warehouse dust which now cover me. I hear Bill shout from the living room. The reason our furniture was bulkier and heavier than we had thought: it’s not our furniture. Expecting to find a modern cream leather set, we’re surprised to discover instead a taupe overstuffed microfiber arrangement. The kind you might expect to see in the Brady’s living room. Very retro stuff.
Dania closes at 6pm Saturdays, so Bill immediately calls the store:
Bill: “Hi, we were just in the store and bought the cream leather living room set, but when we opened it at home it’s the wrong furniture.”
Dania guy: “Oh, we delivered the wrong set to you.”
Bill: “No, no … we picked this up from the warehouse a few hours ago.”
Dania guy: “Oh, we must have given your furniture to someone else.”
Bill: “No … the warehouse guys were very specific with the furniture they got for us. They double checked and everything.”
Dania guy: “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
Bill: “How’s about giving me the furniture I wanted?”
Dania guy: “Hmmm. I can get someone out there in a week from today. Please keep the furniture clean and don’t unwrap anymore until we’re there.”
Bill: “Wait a second, that’s ludicrous. Give me the store manager.”
Dania guy: “I am the store manager.”
Bill: “Well then give me the sales lady who just sold me the wrong furniture.”
Dania guy: “She’s busy serving another customer.”
Right about now is when Bill — metaphorically now — loses his mind. A switch gets thrown, a gasket blows, ballistic things happen, the whole kit-n-caboodle.
Now living room furniture-less, we still have to get the old sectional from the garage and to SeaTac where Bill’s employee is at home waiting for us to drop it off. We have until around 9pm to return the rental truck to U-haul. Once more into the rain, we load the old furniture into the truck and drive off. Along the way, we stop to pick up Bill’s car from a lot where we parked it earlier in the day before all the furniture moving. I get into his car since I’m going to follow the rental truck to SeaTac. As Bill pulls away, I notice that we’ve now been driving the rental truck — packed with the the furniture we’ve sold to someone else — with the back door wide open. I lay on the carhorn to make Bill stop before he pulls onto the highway. A quick check later and it looks like we have lost a cushion. I now race off in Bill’s car madly looking for a sectional cushion that is on the highway, in the rain, in the dark on the opposite side of the road.
I run the whole drive path, flashing unfortunate oncoming cars with my brights to find a cushion lost in the darkness. No luck. I get back to the lot where Bill is waiting and tell him the cushion is gone for good. “Oh” he says, “I was going to call your cellphone but you didn’t have it. I miscounted.” Boy fight number two erupts.
First Ski of the Season
Yesterday my friend Lars and I hit the slopes of Crystal Mountain for our first (albeit late) ski of the season. Crystal’s been having an amazing year snow-wise, in the last two weeks, they’ve received nearly 10 feet of snow; since opening day the measure is over 240″ inches of the white stuff.
The weather couldn’t have been better for the trip. Crystal (if you’ll pardon the overuse) blue skies, relatively short lines and great snow made for a fantastic trip. One down, 9 more to go!
American Ridge Lodge Snowshoeing
We just got back from the winter camping from the regular crew. This year’s trip was a return to the American Ridge Lodge; the group had visited a few times prior (this was our first) and so they knew what to expect. I just got the eVite saying essentially: 1) it’s going to be cold, 2) everything is pack-in / pack-out, 3) you have to bring snowshoes or you’re doomed and 4) no electricity, no running water, a twenty seater pit toilet and single pane glass windows.
I packed up our backpacks as best I could, rented a pair of Denali snowshoes from REI and we headed out Friday in the very early afternoon.
Getting There
The American Ridge Lodge is located on the northern edge of the Mt. Rainier national forest. Usually one could get there from Seattle by heading south on I-5, turning left on the connecting highway headed up to the mountain and making the connection over Chinook Pass. Note I said “usually”. That plan doesn’t work in winter, when snow drifts regularly top 20 feet at times, and especially when late year storms take out large swaths of road from overflowing rivers. Such is the case in wintertime.
No, to get up to the lodge in the winter requires you to drive east through Cle Elum to Ellensburg, then head south to Yakima. When you get to Yakima, you take the first off road and proceed to drive 60 miles towards the mountain passes. When the road has turned to a sheet of ice, you haven’t seen another soul in 30 minutes and you’ve approached the opposite end of the Chinook Pass, you’re there. In the summer it’ll take you about 2 hours. In the winter, around 4.
Once you’ve arrived, it’s now time to strap on your snowshoes, gear-up the backpacks and start climbing. Getting up to the Lodge is a little short of a mile hike up a slight grade in the snow. Not bad if it’s just you and your snowshoes. Marginally more complicated when it’s you, firewood, drinking water, food, an inflatable air mattress with battery operated compressor (a requirement), a 0-degree F rated sleeping bag, a bottle of 18 year McCallen scotch and snowshoes. Take your time. Better yet, take your time and do it in the dark with a light drizzle of sleet falling on you. (In all honesty, it’s not that bad.)
About the Lodge
Back around 1905 the early settlers of the region used to come out to this area of the American Ridge to do some downhill skiing. Given what I’ve seen from making the drive and the current weather, I can only assume that the early settlers of this region were batshit crazy. Over time the area grew in popularity when by the early 40s locals had erected a set of small warming huts. Now, bear in mind, they didn’t erect a chairlift system to cart skiers up the hill with their hardwood carved skis and cast iron poles. You had to carry those up hill yourself. But, when you finally made it down hill, you could at least get yourself warm.
During the Great Depression the CCC tore down the makeshift warming huts and replaced it with the lodge as it stands today, around 1948. The ski area only lasted for another few years following that, as better and larger areas opened up in surrounding areas. By the late 50s the lodge had been abandoned and fell into disuse. Ownership of the lodge reverted back to the Forestry Service and in the mid-70s the local school district used it as a sort of nature classroom, taking school children up to the area for classes. Amazingly the lodge didn’t burn down, get vandalized into nothingness or even just rot away. During the 80s a restoration / renovation project brought it back into a more serviceable status, but in doing so they took out the stove, the bar and furnace. Now the Lodge is used by campers by reservation and the fees go to conservation.
Despite the fact that the lodge is as old as it is, and spent a good time of its existence abandoned, the structure is in very good shape.
Around the Cabin
You want pristine? You want silent? You want starry sky and the milky way? You get it in spades. The whole surrounding area basically drips with Hallmark Christmas card goodness. The ski runs are still around for the most part, the smaller runs have all since been reforested naturally. However the main run and the next smaller run are quite easily seen.
Out in the Snow
The hiking in the area was great. From what I could tell, any other group that had been there didn’t make many tracks in the snow. So, we had the range wide open to us — and maybe it’s a primal childhood thing for me — but I just can’t stand seeing pure snow go un-walkedin.
Bill and I started out wanting to head to the top of the main ski run and then make our way across that ridge and finally head down. If we found anything particularly cool, we’d go out after it. Not wanting to be an afterschool special, I had my GPS unit on tracking our movements so that I could backtrack us if I had to. Of course, in hindsight, I could have just followed our deep tracks in the snow. Eh. I got to play with my GPS receiver anyway.
The Green-Eyed Monster
One of my high-school classmates is, quite likely, a billionaire. Or perhaps a multi-millionaire. Once your air becomes rarefied, I’m pretty certain the matter becomes a distinction without much of a difference. Suffice it to say, he has got more zeros in his net worth (on the most worthwhile side of the significant digit at least) than I do. You see, Gerald Beeson is the chief financial officer of a $12 billion hedge-fund responsible for a good daily percentage of trading traffic on the NYSE and Tokyo stock exchanges.
I came across this information in a rather roundabout way, when I was monitoring a stock I hold, E-Trade, which is a company I invested in as a rebound / bottom-feeder investment. Personal disclosure: I have come to realize my shortcomings as a stockpicker. Cum Laude Finance B.A. in hand — with an analyst stint under my belt at a bulge-bracket investment bank natch! — my capacity to pick ‘em should only be matched with the phrase “for just how far they can fall,” but I digress. Any semblance to a good investment idea, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
Now in E-Trade’s most recent double-digit slide (huzzah!) I saw a mention of an outside hedge-fund, Citadel Investment Group making a $1.2 billion capital infusion into the company. This infusion came about as a result of the present MBO sub-prime meltdown; financial institutions must maintain a certain amount of retained capital for liquidity’s sake. The name Citadel sounded familiar to me, when I realized I saw that company’s name in the Marist High School alumni book. A little google-stalking and bingo — $$$-aire alumni.
I haven’t kept up much with my friends from Marist, a situation complicated by geography, the general inertia of adult life, and partially owing to the fact that I am dead to the school. And I don’t mean that in a figurative “Screw him, he’s dead to me!” way — the Marist rolls literally list me among the deceased student body. (I have no idea why this is the case but I hope I went out in an over the top John Woo Hollywood-esque extravaganza with pyrotechnics, extreme GunFu and the cliched, gratuitous slo-mo dove flyby.) This of course means that a school’s worth of bored, eyes glazed over high schoolers has been praying for my immortal purgatory-toasted soul for about a decade; a vision which fills me with a Tom Sawyer like glee. That being the case I should also add that mere death is not enough to keep Marist from sending capital campaign requests to my door. The Lord does indeed work in the most mysterious of ways.
I do remember Gerry pretty well from high school. He was, and I’m sure still is, a really great guy: a quick smile, very easy going; someone you’d want to be around. I drove him to school a few times in my baby-poop green car back while I lived with my grandmother, we talked about my cousin who went to St. Gall grade school with Gerry, chatted in the hallway about general high school stuff.
I also remember the last (and sadly, only) time I met up with some of the Marist guys (Erik Kantz, Chris Fusco, Kevin Patula, Jon Harmoning, Maury McNulty and Gerry) which was at a very real memorial for our friend Mark Mucha. We were all sitting in a golf course clubhouse drinking a pint of beer, where we raised a pint to Mark’s memory and to a lesser extent my surprise resurrection. Great guys all.
But I’m still not a $$$-aire.
Frankfurt Thanksgiving ‘07
Hello There!
I’m a media darling!
Last week Friday Anne Baker, the VP of Marketing here at my new gig (ActionEngine in Bellevue, WA) asked me if I had downloaded and looked at the new Google Android software development kit. (Android is a new mobile phone operating system and is the presumptive basis for the oft-rumored gPhone.) Being the geek that I am, of course I had. “Great!” she then said, “Can you do an interview with the Seattle Times in about 30 minutes?”
To be sure, skimming the documentation in an SDK and being able to speak authoritatively on the subject (with a member of the press no less) are two wholly different matters. I tore back into the docs, while simultaneously watching a YouTube stream from the Google evangelist corp and rapidly jotting down notes of my impressions and interpretations of what I was digesting and then subsequently regurgitating. Anne and I then sat down with the reporter for about an hour’s worth of chat.
I knew the story would run in the Seattle Times business / technology section — but what I didn’t know was that the story would then be picked up by two blog outfits: one covering exclusively mobile content, the other an Android fanboy site. All three of them reference me by name, and quote me directly as saying:
Chris Lihosit, a senior creative technical architect at Action Engine, said one of the first things he did last Monday was download the developer kit, which encompasses all the tools needed to build an application. Although some of the features look great, he said, Action Engine is not interested.
“To be clear, I’m excited about firing it up and banging away to my heart’s content whenever I have a weekend to burn,” Lihosit said, “but I don’t know if it will be part of my job description.”
While the quote is indeed accurate, I *am* excited to play around with Android and I also suspect that it *won’t* be part of my job anytime soon — the article misrepresented the points I was trying to make. (This generally seems to be par for the course when giving interviews, which makes talking point memos seem all the more reasonable in hindsight.) The points I really laid out were:
Android Pros
- Android is built on the shoulders of some great open source technologies, like an OpenGL api, a great text rendering engine, the webKit backend of Safari and SQLite, a full relational database. All pretty cool, well thought out stuff.
- Android allows for multiple java process to run on the JVM, in either a synchronous or an asynch mode. This is big stuff to mobile developers; right now only 1 app can run at a time with mobile Java so things like soft switching and data sharing are right out the window for the majority of handsets in the global market.
- Android opens up a fairly universal access policy to a phone’s underlying capabilities — this is a massive improvement over somewhat spotty JSR implementations in the mobile industry today.
- The entire handset experience is apparently meant to be swappable. Don’t like the dialer? Get a new one. Want a new address book? Pop a better one in place. Looking for eyecandy on the idle screen? Here ya go. Only a few of these can be accomplished today mass market (Windows Mobile being the notable exception) and they all require certification and cash from gatekeeper organizations like Qualcomm.
Android Cons
- The Android release doesn’t do anything to solve the glaring problem in mobile: the ~6,000 device types used in the world, each with its own set of characteristics. Entire companies have been built upon device databases which contain profiled phone capabilities. With the replacement cycle of handsets being what it is the likelihood of this problem going away any time soon is nil.
- Implicit in the release are some baseline assumptions for development, such as a screen size that will provide enough real estate to provide a meaningful user experience. Volatile memory constraints, persistent file storage and guaranteed network access are all bottlenecked at the ODM fab. The goodness of Android can be spoiled by an accountant looking to shave $2 from the component price of a handset.
- Android has an XML based layout language, which looks to be similar to XAML in the Vista release. This approach has been tried before with mobile and has consistently failed. Exactly how an experience will gracefully degrade from a designed-for device of 320×240 to a run-on device of 172×240 isn’t particularly specified. And, *if* there isn’t a guarantee of great UX change, then Android is exactly the same as other mobile development languages. Which is to say, shitty.
- All the development for Android occurs in Java (horray!). However, it runs on a proprietary to Google (i.e., not open sourced) virtual machine called “Dalvik” (boo!). Dalvik, it turns out doesn’t actually run J2ME / MIDP2 … it runs J2SE or the desktop version of Java. (Note: Sun has been rumbling that J2SE and J2ME are converging, and therefore they might cut J2ME.) As a result of this code change, none of the existing mobile applications (I mean ZERO, NADA, REIN.) will work on an Android device — zero forward compatibility. Runtime file extensions are even different, instead of “.jar” they’re “.dex” (hurray for patent attorney billable hours!). Android starts with a clean slate … every ported app for Android is a baseline refactor and rewrite. That sucks primetime.
My real take on the Android release is that this is Google’s play to bring the power of their datacenters onto the mobile phone. The Android APIs integrate well with the online suite of Google Apps (Picasa, gMail and gMaps are all mentioned by name as application possibilities in the evangelist videos) so it’s clear that Google’s headed to the third screen. In a roundabout way, I see this also as Google’s entree to the embedded marketspace; there isn’t anything stopping Android from running on a set top box either. This incidentally is the space where Microsoft has long drooled as a future market for growth. Microsoft has met with very limited success in this market so far.
I think that Android will have great success. Well, let me qualify that for a second. I think Android will have great success in APAC and India, both places that are easily 2-3 years ahead of the US in terms of mobile adoption and utility. Domestically, the wireless carriers are all walled gardens the likes of which evoke the openness of CompuServe and QuantumLink in the 80’s. (This is to say, nearly zero.) I would love to see a Google evangelist convince one of the 8 brand management decision makers at AT&T, Sprint/Nextel, Verizon, or Alltel (yes, there are literally just a handful of these people in the US) that allowing any third party to remove their billion dollar investment in branding is a good idea. Off the bat, carriers would love their ability to form slotting and revenue share partnerships with service providers if anyone can build deep seated applications. Just try to steal that candy from the 800-pound gorilla baby.
As part of its launch, Google announced a $10 million bounty program (snarky comment: perhaps they should value the bounties in Euros soon). Motivating anyone with the carrot of shiny lucre is neato, but who’s really going to be going after that money? A first round prize of $25,000 isn’t nearly enough to bankroll an engineer for a significant length of time. (Back of envelope opportunity cost calculation: Average J2ME dev salary: ~$90k/year, loaded with benefits $135k or $67.50/hour. Doing double duty as both a designer, a developer and a tester, that leaves around 370 work hours or a little over 2 months to develop, test, release and win a prize before the breakeven line is passed. In the terms of a software development business, that’s a bit hard to swallow.) A final round prize of $275,000 would most likely come from an established mobile application house porting an application to Android making the money less of a prize and more of a de facto investment.
Adobe did this sort of thing back in 2002/2003 when it first released FlashLite (back then the new mobile killer platform). FlashLite still doesn’t have a meaningful presence in the US (well, it is on one phone from Verizon). Until there is some there “there” I see this as really being an academic exercise; Google is rewarding the geek elite to do what we would normally do anyway — hack around with cool new tech.
Echos of a start-up
Six-degrees, or so we are told, is all that separates any one of us. I am just now wondering if that maxim holds true for companies as well, even late 90’s software flame-outs.
A few minutes ago, while researching a possible competitor to my business with a customer (Plusmo — a disastrous branding mistake if I could ever recognize one), I realized that I have an unwitting connection to that competitor. We share the same silicon valley business address as my very first technology company, Aveo Inc.
Aveo Inc. is long gone now, a victim of the Valley implosion, a board of directors that believed in the “Gotta Keep Spending” unlaughable joke business model and some executive management that was asleep at the wheel. Still, it’s more than a bit freaky to think this company is using the conference room I once slept in while pulling all-nighters.
I wonder if they still have all my shit I left behind in my cube? I want that stuff back!