Who You Calling A Jesse?

I noticed today that Fido (a Canadian mobile telco that is part of Rogers) is now offering the Nokia 6301 with UMA enabled if you buy their UNO router. The router thing is kinda dumb. Its just a crap average wifi router than might have some software installed to point your session to Fido/Rogers servers? Or maybe its just a wifi router for $80?

Anyway, kinda lame in how this is going out. I have heard Rogers is rolling it out as well. Perhaps it pains them to use Nokia devices to roll this out since Nokia likes to offer unlocked devices in the US for the same price Rogers sells them for with contracts? It is really cool technology and could, in theory, reduce costs all around. But pushing 802.11 routers that are special seems to be a bit odd.

UMA is: “Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA, is the commercial name of the 3GPP Generic Access Network, or GAN standard. GAN is a telecommunication system which extends mobile services voice, data and IP Multimedia Subsystem/Session Initiation Protocol (IMS/SIP) applications over IP access networks.” Wikipidea.

Under what I think is the wrong category, the iPhone is named Invention of the Year by Time. It’s not an ‘invention’ at all though, unless you count the overall phone, PDA, and billing experience. Apple has maybe invented a better process for mobile computing and cellular networks. The iPhone is an enabling technology through its experience, not through its email, browser, etc. It makes the mobile device easy to use and thus inspires a load of developers to mimic that experience on their applications. For that, it is just amazing. The iPhone should get gadget of the year—which it probably will, voting is still open.

Having only played with an iPhone, owned a Blackberry and an Nokia E62, and still have to deal with the moronic customer service of Canadian cellular providers my opinion is purely based on observation but it is pretty obvious that the inability (or lack of motivation) to provide the activation, service, and billing experience that comes with AT&T in the US is what is stopping Rogers from offering the iPhone.

I still want a real keyboard btw… N810 with the iPhone OS would be perfect.

Last night (but dated today) an article on how the iPhone comes with a cost for Rogers appeared on the Globe and Mail web site. The article points out how Apple was able to simplify the silly billing practices of mobile carriers in the US and the EU (the iPhone launching in the EU November 9th). They compare the equivalent bill in Canada for the unlimited data/voice at $70 a month (leaving out the AT&T monthly charge with the exchange rate is actually lower in the US). Sadly in Canada if you try to use the data people have been seeing on their iPhone you could go well over $1000 a month. In theory, that is why Apple has not released the iPhone in Canada yet.

I know of a few people with an iPhone in Canada. Some not using their data, others lucky (or silly for paying that premium for so long) enough to have kept the old Fido (a GSM carrier that didn’t have long term contracts then either) unlimited data plan that was around in 2000 before the phones that would use said data were really in use.

Personally I think the iPhone is cool but the lack of iPhone in Canada doesn’t mean the carriers suck. It is the fact they refuse to have phones that are less than a year on the market in the US (never mind Europe), have wifi, with a two year plan still costs hundreds of dollars, and don’t in reality cost close to $150 a month if you actually use them for talking, texting, etc. Their inability to change this practice when the profits of AT&T, likely in part thanks to the iPhone, are stated is what makes them suck. Then of course there is the possibility that Canadians think both Bell and Rogers (CDMA and GSM carriers and our only real choice) are terrible companies in terms of customer service and technology adoption/reliability and that alone means they suck. They could be happy with the money they are making and fear change but that should mean the CRTC needs to stop protecting them and open up the market, now!

I have seen it stated before but I will say it here too… Apple’s big coup with the iPhone is not the technology, it is taking the position to tell the carriers to stuff it and change or loose out on the coolest technology out there (according to Apple’s marketing machine). One lesser mentioned observation I have had is that Nokia (and Motorola) is also sending a message to carriers but in a more subtle way, they are selling their phones unlocked for a decent price in North America (at least). With the US/CDN exchange rate just drop into a Nokia store in any trendy US mall ;) You will still be screwed on the data plans but you can always just use wifi where you can, maybe a little VoIP.

Let me introduce to you UW’s very own Twitter clone called UW Chatter. It’s purpose, to act as notification resource for students, staff, faculty, departments, groups, etc. Features it has now:

• post to your groups and stream
• list friends, add groups, create groups, remove groups, etc
• jabber client (uwchatter@gmail.com)
• email to SMS notifications
• email notifications

What it still needs:

• SMS gateway
• other IM clients
• stable jabber
• a production server
• UI love
• twitter API hook in
• mobile version
• a way to post to groups from jabber, right now you can just post to your own stream

About the app…. We built this with Ruby on Rails. It lives on a development box with a Mongrel cluster and mySQL in the back end. The code itself will go to Rubyforge the end of June (as will the rest of our Ruby apps).

Please give it a go, create some groups, post some notes. Try it out! If you join the bug and notes group you can post your thoughts on the app and what you would like to see. We still haven’t written a help file yet so you really need to just try it out!

I was supposed to present this today at Design Camp Waterloo but I ended up running around campus chasing my tail…

Since the tragedy at Virginia Tech just about every higher education campus is dusting off their emergency plan. Why the Montreal shooting in September didn’t have the same effect is beyond me. I suppose people related it more to high school, although a CGEP is more like a Univeristy campus than a high school… anyway people are looking at security and communication with students, staff, and faculty. For some reason they are fixating on mobile phones and SMS as theanswer to all this. That is wrong, it is only a part of the puzzle.

The problem

The problem is defined as how can we get a blast message out to people on campus immediately. I don’t think anyone is expecting to reach everyone at once but reach enough people that the word will get out quickly. SMS is really good for that. A recent poll of students on the Waterloo campus (1300 respondents) has just over 70% of students with mobile phones. If you have all their numbers and an application to blast it out and you assume most have their phone on, just hope they aren’t desensitized to SMS enough that they will check it within a few minutes of it being received. There you go, problem solved.

There are some problems with this theory though. Like the bouncing IM client on their desktop, how many students ignore the instant message part of SMS? How many have their phones on? How many have the same number they entered (likely more now thanks to number portability)? If students are following the rules, their phones are off or silent in class as well.

I think you will reach a lot students with SMS but I don’t think you would reach enough to rely solely on a SMS alert system. I think an alert needs to go out over SMS, email, IM, post on web pages, and ideally even send an alert over the Facebook Waterloo network (23 500 people in that now).

The solution: social networks.

If you look at a system like twitter, you have IM and phone settings but you also have an active user base. If you sent an alert over a social network that has an active user base I think you are far more likely to reach people. It is just amazing how quickly word gets out on twitter. Back to the Virginia Tech tragedy, students and the media turned to social networks for information. That certainly validates their utility.

With the social network theory as my motivation, I have been working with a great group of people under the banner MMNP to create a twitter like application for the UW community that will have an alert feature. It will send out an alert to all the communication venues the user has in their profile.

I will talk about this topic and demo our application this weekend at BarCampWaterloo. Then I will demo it again at Design Camp Waterloo (they really need to plug that into the BarCamp wiki) on the 17th of May. After that the app will go into public use mode but the server likely won’t be stable for a while. We are just finding our way with Mongrel clusters ;)

Last week I mentioned a bit about the redirect script based on HTTP_USER_AGENT we use to send mobiles to a special version of the home page. This week I have some basic documentation written along with the PHP for download that we use on the mobile.php version of the home page.

Essentially all we are doing is parsing content from the static site and generating a mobile friendly version that is just content in smaller chunks. They are identified by their div class or id. Have a look at the documentation and let me know if anything needs more explanation.

If you go to the UW home page in a Blackberry or Nokia device you will notice that you get a very different page than what you see on your laptop. I mentioned this change back in January. A few people have asked about how we are doing that and given a post on the quirksmode blog suggesting a similar idea I figure I should post the code for all.

In a PHP script that is included in the top of the index.php file, all we do is:

1. $ua = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
2. if (stristr($ua, “Windows CE”) || stristr($ua, “AvantGo”) || stristr($ua, “Mazingo”) || stristr($ua, “Mobile”) || stristr($ua, “T68”) || stristr($ua, “Syncalot”) || stristr($ua, “Blazer”) || stristr($ua,’BlackBerry’) || stristr($ua,’Opera Mini’) || stristr($ua,’Nokia’) || stristr($ua,’SymbianOS’ ))
3. {
4. $DEVICE_TYPE=”MOBILE”;
5. }
6. if (isset($DEVICE_TYPE) && $DEVICE_TYPE==”MOBILE”)
7. {
8. $location=’http://www.uwaterloo.ca/mobile.php’;
9. header (‘Location: ’.$location);
10. }

A bit of a headache was getting the right info for the user agent. Each device displays odd information that either tells you the browser or the device or the OS. A little trial an error was needed here.

Then in the mobile.php (uses the xhtml-mobile10.dtd) file we have minimal links but when clicked they parse content from the main index.php page. No duplication of content, just optimized. I will post more on that later ;)

As part of the ‘mobile tech project’ I have been using a Nokia E62. It is great but slow so I usually use my own Nokia 6680—it just works and I don’t mind typing SMS on the normal phone keyboard. Now that might change as I have my Oracle calender syncing properly (something I can’t even do with my Mac). I was directed to a post from a Oren Sreebny over at the University of Washington (another UW) where he posts how to fill out the sync profile for Oracle Calender in a E62.

This is great but he reports no luck with SSL and the only access to syncML on our campus set up is via SSL. I made a couple changes and it seems to work fine. The following are the settings I used:

Under a sync profile for a calender I used:

• Include in sync: Yes
• Remote database: ./Calendar/Events
• Synchronization type: Normal

Under Connection Settings:

• Server version: 1.1
• Data bearer: Internet
• Access Point: Always ask
• Host address: https://bookit.uwaterloo.ca/ocas-bin/ocas.fcgi?sub=syncml
• Port: 443
• User name: my Oracle Cal user name
• Password: my Oracle Cal password
• Allow sync requests: Yes
• Accept all sync reqs: Yes
• Network authentic: No

This is essentially the same thing as Oren’s posted settings besides the port number and host address. At a guess this might work on all modern Symbian phones for those that have Oracle Calendar.

Now I can just sync my E62 with iSync and iCal works… how cool is that? My 6680 doesn’t support syncML as far as I can tell :(