See: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/July/july11_mobilityresearch.shtml for details of the announcement.

On July 1, 2008 I hosted a Mobility Research Summit  at our Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View to explore the vision, directions and issues to be addressed by the center. This was attended by some 18 representatives of industrial sponsors and potential sponsors.  Several exciting research projects are underway, and new project will be started with the arrival of new students in the Fall and Spring. Future general summits and topic workshops and working groups will be held in the Fall.

A summary of the meeting and the presentations can be found at http://mobilityresearchcenter.org. This web site will continue to evolve.

I invite your comments and participation.

Today, powerful mobile appliances such as smart phones, Internet tablets, and personal or in-vehicle transportation guides already offer greatly improved access to communication and “conventional” Internet services, integrating email, web access and messaging, and using voice and gesture to compensate for the limited mobile-device interfaces and situational constraints. But now more can be done to create a next generation of proactive, intrinsically mobile applications that take full advantage of the fact that the devices are mobile and personal, and move with the user during most of their day.

A suite of these applications and supporting services in the cloud can become your personal mobile companion or assistant. These context-aware application systems can know where you are, where you have been and where you are going; they can know where your friends are, and what kind of food you like; they can actively find a preferred place to eat and coordinate with colleagues. They can select and customize useful advertisements and attract offers and coupons appropriate to your needs and interests, and recommend appropriate purchases and activities. They will dynamically adapt their interaction style to your current location and activity; they can filter messages to ensure that the right messages are delivered at the right time and place. To enable this highly personal user experience, these applications collect and use rich context to provide guidance, recommendations, and to act on your behalf to enhance your many life, work and play activities, where ever you are.

The role of context

Enabling these intelligent and proactive applications is the effective and systematic use of context. Context is much more than just your current location, already used effectively in guidance appliances. Context can incorporate information from multiple sensors in your device and the environment (such as motion, temperature, light, health), from your calendar and contact list, from your history of movement and past interactions, from your social network and nearby family, friends and colleagues, and from your current preferences and activities. These context-aware applications leverage a user’s context of use to improve the user experience. Context is particularly important and useful in the dynamic mobile environment. Context-aware systems most often sense and use context information implicitly and proactively on a user’s behalf. The benefit is that a user does not have to explicitly provide information about who they are or where they are located or what they are doing, but this information can be used on their behalf, nonetheless.

Some examples

• A mobile tour guide, where information is proactively provided about the tourist site the user is at or headed towards, providing the right information at the right time.
• An inter-modal transport assistant that helps the user chose, coordinate and reserve travel using a mixture of public transport, taxis and ride-sharing, taking into account location, destination, urgency, preferences and schedules.
• A context-aware recommendation engine for a mobile meeting arranger or tour guide that uses context (including location, nearby friends) to propose a restaurant meeting a number of parameters (e.g. type, price, proximity), incorporating individual and joint recommendations and preferences from friends; if accepted, it can try to make an online reservation, taking in to account travel time to get there, or get some indication of the wait time for a walk in reservation.
• An appropriately equipped cell-phone and cloud-based travel service could look at selected information from your emails, IMs and contact list to recommend things to see and do that you and your friends might enjoy. Furthermore, you might opt-in to receive carefully targeted advertisements and e-coupons from nearby restaurants and attractions that would appeal to you and your group.
• Consider calling someone who moves around a lot. Despite one’s best attempts to keep track of their locations, it is fairly common to call them, only to discover the time zone is wrong, and you have woken them up. Of course they could turn off their phones, but that is not satisfactory for urgent or emergency calls. Instead, it would be much more effective if they could set a context or status (“at home”, “in bed”, “in Phoenix”, “do not disturb”) on their phones, just as they do with their IM or Skype sessions. When a call is placed, the caller might get an indication of the status, or perhaps even location, depending on the degree of access granted by the recipient, and the offer to place the call or defer it. Even more useful would be if some application on the phone could set the context automatically, based on location, time and user preferences. Perhaps it would ask the owner to select a context descriptor if an ambiguous change is detected. Finally, the application on the phone (or in the supporting cloud service) could dynamically evaluate the request to accept the call based on context, urgency and preferences, and automatically route the call to the phone, to SMS or to voice mail, as appropriate.
• Context-aware information management for a mobile professional, who needs the right information delivered in the right way at the right time; based on context the information from sensors, websites, email and IM will be prioritized and filtered, and delivered to their mobile device when the mobile professional is in an appropriate context. For example, if the mobile professional is visiting manufacturing facilities, having items needing critical attention at that site should pop up. A useful metaphor is to have a “virtual yellow sticky” attached to a place (to a context), and have it “pop up” for attention when the time and situation is right. Note, if the person is driving, receiving an urgent SMS or sticky pop-up is not useful; at least the device could offer to read the urgent SMS or message, using TTS.

In a future posting, I will discuss some of the research activities and challenges we are pursuing in theCyLab Mobility Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh.

Jonathan Zittrain led off the Berkman@10 conference with an overview of his compelling book, The Future of the Internet– and How to Stop It. He claims that the generative power of the web is threatened by many forces exemplified by the iPhone. I thought Steve Jobs was rescuing us from the carriers by wresting control of content away from his partne, AT&T; but Zittrain claims that Apple can be just as dangerous. If the battle was simply corporations vs. consumers, it might be winnable; but the consumers are conflicted. In the short term they want more reliability and less spam, so they may choose to buy closed systems, not caring about long term innovation. Google and other SaaS suppliers present the same problem. Any gatekeeper can become a jailer.

Zittrain’s main hope for an open internet, together with Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) and Tapscott (Wikinomics) is the fundamental liberal belief that humans are good. The main evidence today is Wikipedia.

Speaking of liberalism, the second conference, the National Conference for Reforming Media looked like a reunion of the people I knew in 1970s Berkeley along with their grandchildren. The serious policy wonks wanted to fight corporate power, especially on the internet, but there was a big contingent that wanted to arrest Bush and Cheney, revive the Black Panthers, and stop all wars.

Everyone agrees the mainstream media deserves to be killed by Google News and Craigslist because they boogey with Carl Rove. We hope that the internet opens up a new playing field in which the rest of us have a chance against the big guys. At least one speaker articulated this as “Look, we have about five years while the evil ones try to figure out the net. After they learn what we know, their money and connections will crush us.”

As I see it, the biggest battle is over wireless spectrum. The wire line and cable companies are a duopoly that can choke off the internet. For example, a Farber post today suggests that cable companies are capping internet subscribers’ bandwidth to insure that they don’t cancel their cable and start downloading all their TV from the net. The power of the incumbents is the last mile. If a lot of wireless spectrum could be released to WiFi, WiMax, UltraWiMax, or something, then a third channel to the internet would open up and we’d all cheer. A likely source of such spectrum is the white space between VHF TV channels in any local market. Watch the white space. The changeover to digital TV confounds the issue.

Consider a service using all the ideas in Orbitz, Google Maps, Facebook, eBay, and Zipcar supplemented by GPS-navigators and high-function cell phones as well as the web. It would become the central nervous system of the entire surface transportation system for the Bay Area. It would on the web and communicates to public transit services, vehicle-based radios, personal computers, and cell phones. It links all drivers and all riders in an attempt to match the convenience of personal vehicles. It can be a profit-making service that improves the quality of lives and helps the environment.

We all know the advantages: Everyone owns one. We all know how to use them. Women love them and they fit nicely into a pocket. Did I mention they do wireless?

Cell phones seem like the obvious platform for the next generation of billion-dollar startups. But they’re not.

Hundreds of web entrepreneurs have gone into mobile. How many successes can you name?

That’s what I thought.

What follows is an explanation of why creating a successful mobile-wireless software startup is not just improbable, but impossible. Specifically, why

• The underlying technology is broken
• The business case is a proven recipe for failure
• The social aspects are more awkward than a middle school dance

The underlying technology is broken

1) There are hundreds of different phone models. Your software needs to run on all of them. How hard is this? Nokia makes a competitor to Loopt called Nokia Sensor. In the last five years, Nokia has only been able to get its software working on ten of its forty-three currently sold phones. And Nokia doesn’t even have the challenge of porting its software across the operating systems and architectures of multiple manufacturers.

Modifying the software for each phone’s display is a matter of brute-force labor. There’s no intellectual way around it. Yahoo! is one of the few companies that’s been able to pull this off, but only because they have an army of Ph.D. hackers working for them.

You won’t have an army of hackers like Yahoo!, nor will you understand the hardware better than Nokia.

2) The carriers partially disable Bluetooth functionality to prevent customers from downloading their own ringtones. This also means all those good features you came up with in the last brainstorming session aren’t going to work.

3) In order to load software, you need to buy the optional cable. No one owns the optional cable. Even if you gave your customers the optional cable for free, it only works with windows. Your early adopters use Macs.

4) You don’t know how to install software on your own phone, so why would you expect your customers to know how to do it?

5) Any software that pings the cell tower will quickly drain the battery. Pinging the tower every five minutes completely drains the batter in two hours. So much for making calls.

The business case is a proven recipe for failure

6) Cell phone carriers will never partner with you. At least not on terms that allow you to make a profit.

7) Even if one carrier partners with you, the rest won’t.

The next generation of WiFi will make your product obsolete in two years anyway.

The social aspects are more awkward than a middle school dance

9) Let’s say that against all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible. Invisible software isn’t viral.

10) You also can’t flaunt what you can’t see. So much for your idea of your product being a status symbol.

11) Cell phones don’t fit into girl’s pants. Remember how the women you asked said they would only use your software if it had a vibrate mode? Oops.

The canonical formula for business success is luck, pluck, and virtue. Success in mobile wireless is mostly luck. Maybe some prayer. It pains me to see some of the smartest people I know falling for the mobile trap. I’ve observed dozens of entrepreneurs go into mobile wireless. All have failed.

That’s not to say there will never be a day when it’s feasible for startups to venture into mobile. How will you know when the time is right? Ask yourself this question: Could I make money as a distributor of mobile software? If the answer is no (because there is no software to distribute) then find something else to do and check back again in a year. Mobile is still the future and it isn’t going anywhere. But in the meantime, better to let others get stuck in the billion-dollar sand trap.

Also, we’re holding a one day conference on mobile computing on 4/22 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. See http://west.cmu.edu/west_connect/events_news/events/14607447.html