PhoneGap, an open-source mobile framework, offers an alternative: It helps developers build a common codebase for their apps so the apps work across devices and systems.

I recently spoke with Joe Bowser (@infil00p), creator of PhoneGap’s Android implementation, to get his take on the strengths and limitations of PhoneGap and what developers need to know before putting it to use. Bowser will dive into a number of related topics during his session at next week’s Android Open conference.

Our interview follows. (Note: this interview was conducted before Adobe announced its acquisition of PhoneGap’s parent company, Nitobi.)

What is PhoneGap and why should mobile developers consider using it?

Joe Bowser: PhoneGap is an application framework that allows developers to use HTML, JavaScript and CSS to create apps that are present as first-class applications on the phone. That means the apps have their own icons and operate similarly to native applications without a browser frame around them. They are distributed via the application stores, such as the Android Market and the Apple App Store, and they have access to a set of native functions to further make them work like native apps.

Developers use PhoneGap because it allows them to have a common codebase for all their application code. It doesn’t force developers to reinvent the wheel every time they move from platform to platform.

Are there downsides to using PhoneGap?

Joe Bowser: You are subject to the limitations of the browser and the JavaScript engine that comes with your device. On Android 2.3, this isn’t too bad. Earlier versions of Android don’t support certain features, and many of them use older JavaScript interpreters, which can impact an application. Also, there are certain things that are better implemented in native code, like cryptography or 3-D graphics. Most apps don’t use features like this — they simply display information, which the web does well.

What challenges did you face when creating the Android PhoneGap implementation?

Joe Bowser: The Android PhoneGap implementation was our first implementation after the iPhone, so there were questions about whether this was possible at all. At that time, the Android 1.0 SDK was just being released, and the only devices that ran Android were the HTC Dream and T-Mobile G1. This has obviously changed, but the most challenging thing is still testing on all the real devices that are out there. Every device has its own implementation of the Android OS and its own implementation of the WebKit rendering engine.

What’s the best way for PhoneGap developers to handle device-specific needs?

Joe Bowser: It depends on the feature set. Most applications don’t need many device-specific features beyond the user interface, but there are numerous plugins that can help with this approach. The best approach is to decide what features you need and to use only those features. There are many applications that have permissions turned on that they don’t need. For example, a simple ebook doesn’t need access to your phone state, GPS or contacts.

What is a hybrid app?

Joe Bowser: A hybrid application is one that has features of both a web application and a native application. Certain features, such as Image Capture, NFC or Android OpenAccessory, may be implemented natively since there is currently no way to do this in JavaScript. But the application logic and the UI are implemented using web technologies to allow for a consistent and unique user experience across devices.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Related:

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript: The other way to develop mobile apps
• Why fragmentation is a good sign for Android
• How to start programming in Android
• The implications of a money-making Android app

The company’s platform for connected, wearable devices is based on the tiny WIMM module, a wristwatch-sized Android-powered computer that has a capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, an accelerometer, magnetometer, audible and tactile alerts, and a 14-pin accessory connector.

An early-stage Silicon Valley-based company, WIMM is trying to lead the “micro experience” movement of wearable hardware. The company hopes to license its platform to brands in a variety of industries, including mobile, sports, finance and consumer electronics.

I recently spoke with Ted Ladd, director of developer relations and platform evangelist for WIMM Labs, about the convergence of wearable tech and micro experiences. Ladd will lead a session on “Wearing Android: Developing Apps For Micro Devices” at the upcoming Android Open Conference.

Our interview follows.

What shifts are driving society toward wearable computing?

Ted Ladd: We are now connected to the cloud and to each other all the time. Wearable technology makes that connection more convenient and powerful. You can read a recent SMS or pay for your coffee with a flick of the wrist. Or you can track your workout — reps, calories, heart rate — without trying to strap a smartphone to your chest. These technologies are available today.

The value isn’t just from wearable technology; it’s also from the proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled sensors — from heart rate to proximity — and web services that can collect and interpret that data. Wearable technology provides the local hub for these sensors, allows the user to see and interact with the data directly via local applications, and then sends the data to the cloud (with the user’s permission).

What are “micro experiences”?

Ted Ladd: Micro experiences are subtle glances of immediately relevant information. It’s things like looking at your watch to tell the time, looking at the thermometer to see the temperature, or glancing at the speedometer to tell the speed. We have extended this metaphor to wearable computing to help developers design Micro Apps that deliver these glances. Since our platform is built on Android, the challenge when building a WIMM Micro App is not technical. Instead, the challenge is to rethink the features and UX of the app.

Are there downsides to the information immediacy that wearable computers provide?

Ted Ladd: Just like with a smartphone, perpetual connection to the office, to friends, to sensors, and to the cloud has its drawbacks. We are deluged with information. What we want to do is funnel only the most important information into personal snippets that fit subtly into our lives.

What do you see as the first killer app for the WIMM platform?

Ted Ladd: We are a platform company, so our business model is to help existing companies easily design and launch wearable products — using our module at their core. For a fitness company, the killer app is exercise tracking in real time. For the military, it is body sensing, location tracking, and communication. For a theme park, it may be real-time updates on the wait times for popular rides. For a consumer company aiming at business professionals, it might be a context-specific task list. As a platform provider, we try to enable our licensees to create the killer app for their industries.

Now, speaking only for myself, I love the calendar and the Starbucks Micro Apps. They are more convenient and subtle than the apps on my smartphone.

What were the biggest challenges you faced in developing the WIMM platform?

Ted Ladd: Our device is always on, displaying the time and other possible data on a reflective screen. In this “passive” mode, the device is running on a small microcontroller, which sips power. When I touch the screen, the device launches its full-color capacitive touchscreen and ARM 11 applications processor.

Designing this dual-processor architecture was not trivial. Happily, the user doesn’t see the complex hardware and software processes that make this work. The user only sees the time, and then with a touch, a full computer.

What are some of the obstacles to the adoption of wearable computing?

Ted Ladd: A common thought in the press is that wearable technology will not evolve because the smartphone has already captured the mass market. As evidence, the press cites the perceived trend away from wrist watches, especially among the younger, more digitally connected generation. I disagree. Once people see the current and rapidly evolving functionality of wearables, they will see the value for this class of products as a complement to their smartphones. And as major consumer brands add fashion and extra functionality via hardware and software, the value will become immediately apparent.

What kinds of developer tools do you provide?

Ted Ladd: We are launching our Software Developer Kit soon, which is an add-on to the Android Developer Tools, along with an emulator, sample code, design guidelines, videos, and forum. We also have a Hardware Developer Kit for people who want to design accessories that attach to a WIMM module.

We will also start shipping the WIMM One Developer Preview, which includes the WIMM module, a wrist strap, paddle charger, and cable. This product aims to help developers understand the platform’s capabilities.

Ladd shows off a WIMM module in the following video (demo begins at the 1:18 mark)

This interview was edited and condensed.

Related:

• Three Android predictions: In your home, in your clothes, in your car
• The next, next big thing
• Arduino is a building block for the world to come.
• The return of the Personal Area Network
• Healthier living through mobile location data

Brian Jepson (@bjepson) is an O’Reilly editor and hardware hacker who’s recently been focusing on making things with technologies like Arduino and Android. Jepson and Tyler Moskowite (@tmoskowite), a programmer and engineering intern at Make Magazine, will be presenting a workshop on “Getting Physical with Android: Open Accessories & NFC” at the upcoming Android Open Conference. I recently spoke to Jepson and Moskowite about the convergence of Android and hardware hacking, and what it might mean for the Android ecosystem.

Our interview follows.

What does Android’s openness allow developers to do?

Brian Jepson: I think the biggest thing is that it allows developers to experiment. On iOS, you have to spend money to even deploy apps to a phone that you own. And unless you put an app in the App Store or sign up for the Enterprise or Academic programs, you can only distribute apps to 100 devices total. It’s cumbersome. I love that you can “sideload” apps on Android: make an app, distribute it outside the Android Market, and people can use it.

Tyler Moskowite: Allowing developers to reproduce their own versions of the Android operating system has resulted in many custom versions of Android. The most notable one is Cyanogen Mod, which provides the base for lots of custom Android systems.

What kinds of things are makers building with NFC, the Accessory Development Kit, and Arduino?

Brian Jepson: I haven’t seen much being done with NFC, though I did a wacky demo with it that involved Processing, Arduino, and Twitter. But there have been lots of cool things done with the ADK. I’ve seen everything from tablet-controlled dancing robots to a cell-phone-controlled ball maze inspired by the life-size labyrinth at Google I/O.

There have been interesting projects going on with Arduino since before the ADK. In fact, I built a variation on Tero and Kimmo Karvinen’s Soccer Playing Robot (from Make: Arduino Bots and Gadgets) and brought it to Google I/O. This combined Android and Arduino, but they communicated over Bluetooth instead of a cable, the way the ADK currently works. Tero and Kimmo’s robot is one of my favorite Android/Arduino projects. Amarino is also very cool, though it’s more of a platform for connecting Arduino and Android.

How big a problem is fragmentation in the Android ecosystem?

Brian Jepson: It’s more noticeable to me because I work with things like NFC and ADK that require a very recent version of Android. I don’t know how big a deal it is for lots of other folks. I can look at the fragmentation dashboard, and yeah, it’s not pretty. At least Android 2.x is dominating. But it’s a problem and a headache for developers. I figure Google can mitigate the problem, but I don’t see them ever making it go away.

Tell us a little about the Mini Maker Faire event at Android Open. What kind of makers are you looking for?

Brian Jepson: We are looking for anyone who has made something cool using Android and related technologies. We’d love to have a broad spectrum of crafts, electronics, robots, and so forth.

Related:

• Hands-On with the Android Open Accessory Development Kit
• Parallel programming, Arduino and the good kind of trouble
• Arduino is a building block for the world to come
• Why Google Choosing Arduino Matters
• Why fragmentation is a good sign for sign for Android

I recently spoke with Frank Maker, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, who is doing systems research with Android on low-power adaptation techniques. Our interview follows.

What are the main power consumption issues Android developers should be aware of?

Frank Maker: The number one thing developers should do with their app is allow it to sleep. On a desktop computer, you just launch the app. It runs. You close it. You open it. But on an Android device, you actually go through states where it has focus, it doesn’t have focus, things like that. A developer needs to handle those states appropriately instead of trying to make an app work like it would on a desktop. So, if the activity loses focus and the user is going on to another application, then your app should respond to that if it has anything that’s going to use serious power. You can bundle up the state and put the app to sleep rather than letting your app’s tasks run in the background.

What are the risks associated with poor power optimization?

Frank Maker: The biggest risk is that you’ll get eaten alive in the Android Market. There are many applications in the Market that are marked one star because of bad battery performance. Even worse, if your app has a reputation for poor power use, you’re going to completely lose your market share to competitors with better reputations.

On the user side, are there tools for monitoring and managing power consumption?

Frank Maker: There’s a battery usage screen on Android. If you go to “Settings,” “Application Settings,” and then “Battery Use,” there’s a nice little display that shows you the ranking of the different applications. I’ve looked into it as part of our research, and while it’s simple and not super accurate, it will definitely tell you if one app is using way too much power.

Battery life basically isn’t a problem until you make it a problem. By that I mean it’s not something users think about initially, but if their battery starts going down really fast and they just installed your app, they’re generally going to put two and two together. They’ll then go to the Market and see if other people have posted about their experiences with that app.

Tell us a little bit about the research you’re doing at UC Davis. What exactly are you working on?

Frank Maker: I sit on the border between hardware and software. We’re trying to solve the problem of taking one piece of software and putting it on lots of different platforms without changing the software each time. Right now there’s a lot of refactoring that goes on when you deploy an application to a new mobile platform. We are trying to create automatic methods instead. One of the things we’ve looked at is building a model for the power usage in real-time on the device. So the idea is that when you launch the software on the device, you figure out how much energy it takes to do tasks on the device, rather than trying to know it beforehand.

Related to porting across platforms, do you think Android’s fragmentation issues will improve over time?

Frank Maker: I’m pretty confident that the Android platform will solve the fragmentation problem. Google is addressing it. For example, on the Android developer blog, Dianne Hackborn recently wrote about new tools that help you adapt to different screen sizes. There’s also the battery usage meter, which I mentioned earlier, and Android has always provided a directory structure for your resources to adapt to different configurations. You can automatically select the right resource for the right device and pinpoint exactly what you want to do for each device.

Broadly, I feel like Android is in a transition period. It’s evolving from a young, scrappy platform into something more established, and now it has to really solve these issues as it moves into adolescence.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Related:

• Three Android predictions: In your home, in your clothes, in your car
• How to start programming in Android
• Ten Tips for Android Application Development
• Android Programming: Understanding the Activity Life Cycle
• Why fragmentation is a good sign for Android

I recently spoke with Sean Byrnes (@FlurryMobile), the CTO and co-founder of Flurry, about the state of mobile analytics, the strengths and weaknesses of Android, and how big a problem fragmentation is for the Android ecosystem. Byrnes will lead a session on “Android App Engagement by the Numbers” at the upcoming Android Open Conference.

Our interview follows.

What challenges do mobile platforms present for analytics?

Sean Byrnes: Mobile application analytics are interesting because the concepts are the same as traditional web analytics but the implementation is very different. For example, with web analytics you can always assume that a network connection is available since the user could not have loaded the web page otherwise. A large amount of mobile application usage happens when no network is available because either the cellular network is unreliable or there is no Wi-Fi nearby. As a result, analytics data has to be stored locally on the device and reported whenever a network is available, which can be weeks after the actual application session. This is complicated by the fact that about 10% of phones have bad clocks and report dates that in some cases are decades in the future.

Another challenge is that applications are downloaded onto the phone as opposed to a website where the content is all dynamic. This means that you have to think through all of the analytics you want to track for your application before you release it, because you can’t change the tracking points once it’s downloaded.

What metrics are developers most interested in?

Sean Byrnes: Developers are typically focused on metrics that either make or save them the most money. Typically these revolve around retention, engagement and commerce.

One of the interesting things about the mobile application market is how the questions developers ask are changing because the market is maturing so quickly. Until recently the primary metrics used to measure applications were the number of daily active users and the total time spent in the app. These metrics help you understand the size of your audience and they’re important when you’re focusing on user acquisition. Now, the biggest questions being asked are centering on user retention and the lifetime value of a user. This is a natural shift in focus as applications begin to focus on profitability and developers need to understand how much money they make from users as compared to their acquisition cost. For example, if my application has 100,000 daily active users but an active user only uses the application once, then I have a high level of engagement that is very expensive to maintain.

Social game developers are among the most advanced, scientific and detailed measurement companies. Zynga, for example, measures every consumer action in impressive detail, all for the purpose of maximizing engagement and monetization. They consider themselves a data company as much as a game maker.

What do you see as Android’s biggest strengths and weaknesses?

Sean Byrnes: Android’s biggest strength is adoption and support by so many phone manufacturers, and the fact that it’s relatively open, which means development iterations can happen faster and you have the freedom to experiment. The installed base is now growing faster than iOS, although the iOS installed base is still larger, as of now.

Android’s biggest weakness is that it offers less business opportunity to developers. Fewer Android consumers have credit cards associated with their accounts, and they expect to get more free apps. The most common business model on Android is still built on ad revenue. Also, because the Android Market is not curated, you can end up with a lower-average-quality app, which further reduces consumer confidence. At the end of the day, developers want a business, not an OS. And they need a marketplace that brings in consumers who are willing and able to pay. This is Android’s biggest challenge at the moment.

Is Android fragmentation a problem for developers?

Sean Byrnes: Fragmentation is definitely a problem for Android developers. It’s not just the sheer number of new Android devices entering the market, but also the speed at which new versions of the Android OS are being released. As a developer you have to worry about handling both a variety of hardware capabilities and a variety of Android OS capabilities for every application version you release. It’s difficult to be truly innovative and take advantage of advanced features since the path of least resistance is to build to the lowest common denominator.

It will likely get worse before it gets better with the current roadmap for Android OS updates and the number of devices coming to market. However, fragmentation will become less of a concern as developers can make more money on Android and the cost of supporting a device becomes insignificant compared to the revenue it can generate.

Related:

• Why fragmentation is a good sign for Android
• How to start programming in Android
• The implications of a money-making Android app

From a technical perspective, it seems a little suspect. After all, Microsoft has already developed much of the same functionality that Skype provides. Windows Live Messenger offers free instant messaging and voice and video chat, it already works with Lync and Office, and Microsoft had previously announced plans to integrate Messenger into Windows Phone.

From a financial perspective it doesn’t look much better. Even though Skype is a massive (and disruptive) presence in Internet communications, it has never been very profitable. Last year Skype had $860 million in revenue, and a net loss of $7 million, according to its initial public offering filing. Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels told MSNBC:

It doesn’t make sense at all as a financial investment. There’s no way Microsoft is going to generate enough revenue and profit from Skype to compensate.

So why would Microsoft pay so much for a company that doesn’t have vastly superior technology or great financials? As far as I can tell, there’s five reasons:

1. Skype’s user base

Skype has a strong and loyal base of more than 170 million active users across multiple platforms. Microsoft will get instant access to Skype’s network, which represents a huge influx of customers and a big leap in Microsoft’s presence as a consumer Internet company.

2. Skype and the enterprise

Of course, it’s not all about consumers. Skype has been aggressively pursuing the enterprise market in recent years and has made some solid progress there. Microsoft likely sees this purchase as a win for both its consumer and business product lines, and we can expect to see Skype integration coming soon in all manner of Microsoft products and platforms. Already promised is Skype support for Xbox (and Xbox Live), Kinect, Office, Lync, Outlook, Hotmail, and Windows Phone.

3. Windows Phone integration

Along those lines, perhaps the most obvious outcome will be Skype’s integration into future versions of Windows Phone. This will allow Microsoft to compete squarely with Apple’s Facetime and Google Voice. Expect to see Skype on a Nokia Windows Phone in the near future.

4. International long distance

Interestingly, one of Skype’s biggest strengths was barely mentioned in the press conference announcing the deal: the massive amount of minutes Skype users represent on the public telephone network. Skype’s been in an all-out war with the entrenched telecom carriers since its inception — the carriers despise Skype and rightly see it as a major threat to their business model. According to Alec Saunders, a telecom vet and ex-Microsoft employee, with this purchase Microsoft instantly becomes the world’s largest carrier of international long distance minutes. How Microsoft will take advantage of this, and what impact it will have on their existing carrier relationships, is one of the open questions around this deal.

5. Blocking the competition

Let’s not forget another angle that surely motivated Microsoft to pursue Skype — keeping it away from the competition. It’s been common knowledge that Skype’s investors have been looking for a buyer for some time. Skype was on a rocky road to an IPO, and it sounds like the investors who bought Skype from eBay were concerned about the viability of that process and eager to get their returns sooner rather than later. When Google came to the table, you can bet the deal-makers in Redmond started some serious number crunching.

Reports are surfacing that Microsoft may have paid much more than they needed to get Skype. Anonymous sources close to the negotiations have said that Google came in second place in the bidding at just $4 billion. That’s a huge difference and it certainly suggests that Microsoft could have gotten Skype for much less. But some believe Google was never a serious suitor in the first place, and their interest may have been mostly about trying to keep Facebook from getting Skype.

As Microsoft is feeling pressure from the likes of Google and Apple, especially in the mobile space, the idea of a competitor getting their hands on Skype (and their network) was surely something Microsoft wanted to avoid. Microsoft is already seen as playing catch-up in the mobile space, and if Google got Skype that would put them even further behind.

Related:

• How Facebook benefits from the Skype deal
• The State of the Internet Operating System
• State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars

Tethering can have a significant impact on mobile networks since tethered computers tend to use up a lot more bandwidth than mobile phones. This was likely one of the reasons AT&T was so slow to allow the tethering functionality of the iPhone on their network (it appeared more than a year after Apple announced the iPhone’s tethering capabilities.) And when AT&T finally did open up their network for tethering, users had to pay $20 extra per month for the feature.

Now we’re seeing AT&T sending warning notices to users it suspects of using unauthorized tethering apps and Google allowing mobile carriers to block these kinds of apps from appearing in the Android store. While many have complained about these actions, it’s not surprising that the carriers would try to limit tethering to sanctioned apps and users who have opted to pay more for tethering functionality. Allowing jailbroken iPhones to tether or Android apps like PdaNet, Easy Tether, and InternetSharer that facilitate tethering without the carrier’s approval is seen by the carriers as taking money out of their pockets. (Google appears to be allowing carriers to filter the Android store to block these apps for their users, but the apps are still available and installable).

The cat-and-mouse game between carriers and unauthorized tethering is still going strong, however. For example, here’s a recent tweet from the folks behind PdaNet:

.bbpBox64346260651524097 {background:url(http://a3.twimg.com/a/1303834694/images/themes/theme1/bg.png) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

This really all boils down to the fact that “unlimited” has a unique meaning in terms of mobile data plans. Cellular carriers have long been criticized for liberally using that word in situations where the service isn’t truly unlimited, and their desire to make users pay more for tethering is another example of how that unlimited data plan you thought you had, really isn’t unlimited. Many have faulted AT&T for their network issues and how long it took them to officially allow tethering, but at least they’ve clarified their data plans and language — you won’t find the word “unlimited” in their rate plan descriptions anymore.

Where does this lead? Even though customers have made it clear they feel tethering charges are unfair, the carriers have made it equally clear they plan on monetizing this feature as much as possible. With both AT&T and Verizon clamping down on unauthorized tethering, the climate for people who want to tether for free will continue to get more restrictive. But it’s important to note that unlike the situation with AT&T and iOS devices, where you must jailbreak the device to get around the carrier’s tethering restrictions, on the more open Android platform there will likely always be free tethering options for those who are willing to go outside of the official store for apps and don’t mind breaking their carriers’ terms of service.

Photo: iPhone -> eee pc tether. by paul_irish, on Flickr

Related:

• How to tether an Android phone to an Apple computer
• How to tether your wifi-only iPad to your Android phone
• Tim O’Reilly on what lies ahead in net neutrality
• 4G is a moving target

What are the most challenging aspects of location development?

Darian Shirazi: There are three really big challenges. The first is probably the least difficult of the three, and that’s getting accurate real-time information around locations. Crawling the web in real-time is difficult, especially if you’re analyzing millions of pieces of data. It’s even difficult for a company like Google just because there’s so much data out there. And in local, it’s even more important for crawling to be done in real-time, because you need to know what’s happening near you right now. That requires a distributed crawling system, and that’s tough to build.

The second problem, the most difficult we’ve had to solve, is entity extraction. That’s the process of taking a news article and figuring out what locations it mentions or what locations it’s about. If you see an article that mentions five of the best restaurants in the Mission District, being able to analyze that content and note, for example, that “Hog ‘N Rocks” is a restaurant on 19th and Mission, is really tough. That requires us to linguistically understand an entity and what is a pronoun and what isn’t a pronoun. Then you get into all of these edge conditions where a restaurant like Hog ‘N Rocks might be called “Hogs & Rocks” or “Hogs and Rocks” or “H ‘N Rocks.” You want to catch those entities to be able to say, “This article is about these restaurants and these lat/longs.”

The third problem we’ve had to tackle is building a places taxonomy that you can match against. If you use SimpleGeo’s API or Google Places’ API, you’re not going to get the detailed taxonomy required to match the identified entities. You won’t be able to get the different spellings of certain restaurants, and you won’t necessarily know that, colloquially, “Dom and Vinnie’s Pizza Shop” is just called “Dom’s.” Being able to identify those against the taxonomy is quite difficult and requires structuring the data in a certain way, so that matching against aliases is done quickly.

Identifying and extracting entities, like restaurants, is a challenge for location developers.

How are you dealing with those challenges?

Darian Shirazi: We have a bunch of different taggers that we put into the system that we’ve worked through over time to determine which are good at identifying certain entities. Some taggers are very good at tagging cities, some are better at tagging businesses, and some are really good at identifying the difference between a person, place, or thing. So we have these quorum taggers that are being applied to the data to determine the validity of the tag or whether a tag gets detected.

The way that you test it is that you have a system that allows you to input hints, and you test the hint. The hints get put into a queue of other hints that we’re testing. We run a regression test and then we see if that hint improved the tagging ability or made it worse. At this point, the process is really about moving the accuracy needle a quarter of a percent per week. That’s just how this game goes. If you talk to the people at Google or Bing, they’ll all say the same thing.

At Where 2.0 you’ll be talking about an “open places database.” What is that?

Darian Shirazi: A truly open database is a huge initiative, and something that we’re working toward. I can’t really give details as to exactly what it’s going to be, but we’re working with a few partners to come up with an open places database that is actually complete.

We think that an open places database is a lot more than just a list of places — it’s a list of places and content, it’s a list of places and the reviews associated with those businesses, it’s the list of parks and the people that have checked in at those parks, etc. Additionally, an open places database, in our minds, is something that you can contribute to. We want users and developers and everyone to come back to us and say, “Dom and Vinnie’s is really just called Dom’s.” We also want to be able to give information to people in any format. One of the things that we’ll be allowing is if you contact us, we’ll give you a data dump of our places database. We’ll give you a full licensed copy of it, if you want it.

Where 2.0: 2011, being held April 19-21 in Santa Clara, Calif., will explore the intersection of location technologies and trends in software development, business strategies, and marketing.

Save 25% on registration with the code WHR11RAD

How do you see location technology evolving?

Darian Shirazi: Looking toward the future, I think augmented reality is going to be a big deal. I don’t mean augmented reality in the sense of a game or in the sense of Yelp’s Monocle, which is a small additive to their app to show reviews in the camera view. I think of augmented reality as you are at a location and you want to see the metadata about that location. I believe that when you have a phone or a location-enabled device, you should be able to get a sense for what’s going on right there and a sense for the context. That’s the key.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Related:

• Why location data is a mess, and what can be done about it
• Joe Stump on data, APIs, and why location is up for grabs
• Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places

In February 2010, Nokia announced with great fanfare the open sourcing of the Symbian OS. At the time it was the most widely used smartphone OS around the world. A foundation was established that included support from heavyweights like AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

Not even a year later, Nokia reclaimed control of the system and put the future of the open source project in doubt. Concerns
were validated two weeks later when Nokia announced it would be pulling the source code offline and effectively ending the open source Symbian project.

Nokia recently surprised observers by putting the source code back online and boldly announcing its reappearance in a blog post titled “We are Open!”. Nokia stated intentions to deliver “continuous evolution of the platform to partners and customers — including consumers.” Acknowledging the diminishing role of Symbian in light of the new Microsoft deal, Nokia also said they still needed “the collaboration with our platform development partners” and that they “continue to value an open way of working.”

Where 2.0: 2011, being held April 19-21 in Santa Clara, Calif., will explore the intersection of location technologies and trends in software development, business strategies, and marketing.

Save 25% on registration with the code WHR11RAD

But when Groklaw and others looked at the fine print, it was clear this version of Symbian could not in fact be considered open source. These revelations forced Nokia to clarify their version of “open” in a blog post titled “Not Open Source, Just Open for Business“:

… Nokia is making the Symbian platform available under an alternative, open and direct model, to enable us to continue working with the remaining Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators we are already working with … we are releasing source code to these collaborators, but are not maintaining Symbian as an open source development project.

While it’s understandable that Nokia is looking to minimize resources dedicated to Symbian, it’s a shame they can’t keep the open source project alive. Symbian would likely still die a slow and natural death, but at least the option for future developments, enhancements, or bug fixes would exist for those still interested in the Symbian platform.

Update 4/12/11: Nokia held a Symbian event today. Sascha Segan at PCMag sums it up:

There is absolutely nothing about today’s announcements that would change anyone’s existing opinion of Nokia and Symbian products. If you love them, Nokia isn’t totally abandoning them. If they weren’t compelling before, they won’t be compelling now. Nokia is just trying to keep its entire existing user base from bleeding away while the company switches to Windows Phone, and that’s a real tightrope walk.

I recently spoke with Tactical Information Systems CTO Alex Kilpatrick and Mary Haskett, co-founder and president, about the state of biometrics and what we need to be concerned about as surveillance becomes more prevalent in our society. They’ll expand on many of these ideas during a session at the upcoming Where 2.0 Conference.

Our interview follows.

What is biometric matching and how might it be used in future consumer applications?

Alex Kilpatrick: Biometrics is the science that studies things that make an individual unique. Interestingly enough, there are lots of things that make an individual unique, especially when examined closely enough. The most common is fingerprints, but the pattern of ridges on your palms and feet are just as unique. Your iris, the colored part of your eye, is extremely easy to read and unique, even among twins. The shape of your ear, the way you walk, the size of your hands, your smell, the way you talk, and of course your face are all unique.

Biometric matching comes in two forms: verification and identification. Verification is when I come to a sensor and say “I am Alex Kilpatrick” and the sensor verifies that one of my biometrics, perhaps my face, matches the biometric on record. This type of matching is relatively easy. Identification is when I present a biometric to a system and ask it “Who is this?” That is a much harder problem, especially when there are hundreds of millions of records. The FBI deals with this problem every day, taking unknown fingerprints from crime scenes and looking for a match in their database containing millions of records.

Like most technologies, biometrics can be used for good or evil. In consumer applications, it can be used to help prevent identify theft by providing strong authentication for financial transactions. It can be used for convenience — to allow you to login to a computer, or gain entry to your health club without having to remember a password or carry an ID. Disney World uses biometrics to prevent season pass holders from sharing their passes with other people. It can be used to identify people who can’t identify themselves, such as Alzheimer’s patients, autistic children, very young children, people in accidents, etc.

Mary Haskett: I think the entire industry is holding its breath and waiting to see what’s going to happen in the consumer space.

The potential is enormous and current methods, like a card or code that you have to show or recite, are actually quite crude. But everyone is wondering if the consumer will accept it. Are they willing to use their fingerprints, face image, or iris image in these ways?

Where 2.0: 2011, being held April 19-21 in Santa Clara, Calif., will explore the intersection of location technologies and trends in software development, business strategies, and marketing.

Save 25% on registration with the code WHR11RAD

How are biometrics being used in surveillance technologies?

Alex Kilpatrick: In terms of “surveillance society” activities, there are only two players: face and iris. There are technologies such as gait — the way you walk — that may theoretically be used to monitor people, but these are not discriminating enough to uniquely identify individuals. For a biometric technology to be effective for covert surveillance, it has to be able to detect you from a distance without your knowledge. Currently, face matching is the only biometric technology that supports covert surveillance, meaning that you can be tracked without your consent. However, it is not robust in situations involving poor lighting, poor cameras, or poor angles. Face matching is very effective for “passport”-style controlled poses, but its accuracy drops off rapidly with shadows, or with the traditional angles used by current surveillance cameras.

Outside of face, there are iris cameras available now that can detect an individual at distances up to 2-4 feet, but these require the cooperation of the individual — they have to look at the sensor.

The bottom line, though, is that there are not any broadly effective biometric means of covert surveillance available right now. That will change in the near future, though.

The most “promising” technology for covert surveillance is 3D face matching. This uses a three-dimensional model of an individual’s face, so it is much more robust when matching partial faces, or faces at low angles from surveillance cameras. These systems are not currently effective for large populations, but research is progressing rapidly in this area. I would guess that this technology will be mainstream in the next 5-10 years.

Iris technology may also advance to become effective without user participation as well. Your iris is effectively a barcode to a computer, and it provides a much better system for matching than a face. For iris to be effective for covert surveillance, better cameras with highly adaptive focusing systems will need to be developed.

That said, the advancement of biometric technology may ultimately be a moot point because many people carry around a GPS tracker with them all the time in the form of a smartphone. These devices can track your location down to 10 meters if they use GPS, and 300 meters if they use triangulation. That may not be accurate enough to place you at a particular location, but it is enough to build a pretty accurate profile of your activities. The devices can be activated (including GPS) without your consent, if required by law enforcement or other authorities.

What are some of the pros and cons of location-based surveillance tech?

Mary Haskett: If you consider apps like Foursquare and Gowalla to be location-based surveillance technologies, and I do, then you’ve already experienced some of the benefits. I’ve run into people who were at the same cafe where I was eating and I was very happy to get a chance to connect with them. I’ve tried restaurants based on seeing people I know check-in and comment on their experiences. But I will also sometimes choose not to check-in at a restaurant because I don’t want to hear my kids complaining “You had sushi for lunch? Why don’t you ever take me when you get sushi?”

Alex Kilpatrick: Like so many technologies, the advantages are a double-edged sword. When I travel, I can meet up with people in the cities I am visiting, but I also have a social obligation to meet up with those people, even when I may not feel like being social. I can track my kids on their way home from school, but they can never have the covert thrill of going somewhere they probably shouldn’t go. A restaurant can offer me a free dessert for checking in, but I can also be targeted by a deluge of ads based on where I’m walking.

The biggest disadvantage of these technologies is the continual erosion of the expectation of privacy. As people share more, there is less of a societal need to keep things private. This results in people sharing more than they should, as well as a troubling lack of concern about what companies are doing with their data.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, wrote a great blog post about living in “noprivacyville.” In this thought experiment, he took privacy to an extreme — would you be willing to have every aspect of your life tracked in exchange for 30% lower cost of living? Insurance companies are already offering discounts if you are willing to have them install a GPS tracker in your car, and accept continual surveillance. Those companies can save a lot of money if they can see how you really drive, and adjust your costs accordingly. Many people would welcome 30% savings, and they will probably feel like they aren’t changing their behavior at all. But it’s a slippery slope. Once you accept surveillance in one aspect of your life, it’s easy to let it slip into another. Before you know it you’re paying a 30% premium to have a browser that doesn’t track all of your web activity.

The biggest danger to society is not the technologies themselves. Technology can be controlled. The biggest danger is that over time our society will just accept surveillance as part of the cultural landscape.

How can people protect themselves from unwanted surveillance?

Alex Kilpatrick: There are “dazzle” techniques that can be used to degrade face matching — contacts can block iris matching, a rock in your shoe will fool gait sensors, etc. However, all of these approaches are stop-gap measures. They don’t address the fundamental root of the problem: Ultimately, as a society we have to decide that we will accept some risk in exchange for living in a truly free society.

The biggest barrier to unwanted surveillance is knowledge and vigilance. Knowledge about where it is occurring, knowledge about what is being done with the information, knowledge about who is behind the surveillance and what their motivations are. Learn to ask “Why do you need this?” and “What if I leave this blank?”

Vigilance is about protecting your privacy; don’t share personal information unless there is some real value to sharing it, and only share information with the people who absolutely need the information in order to do their job, or with people you trust. Once you share the information, it’s out of your hands. Trusting a company to protect it is not a viable long-term strategy. The only long-term strategy is building a society where people value privacy and are willing to fight for it.

Associated photo (on home and category pages): Points by Vince Alongi, on Flickr

Related:

• Open question: How much location information are you willing to share?
• The truth about data: Once it’s out there, it’s hard to control
• Privacy law needs a reboot