Innovative mobile applications and advanced network technology are great, but only if they work. Bhavik Gandhi toured from Stockholm to Istanbul with the purpose of testing mobile applications on the road. His disappointing results have led to promising solutions.
Monday, November 1, 2004
Bhavik Gandhi in Turkey
Traveling by bicycle and equipped with Sony Ericsson's P900 and T39, and XMS's digital paper and pen solution, Bhavik Gandhi set out to test the hardware, location-based services, simple data transfer and the networks of different operators. Although his journey took him through some of Europe's most technically advanced countries, the inadequacies of mobile technology were extensive.
"Application developers need to consider how their applications might perform in the real world," says Gandhi, founder of EI Labs, which provides models to simulate market growth and risk for high-tech products. "In a perfect world, a cool application might work as long as there is always 100 percent GPRS coverage. This is rarely the case outside the main cities." But he is neither negative nor discouraged. Instead, Gandhi has come up with a growing list of ideas on how to make things better.
The road to improvement
"Most of the problems I encountered were network-based; things such as roaming, network pricing and the types of services offered," Gandhi says. "SMS and voice worked fine but not data or GPRS. It would be good to have a bot (a robot or software program) that automatically checks the network for available services and then formats them," he says.
"Another aspect is that with GPRS applications, language is seldom considered. Again, why not have a bot configured to your preferences that identifies language, habits, or whatever you want it to do. For example, I always like to check CNN each morning when I turn on my phone; it would be great if that happened automatically."
Bhavik Gandhi in Austria
Gandhi's route took him through Sweden, Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece and Turkey. His experience was that, except for SMS welcome messages from operators, location-based services were, for the most part, nonexistent. Tourist information in Salzburg offered a mobile service, but this was simply a premium phone number, not a true location-based service. Some Greek cities had limited location-based information for local events and taxi services.
Features that Gandhi would like to see include a free trial of a service before investing in a premium phone call. Services could be offered on a daily basis, rather than per call. Information could be downloaded and stored on the phone; or instead of receiving information as an audio file, it could be sent as an SMS, making it more accessible in areas without a network.
"Operators generally move slowly," Gandhi says. "That's why it's better if developers take charge and work with configurations in networks, filtering and re-organizing information, and then clearly presenting it in the mobile phone. Despite all the advanced applications, the phone remains a voice and text tool � build services around these. It's all about communication."
To improve communication, Gandhi has compiled a wish list of communication, information and data services, based on his traveling experience:
- PO Box � to cache redirected SMS, e-mail and voice mail until the user accesses it from a network location.
- Email Bridge Server � the ability to translate text based email into voice messages
- Audio SMS � with a market positioning between a text SMS and Push to Talk services.
- SMS broadcast � the ability to create SMS mailing lists and broadcast to small groups.
- Peer-to-peer networking � the ability to search for peers with the same interest in a certain city.
- Remote data storage and backup � the ability for users to backup data to a remote server via the phone. Data may include files created on the phone, such as Word documents, voice or audio files, images or videos.
- Remote address book, calendar, SMS and e-mail synchronization � a unified contact synchronization between contacts stored in a PIM, such as Outlook and on the phone.
- Web-based interface for phone settings � users should be able to edit their phone settings and back them up via the web, for easy transfer to other phones.
- E911 services � a single number that acts as an interface to local emergency numbers.
- Dictionaries � for local language search and translation, available as an SMS-based or GPRS-based look-up feature on the phone.
- Reverse mobile positioning � to locate a lost phone the user sends an SMS to the phone followed by a password and it returns an SMS with the location.
- Events, tickets and alerts � a closed loop marketing system where the user gets event notifications, can buy tickets via the phone and is given an alert days or hours before the event.
- Pricing clarity � the user receives an SMS with information about pricing details, customized for the user�s network, including any extra roaming charges.
As a result of this trip, some of Gandhi's ideas will be developed further into viable business models.
By Kris Walmsley
Ericsson: Cyclist test-drives mobile applications
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