Another slick application for Mobile MUSE platform

Well this idea had struck me some time ago, and an e-mail thread with my colleague - Richard Smith - prodded me to do something about it.   The problem is that it's a real shame I even had to do it.  You see it all came down to price plans for wireless networks.

In particular, Richard sent me a note where he parenthetically bemoaned the price of data on the Fido network.  Specifically, in one instance he had consumed about 500K bytes of data - for which he was charged the whopping sum of $17.25 (pre or post tax - I'm not sure).  In another instance, he had consumed about 270k bytes of data - for which he was charged $8.01.  Now when you consider he's using an N80 device that has a reasonable 3M pixel camera, his average photo is just south of 1M.  So uploading a single photo at these rates would cost on the neighbourhood of $30 each!

This topic had come up a little while ago and I mentioned that someone should use the Mobile MUSE platform to write an application that would receive an MMS then upload that MMS content to Flickr.  No one however took the bait.  So this year I decided to try my hand at that application.

As with my previous applications (which used Javascript to download arbitrary videos and images from YouTube and Flickr), the actual amount of code I had to write was quite trivial.  But first I had to learn about Flickr's web services API.

Being the rusty programmer I am, this took me the better part of the morning to get up and limping about.  However, once mastered, integration to the Mobile MUSE platform was relatively simple.

I created a service point for the Mobile MUSE platform that asked that all incoming MMS messages from the MMS gateway that contained the keyword 'flic' in the first text object, be given to my application code.

That application code then uses the Flickr web services API to upload the contained images to my Flickr acount.  And before you know it - Bob's Your Uncle!

With about a day's worth of effort, I had found a way to use fixed price MMS (which depending on your carrier costs about $.25 or $.50 per message to send) to upload my images to Flickr.  Contrast that to Richard's bill of $17.01 for $250K of data!

It's not all roses however.  In fact there's one big caveat:

Most carriers restrict the maximum size of an MMS to about 300K.  This poses a problem for Richard's 800K images.  Fortunately for Richard, Nokia's Symbian implementation of MMS provides rather robust mechanisms to handle hefty data.  There is a configuration option that instructs the phone how images should be formatted for MMS.  This includes a couple of small resolution formats (which sort of defeats the purpose of a 3M camera I admit), but it also enables you to say 'preserve the original size'.  Then when the image is sent, it will try to send it in that original size.  However, 800K is still more than 300K so the phone does some lossy compression on the photo to get it beneath that 300K barrier.  Not perfect I admit, but it sure beats $17.01!

Another neat trick is that if I'm not too fussy on resolution, I can construct an MMS with a number of photos contained in that message.  For the same fixed price ($.025-$.50), I can upload multiple photos to my Flickr account.  The other neat trick is that this capability is available to EVERY camera-enabled phone on the market to day! No software to install...works nicely with the UI already present in your phone's software and all that is needed is the knowledge of the phone number to which the message should be addressed. 

I know some of you are out there saying "what's the big deal?  Why not use Shozu, or Nokia's own Flickr integration package?".  Well the answer is of course cost.  Because my solution uses fixed price MMS, it may not be exactly cheap, but it's literally a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than simple data upload services. 

And that's the sad fact but a demonstration of another fact:

Innovation is like water.  You can dam it up and create all the dikes you want, but in the end, like water, innovation finds a way through.

Some of you savvy folks out there might think "Well hey - that's a slick idea Jim!  Can you do the same with my videos?  Can you upload my videos to YouTube using MMS?"  Sadly the answer seems to be 'no'.

I investigated this and in fact YouTube supports a mobile video upload feature.  Essentially you go to your YouTube account and enable mobile access.  It provides an obtuse looking e-mail address and simply tells you to use your mobile device to e-mail your video to that YouTube address and it will magically appear on YouTube.  Alas that solution requires hefty data transport fees so that was clearly a no go.  However, I thought I could use MMS to get the video to my application then deliver it via e-mail to YouTube.

Alas I couldn't get the e-mail transfer to YouTube to work.  Nothing wonderful happened and after three days, I received a terse e-mail in my inbox saying 'Your video upload failed'.  Hmmm.... not very helpful.

But I think you see my point here.  It was relatively easy to create an application that solved a real world problem using the Mobile MUSE platform.

In the coming months I'll be creating some whitepapers and tutorials on some of the code I've written.  Keep coming back to developers.mobilemuse.ca