The conversation and the controversy on privacy also around mobile apps the their collection of only partially anonymous data will go on and with Google’s latest announcement it won’t get any better. And my point to accept sharing data with out loosing anything but for the benefit of a greater good gets lots of support through this:

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone <..> your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part <..> and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Google’s response to your immediate privacy concerns is

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions <..>. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection.

I do not think a “I’m doing 120 here on this little road – there can not be any congestion here” message from my mobile phone will hold enough usable evidence to fine me for speeding. And should I consider robbing a bank or killing my neighbor and have the intention to escape by car and know that this is my only weak spot to not be caught, I will seriously consider to opt-out of the service before departure.

If you’d like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

Cant wait to see this work in Europe/Zurich/Stuttgart(?)…

Read more details on the Google blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/bright-side-of-sitting-in-traffic.html

Publishers who distribute content, media and applications on the web want to understand how, where and by whom their assets are being consumed. This is a question very often answered by Google Analytics, a tool based on JavaScript and Cockies to track user behavior on the web that comes bundled with a nice analytics service and reporting engine to draw conclusions out of the collected data. Some people argue that the analytics are not all actionable or do not lead to any actions, but Google is the most popular today – by far.

With the mobile web finally becoming a reality thanks to the iPhone, the distribution channels of digital assets to consumers today include not only mobile sites but more and more also mobile applications and especially iPhone applications. For the consumer the difference between the two is small and sometimes even not noticed, but for distributors of content moving to iPhone applications is quite a change when it comes to analytics. For websites optimized to show on the iPhones web browser one can rely on the same tracking and analytics functionality from Google. But iPhone applications are not supported.

Quite early in time, Pinch Media started providing an analytics library and service very similar to Google Analytics that can be used for user tracking in iPhone applications.

Pinch Analytics is software that collects anonymous usage data from mobile phone applications, and presents it in aggregated form. <..> Using Pinch Analytics will provide you with information about how your application is being used, which you can then use to improve and enhance it.

So Pinch Media is really a Google Analytics for the iPhone and they also track the same type of data. But also since the revelation of the Palm Pre collecting user data and constantly updating the vendor about them, the community seems to see this differently. The current conversation considers tracking user behavior in iPhone apps spying on them and using their bandwidth for the tracked data stealing from them. Two of the differences are an assumed less anonymous character of a device id of the iPhone over an IP address and the higher accuracy of a geo location based on real latitude and longitude and not just the location of your provider IP location.

The German newspaper Die Zeit also considers Pinch Media spyware and suggests a firewall for the iPhone. At least the blocking part of such a firewall is now available to users of cracked iPhones through Jay Freeman’s privaCy tool.

Pinch Media have in the mean time reacted and now also offer a version of their tool with an extended option for users to opt-out of the user tracking. And this requires the developers to update the existing iPhone apps.

I am sure a lot of developers will update their apps and carefully consider whether to use analytics libraries or not in the future. The is in line with the typical patterns of the consumerized mobile and web business and this is good. But I do not like the term spyware. Wikipedia says about Spyware:

Spyware is known to change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs.

Pinch media is able to derive relevant conclusions out of their intelligence that do not harm the user but help the developer of the application.

An approach I really like is the one of Twitterfon. They have a free and a commercial version of their app and for the free one they expect their users to agree to sharing some of their data. Get something for free but give something back that does not cost you anything that can be valuable for the vendor.

What do you think?

GPSies is the 17th most popular navigation application in the German app store. Thank you all for the great reviews and the lots of downloads.

Some of the reviews from Germany here:

“Super Apps – funktioniert und einfache Bedienung” – 5 Stars
Habe das Programm heute probiert, 50 km Radtour (Stadt und freies Feld) hatte mein iphone in der Brusttasche und ca 2 Stunden auf Empfang. Batterie war auf 45% und nach dem upload der Daten hatte ich eine Streckengenauigkeit von ca. 99% auf Google map. Einfache Bedienung und eine sehr gute homepage des Anbieters. Kann dieses Programm für alle die Wissen wollen welche Strecke sie gelaufen oder gefahren sind nur empfehlen und das ganze ist sogar kostenlos.

“Super und einfacher GPS Strecken-Recorder” – 5 Stars
Mein Garmin Edge hat gestern leider vehttp://blog.wohlrapp.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=314&type=image&TB_iframe=truersagt (Radtour, Akku leer). Da habe ich mir bei einer kleinen Pause GPSies heruntergeladen und die Strecke aufgezeichnet. Absolut Top! Keine Aussetzer, Akku war nach den 3 Stunden zwar fast leer, aber das nimmt man gerne in Kauf. Tolle Darstellung der Strecke im Netz! Top!!!

We also getting good reviews from the US, but still could do better.

“Great app” – 5 Stars
Great gps track app. Let’s you upload track to website and share. Great for cycling trails.

See all reviews on Moopf AppStoreReviews.

This is the global distribution of the application:

Get the App here and write your own review here.

The iPhone GPS Logger is finally online and available in the iTunes AppStore: GPSies is the most easy to use iPhone Application that allows you to geo track your sports and leisure activities. Recorded tracks can be stored locally for later reference or uploaded to GPSies.com with one tap. GPSies.com is the leading platform and community for GPS recorded tracks and is used by thousands of outdoor enthusiasts around the world.

The application features

• Record tracks. Pause and resume any time.
• View elapsed time, current and average speed and pace.
• View covered path and altitude profile.
• One-tap upload to GPSies.com.
• Export to all major formats and applications through GPSies.com.
• Store tracks in the iPhone for later reference.
• US and metric system support.
• Recording interval adjustable to suit activity type.
• Pocket mode for optimized battery life.
• Edit tracks with map on GPSies.com.

You can get it from the iTunes AppStore here.

The Best of Swiss Web Awards are the most coveted awards for e-business, Internet and mobile projects in Switzerland since 2001. A total of 277 projects were submitted to the jury this year in eight categories. A panel of 80 experts has revealed this year’s winners of the Best of Swiss Web Awards and one of our projects we successfully delivered in 2008, me2me, was awarded twice with this accolade which honours Switzerland’s top websites.

Congratulations go to our partners Liip AG for winning the Master of Swiss Web with their iPhone Application. Gottago is an amazing application and was for long the most popular free app in Switzerland. With open sourcing the project to Transport, Marc took a bold move that deserves every recognition.

The special topic of this year’s award was “Women wired in Web” and I had the pleasure to share a table with Maya and Terry from byteKultur, a women only web and design agency focussing on Joomla based website implementations. Interestingly enough the jury did not find the fact that a bunch of girls with no support from any boys run their own business relying on an open source project and the community worth mentioning. Instead they awarded a larger campaign project that was leveraging a female celebrity and recognized a bunch of submissions with female supporting roles. Hm. If you ever need a small but good piece of design or look for some Joomla experts, got check out byteKultur.net.

me2me was awarded the Best of Swiss Web Technology Innovation Silver Award and the Business Efficiency Bronze Award 2009.

The project was also a nominee for the 2009 Master of Swiss Web.

Our customer, me2me AG, supplier of Web and voice services, announced today the creation of me2me, a mobile information storage and retrieval service.

Conceived by me2me AG and assembled by Optaros, me2me mobile applications are available for large-scale trials with network operators in Europe and the United States.

Optaros’ open source consulting team provided me2me with a solid infrastructure, allowing users to interact with me2me in following ways:

• Use a single number to verbally store daily life information and tag it with personal terms to make it searchable
• Retrieve information over the phone or with a Web account
• Have information delivered by text message instantly
• Take control over their voice messages: edit, tag and organize their in- and outbox

“We help clients like me2me deliver solutions that are Assembled Web-native, flowing seamlessly between web, mobile and offline,” says Philippe Grosjean, managing director for Europe, Optaros. “Leading companies know that mobile applications are integral in creating quality customer relationships.”

“Optaros managed to quickly turn our ideas into working mobile applications, thanks to their unique approach to open source consulting and assembly,” says Christian Giroux, me2me CMO. “Feedback from testing a beta-version of the service is overwhelmingly positive. We truly see me2me as the next big thing in mobile.”

me2me AG is a mobile communications company offering unique next generation convergent web and voice services. The flagship solution “me2me” offers operators the opportunity to generate new revenue streams and gives users an intelligent daily life information service enabling rapid storage, management and retrieval of information, in order to simplify and help organise their busy lives. Founded in early 2008 and financed by Swisscom Ventures, me2me AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland with subsidiaries in London,UK and Boston, US.

I had the pleasure on Monday to contribute to the Swiss MobileMonday by speaking about iPhone development, what makes the experience so special and how you can learn from Apple’s concepts for other mobile initiatives by applying Open Source concepts to assemble solutions.

The event was sponsored by Swisscom and introduced by the chairman Walter Steinlin, Head of Swisscom Outlook, former CTO and Head of Swisscom Innovations.

Claude Florin did a great job in facilitating the panel with the speakers Tim Haysom (CMO of OMTP) who talked about the BONDI initiative, Martin Gafner and Andreas Zuber from Puzzle ITC with a great introduction to the neo freerunner with OpenMoko, Reto Senn (COO and Co-Founder of Bitforge) and Nicolai Finke Product Manager with Esmertec.

It was interesting to see how it was really a 1.0 (fragmented mobile handset world) vs. 1.5 (clean end-to-end experience with the iPhone) discussion. The group agreed, that 1.0 is broken to a certain extent, but it was also clear that the iPhone and it’s eco system are by far not perfect and therefor more 1.5 than 2.0.

See all the speakers and presentations at the MobileMonday website.

Bruno held a presentation on the iPhone at the Geneva iPhone conference last week. This is the presentation “Why is the iPhone so special”:

I was delighted to see that my Nestlé buddy Adrian Kosmaczewski made it from .Net Architect to Open Source Evangelist to iPhone CTO. Way do go dude. ;)

I referred some of you to the iPhone development guide for beginners in the c’t a couple of weeks ago. Now ars technica poicked upt the topic from a similar angle but in English. Read the 4 part intro to iPhone OS development here: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/iPhone-SDK.ars/1

This won’t be a comprehensive overview, but it should give a feel for the capabilities and limits of the iPhone and its OS, and the challenges developers face in working within those limits.

Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a very good and often quoted paper and in the mean time book to explanation why open source works so well. Besides the good content, it is a metaphor that I like a lot.

Apple’s AppStore seems to work well currently (100m downloads in the first 60 days), but continues to receive criticism for the unpredictable banns for applications (Podcaster and also recently Mailwranlger). Apple takes the freedom to control the content and to remove applications that do not meet the requirements or that they simply do not like in THEIR STORE. Some “contributors” are seriously upset about the devaluation of their sometimes very hard work to provide a piece of software that can only be distributed through a single channel – the AppStore.

Google is yet to prove to be different, but I have good hopes for their “store”, which they call “market”. This sounds much better to me wrt to the expectation I would have for a place to distribute my software through. On the android blog it is announced as

an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.

The light-weight user interface toolkit for Java ME (LWUIT) has been released as open source. Sun has selected GPLv2 and the classpath exception license, which allows developers to link this library statically or dynamically with other modules under other licenses.

LWUIT is a library that helps creating rich Java ME applications through a MVC (model view controller) approach. It supports visual components, theming, transitions, animation etc. Just like JavaFX. But while both LWUIT and JavaFX enable creating a better and more compelling user interface for mobile and other devices, there are really two target generations:

LWUIT will help Java MIDP and Swing developers to enhance the interfaces of new or existing Java ME applications on MIDP 2.0 phones. The LWUIT library which offers pre-made graphical functions and features that developers can quickly and easily assemble into a compelling interface. JavaFX Mobile is targeted at designers and scripters who are looking to create very rich, very immersive experiences across multiple screens like phone, PC, TV, etc. The level of interactivity and animation and control over the presentation is much higher than that enabled by LWUIT. JavaFX Mobile can also run on MSA-enabled devices i.e. smart phones and high end feature phones.

So it is nice to now have LWUIT for sprucing up existing Java ME programs. For new apps I still strongly suggest to consider JavaFX.

WordPress have introduced an Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users can now write and manage their blog on the go.

Download from the iTunes AppStore.

The interesting bit is the solution to prevent data loss when receiving a call. WordPress for iPhone will recover your post after ending the call. You can take pictures on the phone and blog them instantly, iPod touch users are limited to pictures from the photo library.
See pictures of the app in action in the gallery.

There is a dedicated WordPress on the iPhone blog with more info and this video: