Yahoo Blueprint

Mobile games and applications development has come a real long way since the early days.

At some point in time, developers realized that in making mobile applications, they were repeating mundane 'base codes' for every project. After a few projects, each developer had his own set of 'engines' and a library of code snippets which could be assembled and themed ('re-skinned' as the industry jargon goes) to get a range of applications out in shorter time frames.

Another important factor which influenced the growth of development tools was the fact that despite its premise of 'write once run anywhere' that Java (the most popular development flavor) proposed, the sheer variety and subtle differences in the JVM implementations and feature-set of handsets made it nearly impossible to have one set of code that could work on all handsets. Netbeans was one of the first IDEs to introduce the concept of 'profiles' that tried to standardize the process of creating multiple builds with pre-compile like instructions. Another significant development was toolkits such as J2ME Polish

All these led to the process of mobile applications development slowly becoming 'design' processes rather than 'development' processes. Put in a different way, it became possible to 'script' a complete application and use a standard script interpreter/ compiler to translate this into a working application on the phone. The net result - one could now develop pretty professional looking applications in a matter of hours rather than weeks! We too, like most development companies had one such framework. These frameworks took a cue from the desktop phenomenon of widgets. Widsets (now acquired by Nokia) was one such initiative. Widsets allowed one to script applications that could be downloaded into the Widsets main application that resided on the phone in a simple point and click operation.

The latest entrant in this category is Yahoo Blueprint. I like what I see here!
From its website:

Blueprint is Yahoo!’s platform for building mobile sites, widgets and applications. Using a simple yet powerful language based on W3C XForms developers can design and host their Blueprint markup which Yahoo! will deliver to 1000s of different mobile devices.

The process is analogous to building a mobile website - you can use any server technology you like such as Apache, IIS, Java or PHP. Just return Blueprint XML and we do the rest. Remember: your Blueprint services run on the same platform that powers our own mobile services, including oneSearch, oneConnect and even our mobile homepage. Not only is it responsive and powerful, but we supply you with analytics to help you find out what makes your customers tick.

I must admit that Yahoo! did a pretty good job with the Y!Go application for the mobile and I think that they have put in a good tool in the hands of the developers with Blueprint. You can now make real slick mobile apps pretty easy. And guess what, this could be your short-cut development tool for the iPhone too! The only negative I could find from a quick read on the docs was the lack of secure communications for a lil more serious apps - I could have missed it, and in any case this could be added easily. So if you're into mobile apps development, go ahead, download the SDK and if possible, do return here to post your feedback.

Now you can track your lost mobile phone! - Google Latitude

In May 2008, I had posted about how great it would be if Google Maps (Mobile) would add the capability for users to 'Sign In' to the service since that would automatically add the capability to track one's mobile phone, if lost; without even needing to have a GPS capable handset.

Well, finally - its here! As an update to existing Google Maps Mobile, it is not primarily intended to help you when you're 'lost' but to share your location with your family and friends, in real time!

Its called Google Latitude. Check it out! As usual, here's the YouTube video intro:

myMobile extends myMemory { reQall () }

"Imagine being able to talk to your phone while it intelligently organizes your utterances into your Calendar, Notes or To-Dos."
Disclaimer: I'm just about to give all iPhone and Blackberry users an big dose of ego boost and everyone else a sense of envy (apologies).

I have a confession to make, I am an extremely forgetful person. I mean, if my wife asks me to buy a pack of bread, a dozen eggs, a pack of butter and toothpaste; I'd most likely forget the toothpaste. To take care of this I'd begun to jot notes - Post-It style. That mostly used to work, except when I'd forget to take the Post-It notes themselves! :). That said, I do not recall having forgotten to take my mobile phone - ever; its almost become an extension of me - a part of my identity.

"Imagine being able to simply right-click on this webpage and add this post to your list of The-Greatest-Posts-Ever-Made list (just kidding ;) )"

In my 'phone of the future' vision, my handset would seamlessly extend the function of my brain and one department of my brain which could do with some serious extension is my memory.

Let me cut the chase and get to the point. A few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised when I read somewhere about reQall. While they do not claim to have any direct neural interface to my brain yet, they claim to be able do be supplement my memory!

In their words, this is the 'simple' problem they'd solved: "Ever had a brilliant idea while driving, but couldn't write it down? Needed to remember something, but didn't have a pen?"

Being a Blackberry user, I downloaded this cool app from http://www.reqall.com/blackberry [Note: reQall for BlackBerry requires OS version 4.2.0 or higher.]. It integrates seamlessly with my device. So now I can fire up the app click the 'Add by Voice' Option and speak "Meeting with John Doe, prepare the presentation". reQall transmits this voice signal to its server where it does a voice-to-text conversion and sends me an email apart from adding the event to my calendar and reQall interface! And the best part - it works.

reQall gave me a pleasant deja-vu as well! Back at TinfoMobile we'd developed a similar app which won us an award at the Reliance-NASSCOM Developer Contest. We'd made an app that helped the visually impaired by reading out SMS and Call History in Voice. We did the exact opposite of reQall. We transmitted the SMS text over GPRS to a server where a Text-to-Speech engine converted it to Voice and this was played back by a Media-Player instance on the phone (it worked even on a very basic and cheap Reliance Java Black-and-White handset).

There are a dozen other things you could do with reQall and I'm sure it would increase your productivity one small notch higher. Do give it a shot. Its innovation at its best and is powered by Indian brains. Its a company called QTech founded by Sunil Vemuri and N. Rao Machiraju. Three cheers for the duo!

Mobile blogging through Opera Mini

Of all software made for the mobile, Opera Mini java version is what I'd call an essential download. While the earlier versions had some issues with my Blackberry Curve (it was unable to somehow use the socket connections), version 4.1 fixed this for good. Though it now uses HTTP to connect to Opera servers, it is STILL much better than anything else out there.

Its way faster than the built in browser on my Blackberry, much slicker and easier to use, supports a full screen layout, renders as close as possible to a browser on a PC. For phones with screen heights greater than width view the page in landscape mode! A pleasure to browse and blog with :)

The way it works is:
- You type in a URL on the opera mini mobile app
- The app connects to the opera server (almost a proxy)
- Sends the url request
- Opera server in turn fetches and analyzes the site
- It seems to make good use of cacheing
- Translates the page into a format for easy (but real) view on the mobile
- Compresses and streams back the data to the mobile app
- The app renders the page in all its glory :)

If you are a mobile user (there is a mobile client for almost every mobile worth its name), just visit the operamini site:



PS: I started this blog post on my mobile but ended it on the PC.

Tracking a lost mobile phone - google map mobile?

I love the google maps mobile app and its 'My Location' feature - hats off to the innovators at google!

I have an interesting idea . Here are the factors:

1. I known MANY people who have lost their expensive Blackberrys etc

2. On a Blackberry and many new handhelds, where google map is installed; it can run in the background.

3. My Location feature can track my phone down to the nearest 1000m radius, even if the phone does not have GPS capability!!! ('... takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map to find your location' - whoa!)

4. Most people already have a google account - so they could sign-in to 'their' google maps.

Put all these ingredients together and viola! you have a lost phone tracker!

In case someone who uses google maps on the phone (signed in using google sign-on) and accepts their 'My Location' to be archived; he could be log in to google maps from any computer and that would tell him (and law enforcement, if required) a good approximation to catch the culprit (or simply find the phone - that you might have forgotten at a restaurant).

I really wish Google can get this running (I had made this post on their forum quite some time back) and I can ensure they'll have thousands of happy customers.

Add VOIP to your mobile

Here is a list of some of the products through which you could use the mobile phone to make calls over the IP network (GPRS or WiFi) instead of GSM, in other words VoIP over mobile (though cheaper- not all are 'free'):

1. Mundu Mobile, by Geodesic.

2. Skype on Mobile, by iSkoot.

3. Yeigo.

4. Fring.

5. MobileTalk, by Packet8.

Unless its over a WiFi network or a 3G/4G GSM network, most of these solutions would suffer from slight delays due to the nature of mobile data networks today (network latency.

Though not exactly pure mobile VoIP, JAJAH is an innovative solution that would probably have better results than the ones mentioned above simply because, though you can make free calls even over mobiles, at least the last loop on your end of the call would be over the GSM network (though its a VoIP at heart).

So wish you all happy cheaper calls!

Featured on CNBC Young Turks

A link to our CNBC feature on YouTube: