Unplugged for a Week
I just got back from Heli/Cat skiing at Chatter Creek, B.C. http://tinyurl.com/b7s5wv. It's great to be skiing all day and equally great to disconnect from the internet for a while. I'm back now and look for more posts.
I'm away part of the week at a conference on the Role of Media in Supporting Informal Science Learning. It should be a good conference and their is a strong lineup of participants. I'll be posting the summary when I return later this week.
Thanks,
John
Big News
Like I´ve been aluding to on twitter,
See more here
John Carpenter Appointed CTO of Calgary-based Mob4hire to Enhance Their Crowd Sourced Mobile Application Testing Online Community
Mob4Hire Inc., the leader in crowd sourced mobile application testing and virtual market research, today announced the appointment of John Carpenter as it's Chief Technology Officer.
Calgary, Alberta (PRWEB) February 6, 2009 -- Mob4Hire Inc., the leader in crowd sourced mobile application testing and virtual market research, today announced the appointment of John Carpenter as it's Chief Technology Officer.
As a long-time mobile developer himself, John's expertise will help us continue to refine our collaborative testing processes with our global community of testers Mob4Hire is uniquely suited to testing Location Based Services, so we're also excited that John's background will help us drive ground breaking global innovation in that area of our business.
John is an accomplished Geomatics Engineer and a pioneer in Wireless Location and Location-Based Services industries. He was instrumental in helping to create North America's first mobile location based game, "Swordfish(tm)" and continues to win awards for mobile games and applications.
John was most recently the Architect of Geoservices at Useful Networks. Prior to that, he was Director of Technology at KnowledgeWhere Inc. before it was acquired by Useful Networks.
John is a prolific industry and technology evangelist, posting frequently to his blog 2LinesSoftware He's sought after as an excellent speaker who can bridge the gap between technology and commercialization; his next speaking event is the 2009 National Science Foundation Conference on Media and Education in March.
"As a long-time mobile developer himself, John's expertise will help us continue to refine our collaborative testing processes with our global community of testers," states Stephen King, CEO of Mob4Hire. " Mob4Hire is uniquely suited to testing Location Based Services, so we're also excited that John's background will help us drive ground breaking global innovation in that area of our business."
The irony that Stephen King and John Carpenter are working together shouldn't be lost ... "If you use Mob4Hire, mobile application testing won't be a horror story."
About Mob4Hire
With over 2,191 handsets on 233 carriers represented in 87 countries worldwide, Mob4Hire is the leader in real-world, crowd sourced mobile application testing and virtual market research. A Web 2.0 online community, Mob4Hire materially reduces mobile application testing costs and accelerates time to market by connecting developers with eager, less expensive, crowd-sourced testers and focus groups around the globe. Mob4Hire is a Cambrian House Ideawarz winner, is one of Backbone Magazine's top 20 Web 2.0 firms, won an Under the Radar "League of Their Own" award, and is nominated for both the GSMA Top Innovator award and Mobile Monday Peer award at this year's MWC Barcelona in mid-February. Mob4Hire is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with offices in Victoria, British Columbia, and London, U.K. For more information, visit Mob4Hire Blog, or contact Allen Poutanen, VP, Business Development, allen@ mob4hire.com.
The Future of Mobile Development
It seems pretty clear that the future of mobile development will be based around smartphones. Given the success of Android, RIM, iPhone, Symbian and WinMo platforms it doesn´t look like many device manufacturers will be heading back to the old days of custom OS builds (Motorola, Sony you´ve done well with your own firmware in the past but its time now.). This report highlights the growth of mobile applications based on smart phones.
So the question is, Given that smartphone users are many times more likely to download and pay for mobile applications is there any point in developing for the mass-market phones anymore?
Getting Android SDK to work with Fedora 10
Just thought I pass this little bit of information on. Fedora 10 (and Ubuntu also) is a little screwy when it comes to connecting the ADP1 device to Eclipse for testing.
Any USB device automatically gets connected as read-only which means the adb server and Eclipse won´t see the device when you plug it in.
This post gives a little information on how to fix it.
The idea is to create a rules file that listens for the Android device and sets the permissions differently. The rules are all located under /etc/udev/rules.d. So in detail,
Create a new rule for Android devices
vi /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rules
Add the following code
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4",SYMLINK+="android_adb",MODE="0666"
And run
udevcontrol reload_rules
Plug it in and it should work.
New Logo

Here it is the new logo for the company is up and paid for! I liked the design and simplicity of the logo. In the end I had over 200 submissions from 67 designers for the logo design all of which were excellent designs.
More importantly it showed the power of the crowdsourcing model when it comes to getting work done. I am very happy with the logo and the design process. The designers were very flexible and accomodating to anything that I requested. Also you can't argue with the price $250 for a logo.
Now, updating the website...
