Alec Saunders SquawkBox

You really need to read Martin Geddes’ Instant Mess.  He expertly skewers mobile presence by talking about how translating IM to the mobile world won’t work. 

The presence model of mobile IM is broken anyway, becuase it confuses presence with availability. I’m not the first to note that an always-on mobile means the green smiley “online” becomes irrelevant. If you take presence to mean “the sense of other” (thanks, Douglas) then the kids are already are engaged in deep presence exchange under the duvet at night by texting away. The stored “precious” SMS from the boy you have a crush on is presence. Don’t let the technologists near this social phenomenon! They don’t get it, all they see is information transfers. A “unified messaging client” is an oxymoron. It’s like putting a toilet and paddling pool in the kitchen because it’s the “water room”.

He tells carriers to focus on making SMS great, and price it to compete with IM over GPRS.  If you misprice the bundle, the customer will switch.  Get the pricing right, and SMS will be a much better experience than mobile IM.

Meanwhile, at iotum we’ll continue to focus on a next generation of presence that will work in the mobile space. 

In Rebtel, Jajag and others should know what they are up against, Russell Shaw writes that “startups who are so wrapped up in their own special offerings should not underestimate the forces they are going up against”.  Russell is riffing off Andy’s Being on the Inside where Andy’s basic point is that the incumbents can make life difficult, or even shut down startups easily enough.

Frankly, you guys are great armchair quarterbacks.

I want to amplify a little bit of what Jeff Pulver just wrote in his remake of Parents Just Don’t Understand.  In the world of a startup each day is a fight for survival.  Each day you wonder whether or not:

1. The offshore subcontractor you’ve got working for you is going to deliver when he says he will, because you’ve made a big commitment to an important customer.
2. The employees you’ve worked so hard to recruit are still going to think that what they’re doing is meaningful when a recruiter from a larger firm comes along offering more money.
3. You can make payroll in another quarter without more investment.

You do crazy things like buying used servers from EBay, without warranties, because it’s 80% cheaper than buying the new ones.  You build your own desks.  You drive 8 hours to a trade show because it’s cheaper than flying, and besides, that gives you some good talk time with the other folks in the company.  You make promises to customers who believe in you without knowing quite whether you can deliver on those or not.  And then you go figure out how to deliver.

You work every night until you fall asleep in your chair in front of the computer.  In fact, we just had a light hearted discussion yesterday about head snappers (the folks who lean back, and then lurch forward when they wake suddenly) versus face planters (those who sleep with their faces on the keys).  The next day you get up and do it all over again.

Worrying about whether a slow moving giant is going to cut off your air is the last thing on your mind.  My fondest hope is that we’re so successful that we can poke one of these guys hard enough in the eye that they want to buy us.  I’m sure that’s the way that RebTel and Jajah are thinking about their businesses too. Get out there, be visible, create a ruckus, build some momentum.  Build your successes day by day, and customer by customer.

Startups are about making choices, and then living with them, and that’s really different from a big company.  When I worked for Microsoft we debated the merits of cable versus DSL, and tried to predict who would win.  In the end, we participated in the GTE DSL trial and bought a piece of a cable company.  As the CEO of iotum, that’s not a luxury I can afford. We have to validate our hypotheses one at a time, not all at once. An example: a couple of weeks ago an old acquaintance asked why we had chosen to focus on building a hosted service instead of an enterprise play.  My answer?  We had to make a choice.  We couldn’t be both.  By being focused though, we can speed ahead of a player trying to execute both plays.

That’s the reality of a startup, Russell.  I just don’t care what these guys are going to do.  They’re not going to get around to what iotum is doing until long after we’ve already succeeded (or failed). 

And you know what?  Hjalmar Winbladh and Roman Scharf have both built successful startups before.  I’m pretty certain that’s the way that they’re thinking too.

Nokia likes to refer to their current crop of phones as multimedia computers.  They’re trying to convey to you, the customer, that these are more than simply phones.  While it’s true that these are smarter phones than what’s on the market, the comparison to a computer is a little too close to the mark.

Last night I upgraded a bunch of Nokia components for two of my N-series phones — the N70, and the N91.  Specifically, new releases of the Nokia PC-Suite software are available, as well as upgraded software for both phones.  Make sure, before installing the software update tool, that you have installed the PC Suite software first. 

If you care about the data currently on the phone, make sure to use PC Suite to back it up before running the update tool as well.  The update tool will blow away any existing data on most phones, with the exception of phones like the N91, which have built in hard disks. Check to make sure that the back up has actually worked.  My N70 backup did not work, which I did not find out until afterward. The update wiped out my copy of the  very good WayFinder Navigator.  I am now faced with finding the receipt, and begging the WayFinder folks for a new copy. 

The software update tool is good for a wide variety of phones, including many of the N-Series, E-Series and 66xx series phones, but unfortunately not the N90.   It’s very simple to use as well.  You simply download it, plug your phone into the PC using the data cable, run the tool, and wait.  It then fetches the software from Nokia and installs it on the phone. 

Prominent warnings are displayed throughout this process that your phone may be permanently damaged if the power is lost, or if the phone is switched off or disconnected, during the update process.  In fact the software will not install unless the phone is connected to the charger, in case you’re trying to do this in a low battery situation.  You probably also want to be doing this from a PC connected to a UPS, or from a laptop.  Just in case…

In both cases, partway through the process the software update tool complained that it had lost contact with the phone, and demanded that I remove the battery from the phone and power-cycle it.  After the warnings, it gave me quite a fright!  It appears, however, that this was nothing more than the standard reboot-after-installing-new-software you might expect.  In both cases, the phones restarted with the new software.

I also installed the new PC Suite software.  A tip: make sure to install the PC Suite before installing the software update tool.  If the software update tool doesn’t find the drivers it needs already installed, it will fetch some standard Windows drivers from Windows update.  Those drivers do not work with PC Suite.  If you accidentally install those drivers, before you install PC Suite, PC Suite will not be able to communicate with the phone.  I repeat: make sure you have installed PC Suite before using the software upgrade tool.  It appears to be exceedingly difficult to reverse this problem.  I ended up repeating the whole process on another computer.

It took me a couple of hours, in the end, to upgrade both phones.  However, they’re both faster than before. The deadly long boot cycle on the N70 seems to be gone, hooray! The release notes I received from the Nokia Blogger Relations team also indicate that I can expect a more stable experience on the N91 too. In particular, the HDD Unavailable error on the N91 is apparently resolved. Both are welcome changes.

There you have it.  The N Series phones are definitely more like a computer than a phone.  That’s good, but sometimes it’s just a pain in the butt. Nokia makes beautiful phones.  It’s too bad their software doesn’t show the same attention to detail.

More tips on the N91 are available from the N91 Blogger Site.