You don’t need to hear me rant on again about uncontrolled Google Ads.

Yesterday, I moved the homepage of the Haredi Women Professionals (aka Supermom) Network to a new hosting site that plants automatic Google ads along one side of the page. In the ten minutes between my setting up the page and paying for a premium service entitling me to remove the Google Ads, the homepage was advertising links to pornography (how obvious, given the word “Women” in the title, right?).

Here’s another example (from a search results page). Not a mis-match of interests, this time, as much as poorly-chosen ad copy:

Need I point out that Orthodox Jewish Women are not for sale?! :.D

What is the “killer app” of the Apple iPhone?

I say: Scrolling.

Before you get all worked up about how much you adore Google maps and email and video, think a minute. Think about your own pleasure in using an iPhone or iPod Touch, and tell me if it isn’t really about feeling hip, feeling cool, feeling in control, and the fun of scrolling up and down lists; back and forth through album art.

Oh, all right, I’ll allow “scrolling” pictures larger and smaller by multi-touch spreading of fingers closer and farther. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

What do you say? Do you buy my argument?

It’s a big day for our server, anyway. Engadget used my photo of the Samsung charging station at LAX (part of this post) in one of today’s stories. I’d like to think that someone at Engadget is tracking my blog, but I think we need to chalk this up to Google Image Search. :.)

The whole tagging thing is interesting. I think of tagging information as bookmarks for life. I’ve been doing it for ages, but now there are plenty of tools to help me do it (not that I use them).

Tagging is a reaction to search technology, and is proportional to the use of Search as the interface to the data. If you usually search for a contact in your address book by name, you aren’t likely to do lots of tagging in the notes field. On the other hand, if you usually do a search by, say, title (”Barber”) or where the contact lives (”London”) then you might.

Just the number of ways that we mentally search for a name or number — by first name, last name, company name, city, event where we met, job title, appearance (”the bald guy who sat next to the CTO”) — is astonishing. It’s all the more astonishing that my Nokia E65 only searches contacts by first/last name or company name (but not both — depending on how the card is listed.

I’m very sensitive to the way names are spelled: once I know how someone spells their name, I rarely (if ever) get it wrong. No Mark for Marc; no Allen for Alan. The spelling is an inherent part of the way I see the name in my mind when I think of the person. There have been a few occasions where I got a spelling wrong upon introduction (my fault or the introducers), and I’ve compensated for that by spelling the name incorrectly in the contact’s notes field. So one unexpected part of tagging data is tagging it incorrectly, too, so that it can be found by people making a mistake.

All of this rambling is a long way of saying that I think there’s still a huge opportunity for improvement to the interfaces for searching content on our mobile devices.

I’m finally getting down to organizing my notes and thoughts from the MEX Conference held last month in London.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“The user says, ‘It’s broken’ not ‘I’m suffering from a fragmented ecosystem’.” — Jo Rabin, MobileMonday London

“Most people don’t want to buy a 1/4″ drill, they want a 1/4″ hole.” – Scott Jensen, Google

“Cognitive simplicity” — Steve Ives, Taptu

“Neutral vs. Imperial” — JD Moore, Nokia

“‘Chaos’ is not chaotic to non-Western eyes. ‘Chaos’ is shared space.” – Paul Adams, Google

“The environment is the interface.” — Kieran del Pasqua, Intel

iPhone: “The interface is the device.” — Robert Weideman, Nuance

“The device is the analog-to-digital converter of life.” — Robert Weideman, Nuance

“‘Device talking to us’ doesn’t always work as well as ‘us talking to device’.” — comment during a Breakout Session on design use cases for the handset outside the hand.*

“Fragmentation is the result of innovation.” — Carl Taylor, Hutchison Whampoa Europe

“It is seven times quicker to read than to listen. It is seven times quicker to say it than to type it.” — Simon Crowfoot, SpinVox

“…’Point and Shoot’ as a UI design philosophy.” – Simon Crowfoot, SpinVox

*If you’re the one who said this, please let me know so that I may credit you!

An interesting post on the Google Code blog:

“Haptic feedback has been added to the finger down and up events triggered when a keyboard button is clicked. These events have been adapted to create a fingertip-over event which is fired when the finger moves over any button in the interface. When the fingertip-over event is triggered, a 1-beat smooth 70ms high intensity Tacton (2) is presented using the iPhone’s built-in rotational motor.”

I played with some haptic feedback devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month and was really disappointed. The vibration comes from somewhere in the back of the phone — from a specific location where the vibrating buzzer is. In other words, the haptic feedback comes from a location not associated with the area with which you’re interacting. For me, it was a distraction rather than a feedback

I love the concept, but in practice it’s not there yet.

Google’s Grand Central providing phone numbers and voice mail service to the homeless:

“When you lose your home, you lose more than your house,” said Google’s spokesman. “You lose a permanent way of staying in touch with family members, employers, and social service providers. Being able to give a phone number to people and access voicemail can be a very powerful thing in sustaining quality of life.” [via CNET, “Google expands free phone number and voicemail project”]

Grand Central has always looked like a good service. Now it looks even better.

The whole question of using a married name versus retaining one’s “maiden” name is really interesting. There are so many levels of practical and political and emotional and interpretational meaning to a name that there may be no way to disentangle them from one another. The classic “practical” reason for retaining a maiden name would be career recognition: making yourself easy to find, and building on previous reputation, rather than starting over with a new name.

I’ve noticed that the “practical” reason has widened its net… if you want to be found by old friends on Facebook or any other social networking site (or via a Google search, for that matter), you can’t be found if the searcher doesn’t even know your name. Which provides a new incentive for retaining your maiden name, even if only for your online identity.

Identity, indeed. Quite literally.

It will be interesting to watch and to see if this apolitical influence has greater ramifications or impact than simply seeing two last names in social network profiles. Will there be a change in how women perceive their identities as conjoined or distinct from their husbands’? Will there be an increase or decrease in feminist affiliations? In respect for women and their identities as such?

Or will it be another meaningless blip in electronic evolution, made insignificant by progress in tracking and maintaining contacts and relationships online?

If operator hardware sales behavior started to threaten a device manufacturer’s own revenue stream, would the manufacturer continue to be cautious about not offending carrier sensibilities? Or would they throw the first punch by offering service themselves?

It’s not so farfetched, is it?

Related and perhaps illuminating business cases:

• Helio / SK Telecom
• Vertu / Nokia / Ovi / Nokia-Siemens Network
• iPhone / iTouch / iTunes /.Mac
• Google / Android / YouTube / Flickr

Finnish vendor Nokia announced an extension of its mobile music platform on Tuesday, with the unveiling of a subscription service that allows users to keep their music.

At its annual investor day in the Netherlands, Nokia announced its ‘Comes With Music’ platform, that enables people to buy a Nokia device with a year of unlimited access to millions of tracks.

Once the year is complete, customers can keep all their music without having to worry about it disappearing when their subscription is over. [see telecoms.com for the full story]

This is very similar to Nokia’s purchase and inclusion of mapping software on high-end devices (something we discussed in the Mobile Marketing panel at the MoMo Summit). The buzz is that “it’s all about content” — that future revenues are going to be driven primarily by content.

Take a look at how Apple’s iTunes fits into its strategy: revenues are huge at 36%, but the importance is in the content’s role in driving sales of the iPod and computer hardware lines. That lesson hasn’t been lost on others. Think Amazon and Kindle, Nokia and Ovi, Sony and their upcoming revamped music store.

But is the buzz true as a trend?

What do these activities say about company strategy? Where are these players expecting their future revenues growth to come from?

1. Hardware sales? The device is the money maker, with higher prices/differentiation justified by including free content — sales of devices driven by consumer desire for the “free” (or premium) content included; or
2. Content sales? The hardware is a one-off sale, but the ongoing revenues from online content and subscription sales are the real money-maker; or
3. Something else entirely?

It’s clear that the future of computing in general — the big future — is in mobile. Desktop computers, home media centers, and laptops will be nice CE moneymaking appliances, like microwaves and large-screen TVs. Sure, they’re more necessary than luxuries like designer espresso machines, but you can live without them, for example, if you are struggling to pay off student loans.

Mobiles will be like refrigerators or washing machines. You just can’t manage without them. That’s already true now, but at the moment it’s more of a psychological need to not miss anything. As mobile email improves, flat data plans roll out, web browsing becomes usable, phone memory grows to accommodate video and audio entertainment realistically, downloading becomes easier rather than sideloading… as those things happen, the mobile device will be completely embedded as the primary computing device in fact, not just in theory. As the N95 ads say, “it’s what the computer has become” and it’s true (but not of the N95, I’m afraid).

The “content driving sales of content” model: Amazon’s Kindle appears to seek its profits not on device sales, but on opening the market to ebook sales. Is this how they intend to compete with Google’s devaluing of books… by making books affordable through non-printing? Cutting out of the loop the paper, the printing, the ink, the distributor, the store? Making it palatable by including the cellular connection? (Worthy of note: O’Reilly Radar)

The “content driving sales of hardware” model: This appears to be Nokia’s: rolling the cost of the content into the hardware, and keeping the content free by owning it themselves and amortizing the cost over tens of millions of hardware units.

The “content driving sales of advertising” model: Google. The evolution of the tried-and-true broadcast television model. It certainly works for Google. Will we see the day when Google struggles to maintain its advertising value as broadcast networks have? Surely a company is incubating somewhere that will eventually grow to challenge Google’s dominance… then what?

The “hardware driving sales of hardware AND content” model: Although you might argue that people purchase iPods because they want to use iTunes Music Store for price and ease of use… I wouldn’t buy that argument. I would believe that after the hardware sale, the content is a huge follow-on market.

If Nokia is trying to emulate Apple’s model, why are they including all this free content? It erodes the follow-on possibilities. On the other hand, follow-on content sales for mobile devices have been anemic all along (ringtones, music, video, mapping, whatever). So… is Nokia taking for granted that follow-on sales are not that valuable for some reason on this platform? Or are they betting that by getting people to use the content, later on (say, in two years) they’ll be unwilling to give it up, and will pay for subscriptions, and that that will be worthwhile?

I’m not a believer in educating the market. You see, once people become accustomed to not paying for content (eg, television programming), it’s hard to get them to pay for that same delivery later on. What you CAN get people to pay for is previously free content in a more convenient delivery (think buying a song via iTunes for “only” $0.99 rather than hassling to load a CD that’s down in the basement).

What do these models all have in common? With the exception possibly of Apple’s hardware business*, everyone is trying to figure out how to harness desire for content as a driver for sales of whatever it is they sell. Or how to change what they sell in order to make it driveable by content desire.

Why does content desire matter so much? Content is what you experience when you use the device. It is what brings you back again and again to use the device — you want to talk to someone, you reach for the phone. You want to hear a song — you reach for the iPod. You want to watch a movie — you reach for the TV remote. Only now, you can just reach for the mobile phone to do any of those things. It’s the mobile-able content that matters most, because it’s wherever you are.

* You could make a decent case that Apple’s “hardware” sales are actually sales of experience: combined hardware and operating system. Consumers pay more for Apple’s products not because they are beautiful, although they are, but because they want the usable, beautiful, stable operating system and applications. Which are themselves content, in a way.