/egilh

Learning by doing

Vodafone Betavine

Posted on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 9:25 PM

The Vodafone Betavine site is a open community website created and managed by Vodafone Group R&D with the mission to

...support the wider development community in stimulating ideas, developing, testing and launching great new applications for mobile and Internet communications.

Interesting. Vodafone is huge, so they should have the power to make device manufacturers adhere to the (few) mobile browsing and applications standards that exists. If you are not familiar with developing for mobile devices, you can compare it with the problems we had a decade ago developing for Mozilla and Internet Explorer. But imagine a headache hundreds of times worse as each device has its own peculiarities (even “standard“ software like the Nokia Series Sxx).

The site is open to anyone and I am thrilled to see that Vodafone is not censoring complaints (at least so far).
<flame>

Judging from some forums they could have called the site VodafoneBetaWhine…  Vodafone, correctly, get a lot of complaints regarding their Mobile Internet which basically destroys all internet sites that provide their own  mobile rendering. Vodafone Italy goes one step further than the Vodafone operators in other European countries and even imposes their own Vodafone header and footers on some mobile devices making it look like the service is provided by Vodafone. Difficult to explain to customers that pays for picture perfect rendering just to see it garbled by Vodafone...

</flame>

Thanks for the link Maurizio.



Feel free to drop a few cents in the tip jar if this post saved you time and money

Feedback

# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/29/2007 11:15 AM by 0m4r

Nokia is trying something really similar: http://mosh.nokia.com/
I haven't found great ideas, who got one don't share it with others, usually keep it for himself to make moneys, or to try to make them!


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/29/2007 7:14 PM by Egil Hogholt

There may not be any great ideas, but betavine has the potential to become an interesting forum for cross-device developers. Like most forums, I see it more for a place where you can ask for help, than share your latest and greatest money making ideas. Publish a cool app though, and you can reach a lot potential users/testers.

Mosh and Ovi [ovi.nokia.com], on the other hand, are more of a community site for the end user than for developers if you ask me.

BTW, do you have a public blog that is not restricted to Reply employees?


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/29/2007 8:47 PM by 0m4r

I agree with you, and what's your opinion about the tools like: http://www.netbiscuits.com, http://www.mofuse.com/ or https://joey.labs.mozilla.com/
I know maybe they wont to make all the contents workin on every platform, but they try to make "websites" accessible by any mobile device. It's a small pice of mobile applications... but it's interesting. Personally I never used one of these, I had no need but I'm interested (most of the times just courious)



I have a non Reply blog but it's quite "abandoned" to itself since I have to use the Corporate one (I'ma swat). But I'm also thinking to make the post both on my own and on the Reply. The original Idea was to build a "dummy" blog on my own space using the Google Feed API, but, the Reply blog feeds aren't public.... so I can't use this solution.
I'm also working to build a kind of "somthing_like_a_cms" using the Google APIs and at last the Google Apps For Your Domain... but I'm still far from a cool demo (you can take a look to www.basketcologno.com/beta to have an idea, but 'm gonna OT... maybe askme if you are courious)
I'm quite forgetting the link: http://omar.adobati.it (yeah... a singular blog URL :P)


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/29/2007 9:27 PM by Egil Hogholt

I will have a look at the sites and get back to you tomorrow.

Regarding the "company internal only blog"...
I can see the reason for creating a protected/company-only blog if you discuss "secret" information, for example a "project blog" where the team members post updates. But I do NOT see the reason for implementing a standard blog that is limited to internal use. I, for one, use a web based RSS reader so I would be unable to read an internal only feed.

But, if you want to have the internal blog as well as a public one, I suggest that you cross post. There are many options:
1. Use a tool like MultiBlog [http://www.skinmaster.co.uk/multiblog] that allows you to cross post
2. Write your own cross posting tool
3. Build your own tool that uses the Google Feed API to mirror what you post on the internal blog

I find the last option most interesting to implement. It could also be useful in the future if you want to move the blog to another blog provider.


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 8:11 AM by 0m4r

The 3rd point look really interesting, I never look at the problem "by the other side", it's a new and good point of view.
I think I'll try this last solution, also if I don't know how to apply it to the internal blog...I will need a personalized "blog template" and I don't think I can add one... Let me to study a solution. I'll keep you updated if you are interested.
I'm sorry, I think I'm gonna off-topic whit these comments. The original subject of this entry was another....

P.S.
tha captcha code is not always visible. I have to submit the form the view the image, so I wrote the entry once, copy it to the clipboard and then paste it to the textarea to be able to fill the captcha filed. I found this problem both with FF2.0 and IE7.


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 9:20 AM by Egil Hogholt

Why do you need a special template on the internal blog? The RSS feed [http://tamtamy.reply.it/blog/lifecoding/feed/] has everything you need. It is XML so it should be "easy" to use it with the Google APIs.

Thanks about the captcha bug report. It looks like the 3rd party control I am using barfs when it finds an bookmark in urls like this: http://www.egilh.com/blog/archive/2007/10/24/4428.aspx#4445
Remove #4445 and it works OK.

I don't have the source code for the control so I guess I will have to write my own.



# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 10:34 AM by Egil Hogholt

Found and fixed the captcha problem on my blogs. I also made it larger and easier to read.


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 11:31 AM by 0m4r

Here is why I can't use the tamtamy feeds to mirror the blog (that was also my own original idea):
http://www.adobati.it/labs/feedAPI/

As you can see the HTML error message is "Feed could not be loaded", so "our" idea (since you suggest it to me in your 3rd point) is not so easy as Feed API could make it to appear. A possible solution is to find a way to authenticate into the tamtamy platform and then have back the feeds... don't know if this could be done, and also if it is legal.

So, my hypothesis was to don't look into tamtamy but to look out, reading external -not corporate- feed and put them into my corporate blog.... This is why I wrote about a personalized theme. So, contents of my corporate blog will be the contents I wrote, or I'll write, to my own personal blog. BTW, I agree with you about the non-sense policy to keep the blogging platform with a restricted access...

PS:
To access http://www.mofuse.com/ you need an invite, I've got some if you need one. Just tell me the e-mail you'd like to have it delivered to you.

PPS:
Captcha works pretty good now!


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 11:42 AM by Egil Hogholt

Regarding netbiscuits etc.

In general I am very skeptical to systems that "automagically" makes mobile sites. It is very difficult and the form factor of the devices require, in my opinion, a completely different site with its own navigation/concept. Re-using content is important but that should not be a problem if you design the site correctly.

I use a PocketPC Phone Edition for accessing the internet when I am on the road which is "simpler" than using mobile phone as it understands HTML (instead of WML or XHTML). The PocketPC browser is pretty limited so I cannot wait to lay my hands on [http://labs.live.com/deepfish/]. In the meantime I use Skweezer [http://www.coolorwhat.net/blog/archive/2004/12/16/399.aspx] which makes browsing with the Pocket PC a lot faster and cheaper.


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 11:57 AM by Egil Hogholt

Sorry, it was not clear to me what you wanted to do. You cannot access the TamTamy feed with the Google AJAX Feed API as Google.com serves as a proxy to the outside feeds, so your client only communicates with the Google servers. Using a custom template on the TamTamy blog to pull a feed from Blogger may work but I don't see WHY you want to do that.

Why don't you write a client app on your PC in Java/C# that reads the XML feed from TamTamy passing the authentication in the HTTP header [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication]. It can filter articles based on tags/categories and automatically post to blogger using the Blogger API [http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/overview.html]


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 12:46 PM by 0m4r

That's what I'd like to do... It's the way I intend to use to "joke" the authentication issue.
It's quite similar to what I've done in the link I wrote you some replys ago for the http://www.baskecologno.com/beta blog (it's basd on the Blogger Data API), the main difference is that I have not to authenticate to a blogger server but to the tamtamy server. I'll have a try in those next few days of holidays.

Thanks for your suggestions


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 1:13 PM by 0m4r

DeepFish is really cool, sometime I ask myself if is the software that makse things cool, or if the hardware makes thinks cool.
A lot of people (me too) talk so good about iPhone, but it's not the iPhone I think, is the user experience that make the difference... this subject need a lot of time to be discussed...


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 1:18 PM by 0m4r

ops, amistake in the link: http://www.basketcologno.com/beta - this should work.


# re: Vodafone Betavine

10/30/2007 9:15 PM by Egil Hogholt

You are right; user experience, and design, are very important. Apple makes its money on it and everybody else, Microsoft included, do their best to copy.

Jobs is dead serious about design. Just check this article [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html] regarding a "simple" washing machine:
...
We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.
...
We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They're too expensive, but that's just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we've bought over the last few years that we're all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.


# re: Vodafone Betavine

11/6/2007 10:24 PM by 0m4r

Hello Egil,

Here is 0m4r, defeated by TamTamy, or better by the HTTP 302 code... I think I will hate it all my life long!
I can logon to tamtamy via a Java client that could manage cookies, but when I need to request the page I need (a.k.a. the one with the feeds) a really "nice" HTTP 302 (http/1.0 Moved Temporally - http/1.1 Found) code is returned.
So, I think there's no way... the admin know their own stuff...

Ok, I'm not the winner, but now I know how to manage a form-login authentication issue... this should be the lesson I had learn in theese days... Tanks a lot for your support :)



# re: Vodafone Betavine

11/8/2007 1:37 PM by Egil Hogholt

HTTP 302 is a redirect.

What happens if you make a request to the url specified in the Location http header?


Post Comment
Title
 

Name
 

Url

Protected by Clearscreen.SharpHIPEnter the code you see:
Comment