As a long-time Vonage customer, I had the opportunity to buy in to the Vonage IPO at $16-18 a share. I passed, but I still worried that I was missing a good thing. What if it goes up to $20 on day one? I could have made a few hundred bucks. Today Vonage had its IPO at $17. Now it may be that Vonage will shoot through the roof and I may still live to kick myself for sitting this one out, but right now I'm not feeling too bad:
I picked up Carlo Longino's post just minutes ago on my feed reader (he discusses surprisingly low mobile Internet usage penetration statistics) and I was struck by how well his final paragraph summed up what's wrong with today's mobile Internet, or at least many operators' visions of it:
…Users should be empowered to access whatever they want. This means no walled gardens, and powerful browsers that can access full HTML sites. Second, operators should focus on adding value to users’ internet experiences by recognizing that mobile browsing is different than browsing from a computer and add to (not replace) the open access with more customized services and sites for users that want them.
Amen to that. Who wants Internet lite? Not Skweezer users, that's for sure. The original article at Netimperitive is quite interesting too, as it backs up the rationale for Skweezer's whole existence (emphasis mine):
… One in three (33%) British mobile phone users want to surf the web on their mobile phones, but only if it is like the true Internet environment. To date only one in ten (11%) British mobile users have browsed the Internet on a mobile, compared to over one in four (28%) world wide.
Yesterday some PR went out announcing Advertizer to the world. This is very exciting, especially considering how hard we worked to make this possible.
Currently this blog is hosted on wordpress.com and in order to discourage splogs they've taken a hard stance against JavaScript, which kind of rules out ads for now. However, since wordpress.com and other hosts/systems allow RSS sidebars (like my Google Reader starred items on the right) and text ads are now available via RSS/Atom such as through systems such as Greenlight Wireless' Advertizer, that sort of opens the door, doesn't it? Check out this diagram and notice how #2 looks familiar.
Inserting text ads in syndicated feeds isn't a new idea. So far, every mention I can find of RSS/Atom + Ads in my absolutely non-exhaustive search has to do with embedding ads in existing feeds, such as banner ads at the bottom or interspersing real items with sponsor messages. However, syndication formats like RSS and Atom are the new HTML, and as a delivery mechanism one XML dialect is as good as another as far as I'm concerned.
"When can I sign up?" you ask? We're working on that, believe me. The full text of the PR release follows. Read more »
Some months ago, I took a contract assignment working for my friend John Say at his company Say Design, which creates casual games in Flash. I shepherded the development of a download-able puzzle game (John invented the idea himself) during my brief tenure as a project manager. My work at Greenlight Wireless began to demand more of my time, and I had to bow out of Say Design, sadly. John was very gracious about it, and the game development continued.
Finally, Poker Pop World Tour was just released the other week and it turned out really well. Like every other game made by Say Design, it's really high quality. You can download it for a 60-minute free trial from PlayFirst. I was dazzled by how immersing and addicting the game has become since I last saw it in pre-alpha stage many months ago. Clearly a lot of blood, sweat, and tears were poured into that game, and I congratulate the team that put it together. I was happy to see I'm still in the credits, even though my own contribution was probably less than 1% of the finished product.
I don't know for a fact that this particular downloadable game is still built on top of Flash. But I do know that Say Design does a lot of cutting-edge Flash work. With continuing advances of Flash Lite, it's not completely wild speculation to anticipate a Flash Lite version of Poker Pop World Tour available for download to your phone at some future point. I'm just saying.
Since the WSJ is currently having a 10-day open house, I can link to a recent article entitled The Next Tech Battle: Internet Searches on Cellphones (found via textually.org). It's all about operators and search engine companies partnering up to get internet searches on subscribers' screens. Quick read it while you can. Look for this part of the article, towards the bottom which I shall emphasize for your enjoyment:
Internet companies and cellphone service providers have been offering rudimentary search capabilities on phones for several years. Searching the Internet with traditional cellphones, though, has been unwieldy, with results often restricted to a limited number of Web pages that have specifically been formatted for phones.
But the experience is starting to improve, thanks to faster wireless Internet connections and bigger cellphone screens, which increasingly now are also color. And sales of a new generation of so-called smart phones, which can send email, surf the Internet and download software, are growing rapidly. [...]
Developments in software are also making it easier for cellphones to interpret Internet pages and extract only key information, such as focusing on text but ignoring large images or menus of options that often sit on the side or the top of Web pages. Meanwhile, companies are building mobile-friendly Web sites.
The article concludes with questions about the viability of advertising on a small screen. So on one hand, let's all wait for the mobile web to be built. Good luck waiting for that to happen. Or another idea: wait for phones and networks to get better and faster. What about now? Have they ever heard of Skweezer and Advertizer? I wonder what both sides are giving up to get these partnerships.
I haven’t yet commented on our recent change to Skweezer to discontinue free WebTV access a few weeks ago (a.k.a. MSN TV, but I prefer to call it by the old WebTV name). To recap: since April 24, 2006 if you try to browse Skweezer with your WebTV device and you’re not logged in as a Skweezer Pro subscriber, you get a the following message:
Skweezer® Notification
Hello MSN TV user! Skweezer was developed for mobile phone and PDA users. In order to use Skweezer with your MSN TV device, you need to create a Skweezer Pro account. Click here to sign up for Skweezer Pro, or to update your existing Skweezer account to Skweezer Pro.
If you are not using MSN TV and believe you have received this message mistakenly, please let us know.
It was not done lightly. After all, how cool was it that a completely unintended group of users found a new use for our technology? Theoretically, Skweezer is a perfect fit for WebTV: the content is reformatted for the lower resolution screen, and our dynamic compression really speeds up the web for the mostly dial-up connections. It’s similar to the problem that mobile users have, and we thought that was pretty cool at the time. However, as we experienced rapid growth, it became important to re-examine our traffic patterns to see if there was some way we could improve service quality. Read more »
Our web host for Skweezer and Advertizer is Data393, and I just wanted to say that they are awesome. They're based out of Denver, they have a very professional staff and excellent infrastructure, and they've totally been there for our growth. It's been several months since we moved over to them, and we've been very pleased. Lee, Casey, Steve, Jennifer, Chris, and everyone else on the team that has put up with us: you guys rock.
That is all.
I’ve really been enjoying the database war stories from O’Reilly Radar these past few days. The discussion about getting Web 2.0 application architecture scaled up to meet rapidly growing demands has held my interest since I have been scrambling for the past few weeks to increase the query performance of Advertizer, the text advertisement aggregator/mobilizer that powers Skweezer ads. In summary, we were able to take a full-text SQL query that used to take nearly 10 seconds and drop it down to mere milliseconds. This takes Advertizer from the realm of proof-of-concept up to serious enterprise-ready money machine. I am thrilled and relieved now that it’s done and live.
Before it had a name, Advertizer was simply the mechanism that Skweezer itself used to gather text ads from multiple advertising partners in real-time, pick the best ones and put them on the bottom of the page. Eventually it became a stand-alone system general enough for other companies to use too. After all, mobile text ads = the next new hotness. As we grew, it became clear that real-time ad aggregation was too dang slow because in order to get the best ad from several different publishers, you need to wait for the slowest one. Advertizer then changed to a data-cached system where it would store the ads to show in a temporary database.
In order to match ads based on context and keywords, (okay, don’t laugh) I thought that using SQL Server’s full-text indexing was the way to go. It turns out I was wrong about that. Some of those queries were taking over 10 seconds to return, which is far too long to wait for ads. Also, having one single database is a performance brick wall. After hiring a DBA consultant ($$$ but worth it), that same multi-second query now returns fast enough to support 1.6 million queries per day, per server. Our projected hardware costs just plummeted, and that’s huge. Read more »
