James Senior's Blog

Aha – so that’s what the beam of light was for the other night – it was the official Bing launch at the Seattle Center.  You could see the beam of light for miles and it made for great late night viewing from the top of my building!  You can click below for the full Photosynth experience too.  There are some stunning photos on Flickr too, so that’s where some of that $100m marketing budget went :)

Last month Seattle picked up Fast Company’s City of the Year 2009 on the basis of its “divine geography, frontier spirit and an abundance of both artists and geeks” and also got labeled as the 2nd hottest place for startups outside the valley in a recent study.

In the article Fast Company interviewed John Cordell – an Internet Explorer architect – who claimed that Seattle is the best place for software engineers because of the climate:

"You go into a hole and work 80 hours a week for eight months, then come out of the hole and take a break to recharge your batteries. Seattle has eight months of bad weather and four months of absolutely beautiful weather. It's the perfect place for software engineers."

But what might be right for software might not be right for services or “cloud computing” where agility is the name of the game and you’re considered old hat if you’re not shipping code every night and playing Four Square by 6pm and tweeting about how you just assassinated your best friend whilst sipping a frappacino.

I’ve seen it first hand, now the lovely weather is here in Seattle – and it is lovely – people change, there’s less time spent in the office, more time down by the lake or hiking in the mountains - these Seatteites love their good weather and their outdoor activities.  I can’t blame them.  For most of the year the weather is a little on the dull side so once the sunshine arrives you just want to get out and make the most of it.

Is a more stable climate more conducive to agile software and rapid releases?  Would a climate where people are accustomed to the sunshine be better, where programmers don’t mind residing in the air conditioned office whilst they finish their code check in for the day which automatically is published to the cloud?

Does California and specifically Silicon Valley have the upper hand in this climate battle over the clouds, or will Aesop have the final say as the Tortoise and the Hare is replayed?

Photo courtesy of AdagioatMSN from Flickr

A natural extension to the social web is played out on mobile devices.  Be this a version of the website that has been designed specifically for a smaller screen (e.g. http://m.playfoursqaure.com) or an application that runs natively on the device (e.g. Facebook App on Windows Mobile). 

These extensions are invaluable to the success of a social website for they allow the experience to travel with the user and continue the flow of data wherever they are, and as the value of a website is found in the content, it’s critical to provide as many input points as possible and keep them open at all times.  Mobile is an example of such an input point.  Couple the mobile input point to a mobile device with GPS capability and data flowing to and from the network becomes exponentially more valuable and the experiences both for the mobile user and consumers of their information becomes extremely customized.

Apps are by far the better option over a mobile (wap) version of the website because they provide a richer user experience, allow better integration with the mobile operating system for sharing of content and also a way for developers to monetize their application ($25bn market by 2014).  Remember that the flow of data is key so having an app that makes this happen quicker and more easily for the user is imperative. 

Examples of where this is true include the success of Twitter, due in no small part to the client applications running on devices – particularly mobile – and also new social games are emerging like www.playfoursquare.com whose adoption of amongst iPhone users is much greater than other mobile platforms – because they have a really nice app.

It’s not just about the software either. With companies like www.modu.com delivering modular phones that allow you to quickly change the physical build of a device for different scenarios, the type of data that flows to/from the network will be dictated by the configuration of phone you have on your person at the time.

Back to the software though, and where all this is going.  Windows Mobile 6 – the current version - is not the best for social applications, because it’s difficult to write apps that people love to use.  With Windows Mobile 6.5 that will change with support for touch gestures and a widget framework that allows web developers to build application-like experiences outside of the browser without having to write native code.  Microsoft are also launching (a well publicized) Marketplace where developers can sell the applications they build.

We’ve just released an SDK for Windows Mobile 6.5 which also includes emulators for testing – you can download it here. Rob Cameron has more information in his blog post on the SDK.