It’s up at Slideshare: CliqTags – An Introduction

It also goes through what a QR Code is and what it can be used for, and why using a platform like CliqTags makes sense.

E.g.

• To create a feedback form you only need to provide an e-mail address.
• To build a Twitter feed you only need to provide a Twitter user name.
• To make a video page you only need to provide a Youtube link or video ID.
• etc.

The current focus is QR Codes in terms of creating tags for print, but MS Tags etc are considered for implementation shortly.

It supports 3 business models, via a flexible plan system, that can be configured for individual customers or  groups of customers.

• Prepaid, via separate invoicing
• Subscription, monthly
• Clicks, per tag access

Online payments are handled via Paypal (credit card or Paypal account).

It’s currently introduced in Sweden, but will be rolled out worldwide shortly.

CliqTags™ was developed and funded by Abiro.

As always there are many possible futures, yet Abiro believes QR Codes will be in the mix, and increasingly so.

When comparing to requesting a person to send in an SMS with a given keyword, a QR Code is much more immediate, provided there’s a QR-reading application in the phone and the user knows how to use it. We are not there yet, generally speaking, but it’s increasingly likely that if you have a smartphone, you might also have a QR-enabled application installed, and if no other, at least it might be Google Goggles.

It’s anyone’s guess whether Google will fully integrate Goggles into the embedded camera app, but it’s not farfetched, and would make the photographing experience quite different, providing meta data that adds value to the photo, and that provides (hopefully) relevant information to the user about what the camera sees, including QR Codes of course.

Abiro will launch a service that will help with everyday adoption of QR Codes in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

You might want to try out QR Code Generator meanwhile.

Definitely not the first, neither is it the last (rest assured):

QR Code Generator

Information about the same

Features

It has a few features that are slightly unique, that might make it worth your while:

• Simple selection of content type via tabs
• Some content types seldomly seen elsewhere (Contact, Location)
• Two modes of location, including an Abiro-hosted map application
• Link shortening for Link/URL, Contact and Facebook Like
• Target scripts for handling Location (showing a map) and Facebook Like (unshortening of link and performing Like)
• Coloring of created QR Codes (with color picker)
• All information displayed on a single screen
• Embedded presentation about why and how to use QR Codes

I’ve noticed that QR Code apps are quite tolerant to colors, as long as foreground and background colors are reasonable different (duh!).

Technical

Of note:

• jQuery came in very handy for the tabs and color picker
• Even though the markup is quite verbose, everything’s scripted, including creating different fields for different tabs, so the source code is quite maintainable
• A modified version of the phpqrcode library is used for generating the QR Codes
• It took slightly more than a workday to implement, yet with long pauses (meetings, movies etc)
• It’s slightly experimental, so layout and types may change

That’s a lot for en estimated revenue for 2011 of $4.2B, but it’s still growing.

Everything you need to know about Facebook’s Potential IPO (infographic) – Digg Topnews

• An idea grounded in business potential
  • As opposed to technical wizardry etc
• The simpler and more grounded the idea, the better
  • Quick to realize/deploy/maintain
  • Easy for investors to understand the potential (mind you, investors
    only care about ROI)
• Early capital, via investors and/or real customers
  • To get headroom to work freely
  • Investors can help you with contacts, market info etc
  • Early customers serve as market and offering validation
• Take and keep control of the idea and the execution of the idea, but
  have others do the main work
• Be in control of what people work on your team
• License in things that you don’t consider core
  • Gain time
  • Focus internal competences on what’s unique and must be owned
• Establish a brand that completely hides solution partners’ brands
  • Partners simply don’t exist externally
• Connect a very simple statement to the brand
  • What you solve, why customers should care, etc
• Be very focused, and don’t stray from that focus unless business reality
  tells you so
• Yet, if you find that you need to revise your ideas and plans, do so
  with renewed focus; don’t diddle-daddle
• Business is about making money, for the company, for the investors, for
  you; don’t forget that
• Ideas are abundant, and many get the same idea; the whole thing (but
  hard to achieve) is to realize it and make money out of it
• Running a company is hard work and can involve tough conflicts with
  other people that want to control the company; stand fast
• People will try to shoot down your idea, as they simply can’t fathom new
  concepts until they are real; stand fast
• If you really believe in your idea, and you should, just go ahead; if
  nothing else it will be an experience of a lifetime

Facebook acquires Gowalla and a few other companies: Facebook acquires mobile application firm Gowalla – Economic Times

Analysis: Facebook Goes Geo (again) – AnalystXpress – the Juniper Research Blog

It’s clear from the Facebook/Gowalla information how important it is to be at the right place and know the right people, and that it’s very little about technology.

Even more so in the latter case, considering Gowalla will be shut down, so really what Facebook acquired was a few engineers and their knowledge and vibe.

Do carriers use this data today, or is it just collected?

What right would a carrier have to the “intellectual property” of your phone use? None in my opinion.

Mashable – Carrier IQ Tracking Scandal Spirals Out of Control

I found these useful pages through a simple googling:

• Mobile HTML5 – Tutorial- Your First Mobile HTML5 App – The Basics, Forms, and Geolocation…
• Mobile HTML5 – compatibility tables for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, iPad and other …
• HTML5 in mobile devices – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• HTML5 from a Mobile Perspective « Cloud Four

From the last one I picked these benefits compared to previous HTML versions:

• Offline Support
• Canvas and Video
• GeoLocation API
• Advanced Forms

This means it’s mostly Javascript from now on, whether you like it or not.

You can stay native as well, but it makes a lot of sense to know HTML 5 to achieve cross-platform support with only one implementation. Especially if you develop apps that complement on-line services and where you don’t charge for individual app downloads, but rather use subscription- or ad-based revenue.

I added a basic tutorial at Slideshare.

What’s a QR code and how and why should I use it?

The most interesting and beneficial application I‘ve found for QR Codes is MMS tickets, to enable automatic reading (and hence secure and immediate verification), if now MMS can be trusted for such heavy-duty use. At least there should be few that don’t have MMS enabled on their phones. An alternative is of course to send an SMS with a link to a page showing a QR Code, but that involves more steps for the user. In any case, there needs to be deployed ways to avoid ticket piracy.

Except for that, QR Codes will not the least be used in advertising, as the presentation shows, but there are also many corporate applications.

In common with NFC, QR Codes provides semantics. See what that entails in the presentation.

Windows is completely broken in the user profile / user account department if you consider how easy it is to change settings relating to your profile in contemporary Web applications, compared to how deeply hidden this is in Windows. Most users don’t even know how to do it.

For instance try to change your user icon in Windows. Do you even know how to do it? Yet, you know how to do it in Facebook etc.

Hints for how to fix this:

• Show the user profile the first time the user logs in, so they immediately fill it in to their liking, including contact information to be used as a default in applications (native or otherwise).
• Show a Profile entry in the Start menu, for quick changes later.
• Let the same information be the default information when registering to communities. Hence, e.g. the icon you use in Windows would then be used in Facebook, Twitter etc, provided you want it to be.

Simple things right?

Back to the drawing board, Microsoft. Adopt, adapt and improve.

How is Gmail a geosocial service?

I didn’t expect Skype to be such a big player in this field.

Who’s Using Geosocial and Location-Based Services- – Flowtown (@flowtown)

It seems much more real and feasible now, considering this: DIY Phone Gadgets- DIYers, let’s make a complete list of Android Hardware Interface Tools and Solutions

Charted- Android Fragmentation – TechCrunch

“…the BlackBerry maker worth less than the net value of its property, patents and other assets in a sign of investors’ lowered faith.”

RIM as ‘Wounded Puppy’ Trails Book Value With Faith Fading – Bloomberg

Consider if a company within social networking would be valued the same way. That whole business would collapse in a month if so, considering how much they all burn.

It encapsulates Twitter’s official user profile widget and provides a widget configuration panel, so it can be used as one or more instances in the WordPress sidebar without having to copy-paste any markup.

The publishing process was hairier than I had expected, but understandable considering how much information is (or rather can be) shown about each plugin at wordpress.org. I filled in everything, just to see how it was presented at the site.

The widget is implemented by extending the WP_Widget base class and it’s prepared for translation by using the __() call. The default settings provide a basic black/gray-on-white look as a base for customization. Feel free to check out the code. It should be pretty self-explanatory.

Information at wordpress.org

Information at abiro.com

As I wrote earlier in Mobile- From gadgets to content, it’s a content game for Sony. They have movies, music, games etc.  Yet, how will Sony handle the fact that current phones use Android, considering Google also wants to own the content market.

Note also that Sony has completely failed selling phones with their own brand outside of Japan. What says they will succeed now?

Will the Swedish lab remain? Sony could cut costs by moving to China. Sad for the region no doubt.

Stay N Alive- Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely

And this is not one of those “RSS is dead, long live RSS!” situations. It’s rather “RSS is dead”, get on with it!”, due to the simple fact: People are ignorant and swimming in information. If it’s not in their face constantly they won’t see it.

Do you agree?

First: Without Steve Jobs there would most likely be no iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes, App Store etc, and probably not even any Apple at all. Therefore, think “Apple controlled by Steve Jobs” when I simply write Apple below.

As always, don’t expect political correctness. Business is not about political correctness. It’s about making tons of money. Something Apple is very good at, but without the right vision they would have failed.

Apple (consciously or not) set out to become owner of the most profitable part of the mobile market, its customers, the lion share of the revenue and the control. Audacious no doubt, and no established mobile phone manufacturer dared this. I’m pretty sure no one else at Apple would have dared that either.

A few pieces to this rather complex puzzle, that I’ve written about over the years:

They focused on enabling and open Internet technologies rather than walled garden style mobile technologies. Of course they needed to support voice, GSM and CDMA, but apart from that an iPhone is primarily an Internet-enabled information terminal using the mobile radio as a flat-rate wireless broadband link to the Internet and as an enabler for Apple, rather than as a technology to reach premium operator services. MMS came very late and reluctantly, simply because Apple didn’t see any value of it for its own business. Of course the iPhone doesn’t support WAP, Java ME, Wireless Village etc, for the same reasons. This way Apple saved tons of time and retained control, as they already had most of the technologies needed in Mac OS, and didn’t have to follow standards body work (remember that voice, SMS, GSM etc are handled by the radio modem, that Apple simply licenses from another provider; they only needed to write simple call handling / messaging applications on top of that).

Note also the fact that by deploying flat-rate subscriptions, users stopped thinking about data cost. That was a very important enabler and increased data use several magnitudes, even when talking only smartphones.

They quickly got ownership of the customers by enforcing them to register at iTunes to at all be able to use the iPhone. That way Apple got excellent tracking of user behavior and actually a better marketing channel and loyalty than the operators.

The understanding of after-market business, that operators have tried for many many years, but utterly and embarrassingly failed with. Neither did the traditional manufacturers understand this, and possibly in part they feared the wrath of the operators if they made too much noise. After all, phone manufacturers sell to operators, not consumers.

The understanding that most users are non-technicians, and that not even technicians like technically complex things. I tried using a few year old Symbian and Windows Mobile phones for simple things like e-mail and browsing, and I was stunned by the complexity.

Traditional phone manufacturers simply didn’t dare challenge the operators’ position. Apple just assumed they could and should.

The iPhone is just one phone model, evolved over time. Traditional phone manufacturers still release way too many phones, instead of focusing on making good and easy-to-use phones (this works fine on low-cost simple phones, but smartphones were then a complete mess, Microsoft leading the “confuse a cat” approach). They simply don’t take the time to do so, and somehow still think they need to release tons of phone models each year. I’m sure, without Android they would be completely lost, still using Java ME, terrible content distribution models (OK now for apps, but not for music, video etc, and they don’t get the revenue for app sales; Google does; don’t forget that big loss of revenue, that Apple gets), a completely fragmented app platform situation, etc etc.

Apple makes complete devices. In comparison Google makes Android (pure and generic software), while manufacturers deploy Android. That means Android never gets optimized to specific hardware. Apple is always in control of both, and can put a lot of effort into making for instance lists scroll very fast and generally make the experience very snappy, despite possibly slower processors and less amount of memory. Also, iOS is a more efficient system than Android, and iOS applications are developed in Objective C, that should be as efficient as compiled C/C++, while Android applications are developed in Java that might be more or less efficiently compiled, and the applications are of course not optimized for all the different Android models out there, using different screen resolutions, CPUs, hardware acceleration etc. Again, there’s only one iPhone model, slowly evolved over time, running the same system, using the same APIs. That’s a ton of difference.

The display is the keyboard, and as you know covers the whole front of the phone. That’s a very important design decision, as that makes the UI completely customizable, and keyboards for any nationality can be implemented through software. Also the UI can change completely from screen to screen. Now so obvious, but just a few years ago mobile phones “had to have” a mechanical numeric keypad. Not that you can key very fast on a display-based keypad, but the fact that the UI is  customizable makes up for that. You lose some, you gain much more.

Gesture control of the UI has become a mainstay through the iPhone. The resistive touch panels used earlier didn’t work at all well for gestures, and often required a stylus, but capacitive touch panels do, as they require no pressure and  no stylus. Just your finger.

A seemingly tiny detail was that Apple implemented GPS, accelerometer, compass and other enabling technologies before they were really useful, and in all their phone models (again, as they only had one phone model), all adding to the vast possibilities an application developer could deploy.

Apple understood that mobile photography is not about getting journalist awards but about documentation of experiences, hence image quality was not a major concern, and still isn’t. Meanwhile not the least Samsung and Sony Ericsson fought a war about mega-pixels that consumers didn’t care about and didn’t understand, not even now.

Meego could have solved Nokia’s smartphone woes, but due to politics (and politics alone as far as I see it) they went for Microsoft instead, losing at least a year in market and product development, and also lost the respect from the market that still see only Symbian smartphones from Nokia. Nokia is still the biggest on low-cost phones, but news media hasn’t cared about low-cost phones the last 10 years or so, only smartphones. And media companies are big users and fans of Apple products overall: Free marketing anyone?

Apple charges a fat premium for all its products, and no doubt its phones too, but customers are happy with that. That’s the difference between selling technology and selling life-style/attitude, and is a major factor to Apple’s success. At the end of the day it’s of course all about revenue and profit, and manufacturers using Android are fighting diminishing profits due to overall much more competition, lower prices, Microsoft (and others’) patent trolling, etc. Remember, revenue is not the important thing, even though people mainly talk about this. Profit is.

So some advice to other phone manufacturers (after the fact):

• Release only one smartphone model, make it very good, and evolve it
• Ignore low-end completely, as there’s no profit (yet Apple is supposedly moving there now, at least into low-end high-profile)
• Ignore operator requirements, unless they stifle sales
• Own the after-market sales of content: device + content equals a s**t-load of money
• Provide services customers want, and that increases loyalty and profit

Admittedly, Apple has completely failed in social networking. Why are people not talking about that? Apple instead tries cloud services, in competition with Google, Microsoft, maybe Oracle, maybe Sony etc etc.

It’s the whole that counts, not the details, but Apple did both the whole and the details well. Kudos!