Meet the Mipps: Part 1

This is my first post on the blog, which is way overdue as I've been managing content on Mippin for almost a year now! But that's going to change now because today I'm introducing a new series to the blog. I'll be doing a little write-up of a different member of the team each week -- a little insight to some of the greatest minds in the world! The world of mobile tech, at least. First up...

Name: Simon

Originally from: Sydney, Australia

Official title: Test Analyst

Phone of choice: T-Mobile G1 Android Phone in white

Non-geek interests: Sports of all varieties (including touch rugby, indoor football, and lunchtime basketball) and, of course, the occasional cinema outing

Known around the office for: creating origami animals (without even looking!), eating lots and lots of fruit (thankfully he always shares), and picking up the mail even when it's not his turn

Favorite Fulham lunch spot: Hell Pizza, where you can get an unlimited topping pizza plus a drink for only £4 -- who knew Hell was helping to fight the credit crunch?

How many Twitter followers @simondavinci has at this very second: "100 or so" (actual count: 81)

Three blogs he can't go a day -- err, hour? --without checking: OK! Magazine, Tennis Planet, and the Android category on the Tech Buzz widget

When did he cross over from average citizen to geek extraordinaire and what cinched it for him: It all started with the Palm 5 back in 1998, was kicked up a notch when he joined T-Mobile in 2001, and geekdom was fully embraced (my words, not his) after the launch of the first camera phone from Nokia in the same year

What sort of advancements he wants to see in mobile tech within the next few years: Better battery life and "a better phone than the iPhone" -- he thinks the HTC Hero is on its way

Why he thinks Mippin is absolutely awesome: The people! (Aww, thanks Simon!)

Nokia Homescreen widgets for N97 now Live!

An exciting further development for Mippin Widgets to report today!

If you'd read our last post about Mippin Widgets Going Crazy you'd know we've been working on bringing content on to the idle / home screens of mobile devices running the Android operating system from Google. The first Widget we developed was called the Tech Buzz Widget and it’s gone on to become a popular download among the Android Market community. Its success prompted us to pay more attention to the emerging area of home screen content and services on phones, with a deeper look at how the Android operating system can improve user experience, product design and choice for mobile internet users. In addition we were also keen to identify which other operating systems might be similarly capable of powering a Buzz Widget.

So today we’re pleased to make two new announcements: firstly that a new range of Buzz Widgets is now available for Android handsets, which means potentially up to 19 new handsets by the end of the year, all capable of running four or more Buzz Widgets simultaneously. Secondly, we are also pleased to announce the launch of Buzz Widgets for the Nokia platform.

Launching on Nokia as well as Android is a significant step. It is partly a testament to Nokia that their latest operating systems are sophisticated enough to run a Mippin Buzz Widget, but also because Mippin is once again fulfilling its goal to connect mobile internet users with the content they’re interested in. With mobile consumers increasingly keen on a simpler mobile user experience, there’s more and more interest by developers like us in the phone’s home & idle screen real estate. As users access more of their content and services via this area of the phone’s UI, the development of a selection of home screen capable widgets gives our Android and Nokia users a huge range of content choice, while importantly the cross platform availability of Buzz Widgets reflects the trends in mobile consumer behaviour. As consumers choose different ways to interact with their favourite web content on their mobile, Mippin is in a great place to distribute publisher’s content in a format optimized for the content, the user’s phone and now the user’s needs.

Features

Four Buzz Widgets will be live from today on all Android phones and also on the Nokia N97. These are:

• News Buzz Widget - the very latest up-to-date news

• Gossip Buzz Widget - the latest celebrity news

• Gaming Buzz Widget - the latest gaming news

• Tech Buzz Widget - the latest technology news

Each Buzz Widget gives you a choice of different categories

• The News Buzz Widget enables users can select different categories of news, from All News, UK, USA or World News.

• The Gossip Buzz Widget brings you the top stories from the world of Entertainment, Fashion & Beauty, Gossip, TV & Film, Music & Bollywood.

• The Gaming Buzz Widget gives you Nintendo, Playstation, XBox, Gadgets, Tech News or a mix of all categories.

• With the Tech Buzz Widget, you’ll get Tech News, Mobile News, Gadgets, Gaming, Tech Video plus Android or Symbian depending on your handset.

All widgets allows users to select their choice of refresh rate, so if you can't live without knowing what's going on in your favourite category, you can get the latest stories automatically on your phone every 5 minutes, 24/7!

The picture below shows all four widgets on a Nokia N97.

Customisation

Once downloaded, the widget enables easy customisation with the settings button, to choose your preferred type of content and refresh rate. Then as the stories are downloaded and updated to both Android and Nokia devices, the home screen displays each story headline as it happens - if you then click on the headline it opens the full story, including pictures and video capability. Once a story has been opened, you can either read the whole story by scrolling your finger up or down the story window, or you can browse other stories using the navigation buttons located at the bottom of the story.

Hopefully you'll find it a doddle to use. Other things we should also mention are battery consumption and content downloading. We've been very wary about battery consumption because these widgets are highly addictive. To prevent high battery consumption by default the widget only goes online every 30 mins to get the latest content and it keeps this content in memory and then saves the stories' text to disk. Because the text is saved to disk, you can use the app even when you don't have a network connection, which means it's the perfect solution when you can't get online or if you're on a fast moving train, or even faster moving plane (even if the phone has been switched to flight mode!)






Where to get them

To download all the widgets, head over to the Android Market if you’ve got an Android / Google phone, or if you’re the lucky owner of a N97 (or also a Nokia 5800 / 5530 if you’re prepared to forego the home screen support – home screen functionality not supported on that device) then go to Nokia Ovi Store for the News Buzz Widget. The News Buzz Widget is currently the only Buzz Widget that’s live on Nokia Ovi Store but you can download all of them from these links until they’re all officially live.

That's it for now. As you can tell we're buzzing too :) so time instead for you to try them out! Please let us know what you think in comments on this blog or via info@mippin.com

Downloads for Nokia N97, 5800 / 5530

• Download News Buzz widget

• Download Gossip Buzz widget

• Download Gaming Buzz widget

• Download Tech Buzz widget

What might have been - King of Online

It’s been quite some time since we wrote a post on here, so hoping we haven’t lost our entire readership in the last two months! We’re still here though, we’ve just been busy, so there’s plenty to follow in the coming weeks.

Really sad news last weekend that Michael Jackson died. Like the rest of the world, we’re all big fans here at Mippin, paying our respects in our own inimitable way by attempting a moonwalk around the office. There are obviously lots of theories about what might have contributed to his death, though this in itself isn’t unusual when it comes to Michael Jackson. Still, it’s interesting to think how Michael would have faired now that the music industry has changed so much, requiring most artists to make money from live shows and other businesses instead of from the sale of their music. Michael himself was actually extremely adept at managing copyright, successfully owning much of the Beatles catalogue, so he knew he could potentially earn a fortune from a long residency with the right partner. Sadly it appears as though his personal circumstances required he do this in spite of his health. However if things had been different he couldn’t have chosen a better venue than The O2, a venue synonymous with mobile sponsorship and music merchandising, to help recover his fortune.

With Michael planning on creating new work in an era of social networks and mobile internet, the opportunities a purpose built music venue like The O2 could have offered would have been hugely lucrative, all in addition to the main business of ticket and merchandising sales. As with previous big name shows, Michael Jackson’s would probably have been carefully curated to take full advantage of digital, as well as real world merchandising. In terms of digital there might have been mobile handset & contract launches, content licensing deals for web 2.0 and mobile music services, endless assortments of interactive co-promotional opportunities with major social networks, as well as more traditional digital content sales: video, ringtones, wallpapers etc. With such a long residency, the marketing teams could really have perfected the opportunities, giving Michael the potential to go on earning from the shows long after they’d run their course. Unfortunately, perhaps the downside was that with so many more businesses dependent on the shows success - and profits at stake - it may have added additional pressure to an artist already stressed about a 50 night performance schedule.

The next few weeks will see lots of revelations about Michaels private life made public. Through it all, it shouldn’t be forgotten that to sell 750,000 tickets for his come back tour was an incredible feat. But even more, a host of massive licensing and distribution deals would have been a phenomenal turnaround too and may have shown what he was really capable of. Entering the digital world with a new body of work would have been a foot-tappingly brilllant experience to watch as a consumer of digital music and web services. Sadly, though it’s hard to imagine Michael signing up to more shows than he could perform, perhaps it's possible that planning for these additional revenue opportunities did have an additional, detrimental impact – I cannot say. One thing does seem certain however: had his digital plans been as big as the glory of a sold out stadium residency, then he would have been King of Online too.

Mippin goes Widget Crazy

The word 'Widget' is seriously overused, it can and does mean just about anything. So a little context for you, in this case I'm specifically referring to going crazy about 'Android Home Screen Widgets.'

With the rollout of the 'Cupcake' firmware to the T-Mobile G1's of the World and the launch of the HTC Magic on Vodafone, Android has gained Widget functionality. It's elegantly implemented enabling developers to quickly create a varied selection of desktop treats for Android users. The usual selection of Weather, Clock and Battery widgets has already started to appear (See a video review of some over at DroidDeveloper.com.) To spice up the mix a little we thought we'd add our own little widget to the pot.

The Mippin 'Tech Buzz Widget' is the first of a small family of widgets bringing upto date content from 1000's of top sources direct to the Android home screen. It not only lets you read the full stories in the widget, but also is fully integrated with the YouTube application and Sharing functionality of Android.

Enjoy!

Our Datacentre is moving on Saturday

Mippin continues to grow and as part of our committment to making Mippin an ever expanding service we are moving data centre on Saturday morning.

As a result Mippin will be down for 6 hours from midnight and Saturday night until 6:00am in the morning all UK time (BST).

So for 6 hours you will see the above apology, but when we come back we will be bigger, faster and better.

Automatically distinguishing between a phone and a PC on a website

Despite browsers on phones getting better and better there is still a need for Mobile formatted sites, if not just for lower end phones, but for those on high end phones that hate the waiting or the difficult navigation of the full web on a phone.

Once you acccept this the next stage after creating your mobile site (which is easy with products such as Mippin) is how does your site detect between a phone and a PC. We get asked this question several times a month by publishers big and small. How to automatically distinguish between phones and pcs and send them to the right version of their websites.

Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question because these publishers have substantial PC users and want to do the detection without degradation to their PC website performance - so they need to do the detection on their own hardware.

At the same time there is not enough standardisation on the server-side to make it a simple answer. However, we have fully documented several approaches and we detail them here.

There are 3 approaches:

1) Don't make it automatic. Just create a domain name m.yoursite.com or yoursite.mobi and send them to the right site. However, this is not very user friendly.

2) The next approach is if the publisher is using Apache servers there is a script that can be put in place. This script is here.

3) Finally for those using Wordpress we have a specific solution for wordpress owners. There can install a plugin which does it for you. Details of this plugin are here.

Note that these script are all geared with pointing the user at Mippin as the mobile rendering of the site, but this code is open and its easy to change the code to point at any mobile rendering so you are not forced to use us.

Decline of US Newspapers

There is an interesting article in Techcrunch this morning on the decline of the US Newspapers.

Obviously we have heard this story for some years now but two things struck me. Firstly the declines are increasingly rapid and more importantly the decline are in online too. I think that the decline in online is an indication that the newspapers are failing to monetise their content in the online world. I think we all know that online consumption of news is increasing and this is at the expense of print. Furthermore the opening up of mobile content consumption through products like Mippin are also reducing the need to for users to take their news via print. It just needs the content owners to work out how their content can be monetised. Obviously we feel quite good about this as we have quite a successful route for monetisation for publishers through ad impressions with Mippin.

Furthermore a billion people will be coming online via mobile in the next 4 years so its only worldwide growth or the content industry.

The Future of Blogging: Barclays Bank, Piccadilly Circus?

Most people will probably agree that outside of work, not everyone we come in to contact with will have knowledge of the markets, technology, attitudes or ideas we take for granted each day amongst our colleagues. For us at Mippin this is definitely the case, as a fair amount of the media and entertainment content we work with are blogs, and neither blogging or the ability to read blogs on mobile phones are witnessing massive market demand just yet. We’re all fans at Mippin but to be honest our Friends and Family Beta launches tended to see registrations from just friends, and those were the ones working in the same industry…

However we appreciate that blogging has been around for a long time, and see its role in reflecting the values of society as undisputed. Though the format of blogging is changing to encompass personal news streams, more traditional blogs still play a huge role in provoking discussion, building awareness and forming opinion about most things, just as they are equally important in evolving to provide a wide range of channels of communication and self expression for bloggers themselves. However it’s also fair to say that blogs still aren't consumed by the mass market, which means the Mippin team still need to happily explain what we do and why to some outside the blog or mobile world's.

That is unless we’re in Piccadilly Circus using the services at Barclays Bank.

At Barclays new branch in the centre of Piccadilly Circus they’ve installed a state-of-the-art new interactive video installation that shows live on a big screen the amount of blogs being published across London at any one time, what the blogs are about and the different content categories they sit within. The content categories appear to be searchable and the latest posts are surfaced surreptitiously, introducing customers and no doubt tourists to localised long and short tail blog content, not dissimilar to the thinking behind Mippin. In fact the biggest difference between the new Barclays installation and Mippin is probably the screen size – it would be difficult to get theirs in a jacket pocket…



In reality though it’s great news that Barclays have installed this blog installation, not just because it brings Piccadilly Circus’s neon advertising boards in to the web enabled 21st Century, but because it continues to confirm what millions already know – that blogs and personalised streams will be a major part of everyone’s future. The next question then is how to connect users with the blogged and published content they're interested in when they’re not in Barclays Bank, or at a PC, and it’s that which Mippin does very well. So from now on if we want to explain what we do, Barclays Piccadilly branch is where we’ll be heading. Ignore the world famous icons of Eros and Trocadero next time you’re there too - a British bank might have done something cool with their cash for a change, helping to build awareness and ultimately mass market demand for blogs, and making our jobs here a little bit easier...

Mippin at the Gadgetshow Flashmob

The Gadgetshow presenters have been testing their abilities to get flashmob's together using different tools. Jason was only allowed to use Twitter and Susie (subs'ed very ably by Gail Porter as Susie was ill, get well soon Susie) used Facebook.

On the day the twitter crowd won out by a large margin, I'm guessing around 150 in the twitter crowd compared to about 15 in the Facebook crowd.

A dance off ensued, all good fun, catch the show on Channel 5 on Monday 27th April at 8:00pm.

Apple Fail Mippin App because of YouTube content which can be found in its own YouTube application

We've been submitting a Mippin Application to iTunes for 6 weeks now and every week they've failed us for inceasingly trivial reasons. Now we've been failed for a ridiculous reason.

Quite early on in the process they failed us because of rude words in some of the Internet articles we were publishing. Early this week Tweetie was rejected for the same reason- they kicked up such a stink on Twitter that Apple backed down within hours and accepted it. When this happened to us though, 3 weeks ago, we bowed to their greater wisdom and implemented 2 levels of checking for our iPhone application to prevent "objectionable" content getting through. We rate all our 50,000 feeds in Mippin and prevent most if it even getting to the user, then just to be sure we check every word in the article real-time for a list of rude words and if one appears we block the display of the content from the server. We thought this was enough, but this week we got rejected because of a YouTube video - we were amazed at this. In the very amusing video "sxephil" does use one rude word, but in our minds YouTube have allowed this through - its certainly acceptable to them. What's even worse we found the same video through Apple's own YouTube application on the iPhone - is this "double standards". Above we show on the left the YouTube screenshot of the video which has had nearly 1/2 million views next to the screenshot on the right of the video inside the Mippin application which can be viewed here.

As a little startup we're feeling a little persecuted by Apple of this situation. Could it be that because we actually render mobile content better in Mippin than the iPhone itself can do they are finding any reason they can to stop us appearing on the iPhone. I would say that's an abuse of their power.

Google's Mobile strategy

I watched Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose last night - very interesting. Nearly all the talk was about the importance of Mobile in Google's strategy. Eric explained how Mobile was taking over from the PC in Internet access and as he said he saw another billion phones being sold in he next 3.5 years. In fact this statistic struck a chord with me as I have a site called phonecount.com which tracks the mobile phone growth and predicts 2.5 billion extra phones by mid 2012 (I wonder if he took account that the population of the earth will also increase by a billion in the same period). Now I am sure my approach to calculating this increase is flawed as I just do a linear projection on current increases and I assume lots of people will have more than 1 phone too, but I do think whereas my estimate is perhaps over optimistic Eric is under-estimating hugely.

Meanwhile I was also impressed by Eric's description of the need for content being implicitly personalised for users. By this he meant that the Internet server should know what content each user is interested in and exclude what they have already looked at and push that content to them. Again this struck a chord with me because this is precisely what we are trying to achieve in Mippin - so perhaps we have our own strategy right :-).

Another interesting fact he mentioned was because of Moore's law our phone's storage....

" in 15 years, it’s a thousand times cheaper and faster. So unless something changes in 15 years, I have a grandson, he’ll be 18 in 15 years. He will have all of the world’s information, every video, every movie and so forth on a single hard drive. If he started watching it, he cannot finish watching it in 85 years. He’ll always be frustrated."

This is a fascinating fact. Could this mean that in 15 years time our phones will have the world's information resident on the phone. Then all we need the Internet for it how that information is changing. This offline/online approach to using data requires a re-think to how we use the Internet and the software on the phones themselves. I can see a few new businesses being created based on these new concepts :-)

Five product lessons

The mantra of start-up product development usually involves two core words: 'rapid' & 'innovation'. Implicit in this is that we consider ourselves better placed than many others to filter out the 'urgent but unimportant' and concentrate instead on issues that add most value for the end user.

The casual observer might be fooled into thinking this means that product decisions at start-ups are constraint-free. They would be wrong. Just like our counterparts in larger organisations, we're under pressure too, not from complex stakeholder relationships, poorly defined ideas or lengthy development procesess, but more often than not, from significant resource limitations.

In an ideal world, there would always be enough people, money and time to complete every great idea that will help to build product momentum and engagement. The reality, however, is that all product decisions are ultimately cost/benefit choices and, in the best companies, there are always more good ideas than people to develop them.

Here at Mippin we've made a number of significant decisions over the past few months. So, in our continued spirit of openness, we thought it timely to take a step back and give you an insight into why we've made some of those decisions and the lessons learned:

Lesson 1: Be inclusive
Six months ago much of Mippin's functionality was hidden behind registration. The resulting bounce rate was a minor source of frustration, particularly given the huge levels of engagement from those who did sign-up. For us it became clear that if users didn't see the necessity of registration they simply voted with their feet. Instead, we developed some great code that allowed us to recognise (with near-perfect precision) all returning uniques, their devices and settings. Once we'd achieved that, we were able to push back and open all elements of the service to all our users, whether registered returners or first time browsers.

Lesson 2: Don't add cellophane
Ever bought a newspaper wrapped in cellophane? Annoying isn't it? The digital equivalent of this is offering up content and then forcing your users to interact before reaching it. When it comes to media, access is everything. Surfacing engaging content is the key to providing an experience that will drive repeat usage. Take a look at the image at the top of this article to see how we evolved our homepage with this in mind.

Lesson 3: Search can't fail - EVER
If search fails once, it fails for good. Google have set the bar for everyone (though arguably not on mobile) here and we've worked hard to improve our search results to maximise relevancy as well as adding new vertical searches - for images, video and wikipedia. We've also decided to offer results for popular sites - whether they take users away from Mippin or not. For us a positive user experience that takes someone away from Mippin is way better than a negative user experience that attempts to get them to stay.

Lesson 4: Be a data geek
Keeping an eye on the relevant forces at play within your industry sounds obvious, but it's surprising how few companies are able to react to market changes quickly. One of the benefits of being a smaller team is the ability to alter your development effort as required and with minimal fuss. We noticed significant spikes coming from top end devices (particularly Android and iPhone) much earlier than others and launched dedicated versions of Mippin that were able to showcase a richer user experience by leveraging the functionality associated with new touchscreen devices. (Discover how happy we are with ourselves about this here.)

Lesson 5: Don't get sidetracked
Lastly, users want you you to solve a simple problem better than anyone else. At Mippin we're proud of being able to offer some very clever implicit personalisation that surfaces the most engaging content with minimal user effort. The key when devloping a product is never to veer too far away from your core purpose (unless you spot brilliant market potential elsewhere, clearly). When it comes to adding new functionality, ensure it stacks up behind the reason your company exists. Our social strategy is a good example of this (we've blogged lots about that here). Instead of simply allowing users to connect, our aim was to enhance the content discovery experience - that's central to our core product - by allowing users to act as individual editors, collating and sharing the most engaging content they find.

In the interests of brevity I'll stop there. We're really happy at the way that Mippin is taking shape. As ever, it's an evolving process so don't hesitate to contact us at info@mippin.com.with any comments or thoughts - we'd love to hear from you!

The Mippin team