Delivering a Green Christmas with FOTA

Jason Lackey

In business we often view green more in the context of money than the environment, regardless of whatever lipservice some might pay to this cause or the other. Fortunately technology sometimes provides an out. One classic example that many have already forgotten would be automobile emissions. Yeah, it is a PITA to get your car smogged, but with far fewer people the air in places like LA and Tokyo was far more toxic and opaque in the 60's than it is today.

Some solutions, like smogging cars, are pretty obvious as they directly address problems. Others are less so because they are less direct.

FOTA is one of them.

FOTA - Firmware Over The Air, a way of updating the operating system of a mobile phone remotely, is a technology which, while well established in Japan (by a little software company called InnoPath), has justed started to be widely used in the US.

This year, so far, 3.5 Million devices have been updated, saving a total of 33 Million Kg of CO2 emissions.

You can check out the InnoPath Press release on it, here.

FOTA: $140m Saved and Counting!

Jason Lackey

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. - Isaiah 40:4

Every bug shall be patched, every broken feature made whole; the rough spots smoothed over and the defective UI fixed. - FOTA 4:20

Mobile operators have it rough. On the one hand they have huge networks to support, on the other they have subscribers, each and every one of which thinks they are paying too much. Top it off with the fact that many, if not most, want to have the very latest and greatest phone and they want the latest and greatest to do more and more cool things.

OK, fine. Now this creates more than a little bit of pressure, as the operators, particular those in markets like North America where most devices are subsidized, lean on the device makers and encourage them to rush their best and most beautiful devices onto market and top off these demands with a burning desire to have a specially cooked, custom, operator specific ROM on those phones and you have a situation where you have created the perfect storm for bugs.

Indeed, it is surprising that devices don't crawl like Klendathu (homeworld of The Bugs in Heinlein's Starship Troopers) with bugs.

However, like death, taxes and dropped calls for iPhone users, bugs happen.

What's an operator to do? Well, back in the dark ages, you could do a recall and reflash the phones. Or you could invite your subs to bring their phones in so your techs in the back room of the brick and mortar could jack in with cables and reflash. If you are from Cupertino, you could set down the stone axe and pick up a bronze sword and use iTunes to sideload a full system ROM using (you guessed it) a Mac or PC and a cable. Or, you could set down the antiques and pick up a laser pistol (or at least a nice Smith and Wesson!) and do the updates Over the Air with FOTA - Firmware Over the Air.

Nature abhors a vacuum and thinking people abhor inefficiency. When you look at even major updates, they don't usually involve that much new or changed code. This means that shipping over a whole system image involves a great deal of duplication and inefficiency. FOTA is different, because with FOTA you take the old firmware and the new firmware and create a difference package and push that package to the device. A client on the device, a FOTA client, then reads the diff and uses it to gen up new firmware using the copy already on the device. No waste, no fuss, no fiddly cables or other hassles.

While some of this may not matter to upscale powerusers or may be more of a matter of convenience vs necessity, keep in mind that for an increasingly large number of mobile subscribers in the world that the Third Screen (mobile) is the Only Screen - no Mac, no iTunes, just a phone.

While FOTA has been a standard practice in Japan for years (most device there get at least one update at some point in the product lifecycle), FOTA is just getting started in the US.

Just a couple years ago I recall my delight and joy when I discovered that I could do an OTA update of my Sprint RAZR, an update which fixed a really annoying problem with a corrupted address book.

Now, just some of the devices updated by InnoPath servers in North America in 2009 include:

Casio C711

LG GR500

LG VX11k

Motorola V750

Motorola VU204

Motorola VU30

Motorola V860

Motorola W755

Motorola ZN4

Nokia 6555

Nokia 6650

Nokia E71x

PCD CDM 8975

Samsung Rugby

Samsung SGH-A737

Samsung u-350

Samsung u-450

Samsung u-490

Samsung u-650

UTS GTX75

Anyway, considering how delighted I was when my RAZR stopped autohosing itself, I suspect that the 3.5 million devices that have been updated with InnoPath technology, despite the occasional glitch, have brought a fair amount of relief to a large number of people. Things like this make it a lot easier to come in to work in the morning.

Our press release on this topic is here:

http://www.innopath.com/news/press_releases/2009/2009_12_09_fota.shtml

30 Million to go Silent in India

Jason Lackey

Well, today is the day. Finally, after numerous slipped deadlines and delays, India has finally dropped the ban hammer on GSM phones with bogus IMEIs.

For background, check out our story here.

Much of the impetus behind this effort stems from the Mumbai terror attacks where terrorists armed with assault rifles and mobile phones with bogus and thus untraceable IMEIs went on a three day killing spree, spreading terror and mahem across the Indian metropolis.

Unlike prior efforts, the Department of Telecoms is not backing down, despite the best efforts of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COIA), who would prefer to take no action rather than banning paying customers.

For subscribers in India with bogus IMEIs, there is a way out. A trip to one of 1600 COIA and COIA run Genuine IMEI Implant (GII) centers, with ID and 199 Rupees and you should be set with a banproof IMEI and a paper receipt to prove it.

Read more from zdnet.

They aren't fully alive!

Jason Lackey

Technology is a wonderful thing and sometimes produces some moments of real hilarity.

AT&T’s rebuttal to recent Verizon attacks, which can be seen here, sadly is not one of them. Rather, it is sad, in a kind of #fail way.

Unlike the Island of Misfit Toys, which manages to hit nostalgic heartstrings and be wickedly evil at the same time, although my neighbor here in cubeville has expressed her unhappiness with the usurpation of her childhood for commercial purposes, one could also argue that the original was more or less a commercial effort anyway.

We digress.

Another piece of comedy was AT&T taking their unhappiness with the whole “There’s a map for that” campaign by means of the court. Sure, this is America and we are the most litigious people in the world but sometimes we pass from the questionable to the absurd and this is one. I would recommend more spending on towers and less on lawyers, a sentiment which seems widely echoed in The Valley and on the blogosphere.

Anyway, this brings me to the quote of the day, which is from the judge who got to hear complaints that AT&T did not like the Misfit Toys spot:

"Most people who are watching TV are semi-catatonic, they're not fully alive." said U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten while commenting on the case.

Classic. Wonderfully classic.

Read more at PC World

Bat out of Espoo

Jason Lackey

Performer Meatloaf has a special place in the hearts of many geeks, as he not only appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the seminal late night B movie, but also hit some chords which cannot help but resonate with degenerate teens, which is to say most of them, which many of us once were. This resonance hit stride with the album Bat out of Hell and some would say the single Paradise by the Dashboard Light was the very climax.

For those unfamiliar, the tune is about a fellow who pledges his eternal love to a girl he is trying to have his way with parked in a car some dark place. Of course, the fellow later changes his mind and tries to find a way out of his pledge of eternal love and devotion.

Reminds me of Peter Schneider, Head of Marketing for Maemo Devices at Nokia when he said "Symbian and Maemo will continue to co-exist,"

Well, guess that depends on how you define co-exist. For example, if it means that devices in the pipeline will ship with the OS they were originally planned to ship with, then OK, but it looks like the end of the line for Symbian is on the N-series is coming quickly if the Maemo folks can be believed.

Of course I expect that they won't break any promises or forget any vows, but it sure sounds like Nokia may be "praying for the end of time" so they can get on with the future of building world class smartphones which, as we have seen, is going to be a real challenge if they stick with Symbian.

Sadly the company does seem to be sending contradictory and changing messages with regards to its platform strategy. Considering the developer flight from Symbian and the rather steep fall in market share, particularly on the high end, it would seem that Espoo needs to make a choice, clearly communicate that choice and get on with life. Far worse then telling people something they don't want to hear is telling them something that they do want to hear but lying about it.

Espoo, go ahead and sleep on it.

A Clockwork Pink: T-Mobile Kickstarts Sidekick Sales Again

Jason Lackey

After the recent, well publicized failure of the T-Mo/Sidekick/Danger/Microsoft cloud , T-Mobile suspended sales of the popular Sidekick and Sidekick LX advanced featurephones. Understandable move.

Operators want (perhaps need) to be able to control their destinies and one of the best ways to do that is to own and manage the infrastructure that their businesses depend on. Some wireless operators, such as Sprint, have been a bit more optimistic with regards to leaving their fate in the hands of others, but generally the guys who are serious about the subscriber experience want to have all the variables under their immediate and direct control. Of course, in some ways this makes the iPhone a bit of a slippery slope offering (ending in the land of dumb pipes) from the snake in the garden of Eden as so much of the end user experience is controlled by Apple, but then again there are some who would say that for the most part the portions of iPhone end user experience that actually work would be those controlled by Apple and not AT&T, but that is another story.

Which brings us back to T-Mobile. We have seen that Microsoft has been less than a fully trustworthy partner in the mobile space first by the existance of the Pink effort, which effectively betrayed more or less every ally and friend they had amongst the handset makers, timed when faith in WinMo to deliver with 6.5 being a somewhat lame partial reskin and 7.0 delayed until late next year (perhaps far enough in the future to no longer matter, much like the post comet-strike plans of a diplodocus on the Yucatan Peninsula). Then the whole thing was topped off by the final betrayal of their last friend, Sharp, who was going to make the Pink device. An amazing display of self-immolation unlikely to be matched again any time soon.

So, after all this T-Mobile kickstarts sales of the Sidekick devices again. It is certainly nice to see such loyalty in these times, particularly when so much reputation is at stake. I like T-Mobile, they remind me of Virgin or Southwest, a plucky competitor that "gets it" and tries harder. Their support people are great and actually seem to be alive, engaged and care that your phone works. Just somehow I cannot quite purge the scene from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when Alex has booted Dim into the water and feigning the offering of a helping hand to pull the flailing Dim out of the drink, instead slashed his hand with a knife.

Viddy well, droogies, viddy well.

Droid’s Angry Red Eye – An Opportunity Lost?

Jason Lackey

This piece originally appeared on TMCnet.

Well, Sanjay Jha needed to deliver a home run with the Droid, and by all accounts he did. Unlike the past couple years, people are finally talking about Motorola and they are talking about things other than what a fine phone the RAZR was or how the company is bleeding to death in a sea of red ink. Handset news and blog sites have been verging on “all android, all the time”. Verizon has come out with their first memorable ad in recent history (check it out) and finally there are people talking about Moto in something other than funereal tones.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if they haven’t blown it.

Huh?

Yep, I get the feeling that they may have blown the launch and shot too low. Let me explain…

So, I get the angry red cybernetic eye. I like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, gadgets, widgets etc. I also get the stealth fighters and the missile bombardment stuff in the ad. I like bombs and explosions and things that go boom. I am a macho gadget fetish geek and I am their target demographic and they nailed it. My heart is filled with lust for the glowing red eye monster.

The problem is, the person in the next cube over, we’ll call her Sandy, isn’t. As a matter of fact, she is repulsed and turned off by the whole thing. Sandy understands technology and mobile in general better than many of the engineers who build it. She is clueful and “gets it”, but the ads with the “creepy red eye” and all the violence are for her a huge turn off. Personally I would love to see an ad where Kimbo Slice takes on the Get a Mac guy but there are a whole bunch of people who would not.

Early adopters, hardcore geeks and macho techno supremacists are of course interesting folks and they usually want smartphones. They want badass high spec smartphones and are willing to pay for them as well. But if we are really trying to do an iPhone killer, they are not the target to shoot for. The target that the iPhone has so successfully hit is broader - the intelligent person who perhaps didn’t realize that she really wanted a smartphone, but once she has tried an iPhone found herself hooked because suddenly the power of the Internet and a meaningful Appstore was available in a pocket able form factor and it sure was cool. This is not the person who is going to be chasing after geek superiority looking after more CPU - this is the type of person who wants her technology to help her get things done and on this front they have missed the mark.

I guess Droids are from Mars and iPhones from Venus.

Now, how about that cute little green Android, where did he go?