Hugh Spear's Blog

Is the pendulum of popular support now going to start swinging away from Apple?

Back in 1994 when we started Dialogue with an SMS application called PageMail we gave ourselves three years before we were either acquired or out of business. Why? Well in those days the personal computer software world was controlled by Microsoft and the general view was that if you did something well and it was popular then Microsoft would either do it better and make it cheaper, or acquire you and your product. The result would be the same but you would be wealthier if you were acquired. 

We've lasted longer than 3 years partly because SMS didn't get as popular as soon in the US as elsewhere. We've also seen that Microsoft has become less important in the world and this is partly due to anti-trust lawsuits which have prevented them from having a stranglehold on the market. The most prominent of these was the one which prevented Microsoft from automatically installing Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. 

Now we seem to be seeing the same approach coming along from Apple and threatening small groups of developers who just like Dialogue are just trying to create and sell innovative solutions to an embryonic market.

The advent of IOS 5 marks for me the stage at which the  world's support for Apple will start to weaken and it will be seen less as a force for good and more and more in the same light as we saw Microsoft at the height of its powers. 

I was one of many who applauded Apple for its pioneering iPhone. In one fell swoop it disrupted the mobile industry forever. Nothing demonstrates this more than a look at the once unbeatable market leader Nokia. Nokia has lost market share, lost its Finnish locus of control and lost its' operating system. 

I also applauded Apple's way of dealing with mobile operators who have always been in control of what went on at the handset. This control has not given us great usability nor great innovation. It has pretty much continued with a status quo. Apple pretty much single-handedly democratised the production of a better user experience.

It has been fantastic to see m0re and more handset manufacturers making devices which are as close to the look and feel of an iPhone as they can get without infringing upon Apple's intellectual property.

So all of this work by Apple has been a breath of fresh air to an industry which was set in it's ways. Apple was the new kid on the block, doing something different, frightening the old dinosaurs and we all loved them for it. I still have no sympathy for other handset manufacturers nor carriers who have had the resources to innovate but failed to. But in the background something less healthy was going on.  Apple was getting to enjoy its growing market share and it moved from the 'little guy' fighting the giants, to the 'big guy' who liked to throw his weight about. 

The first hints of this were the controls it placed around what Apps you could install and run on your iPhone. But we forgave them for that because there were so many Apps out there that we ignored the ones we missed. Then there was the very public denial of support for Flash on the iPhone. Again we forgave them for that because Adobe is big enough to take care of itself, and we've all suspected that Flash wasn't as stable as it needs to be.  But all the same we don't put up with this 'Big Brother' style control over what we use on our PCs.

Now we find that with IOS 5 Apple has included all kinds of new components, applications and services and has been accused on several fronts of cherry picking the best third party Apps and recreating these to be part of the Apple product set.

I love the idea of not needing to synchronise with a PC. Even with my MacBook Pro it takes 3 hours to sync my iPhone. It takes twice as long with my iPad so it has ceased to be a suitable solution. So moving iTunes to the cloud and synchronising over wi-fi is fantastic. But wasn't there a wi-fi sync App which was refused approval by Apple and ended up being a very successful App for jailbroken iPhones?  Also, moving iTunes to the cloud makes sense, but iCloud also provides all kinds of other document storage and synchronisation. This poses challenges to products like Dropbox and services like Flickr to compete.

iMessage goes down the same route. There are lots of Apps which merge instant messaging with SMS. One of the more popular is WhatsApp Messenger.  These Apps have had to work around all kinds of difficulties to provide a good product with a good user experience. They are all significantly challenged by Apple bringing out iMessage which is a closed App and doesn't have any obvious API access.

In a recent article, Tim Hanlon explores this idea of Apple putting App developers out of business even further. Sadly, he concludes that it's Apple's ball and they will decide what you do with it and for how long.

I guess we do all have to play Apple's game just as we once did with Microsoft. But there are starting to be the stirrings of anti-trust lawsuits against Apple now and at some point, if they are not careful, they will become the target of a lot more. 

Perhaps it is the natural order of things that empires whether they are technological or political eventually become too strong and people turn against them. It woud be a shame if this is now starting to happen with Apple. It probably won't stop me from using their products, but it will reduce my admiration for their business.

Top 5 +1 reasons for using SMS in recruitment.

Dialogue recently launched its SMS service for Bullhorn the site is great and can be found at http://www.dialogue.net/sms-for-bullhorn/. It offers close integration with the software as a service (SaaS) application in that you send and receive the SMS messages from within Bullhorn itself, and that is the key to usability of add-ins like SMS. But it is also worth reflecting on why SMS is so beneficial to a recruitment and ATS (Applicant Tracking System) context. So here are my top 5 reasons in order of priority:

 Reason #1 Reach.

A mobile phone is always with you and always with your candidates. It is also nearly always switched on and mostly within network coverage. Also, every cellular phone supports SMS and unlike voice calls, the messages can't be diverted. Add to this the research findings that nearly everyone knows how to use SMS and 98% of SMS messages are read. And you have the single most compelling reason for the success of SMS.  You message will reach the person you send it to.

Reason #2 Speed.

SMS is fast, really fast a message can cross the world in a few seconds to land on a phone wherever it is.  If you want to tell someone about a vacancy fast you can.  If you want to tell someone an interview time has been changed you need look no further.  Why is it fast? Well four reasons:

1. There isn't much data to shift around. Being a bit more technical; a text message is 140 bytes of information. SMS uses a 7 bit character-set and uses something called 'bit-stuffing' to get 160 7 bit characters into 140 bytes.  So SMS is compressed into something very small which is then switch through various networks at a very high speed.
2. It uses the cellular network signalling channel (SS7). This is bandwidth which is always there. Ever notice on New Year's Eve when you can't make a call because the whole world is doing the same thing, but you can send an SMS. There is so much less congestion.
3. Mobile networks have invested heavily in SMS infrastructure. Why wouldn't they, it is the success story of the the past decade. In January 1998 I remember when Vodafone in the UK told me that it had carried 1m SMS messages in the whole month. According to the UK Mobile Data Association by January 2010 there were 11m messages sent in the UK every hour. 
4. With companies like Dialogue who are a tier 1 SMS aggregator and the sort of company that will carry all of these 'Application-to-Person' messages; you have no third party between the application and the mobile network, so no delays. Indeed Dialogue even runs its own SS7 (signalling layer) interface for SMS.  So is viewed as a mobile network as far as SMS is concerned.

So overall, SMS is built for speed, the networks have worked hard to handle the volume and if you aggregator is also your application provider then you have very little friction.

Reason #3 Cost.

Several commentators have noted that SMS is the most expensive data in the universe. At an average cost of US $0.1 per SMS, it is over US $700 per megabyte. Compare that with the data plan on a mobile phone or the charges from an ISP and you see what I mean. But that is missing the point that the competitive alternative to SMS is not email or the mobile internet, it is voice, and SMS is much cheaper than voice.  Try making a voice call to 50 people to tell them about a job vacancy that would interest them and you have two costs, the cost of the call and the cost of your time. The cost of the call will not be cheap because the chances are you are calling a cellphone, and the cost of you time must be worth more than $5!

Reason #4 Response.

The response rates for SMS marketing are regularly quoted in the high teens and up to 25%. That is almost unheard of with more traditional marketing mechanics. But what is better than the statistic is the idea that SMS replies coming straight back to your application will enable the recruitment professional to focus attention on the enthusiastic candidates immediately.  Nothing pleases a potential employer more than a recruitment company finding interested candidates quickly. 

Reason #5 Precision.

Who wouldn't want an SMS reminder of an interview date and time together with the address and the name and job title of the interviewer?  You can fit it all in a single message, and probably include some travel advice too.  Again, contrast this with a voice call and you can see information being lost.  

Plus 1.

If I was going to add one more reason, it would be that people are already voting with their feet. The most compelling argument to include SMS in a recruitment application is that the recruitment professionals are already using it, they are just using their own mobile phones, which is more awkward and the messages aren't tracked where you want them - in the log of correspondence with the candidate.

 Recruitment has regularly been highlighted as one of the top sectors for SMS usage. It isn't surprising because it is a people industry and people is what text messaging is all about.  It isn't about replacing email or voice calls. You need email to send documents and you need voice to really discuss a role. But for short alerts like job notifications or appointment reminders or directions and contact details, it is very hard to do better than SMS.

I hope this short article has helped highlight some of the benefits of SMS to anyone still teetering on the brink of embracing the technology.  

Android's killer App Inventor

I can't think that there can be many neutral bystanders in this battle between these two behemoths of the Mobile Internet; Apple and Google.  But those of us that think we are still enjoy anything that one company does which might challenge the dominance of the other. 

Witness the iPhone antenna flaw coming so soon after the triumph of the release of the iPhone 4. A product which seemed to raise the bar still further for anyone trying to compete with Apple in industrial design. Everyone, other than people in Apple, must have been secretly smiling that this gave one glimmer of hope to competitors that Apple were not perfect. They were in fact just human.

This brings me to the point of this post which is something non-human, Android in fact. And it isn't a consumer product in the conventional sense at all, but it may be, just may be a defining strategy which will shape the future of this battle.

The strategy comes in the form of the Android App Inventor. This is a simple point-and-click tool for creating applications for an Android handset. It is apparent that the tool has been created to enable students to create mobile applications. The product is quite clearly educational in its approach and there are a number of teachers and professors that are using the application to teach computer science. 

Now two things spring to mind when I use the App Inventor. 

The first is that it is a very smart idea to get students using your products. Today's students are tomorrows employees and eventually they will have some influence over what their employer does. I remember seeing row and rows of SUN SPARC stations in Sheffield University when I was studying Software Engineering. The one thing I knew was that I wanted to work on one of these once I had a real job. If everyone undertaking computer science courses in schools and colleges is learning how to programme for Android devices, then you have a ready made bias entering the workforce.

The second thing about the App Inventor which gets me excited is that it is such a simple intuitive programming interface that you just want to go back and use it more and more. What was the last software tool that got me this excited? Visual Basic. I was lucky enough to use this tool in 1991, it was the dawn of the IDE (integrated development environment), where your programming was within the development tool. Visual Basic let me prototype windows applications and then just continue and build them. So what if it was interpreted code, the code was BASIC and it wasn't as fast as 'C'. I'd created something while you were discussing a budget, and it worked. It wasn't just me that loved Visual Basic (my previous programming language was BCPL, so I had an excuse!), it was just about everyone. Corporates loved it because they could do something useful quickly and save a fortune. Individuals loved it because they could solve a problem with an application and create a business. In fact Dialogue was created out of PageMail an SMS application written in Visual Basic version 3 which had at least 1 million customers. 

So anyone that can provide a tool which enables others to innovate and rise above their own personal or business challenges, is onto a winner. One might even observe that Visual Basic was in part responsible for the success of Windows and Microsoft over Apple over fifteen years ago. 

I'm not saying that App Inventor is there yet. It lacks a fair bit of what many of us would expect from a serious tool, but I'd say that the folk behind this product have done the hard part, they've created the environment, the 'Lego-like' building blocks and the other components. Adding a few more libraries and creating a way of deploying the results into the Android Market seems to be a relatively small job, and one which probably is the subject of a fair be of internal wrangling.  

If the result of the early trials of the App Inventor are good and the people of Google and Android feel that their commercial purposes are well served by opening up this product to the world at large, then I think it is 'game on' for Google in terms of giving Apple a challenger which is coming at the same problem from another angle. Surely Apple will see this coming and not repeat the history of the 1990s where people loved to use Apple Macs but ended up buying into Windows because of the applications and developer support. Well lets see!

Review of the iPad after 2 months in Europe

Prologue

It is right that this is composed on my iPad and also that I am doing this in the departure lounge at Bangkok airport after two months of user testing in Australia, England and Denmark.

I would say that my testing has been pretty thorough as I have used the device mostly for work, my two sons have used it for leisure and my wife has transformed her life with it.

I guess the executive summary is that I had been fairly skeptical about the value of a tablet-like form factor, but I and we have been bowled over by it's usefulness. It is a revelation.

For more detail read on...

I bought the top of the range WiFi/3G iPad from the Apple Store in Sydney at the end of May 2010. Experience taught me I'd need lots of memory and I also expected the device to become a useful travel companion so 3G was essential. I only used the device for a day or two in Australia, so saved the 3G experience for the UK where I was to be based for most of June and July 2010.

 

Connecting Up

In the UK I knew that Three has the best tariff and also great bandwidth. In fact the bandwidth was so good that I used 3G in preference to WiFi in most places other than my office. The process of getting a 3G micro-SIM in the Three store in Sheffield UK was not very easy and make harder by my being their first customer for such a product. Nonetheless we all persevered and got the job done in around 45 minutes. I chose the 10Gb plan and struggled to even use half of that each month.

First Impressions

My first impression was that the iPad was a super-sized iPhone. This meant that I knew where to find things, but it also puzzled me that there was no support for SMS or voice. I guess this gives Apple some clear blue water of separation from the iPhone. To some extent I can see the justification for this, but I can also see that this will be an easier device for fat-fingered texters like myself.

When we started Dialogue back in 1994 one of our premises for developing PageMail: an SMS application for the PC,  was that it was easier to type a message than key one into a mobile phone. I still think that this is the case for many people and that is why we've continued the PageMail spirit with envelos: a web based application for the desk.

Anyway after configuring email and a setting my iTunes account into the device I had a play.

Everything seemed good and the email app is fantastic. However in order to hear my music and view my photos I had to plug into a computer and sync via iTunes. It took about 3 hours and out of everything I have done with my iPad this is the most ridiculous.

The iPad is a computer in itself so it is really daft connecting it to another one to synchronise data. I expect Apple have a plan to host everyones iTunes content in "the cloud" and then we can all connect wirelessly, but until then we will have to put up with something which looks suspiciously like a ruse to increase sales of other Apple products. Now I've got that rant off my chest I can continue with what will be a fairly glowing tribute.

 

Applications 

Once you realise that the soft keypad is all you need you start to want to create documents rather than just read them. The iPhone in contrast was ok for quick emails and diary entries, but you wouldn't want to write a report on one.

Creating documents really requires you to have some apps for the job. The best ones for this on the iPad are in my view those from Apple: Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations. These for me do all I require and I could review my company's board reports and write my own using the apps. I could even use a nifty VGA connector to do my strategy presentation directly from the iPad. I found the only downside of these apps was there compatibility with the market leading desktop Office applications from Microsoft. Keynote would not convert to Powerpoint though it could open and convert Powerpoint files. This was a big drawback for me as I would then have to share presentations as PDF documents. Also Pages was not great at exporting to MS-Word format. Things like footers, fonts and tables were lost or altered. This really meant that the only person you would share the document with would be yourself, and you could then use Word to reformat the document so you could send it to your colleagues. Again, this isn't a show-stopper but it reduces the utility of the iPad from my perspective.

As well as the standard office apps I also downloaded some more. These were Omnigraffle a kind of Visio replacement which is fantastic as an iPad app, Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk and iBooks. Omnigraffle allowed me to create flow charts and other diagrams which I could then embed within other documents using Keynote and Pages. Sketchbook was more of a leisure app for my son who has a talent as an artist. I knew that the revered British artist David Hockney amongst others had become a real advocate of the iPad as a painting canvas, due in no small part to this app, so I wanted to get my son to give it a try. Here is an example of one of his early efforts:

iBooks was a possible Kindle killer and I wanted to see if it really worked for me as a replacement for a book. One great side benefit of iBooks is that it will also act as a bookshelf for PDF documents that you might download. This made it a good place to look for many online reports I find myself wanting to read. The book I bought to accompany 'Winnie the Pooh' which comes with the iBooks app, was 'Crush It!' by Gary Vaynerchuk. I heard him being interviewed by Jason Calacanis in the 'This Week in Startups' podcast, and wondered if he could be as passionate in writing. He can!

My view about iBooks is that is it brilliant if you want to have several books but probably won't win you over if you just want one book for your holiday read.

I also tried some iPhone apps which worked on the iPad but by and large were not much good at showing off the ipads great user interface.

For me, using the device for work, the experience was great. You get that 'instant start' feeling when you switch it on. There appear to be no moving parts and so the speed of operation is so much faster than listening to a laptop booting up and thrashing around trying to load everything into memory. The email app, the safari browser and the office apps all work pretty seamlessly together to give me all I need with just the exception of the file format compatibility mentioned above.

I'd say my Top 5 likes are:

1. Instant access. When you want to use it - it's there.
2. VGA output. Allows me to present to my colleagues without needing a laptop.
3. iPad specific apps. They aren't as cheap as iPhone apps but they give me so much more value.
4. Portability. It will be my companion whenever I go anywhere on business.
5. 3G - for a lot of us our stuff is in 'the cloud' so you need to be connected whenever possible.

My Top 3 dislikes (because I couldn't think of 5) are:

1. Syncing via another computer. I won't go over this again though.
2. File format conversion difficulties. Must be fixed for business users.
3. Lack of support for SMS. A pet love of mine and my business.

My Top requests for the next version are:

1. Fix above issues.
2. Camera in the front for video conferencing.
3. HDMI output.
4. Multi-tasking.
5. Do something about touch. If the soft keyboard gave some kind of haptic response then perhaps I could touch-type.

Views of others

My children (10 and 13 years old) seemed to be able to use the device immediately, and they were fighting over it within a day. For them it is the best thing in our house and 'Angry Birds' is their favourite waste of time. I have a small wager with myself (and anyone else who wants to join in), that the place where the iPad will truly succeed is in schools and in education in general. My wife is the toughest user to please; a lifelong Luddite she takes to any new technology reluctantly; like a duck to "l'Orange"! However apart from a minor falling out over my use of the Maps app for Sat-Nav, she welcomed the iPad into her world with open arms and was very often first to check her email each morning. This was the biggest surprise to me and I'm guessing that I need to buy everyone one of these if I am to be able to take mine to work.

All in all the iPad gets a big thumbs up from me, but I do hope that some others soon give Apple some competition in this product category.

Remember envelos?

A little bit of history. Back in 1994 we developed our first product at Dialogue. It was called pagemail, and it did one thing well. It allowed you to send SMS messages from your computer.  Over the years we developed that product further, but it was always an application which you installed and ran on your PC.

Then in 1998 we were asked to created a service hosted on the internet, that could provide an email to SMS service for Vodafone in the UK. This would become the Vodafone product Mobile-Alert. But the infrastructure behind this was something which would shape the company thereafter.

We had taken our E3 SMS gateway and put an application on the front of it. We realised that we were now able to do a lot more than just run a service to notify you by SMS when you had a new email. We had an internet hosted SMS gateway.

We had this gateway but we didn't know what to call it. So we had a bit of a discussion and came up with a word which wasn't a real word, but it kind of sounded suitable. The word was envelos, which we sometimes explained as a conjunction of 'envelope' and 'services'. The envelope was the almost universal symbol of an SMS on a mobile phone.

The other thing which turned out well about envelos was that it didn't necessarily sound like English. It was international and we thought that this could only help.

Over the past ten years we have used the name envelos less and less. But now we are getting ready to use it again. It is the new pagemail, but as it isn't an application you install but a web based SMS application, we won't use the name pagemail. But we will use the original pagemail 'paper plane' graphic.

We hope you'll like envelos and find it easy to use. It is almost ready for the world to see. Just a short wait now.

SMS Software doesn't rust

I got a support request in my email yesterday. I used to get these in the nineties which was about the last time I was able to write software. The support request was for a product that Dialogue had licensed to a large corporate customer a long time ago. The customer has been happily using the software ever since, but now had a query about whether and how it could access the software in a new way.

The software in questions was Dialogue's PageMail Expressway application which we created in about 1998. It is a multi-user version of our first SMS application PageMail which was distributed widely from 1995 to about 2000.

The company with the query has been sending about 15,000 SMS messages per month to their staff and wanted to integrate SMS into a new CRM application they had.

I was a bit out of touch with how the software worked, but after a bit of digging found the necessary documentation and forwarded it to our support team. What I noticed about the documentation and the source code was that it was a decade old! I was quite surprised because in that decade a lot has happened in the world and in terms of software and operating system environments. I was impressed that the software still worked and that it was still useful.

I did a quick check across the office to find out who had the oldest software in use which still made money. I won hands down (partly because I'm twice as old as most of our staff!).

I remember how hard it was back in the mid to late 1990s to persuade companies that SMS was a useful technology, but the ones who gave it a go, certainly found that it was 'sticky', and as the technology involved is so simple it can be connected up to many different systems to add to their utility. We spent a fair bit of time designing our software well so that it could be integrated into whatever the customer wanted to use it for, and those design principles look like assuring the software a continued lease of life.

I perhaps shouldn't be surprised that software still works a decade later, it isn't subject to the same  environmental impact as say a car or an office chair. It doesn't use something which has become obsolete, and provided computer systems are backwardly compatible, it will continue to live.

So the only thing which was ever likely to go wrong was the the customer would cease to need SMS in their business, and I've not found many businesses that go down that path.

So my message for the day is that SMS software has probably got at least another decade to run.