There are already two apps that implement this functionality on the App Store: PullList and Pocket Comic. (I discuss these apps in more detail on my original Fresh Comics blog post.) When I decided to put together Fresh Comics, one of the deficiencies that I wanted to address in the existing apps was the ability to use the app when limited network connectivity is available. Since I usually look up what’s new when I’m in transit on the subway, this seemed like a reasonable feature to add.

Since Apple’s App Store approval process is not sufficiently predictable and responsive that I can bundle the comic data with the app and release updates each Monday, the app needs to download the latest data from an online server and use that copy. This data consists of two main items: an RDF metadata file that encodes the creators, title, and other information about the week’s comic books and the associated cover files. Depending upon the quantity and quality of the cover images, a weekly download may be as much as fifteen megabytes in size.

In my ideal implementation, when the user launches the app, all of the covers and metadata will be there from the beginning, and there will never be any indication that the app is missing data. To the user, the app should always appear to have a full set of the week’s latest data and covers. Using ASIHTTPFRequest, I have achieved this once all of the data has been downloaded the first time. The problem is that initial weekly download.

From a responsiveness point of view, the app has no problems downloading the comic metadata file. It’s a simple XML file that compresses well and loads almost immediately on download. The problem is the cover images. Since the app includes a full-screen cover viewer, I would like to have images that are the same size as the iPhone’s native resolutions: 320×480 or 640×960. Individual JPEG images of these sizes can be more than a hundred kilobytes in size, and a typical week may have as many as one hundred fifty new comics with covers. The total download size for this week’s collection weighed in at twelve megabytes.

In the age of WiFi and 3G, twelve megabytes isn’t an excessive size, so I have no qualms allowing the user to download the data using their broadband or cellular connection. However, the download process can some time (depending on the connection), which is where the challenge lies.

In the current builds of Fresh Comics, on a fresh download, I’ve implemented a progressive display scheme that does the following:

1. It fetches the week’s textual metadata and displays that information as soon as possible in the app. Until the cover images are available locally, the covers are shown using a placeholder image.
2. The app keeps a queue of pending cover downloads. For the rows that are visible, the app downloads those thumbnails in the background first. As the thumbnails download, the display updates to reflect the new data.
3. After the thumbnails are downloaded, the app begins downloading the full resolution cover images.

Since the goal of the app is to get the information into users’ hands as soon as possible, Fresh Comics has hierarchy of information priority: textual metadata (titles, creators, etc.), thumbnail images, and finally, full cover images. Using this approach, I’m satisfied with the results I’ve achieved on devices ranging from the earliest iPhones to the latest iPod Touches. The solution works as well as the platform permits and it degrades gracefully as connectivity becomes limited. While I’m proud of my solution, I am quite annoyed that it was necessary in the first place. Since “downloading content for later offline use” is not one of Apple’s seven permitted background tasks, there’s not too much else that I can do to improve the situation.

In contrast, on the Android and Symbian platforms, the solution is simple and straightforward. On Android, I create a system service that wakes up every 24 hours to see of there’s something new and download the updates in the middle of the night. On Symbian, it’s easy to hide the app’s user interface and implement a similar background data check. Implemented properly, neither of these approaches will have any noticeable impact on the device’s performance and battery life.

While I’ve had a mostly positive experience putting together Fresh Comics for the iPhone, Apple’s limitations on background processing results in a suboptimal product for iOS devices when compared to competing platforms. (The Android version will be out soon.) I remain more positive about Android than iOS precisely for reasons such as this. While Android is not as polished (out of the box) in terms of its native controls and look-and-feel, it’s a much more expressive environment than iOS. iOS is a very nice platform for many apps, but once you try to write a proper networked ubiquitous app, it’s limitations become apparent.

Apple’s iOS decisions place it firmly in the “direct manipulation” camp in the direct manipulation vs. software agent debate. However, as long as processing power and network availability remain limited and unpredictable on mobile devices, there will be a need for applications to implement some autonomous functionality to respond to these limitations in order to provide the best experience possible. That I hit this wall writing a simple new comic releases app is somewhat disconcerting. I wonder how many iOS apps remain stunted because of the lack of proper background processing. There’s a solution to this problem, but Apple’s continual refusal to allow iOS programmers true multitasking makes iOS a more limited platform in terms of what is possible on mobile devices.

The event itself. I really enjoyed the conference and the opportunity to interact with others in the Symbian ecosystem. Being stuck in Chicago the remaining 90% of the year, it was refreshing to get a largely European perspective on the mobile software business. The choice of Beurs van Berlag was the right mixture of serious & relaxed, and the venue supported enough simultaneous events that I was never bored over the two days.

The fate of the Symbian ecosystem. While I was not surprised that Nokia decided to take Symbian development in-house, I was surprised that the announcement was made the day before the main Symbian conference. While I think that this is a good decision for the future of the platform, the decision depressed the overall mood of the event.

Qt. I have mixed feelings about my interactions with the Qt developers that Nokia brought to the conference. On one hand, I was quite happy to get some assistance with some programming problems that I’ve experienced on the platform, but on the other hand, I was dismayed to find that the difficulties I encountered were not some simple programmer oversight, but major issues that still need to be solved before Qt is as seamlessly integrated with the underlying hardware as the competitive offerings.

In my case, the problem that I was trying to solve was how to use alternative fonts in my Qt app. There’s a Qt way of doing this that is publicly known to be broken at this point. I tried a number of alternatives myself, and failed at each before chatting with the Qt engineers. The engineer was able to help me solve my problem, but not in any way that I could have solved myself without access to special tools and undocumented knowledge from this particular engineer. Unfortunately, while we solved the problem on a technical level (Hooray – custom fonts!), there’s no way that I can distribute the fix as it renders the app un-uninstallable and requires a reboot of the phone to begin working properly.

My particular problem may be an isolated incident, but illustrated one disturbing issue – while Nokia talks quite a bit about Qt being their next generation development platform, there are some major dragons lurking between the interface of Qt and the Symbian operating system. Perhaps custom application fonts are more of a niche use case than I thought, but I doubt it.

The N8 & the Nokia approach. I went to the conference with a couple of issues/questions about the N8 and managed solve them with the help of Nokia engineers. Finding and setting a well-hidden system preference solved the issue of the e-mail text being far too large by default. My confusion about the podcasting support was addressed when I found out that podcasting slipped in priority when the company began focusing on the Ovi Store for content. A previously distributed client had not been updated for the new device, and the suggestion from the engineer was that I should write one and sell it on the Ovi Store myself. (A dangerous suggestion if I ever heard one – look at the state of third-party podcatching apps on the Mac post iTunes.)

These interactions illustrated what may be the central lesson that I learned at the SEE2010 conference. Prior to the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, I recall lusting after the phones available in Europe that never made their way to the United States. Pre-iPhone, European phones were more advanced and could do more than the ones I could pick up from my local mobile phone store.

Apple changed the game by changing the rules. Rather than “out-phone” the major mobile phone companies, Apple changed the game by focusing on a mobile computer that happened to make calls. The iPhone was more PDA than telephone, and made the PDA form factor relevant by creating a pure touch interface. Over the past 4 revisions, Apple increased the power and functionality incrementally, but focus has not been on the phone portions of the device (example: iPhone 4 & Antennagate).

In contrast, Nokia has continued to make great phones that also happen to run apps.  It was what made them desirable pre-iPhone, and it was a successful strategy. My experience at SEE2010 really demonstrated how phone-centric Nokia really is. In my experience with the fonts on Qt, the discussion wasn’t about how this was a bug in the underlying platform, but rather how we could work around the specific limitations to accomplish what I wanted. That the underlying OS was somehow above reproach bothered me quite a bit.

This leads me to Nokia’s second challenge: the Qt team must become as important, if not more so, than the Symbian team. A recent TechCrunch Europe post describes some of the history behind the Nokia & Symbian (business) interface, and reinforces (some of) what I experienced at the show. I still think that Nokia has not made the leap to the perspective that the phone is just an app on the device. As long as they continue view the device as a phone first, a computer second, the Nokia devices will never be competitive as mobile computers. Which is quite unfortunate, as their Maemo tablets would have been great contenders 2-3 years ago if they could only make phone calls. (I realize that the N900 fits this bill, but it is not a Symbian device, and doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the full use of the Nokia marketing & development machine.)

I don’t think that the problem is that Symbian is ill suited as an app platform (it began life that way, after all), but that the problem is mainly one of vision from the top. The executives at Nokia need to decide if they are making phones or computing platforms. Solid phone platforms will remain important in the developing markets but a more generally focused platform will become more necessary as the markets mature.

(Recent changes in the company’s top management make me optimistic in this regard.)

Regarding the future. While this post focuses on some of the concerns raised during my attendance of SEE2010, I remain bullish overall on Nokia & Symbian’s prospects. For one thing, it still appears to be the most efficient platform for developing modestly priced devices. (Although Android devices are becoming more price competitive everyday.) There are still a ton of Nokia customers around the world, and it should be relatively straightforward to transition them to Symbian smartphones as their computing demands grow. As mentioned above, I think that the company did the right thing in bringing Symbian development in-house, and I hope that the company does the right thing and tears down the barriers between the Symbian and the Qt teams. Now that Symbian has been absorbed, there’s no reason for any divide to persist. Personally, given the Symbian brand’s poor state, I’d rebrand the platform as Qt Mobile or something similar.

I’ve probably used this analogy before, but Nokia of 2010 reminds me of Apple of 1998. Apple picked up the NextStep technology and turned it into Mac OS X and the iOS platforms (eventually). In Qt, Nokia has a similar kind of technology to NextStep. Apple was wise and let the NextStep guys drive the Mac platform. My hope is that Nokia will let the Qt guys do the same.

In terms of work here at Audacious Software, the Symbian/Qt platform is one that I consider secondary for upcoming projects. Being an American developer, I don’t get too many requests for software on these platforms from clients or customers.  I plan to stay current on the developments and technology, primarily as a vehicle for reaching customers outside of North America when the time is right. I am tempted to compete for the $250,000 prizes Nokia is offering in their app contest, but other than that, I don’t expect to realize any meaningful revenue from this platform until Nokia becomes relevant once more in North America, or Audacious Software grows enough to consider picking up clients and customers in Nokia’s stronger markets.

Disclaimer: I am an investor in Nokia and currently hold Nokia shares.

First, a disclaimer: I am a Nokia stockholder largely on the basis of their global market penetration. I have done Symbian work in the past, and would like to see the platform thrive. I own several Nokia phones, but I also own more Android phones. I use the T-Mobile G2 as my primary communication device these days. Please account for these facts when assessing my arguments below.

That said, on to the commentary:

Regarding the N8. I believe that the device has probably been harshly reviewed, and my impression of the device tends to be more positive than that of the general American tech media. That said, I completely understand why sites like Engadget rate the device a 5 out of 10. In short, Nokia took far too long to release this device, and this delay made it the default indicator of where the Symbian platform was headed. When the device demonstrated that it was a more polished version of what came before, it became easy to write the device off as “too little, too late”.

My impression of the N8. I think that the device is wonderful from a hardware perspective. Nokia’s hardware designers deserve kudos. From the software side, the phone is pretty underwhelming. While the tech press likes to blame Symbian^3 for the software shortcomings, I think that the blame falls more on the Nokia’s app developers. I have two major complaints about the apps included on the phone:

1. There is clearly no one at Nokia enforcing any sort of consistency among the applications. The Ovi store looks and operates one way, the mail client another, and the maps app is something altogether different. Consequently, there’s no clear underlying aesthetic or functional schema that defines a how an app on this platform should look and feel. If there is no underlying consistency between apps, developers shouldn’t be surprised when users complain about complexity and poor usability. Today’s users expect to be able to start using an application based upon their experiences with previous apps. This is one thing that Apple understands completely, and it shows in how easy it is to get started using standard iOS apps. From my perspective as a user, Nokia’s modus operandi seems to require many different developers working in isolation to create their software, and combining this software at the last minute to call it a platform. Life’s too short to treat each app as a new puzzle to be solved before doing anything productive.

2. While Nokia ignores usability between apps, it is also ignoring usability within apps. My particular episode: Last week, I took the N8 with me to lunch to set it up so that I could “live” with it for a week or so to learn the platform. One of the required features on any phone I use is support for podcasting. So, after I set up my mail, I tried to subscribe to a handful of podcasts that I regularly listen to. My first attempt was to try this through the music app. I found a podcasting section, but no obvious way to subscribe to a new one. I went to the Ovi Store and found an impoverished podcasting section, and subscribed to one listed. A single episode downloaded, but I was unable to find it. Finally, I went to the web browser, found the “Web Feeds” functionality, and subscribed to a podcast feed. It supported downloading the audio through enclosures, but the downloaded audio was mixed with the music and did not appear in the expected podcasting section. After this, I gave up trying to set up podcasts, and by extension, I gave up on this phone as a competitor to replace (even temporarily) my main phone.

If I, a mobile developer used to these kinds of things, cannot figure out podcasting, how can anyone else? I’m sure that the functionality is there, but I suspect that only users who have used the last several iterations of this feature on the Symbian platform know how to make it work. Aside from the consistency issues, my major complaint with the apps on the Nokia Symbian platforms is that they are poorly evolved applications from an earlier age. Young apps, like Ovi Maps, are usable and understandable. Older apps, such as the music player and web browser, are opaque and frustrating. Nokia needs to quit tacking features onto existing apps piecemeal and shipping these Franken-apps as “solutions”. There’s a time to iterate the existing codebase, and a time to go back to the drawing board and design with the new realities in hand. The Ovi Maps team did this and has a good app to show for it, while I’m embarrassed for whoever is responsible for the browser and music app. Unfortunately, apps like the browser and music app outnumber younger apps like Maps.

While the consistency and complexity issues are fixable with a software update (one of the reasons I remain positive about the N8), it requires perceptive leadership to tell the engineers to start over and do it better.

Leadership changes at Nokia and the Symbian Foundation. As someone invested in Nokia and the Symbian platform, the recent management turnover has been somewhat unsettling if only for the scope of the changes. However, as a developer and shareholder, I am extremely pleased with the changes. The devil we knew was slowly sinking the ship, so I’m happy taking my chances with the devil I don’t know. From my perspective (and many others), Nokia’s problems (on the high end) are pretty obvious: The leadership didn’t understand modern smartphone software, and were more than willing to pretend that the current marketshare will automatically translate into future marketshare. While I know little about Stephen Elop as an executive, I’m optimistic that his experience in Microsoft’s software business will lead him to address Nokia’s weaknesses on the software front. My only worry is that Elop will spend more energy on the services side of the business (Ovi) than addressing the more fundamental app issues.

At the Symbian Foundation, I am hoping that Lee Williams’ resignation this week is an indicator that Nokia will be absorbing the Foundation and getting rid of the walls between operating system and app development. Open sourcing Symbian was a nice sentiment, but the current separation between the two groups only seems to be reducing Nokia’s ability to release & iterate devices at the same rate that Google’s evolving Android. Nokia needs to become more responsive, and absorbing Symbian and making it an in-house project seems to be one way of doing that. The open source foundation experiment failed when partners abandoned the platform, so there’s no reason to not absorb it, replace the committees with benevolent dictators and make the overall process more efficient. As it stands now, the Symbian Foundation’s evangelizing doesn’t seem to be worth further platform delays.

Bullish on Nokia, Lukewarm on Symbian. As it stands now, I remain optimistic about Nokia’s future. It has a global sales & marketing platform that will be able to sell whatever they produce. While their marketshare has been declining in light of new competition, I believe that once they get their software ship righted, their global financial prospects will improve markedly. The recent leadership changes suggest to me that Nokia has finally admitted that they have a problem, and I think that the company has the resources to solve that problem.

In terms of Symbian, the outlook for me remains much less clear. The OS has been losing hardware partners, leaving Nokia and Fujitsu as the only major manufacturers left. My experience with the N8 has convinced me that the base of the platform is solid – it’s the apps that are rotten. Part of this rottenness is a function of the inefficiencies of developing with Symbian C++, but this is being solved with Qt, which is a stellar development platform on par with anything else on the market. At Audacious Software, I’m not betting on Symbian’s success, but I am betting on Qt’s success.

What I think we need to see is the “Qt Mobile OS” powered by a Symbian kernel. This is the plan for Symbian^4, but whether this happens in time remains to be seen. I think that the continuing survival of the Symbian platform hinges on Stephen Elop. The new Nokia CEO can double-down on the Qt+Symbian wager and accelerate the process or he can decide to jettison the platform altogether and focus on something like MeeGo. If I were in his shoes, I don’t know which I would pick.

The next day: Spooky. Now, I don’t feel completely nuts.

As a software developer trying to support myself in the mobile ecosystem, platform statistics are invaluable when it comes to making informed decisions about where to spend my attention and resources. Unfortunately, in the race to become the top mobile platform, Nokia, Apple, and Google have not been helpful when describing their respective ecosystems.

Apple likes to brag about the total amount paid out to developers, while neglecting to share the actual statistical distribution of those payments. Google highlights the number of devices being activated, but downplays the lack of purchase options internationally. Nokia highlights the total number of downloads from the Ovi Store, but declines to share any meaningful revenue details.

In the short story “Silver Blaze”, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned the following exchange between Sherlock Holmes and a Scotland Yard detective:

Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.

Holmes: That was the curious incident.

From my perch as an independent developer, the statistics that platform vendors withhold reveal more to me than the large numbers in their keynote slides. Aggregate developer profits mean little if the payouts follow a power-law distribution where a small minority receives the vast majority of the sales. A large quantity of compatible devices is irrelevant if users cannot buy apps. Not sharing the most basic financial details suggests to me that the app store is underperforming. I understand the platform vendors’ motivation in withholding these details, but as someone in the process of building a mobile software business, the lack of meaningful statistics makes me wonder if these ecosystems are as lucrative as vendors claim.

While drafting this post, I debated whether I was too pessimistic about the prospects of app store models and wondered if my extrapolations went too far. Seeking independent corroboration, I looked for anyone who approached this question using a rigorous approach and found VisionMobile’s 2010 report on the state of the mobile software economy. Their conclusions supported what I already suspected:

Our survey found the number one issue for mobile developers to be the lack of effective marketing channels to increase application exposure, discovery and therefore customer acquisition… Developers reported persistent challenges with getting traffic, customer visibility or in short ‘being seen’. One developer put it succinctly: ‘It’s like going to a record store with 200,000 CDs. You’ll only look at the top-10.’ (p. 24)

The dubious long-tail economics are reinforced by our findings on developer revenue expectations. Only five percent of the respondents reported very good revenues, above their expectations, while 24 percent said their revenues were poor. (p. 26)

Combined with the lack of financial transparency from the app store operators, these findings suggest that I would be foolish to build a business solely dependent upon these markets. Combined with degraded customer relationships created by generic billing systems (a topic for another post), I am not comfortable building my business by relying on payments from the Nokia, Google, or Apple app stores. Their goal is to maximize aggregate market performance, which does not always align with an independent developer’s own goals. While Apple demonstrated how app stores can become a profit center for the platform vendor, it failed to demonstrate that the market can be a reliable profit center for the independent developer. For every Ravensoft, Tapulous, or Car Locator, how many others struggle to make ends meet?

While I believe that app stores are a dangerous environment for building healthy businesses, I wouldn’t be writing mobile software if I didn’t think there were plenty of opportunities available. In my upcoming presentation at SEE 2010, I will share how my company avoids the pitfalls of the modern app stores to sustainably build compelling systems for our customers. I hope to see you there.

1. As described in an earlier post, I cancelled my iPhone subscription in exchange for the T-Mobile G2. In the past week of using the device, I’ve been exceptionally pleased with it, so from my perspective, we can call the G2 an iPhone killer. I’ve been very happy with the apps on it and have begun leaving my laptop in the office when I head home. The G2 works just fine for keeping up with e-mail and the other tasks that don’t require a lot of work.

2. One of the apps that I lost in the transition was Shion Touch, the iPhone app for the online service I’m building. I am happy to report that I have acutely felt its absence on the Android device, and can’t wait to have mature version running on the G2. While it’s annoying that I can’t tweak with my house or office from my phone anymore, this is a good sign as it demonstrates that the technology noticeably contributed to my daily life in a positive way. I’ve lost count of the number of things I’ve built that I thought were great ideas, but ultimately abandoned as they were not sufficiently compelling to continue using over the long term. It’s nice to have some proof (however minor) that Shion isn’t one of those.

3. Given my upcoming talk at the Symbian conference next month, I picked up a Nokia N8 to see how the platform has progressed since my work with the XpressMusic 5800s. Two thumbs up to the following:

• Hardware design: This is an elegant phone packaged in a robust exterior. It feels nice to hold, but I won’t worry about it in my pocket.
• Capacitive touchscreen: The new finger-friendly touchscreen makes the device much simpler to use overall. The device feels much more responsive when I don’t have to fumble around with a stylus.
• Growing app support: I was especially pleased to see Bloomberg and Angry Birds on the platform. Still notably missing: Audible & Kindle support.
• iSync support: It’s nice to see a modern device that still supports this largely-neglected application. I was able to transfer my contacts & calendars with no problem.
• E-Mail: Nokia fixed a bug in the mail client that finally let this phone connect to my Audacious Software IMAP account.
• Widgets: It’s nice that they are here. I missed those on the XM5800.

I was less than pleased with these things:

• Windows XP support: I have plenty of experience getting Nokia phones to talk to Windows XP, but I was unable to get this device to talk to the Ovi Suite. The error appears to be a driver issue where Windows is unable to start “N8-00 USB Phone Parent”. To be fair, I was installing this on an VMWare virtual machine, but I’ve never had any similar issues in the past. If I can’t get the phone to talk to Windows, how am I going to develop and test apps on it using Qt Creator?
• Inconsistent UI language: Among Nokia’s own apps on this device, there is a large amount of variability in the overall software design and little to no consistency. Some apps use the softkey buttons to exit applications, while others hide the exit in a popup menu. The Ovi Store app looks nothing like anything else on the system. The Maps app looks sharp, but again does its own thing. While some of this may be me nitpicking, I had to explore within the apps to accomplish simple things like exiting an application.
• The Social app would fail with an error about a gateway timeout. (Not the most helpful message.) This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I couldn’t find a suitable replacement in the Ovi Store. (I seem to remember an official Symbian Facebook app.) The app eventually started working, but I don’t understand why Nokia thinks it’s necessary to inject Ovi between me and these social services. I’d rather have apps from the services directly than deal with a unreliable middleman.
• The message view in the mail client looks like it was designed by a junior high intern. The default font is way too large and the icons are quite distorted or out of place visually. (The rest of the mail client is fine.)

Overall, I have a positive impression of the N8. Nothing I’ve highlighted can’t be fixed in a future update, and it’s clear that Nokia has learned something from the competition and is (steadily) improving their devices. Given my limited experience with this phone, I would say that it is a device on par with something like the T-Mobile MyTouch Slide in terms of the user experience.

I hope that Nokia brings the price down to something more competitive with the Slide, as its current $550 USD list price places it more in line with the Samsung Galaxy phones ($499 on T-Mobile), which are superior devices. Nokia needs to price the N8 down around $350 USD if the N8 is to compete with the Android devices. (All prices quoted for unlocked phones.)

Since the phone is compatible with my T-Mobile SIM card, I’ll be spending more time with the device over the next couple of weeks. If I can figure out how to get the phone to talk to Windows XP, I may pull out some of my older QXmpp code and see about putting together an app for SEE2010.

The kind folks at Symbian reached out to me a couple of weeks ago about giving a talk about this architecture, and I agreed to head out to Amsterdam in early November for the Symbian Exchange & Exposition (SEE) 2010 conference to share my experiences creating Mobilyze and talk about how I am applying the lessons from that project to build the Shion Online subscription service. The abstract:

While winning the application store lotteries dominate the mobile business press, there are other ways to make money within the various mobile ecosystems. Chris Karr, founder and chief developer from the ubiquitous computing firm Audacious Software, will discuss his experiences building hybrid mobile/cloud applications on the Symbian/Qt platform for research clients.  He will describe the opportunities and challenges offered by the Symbian platform and how adopting a cloud-aware development approach can empower developers to craft mobile systems that accomplish more than a single app on its own.

Applying the lessons learned working with research clients, Chris will also describe an upcoming online/mobile service that he is currently assembling. He will explain how his service uses cloud technologies to sidestep the financial pitfalls of modern app stores to create a predictable revenue stream that can be carefully cultivated in a healthy and organic manner. He will describe the costs and benefits of adopting a cloud architecture for his system and how the cloud model may not always be a good fit for every commercial application.

I’m looking forward to putting together this presentation, in light of Nokia’s current challenges in the US market. Overall, the major message will be think about opportunities for building online services and how to push those services to all manners of devices in order to build reliable and predictable subscription revenues.

If you’ll be at SEE2010 and would be interested in chatting more in person, please leave a comment or send an e-mail to chris@audacious-software.com and we can coordinate from there.