web services

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!

As part of the Mobile MUSE project, I have been involved in creating a platform of multi-media services for mobile devices.  We'll get to what that means in a minute, but I'd like to explain some of the rationale and concepts behind the motivation for the platform.

One of the problems in delivery content to mobile devices is barrier to entry for developers.  These barriers take many forms.  These barriers invariably fall into three different categories:

• Financial - it can be difficult for small cap companies in early development phases to afford the investment required to begin working in the mobile space.
• Technical - At the end of the day, mobile devices differ radically from each other in terms of capabilities and even implementations of standard level technologies.  This situation is in stark contrast to the traditional Internet world where PC's generally support a myriad of standard and de-facto standard implementations.  Usually the biggest headache for Internet developers is accounting for two different browsers: IE and Firefox.  The mobile world should be so lucky.
• Business - Multiple wireless network operators put up various barriers - some technical, some financial - that make it difficult to create generic cross-carrier content.

The platform that's been developed for Mobile MUSE is an attempt to redress these barriers and provide a more hospitable environment for rich-media content development.