Tom Hume

• The Perry Bible Fellowship
  Awful :)
  (tags: mario cartoon)

• MEX Conference, May 2007 - a photoset on Flickr
  (tags: mex rod art)

• ChristianLindholm.com: My speech at MEX, The SW Transformer A Vision for a mobile OS
  Christian's talk from MEX
  (tags: christianlindholm mex)
• In search of a Holy Allegory - Project Monkey
  "If you start to compromise your entire construction just to use regular repeated elements you will not only build an inadequate item but will suffer from looking like every other of that type in existence and loose the edge of being individual."
  (tags: dev software analogy)
• Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Vodafone's new data plan - defensive measures leave plenty of loopholes & questions
  (tags: vodafone pricing data mobile analysis)
• MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience - PMN Handset Industry Dashboard Q1
  Look at the stats on that
  (tags: pmn dashboard)
• Coding Horror: Programming Tip: Learn a Graphics Editor
  +1. When I started out I was one of those folks who didn't "get" what antialiasing did and why it mattered.... ooh I learned that sharpish :)
  (tags: software dev design)
• Big Visible Charts
  (tags: charts dev software scrum agile pm bvc)
• Microsoft to buy mobile ad pioneer Screentonic - www.mobile-ent.biz
  (tags: ms microsoft mobile screentonic ad)
• Goodie-Goodie Google has evil NDA
  This really annoys me; for a company that's so Not Evil it's a pretty grotty thing to routinely do. Not that the competition are much better
  (tags: google nda)

More bits and pieces from MEX since my last post:

1. What's the cost to the operator or handset vendor of adding in context-aware features, compared to the (commercial) benefit?
2. 61% of women carry a phone in their handback. 60% of men in right trouser pocket.
3. A great presentation from Argo Group showing off real-world results from their test suite: response times for text messages during NYE, what happens when things go wrong with MMS delivery: "you need to think like the user, test like an engineer"
4. Fantastic break-out session with Christian Lindholm, Scott Weiss and chums: including revelations about large internet portals taking a more scientific approach to usability than handset vendors; the need of insight and intuition to make great products (whereas usability can get you to "good");
5. Measuring device usability by counting numbers of support calls generated;
6. Christian wondering out loud why the Motorola Z8 has such a Series-60 like UI during a panel session including Matthew Menz, Head of Interaction Design at Motorola :)
7. Annti Ohrling of Blyk talking about their research and their intention to concentrate on text-message push marketing

All this, and a verbal kicking from James Pearce too, after I ventured the idea that fragmentation (as a consequence of open standards) was in one way an opportunity for companies like FP (or others who are out there solving device fragmentation problems - Argo Group, Volantis, etc.). Never been told that I should be ashamed of myself by a speaker at a conference before :)

Nice to catch up with you afterwards tho James :)

• ZIP Code Postal Code Area Codes Database Subscription and Solution Services | ZIPCodeWorld.com
  (tags: zip code database)

I'm camped out at MEX for 2 days, wearing my analyst/blogger and FP hats.

It's been interesting so far - great bunch of folks, an intimate atmosphere, good venue, and some familiar faces. I like the format too - talks or panel discussions with frequent breakout sessions.

I'm here as a guest to take notes formally, so won't be publishing an exhaustive report, but some impressions and thoughts so far:

1. Cliff Crosbie of Nokia was excellent talking about the importance of the retail environment, though we weren't clear what percentage of handsets are sold via this channel nowadays. Message: if you want to sell these products, make sure your sales force are knowledgeable, confident, and appropriately incentivised.
2. Mike Grenville's break-out session on retail, where we concluded that we need simple pricing, building trust by letting users try things out, and across-the-value-chain incentives so that sales staff benefit from educating customers about mobile data services.
3. The Prada phone has sold very well, and (coincidentally) has the strictest ever guidelines for retail display.
4. There's a contradiction between wanting openness in all business dealings, and a well-integrated user experience running from content, through handset, to network.
5. Big Brother vids generated 50x the traffic for Vodafone live and 10x as much revenue when they were made free to download as when they were sold.
6. Vodafone see mobile as a satellite of fixed Internet use nowadays, apparently.
7. The address book keeps being mentioned as a gateway to Internet services: score one, Mr Johnston :)
8. Telecomms is Apple-obsessed right now, and (I think) ignoring that fact that the products their jealous of (ipod, Walkman) are all single-use devices whilst mobile is general purpose.
9. Christian Lindholm: "Skype is interesting because of its intergenerational appeal"
10. Contextual UIs which take the environment into account are (a) hard and (b) of questionable value.

All this, and Mr Heathcote lurking in amongst a crowd of on-brand Happy People in Nokia presentation...

• Image Zoo Ambient Advertising
  (tags: imagezoo ireland ad)
• Agile Fusion » Proguard as alternative to precompiler
  Optimise out that unused code
  (tags: proguard preprocess midlet j2me port)
• Amazon.com: Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Unlimited Online Storage: Amazon Web Services
  New Amazon S3 pricing includes a per-1,000-request model
  (tags: amazon s3 pricing)
• The Loony BIN - Worse Than Failure
  "whenever I hear someone complaining of random file corruption, I don't really believe them"
  (tags: bin backup file transfer corruption)

• Reactable Instrument - Björk Introduces a New Electronical Music Instrument (VIDEO)
  (tags: bjork synth ui music)