Rob's Blog - February 2005

New UK Mobile Content Rules

The BBC has an interesting article on it's news website, Tough rules for ringtone sellers.

It turns out that new rules regarding the selling of mobile content in the UK have been in place for the past month, but I for one wasn't aware of this.

The main changes seem to be designed to counter the rapid rise in subscription sites. This is where you think you are signing up to get a free or very cheap ringtone, but in addition you are also signing up for a subscription to receive a certain amount of charge for content. This is rather like the Apanachi spam I mentioned a few weeks ago.

The new rules in brief are...

The rules are being enforced by the regulatory body MEF.

This is undoubtedly a good thing. Many people are put off by how easy it is to buy mobile content without knowing the exact price of it. This would certainly seem to be a step in the right direction to help grow the sector even further.

It's Snowing In Colchester

Here's the view from our spare room.

The snow is really starting to come down heavily in Colchester this evening.

Sinner Or Winner?

Channel 4 have just shown a short film about the 'sinner or winner' preacher who is at Oxford Circus station most days.

It's interesting to hear what he actually has to say instead of having it blasted down his megaphone when i'm dashing for a train.

Levellers Cambridge Feb 2005 Review

I've just got in from seeing the Levellers playing at the Cambridge Junction.

The set while packed with their classic tracks, and a few new treats, was disappointingly short at an hour and ten minutes in length, including the 3 encores.

This was my first time at the Junction and hopefully it will be my last. It was dangerously over crowded, making it nearly impossible to reach the toilets from where i was standing. People were packed in and there was no room to get from one part of the venue to the other. The sound desk cuts off a huge chunk of the space inside the venue. Ideally there should be space behind to walk in.

I'd give the concert 6 out of 10, and that's being generous as they're my favourite band. A venue like the Corn Exchange would have been better and a longer set is definately needed.

One Way Of Life!

The Levellers live at The Junction in Cambridge.

Platform 9 3/4

It's a great bit of free marketing for Network Rail, but I always love seeing the sign for Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross station in London.

There is always a queue of people waiting to take a photo and today it was Japanese tourists as I went past.

The Harry Potter books must be the best free advertising King's Cross station gets.

Some Colchester Snow

There's been some overnight snow in Colchester. It's not really settled, though there is some on the Ka's windscreen still.

Meeting Six Apart

I was lucky enough to meet some of the guys from Six Apart today.

Unfortunately Mena was unwell and not able to attend, but it was still a great experience and very interesting to hear what they had to say.

Lifeblog Posting Protocol Example

As you may have seen by the couple of test posts on this website, I've managed to get Nokia's Lifeblog application posting entries to my blog.

Lifeblog uses a flavour of the Atom protocol to handle web posting. Nokia have also very kindly posted the Lifeblog posting protocol specification, which details how Lifeblog works. However, there are some differences I've found between the spec, and how Lifeblog 1.5 actually works. Here I'll document what I've done to get posting working.

Currently Nokia only claim that Typepad enabled blogs are supported, but now my homebrew blog supports live posting too.

Lifeblog works in two stages...

Let's have a look at how the application works in practice.

Firstly you have to enter where Lifeblog can find the list of supported blogs into it's web settings menu. When you first attempt to post a blog entry from your phone, this address will be called to retrieve the list of supported blogs.

It will send a WSSE header for authentication. I have explained how to implement WSSE in Perl before so won't go through it again. Once validated the list of supported blogs needs to look something like this.

I return this with the MIME type of text/plain, though the spec says it should be application/atom+xml. I've not had it fail on me doing this. It is important to note however is that when I inserted linefeeds to make the XML slightly more legible it failed. So I'd recommend not having any linefeeds in the XML to ensure it works correctly.

Notice how all the entries have the same title, robertprice. This is how Atom knows all the different links are related to the same blog.

If the WSSE authentication fails, just return a 401 Unauthorized error. In Perl, you can get a CGI script to do this using the following code.

Now Lifeblog tries to send the actual entry to the atom scripts. Entries are in two parts, so your scripts need to keep track of the session being used. This is done by use of the id element that you send back to with your reply to the first message. Lifeblog then makes sure the second part returns this id, allowing you to keep state.

For example, here's a test entry of me trying to post a note to my blog.

Lifeblog sends the first batch of XML...

We reply with a bit of XML, and 201 Created HTTP response, assuming the WSSE authenticates. In Perl we can do something like this...

The id is returned in the variable $tag. Mark Pilgrim has an excellent article on his site about what makes a good atom id tag. In this example we can use a simple bit of Perl code like this...

Now lifeblog sends the second part of the data. In our example, it looks like this.

We reply with a confirmation XML message, again with the 201 Created HTTP status code.

In this case, I'm assuming the values for title, summary and id have been extracted from the XML sent by Lifeblog. I'm also returning an issued date, this can be generated using a little bit of Perl, for example...

It's trivial to extract the XML, in my case, I just used XPath expressions to get the relevant data.

Let me just go over the difference between the two XML postings made by Lifeblog.

In the first part it sends over the item we want to post. In this case it's the note. The content is in the <content> tag, and lifeblog also adds some Dublin core metadata telling us the type is Text and the format is Note. If we were sending an image, the metadata would be missing, and the content would be in base64 with the MIME type of image/jpeg.

The second part contains the lifeblog data. Here we have the title, created date and any other data we added on lifeblog. If we had entered some body text, it would have appeared here in the <content> tag. It also contains the <link> tag that contains the id tag of the first part so our script can rebuild the two XML items.

Now you should have enough information to make the glue for Lifeblog to link into your own blogging system.

I'm just using the trial version of Nokia Lifeblog 1.5 on my Nokia 7610 phone, and it's working just fine for me! Well done Nokia for producing such a useful bit of software.

Hello Galit

This is Galit our mobile guru at work.

Testing Lifeblog Note Posting

This is a test entry to see if I have my Lifeblog posting scripts working correctly for notes.

Testing Lifeblog Image Posting

This is a test entry to see if I have my Lifeblog posting scripts working correctly for images. The image setting is set to basic on the Nokia 7610.

Blogger Ivan Noble Dies

The BBC "blogger" Ivan Noble has died aged 37.

Ivan has been keeping a blog like diary on the BBC's news site for the past few years documenting his battle with cancer.

It's been one of the more interesting areas of the site, and had given a valuable insight into the mind of someone battling such a terrible illness.

A selection of his diaries are due to be published later in the year by Hodder. I also hope the BBC will be keeping his diary online as well as a permanent resource for others.

Extortionate Data Charges On Orange

After complaining about Orange's data charges for GPRS in a few blog entries lately, this month I have found myself stung for 40.18UKP (excluding VAT in data charges alone.

I called Orange to complain that I thought the bill was incorrect and I couldn't have used the 38MB they claim I have. They have looked at their logs, which they claim they can't share with me (surely they must under the Data Protection Act?), and they say on Friday 7th January, my phone made repeated data calls, sometimes up to 3 times a minute between 12:09 and 17:25. Each call transmitted 102445 bytes of data. It seems very strange to me, so I have requested they pass it to their backend team to investigate the charges as I think they are wrong. I can't think of anything I have on my phone that would produce that much traffic, and of such a precise size each time. I also would have been at work on Friday, so wouldn't have used my phone that much.

They called back today to inform me their backend team has confirmed the network usage, but as it appears to be accidental, they'd only charge me half the price. This seems to be the best of bad deal, so I have accepted it.

I wonder if there is a vulnerability with the Nokia 7610, maybe with Bluetooth, that allowed this to happen. Unfortunately the log on the phone only gives the total amount of data transferred from the phone, not when. It would be nice to have a better log, so I wonder if anyone has written a better logger for series 60 phones? Of course, what would be better is access to the logs (that Orange won't share) of my phones usage, including the destination IP address of any network traffic.

FT, Advertising And Mobile Site Evolution

It's interesting to see how the evolution of mobile sites is running like that of the websites.

Currently most sites look rather like the old "under construction" homepages of old, though designers are starting to break that mould more and more, such as Emap's FHM mobile site.

The FT is now planning to produce a mobile site that is funded by advertising and free for the public to use.

Currently the FT has a mobile presence, but this is via a Java midlet the user has to download to their phone and pay for content.

This is starting to mirror how websites work, and is another step down the road to digital convergence. The majority of non e-commerce websites offer their content for free, subsidising the cost of running the site with the income from advertising targetting their users.

The market will try to charge users for content if it thinks the customer will pay. Gradually more content will appear for free and with digital convergence, standard websites will become accessible to mobile devices. Content based sites will have to start taking this route soon. Charging for downloads such as ringtones and games will still be possible, but I wonder how long it will take for a viable p2p client to appear in the mobile world. p2p changed the face of home internet usage, it could happen again for mobile. Once you can get games, videos and ringtones for free this way, why pay? It will be the killer app mobile is crying out for.

Cross-Network Video Shortcode Problems

Video on demand would seem like an obvious win for phone operators with 3G services. 3 and Vodafone are already running them, but only off their portals. 3 operates a walled garden, where it is impossible to go offsite. Vodafone allows the user to go offsite, but charges them for any data transferred, whereas it's free if you stay in the portal.

The BBC is running into problems with this. It has a public service mandate, so shouldn't favour one network over another. The BBC wanted to stream EastEnders highlights to 3G phone owners, who could subscribe using by texting into a shortcode to receive the content.

Video shortcodes are potentially a very useful way for brands to bypass the networks and get their content direct to customers. To reflect this, it has very wide tariff range. However, the networks are in no rush to make sure the shortcodes are valid cross-network.

Because of the lack of portability, an organisation wanting to take advantage of a video shortcode, could potentially need one per network. This makes it an unattractive proposition, as users have become used to cross-network shortcodes.

Due to these problems the BBC has decided not to launch their EastEnders service. Angel Gambino, controller of business development and emerging platforms at the BBC, voiced her frustration in this weeks New Media Age magazine.

I think she's right, but data charges should also be addressed. A user already paying a premium to access their shortcode video content may be in for a nasty shock when their phone bill comes in, complete with the current extortionate data costs charged by the operators. For example, Orange charge 3UKP per MB for GPRS data, though I'm not sure on their current 3G costs. We all know how much the phone networks paid for their 3G licences, and so are desperate to make money from customers using the technology. However, at present it really seems they are suffocating the market, instead of letting it grow. Lowering the costs and getting cross-network compatibility in place, will really see the data market grow, and with it, the network's profits.

Vote Roger Green!

If you've not yet voted in the Netimperative Awards for the winner of the Lifetime category (the list on the left hand side of the page), then may I suggest Roger Green.

I was lucky enough to work with Roger at Emap Online for 4 years, so I'm completely biased. However, having worked with Roger I know the time, effort and skill he put into building and developing the UK digital industry. Under Roger's guidance, we produced innovation after innovation, and were quickly copied by the rest of the industry. To his credit, our awards shelf was always full.

Roger is now at Newsquest as their Managing Director of Digital Media.

Go on, vote Roger!

WSSE Authentication For Atom Using Perl

Atom uses the WSSE authentication for posting and editing weblogs.

Mark Pilgrim explains more about this in layman's terms in an old XML.com article, Atom Authentication.

This information is passed in an HTTP header, for example...

We need 4 pieces of information to create this string.

A nonce is a cryptographically random string in this case, not the word Clinton Baptiste gets in Phoenix Nights (thanks to Matt Facer for the link). In this case, it's encoded in base64.

The timestamp is the current time in W3DTF format.

The for items are then encoded together to form a password digest that is used for the verification of the authenticity of the request on the remote atom system. As it already knows you username and password, it can decrypt the password the nonce and timestamp passed in the WSSE header. It uses the well known SHA1 algorithm to encrypt the pasword and encodes it in base64 for transportation across the web.

We can use Perl to create the password digest, as shown in this example code.

The password digest is now stored in the variable $digest.

We can also create the HTTP header from this if needed.

Please note, to use this Perl code, you have to have the MIME::Base64 and Digest::SHA1 modules installed. Both are freely available on CPAN.

Update - 22nd November 2006

Some more recent versions of Atom expect the digest to be generated with a base64 decoded version of the nonce. Using the example above, some example code for this would be...

When using WSSE for password validation, I now always check the incoming digest with both versions of my generated digested to ensure it's compatible with different versions of Atom enabled software. One of the best examples of this is the Nokia Lifeblog. Older versions expect the nonce to be left, newer versions expect the nonce to be decoded first.

Good And Mad Mobile Marketing Examples

A piece in the current New Media Age magazine caught my eye earlier.

First Choice, a travel firm here in the UK, has reported a disappointing response to it's latest mobile campaign.

The campaign relied on on users testing "holiday" and their email address to a shortcode and they'd receive an SMS response and an HTML email with a brochure in.

This really seems to defeat the object of using mobile to me. What benefit does the user get from SMS'ing in? The campaign relied on the user wanting an email from First Choice, so why not just use a home computer to request it without the cost of an SMS and having to divulge your mobile number? There was no additional benefit for the user by using mobile in this case.

First Choice however are putting the blame on a lack of prominence for the service in their advertising. This may also be a factor, but I think they really need to give the users something unique.

Proctor and Gamble seem to be taking a far better approach to using mobile with their current campaign for Head and Shoulders shampoo.

Their campaign encourages users to SMS in and they receive a car racing game for their mobile in return. The game is also multiplayer and has an interactive scoreboard.

This really seems like mobile advertising and brand building done right. The user gets something of value that they'll reuse, and in the process keep seeing Head and Shoulders brand.

O2, i-mode And 3G

O2 have announced they will be launching transactional services when their i-mode service launches in the second half of this year.

The Chief Executive of O2, Peter Erskine, is stressing that they are not launching i-mode out of defence, but because they want to bring the internet to mobile in a different way from today's WAP services. They hope to take advantage of the transactional abilities and allow users to download content and reduce the need to upgrade hardware.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but surely current XHTML phones already have this ability. O2 already own their billing system, so why not tie in transactions to it without having to use i-mode? O2's comments would have been true a year or two ago, but the market has moved on rapidly since then, and i-mode would seem to be less and less relevant to the UK market.

O2 also released a few other snippets of information in the i-mode press release, the most significant being that they are still unable to deliver all the MMS messages it's customers are sending. This is really something the mobile operators should have addressed last year, and they wonder why MMS isn't the golden goose they thought it would be. I know I still have problems with Orange and MMS outside their network.

After launching their 3G service last Tuesday, they have also admitted they are no longer planning on providing DAB digital radio on their handsets over 3G. This leaves the market open for the likes of Nokia with FM radios built into their handsets and their new Visual Radio software.

I'm Going To Be A Father

It had to happen eventually, and it has.

I'm very proud to annouce that I'm to become a Dad in August.

Here's a picture of my baby from the 12 week scan we had taken on Tuesday...

Everything seems to be going OK, and the baby appears to be perfectly healthy.

I'm really, really excited about this! It's a very big step to have a child, but one I'm looking forward to.

Driver Sentenced Via Mobile Phone

Aftab Ahmed of Bury St Edmunds became the first person to be sentenced over a mobile phone on Wednesday (1st Feb 2005).

Aftab was on his way to Ipswich Crown Court to be sentenced for a bankruptcy offence, but he was stuck in traffic and late.

Judge Caroline Ludlow didn't want to delay the case and increase costs, so with Aftab's lawyers consent, she fined him 140 hours of community service with 750 pounds costs.

The BBC has more details on the case, Phone call sentence for offender.

MIDP2 Sprite Collision Bug?

I wonder if there is a bug with the collision detection in the MIDP2 Sprite implementation in the J2ME Wireless Toolkit?

I've been trying to write a simple game to get myself up to speed with the new game classes in the current J2ME implementation. I won't bore you with the details, suffice to say that I have a sprite I'm moving about and checking for pixelLevel collisions on a tiled background.

This seems to work fine until I change direction. When this happens I apply a transform to the sprite either using TRANS_MIRROR or TRANS_NONE, so the sprite faces the direction of travel. When this happens, the collision detection seems to detect a collision if any part of the background tile has content in, not just if I have a real collision.

The solution to this problem seems to be to move the collision detection to before any Sprite transformation.

It's now time to refactor my code to account for this.

Carling Bluetooth Kiosks

There is a piece in the current Revolution Magazine about Carling trialing a Bluetooth-enabled touchscreen kiosk in Bristol.

A test project with Bristol City Council will see Carling trial Bluetooth-enabled touchscreen kiosks around the city, along with a wireless "cloud" to enable users with Bluetooth phones to access the web wherever they are. The Kiosks will give people free internet access and information on where to go and what to do in Bristol. They will carry a dedicated Carling channel, offering competitions to win tickets to Carling live gigs in London and Bristol, or a pint of Carling at a local pub. Chris O'Donnell, head of OneZeroOne, which is involved in the project, claims: "This is the future of consumer interaction with brands. We're really focused on 'destination planning', whereby we set up kiosks in locations where people have completed their journey, such as shopping centres, pubs or rail stations. Here, they are in a different mind-frame from when they are are at home or travelling from A to B, and they are open to different kinds of messages." He says there are also plans to replicate the campaign in other cities. Bristol Council has spent time and money in educating locals on what the kiosks will offer them, and Carling hopes it will provide a new channel for targetting people on the move. The project will run until March, after which the firm will review the technology. The pilot will help Coors explore several new technologies in the same place.

I'm not sure how they can provide free internet access to Bluetooth phones, unless the phone user was a hardcore tech fan using GnuBox to route internet access via the phones onboard bluetooth.

A search on the web revealed a story on NetImperative, Carling trials branded internet kiosks.

Here they say that kiosks will offer wireless internet access supplied by Cityspace. Cityspace only offer WiFi access in kiosks, so it sounds like Revolution may have misunderstood the original press release, and Bluetooth isn't being used for internet access after all.

The story also specifically says that Bluetooth enabled mobiles can opt-in to receive Carling offers and Carling live music footage for free.

That sounds more like it. They don't say if the kiosk will be scanning and spamming (bluejacking) unwary passers by, or if the user will specifically have to message the kiosk when in range to initiate the contact. Hopefully it will be the later, but you never know with enthusiastic marketing types running the show.

Thoughts On Nokia 7610 Web Browsing

One thing that is really annoying me at present, is Nokia not shipping a decent browser on the 7610 phone. I've found the built in web browser usable, but it does have it's limitations.

It doesn't support file upload for starters. This would be a brilliant feature to have on available on the phone. All the photos I take currently have to be downloaded to my PC, or sent via the phones email software to be used. Just think file upload was there. It would be trivial to build web based applications to upload photos to sites and use them. I guess Nokia want to make sure this is limited to ensure a market for their Lifeblog product, which allows photos to be uploaded via (what appears to be) an Atom interface. However, Lifeblog is a commercial product, and I don't really want to pay extra for what I would have thought was standard functionality for a phone of this type.

Opera For Mobile would appear to offer a superior solution for web browsing on the 7610. It supports all current sites out of the box, re-rendering them if necessary to fit the screen on the phone. It also allows itself to be used and launched by third party software. The sore point here is that you only get a 14 day free trial before you have to buy it, and it's really expensive. Opera do offer bulk purchase deals, and it would have been nice for Nokia or Orange (my network provider) to have supplied this with the phone. For individual purchases, the cost is just too high, and I can't justify it with my current usage levels. If I bought it I may find my usage levels (and data bill) increasing, and justifying the purchase price, but not at present. At a time when mobile networks are trying to increase their data revenues, surely providing good connectivity software to users would help them claw back any bulk purchase cost in profit from the increased data traffic. It's also a shame that Opera can't create an free version, maybe supported by ads. People are more inclined to spend on their phone, so the right ads could well subsidise the cost of giving it away for nothing.

I had installed Opera when I first got my 7610 a few months ago, but never really used it. This was a mistake as when I really want to evaluate it, I find my trial time has run out. As I didn't have anything saved for it, I tried removing it and reinstalling it. The software is clever enough to know it's been installed before, and won't let me have another trial period. I don't think Series 60 Symbian phones have the equivalent of the Registry in Windows, so it must be putting a file somewhere. I would assume this would be on the C drive, and not on the MMC drive. I've had a delve around with FExplorer and found an Opera folder in the images directory. I deleted it, but it hasn't made a difference. Does anyone know how this works, or how to reset the trial period? I really want to give Opera a serious try, and I don't want to have to buy it full price (yet) or get another phone to do so.