Geeky Peek

I read this article on Mashable and it made me angry about the continued iPhone/US centric point of view of mobile. I’ll recap the Mashable article’s key changes in mobile in the last 5 years, or you can read here:
-touchscreen
-social networking on your phone
-broadband
-mobile apps

My big criticism. Anytime you talk about major mobile trends and don’t mention Nokia & GSM, its like talking about retail trends without talking about WalMart. Apple is predicting about 37M iPhones being sold this year, Nokia is expecting to sell 400M or so phones. Net total, Apple has sold roughly 50M iPhones. 50 million. I want to make sure that number is clear for when I juxtapose it against some numbers in a second.

Here is my list of some big, big, big things that happened in the past 5 years globally:

-on July 10th (two weeks ago), according to Ericsson, the 5 billionth GSM subscriber was added making it basically the most successful technology of all time, there are only 6.8B people in the world… and there are 5B GSM mobile subscribers!!! That is jaw-dropping.

-3 billion people now text… wow… who cares about social networking… 3B texters!!! I didn’t even think the global literacy rate was that high

-3G hit its 500M-th customer, so 10% of the world have “broadband in their pocket”… yawn. If you are building data services and not thinking about the 4.5 billion potential customers who run on GPRS… you are thinking pretty narrow-minded.

-Nokia makes the Nokia 1280, a $15 phone!!! $15! Why did you pay $400 for your iPhone again when 97% of what you do is texting and phone calls????

-BlackBerry sold roughly 100M units in the same timeframe iPhone sold 50M (they had a 10M unit headstart roughly)

-The combo of Texting + BlackBery + mobile email = mobile messaging explosion

-There are now about mobile social network users reaches 250M globally!! I actually agree with mashable that this is pretty damn big, and part of the above mobile messaging explosion.

The future, lower priced devices and lower rates. iPhone and Android get stuck at a few hundred million devices until they figure out how to make devices that work on 2G and cost far less. Somebody else figures that out and takes them out. Maybe/hopefully that somebody is Peek.

Dear Google Developer or person thinking about trying to join Google,

Your job is not entrepreneurial. I hate hearing the line – “Google is so entrepreneurial, its like a startup!”.

Real entrepreneurs have to worry about money and resources. If you work at Google, you do not.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about awareness and marketing and doing it affordably and on a budget. Tech blogs broadcast every word from the mouth of Google.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about culture, they can’t just hire a bunch of hyper-rational introverts with no friends, who are massively arrogant about their math skills…and cookie cutter follower zombies in the world of technology.
Real entrepreneurs have to buy their own lunch. They don’t get fat off of morning Googley donuts.
Real entrepreneurs have to worry about profitability and making customers happy, they can’t just invade the privacy of all their customers and launch buzz on them.

Honestly, for the life of me, I can’t fathom why a developer would go take a job at Google. Its like being an awesome carpenter and saying “I want to go work at Ikea” so I can churn out follower products like an open-source mobile OS 5 years after Symbian or web-based email 10 years after Hotmail or a webOS 3 years after Palm did it. Way to gooooo, you are such wonderful innovators, you are applying the Microsoft method of “do it several years after everybody else”. I’m sure they haven’t been burned by that, and I’m sure you won’t either.

Anyways, all this to say, if you want to try to do things differently, if you want actual, real entrepreneurial experience and a real start-up job… we need a killer dev at Peek. I dare you to get up off your comfy Googly job and email me dan at getpeek. You will work on some of the coolest tech in the business. We believe the fat world of HTML & javascript isn’t right for mobile, we want to make OSs, protocols, devices and apps that can be used across the whole world, not just by upper-middle class westerners who have broad 3G deployments and money to buy $400 devices.

If you are this person, or if you know this person, email me at dan at getpeek.

We are looking for an experienced, strong developer to play a significant role in the Peek dev team.

The role is vast:
-mobile coding (app + embedded level)… this is done in C/C++
-Our Peekway servers that send, receive and store emails, social network, texts, etc. This is done in Java/J2EE (sometimes Spring)
-You will get to actually operate your code, and fix it when it breaks. We run on Amazon AWS on Linux, Apache, My SQL, JBOSS infrastructure
-All of our backend services… care interfaces, billing and so on… you’ll get your hands on that as well
-Crazy stand-alone apps like PeekSocial

We practice agile and devops (you will deploy/rollback/troubleshoot bugs in your own code), we deploy new features fast and furiously. You will have both massive discretion on your own projects, bugs, features that you implement as well as massive input into the future of what you develop on.

We are looking for a very, very, very good developer and person. What we need:

-we need a developer who has coded big, hard projects and made them successful
-languages aren’t crucial, we presume if you are awesome you can remember how to call malloc() and free() in C (if thinking about memory mgmt scares you, this isn’t the role for you) and we presume you can learn how to Autowire in Spring
-You need to have experience with scale… i.e. when you argue architecture, there should be experience backing those words, not just repeating Martin Fowler’s arguments (whoops, I just made fun of myself)
-You get things done… you are both an artist and a duct-tape programmer, you are passionate about both hitting dates and making everything follow a design pattern… you don’t do things like make ugly GUIs because “I’m not a GUI guy”
-You like the warm and fuzzy feeling when writing unit tests, they are like a cool glass of ice tea on a summer day to you
-You like “surprising” people with the new hack you thought of last night and wrote this morning
-When you troubleshoot you use science, metrics & fact. Not crazy logic. Especially not crazy logic about crazy race conditions.
-You are not an angry asshole, you like human beings and communicating with them in a non-aggressive/violent way… you like working in a team of really smart/energetic people and telling them about the human normal things you did on the weekend
-You care and have passion, if customers complain about something not working… it hurts deep inside. If there is an outage because of some code you broke, you think about pulling out your samurai sword and emailing a friend to be your second.

Peek launched nation-wide in the US late 2008. Since then we’ve launched successfully across Europe and in India, and picked up many awards along the way including Times Gadget of the Year and Wired Product of the Year. Our team are true start-up veterans – Dr. Amol Sarva played a key role as Finance Director in starting-up Virgin Mobile USA and our chairman, Dave Sprosty, was CEO of SpeakEasy, who were acquired by BestBuy where we became COO, and later CEO of BestBuy Mobile. Oh yeah and me, Dan Morel, I helped start a company called Redknee that went from 0 to IPO completely organically.

And we have cool purpose. We want to make the internet & data available to everybody globally. We want people in the rocky regions of Pakistan to be able to pull out $50 devices that let them communicate and get all the data they need. This means that we need to make devices that are affordable & use as little data as possible… but are still freakishly capable!!! Its a big, big challenge.

We are hiring an ace developer in New York. If you are awesome, email me… dan at getpeek dot com.

You will get to develop on all aspects of Peek – device, server, etc. We are Java in our world of servers and C/C++on the device. We call C++ and Java – Caca++.

Ok, here’s the job description, I’ll let you guys figure out what the job is… and then for fun guess the pay.

-16 hour days
-probably get alarms 2-3x per night
-alarms and issues are really hard to solve, no real manual available, mostly trial and error
-on the job training only… no real prep or training available
-tons of advice and criticism but no real help
-massive physical and emotional stress… people’s lives are in your hands
-lots of your job is cleaning up other people’s messes
-if you do your job great, you can change the world… if you do your job really badly, you can cost society millions

This is pretty funny. Apparently while Consumer reports can’t recommend that folks buy iPhone 4, it is still the highest ranked smartphone by consumer reports. I.e. its the best of a bad lot.

If I think of the major non-iPhone smartphones launched recently my list would be something like:
1. Kin
2. Palm Pre
3. HTC 15 diff’t phones that are really similar + Android
4. Moto Droid
5. Old school BlackBerry – 8800 series/Curve

I’d definitely take the iPhone over the Kin and the HTC line up. I think I’d have taken the Pre, and I’m pretty sure I’d take the Droid… though the squarish lines on the Droid are definitely not for everybody. And if I need something reliable, I’m probably going BlackBerry.

Or if I’m thinking of a no-nonsense combo that just works and is super affordable – I’m doing Peek + a Nokia candy bar.

I think by now most folks have read the reports that only 500 kins were sold. If that number is true, its shocking. Its horrid! Its one of the worst launches ever (we sold 500 in our first few days, and we were absolute nobodies). In fact, I remember a friend of mine who works on Windows Mobile telling me “do not launch this product, it will not sell”.

But I’m not here to bash Microsoft. I’m here to bash you. Its not Microsoft’s fault. Its yours.

A few years back Microsoft bought Danger, the maker of the ground-breaking Sidekick. The Sidekick is a demagogue in the world of phones, they along with Palm paved the way for the modern smartphone. Messaging-oriented, stylish designs, QWERTY keyboards, trackballs and more, they pushed the bar on what a phone could do. People were buying lots of Sidekicks, it was the hot, must-have, Paris-Hilton-stolen-celeb accessory.

The iPhone, the Treo, the Moto Q, the Sidekick, the Blackberry Pearl, Samsung BlackJack, a plethoria of HTC devices that were clunky that nobody bought, and lets not forget about the very functional voice brethren of RZRs, KRZRs and PBLS. There was a plethora of choice & people exercised their right and bought interesting, different devices. Nobody I knew had the same device as me.

Fast forward to the past 12 months in mobile:

1. Palm launches a bunch of stellar devices with groundbreaking software on it. These are not only cool devices, but they were priced accessibly for the average person. RESULT: dead, sold to HP.

2. Microsoft, with lots of the old Danger/Sidekick team they bought, launch the Kin. Again, a really good device. Looked great. RESULT: sold 500 of them and shutdown the bu.

3. The iPhone 4 launches and sells millions in days.

4. Motorola flatlines, only to move to Android, which saves them.

So did Palm and Microsoft make bad products, while Google & Apple mad great ones??? No!!! They all have had issues. The iPhone 4 doesn’t make phone calls for the love of god, and the battery and laggy performance on every Android device is horrendous.

Apple + Google monoculture, thats the real problem here. You, the people, are buying Apple products for no fricking reason. What annoys me most is how the iPhone uses the artist class, traditional anti-monoculturists, and turns them all into iPhone lovers. What gives??? Its confounding. The iPhone has zillions of flaws, just like its competitors. Why don’t you folks experiment and buy devices from extremely successful device makers like Microsoft and Palm?

I actually wonder if its backlash from the plethora of choice from a few years back. I think people got sick of buying half-functional, slow-ish, hard to use devices (Moto Q – cough cough). The supreme example here is everything WAP. I feel like WAP-browsers set back the internet on the phone ages. It was awesome in its back-end, low overhead design but terrible in its usability. WAP left a huge opportunity for somebody to think about and solve browsing & data… that company was Apple. A frustrated pile of people who were tired of spending money on half-working devices that took 4 minutes to get a single web-page that was half of what it should have been flocked over to Apple iPhone. Then I think people stopped wanting to go to the AT&T store, talk to some sleazy sales rep who knew nothing, and figure out which phones actually worked and which didn’t. They just bought iPhone because everybody else was and it seems to do the trick. No more mystery of if my phone will work or not.

But I think we’ve gone too far now. We need to stop being zombie purchasers of iPhone and Android devices. We need to experiment once again and try new devices that launch in the marketplace.

Exciting past few days. We went from a bad situation to a great one with Spotnik in Europe. We’re adding users in droves now. It feels good to turn bad experiences into good ones, like a come from behind victory.

This is really big news – this is the first solution of its kind, a “no roaming fee” device. If you are mobile and in Europe you are generally paying roaming fees through the teeth as you go from country to country. Hopefully we help put pressure on roaming fees across the board, I’d love to take a bite out of that fat teleco profit stream.

If you want to order a Spotnik Peek you can get it here –

Firstly, since I am in an apologetic mode these days, let me apologize to the early European customers. It has been a bumpy ride, we are very sorry. Here’s the most obvious not to do launch list for any of you aspiring startups:
-send them devices late
-have them not work
-don’t listen when they complain

We did all of that to the first few early users in Europe. But that is done – we are getting through the issues and listening loud and clear now! Be ready, we are doing something special in Europe, roaming is a huge issue and together with Spotnik we hope to be a huge solution.

Anyways, I know I have mentioned this before, but I’ll do it again. In my spare time I am a soccer goalie. Development and goaltending have a lot in common… sometimes you let a goal in. Sometimes those goals stink and you wish you had done better. Humble pie.

We have seen better weeks at Peek:
1. Worst outage in a long time on July 4th
2. Googlevoice “incident”
3. Initial European customers having a bumpy ride

Since some of you are more technical readers of this blog, I’ll share some of the details of the July 4th outage. Annoyingly, we had a comedy of errors. Our monitoring system (we use Zenoss), crashed the morning of July 4th. Annoyingly, some key components in our system crashed shortly thereafter. Since our monitoring system was down and it was the long weekend, we were slow to respond. Monitoring system crashes are scary, its like reading the book Blindness (one of my favourite books/authors).

Anyways, dear customers, please hold tight. We will do better and improve.

We rolled out a bad build at 3am last night that caused some of the googlevoice beta users to get each other’s googlevoice messages. I humbly and deeply apologize, your data is of course extremely important to us.

Only 12 people are using the googlevoice service (of many, many thousands of Peek users around the world). Most of those twelve people I know very well. Its a bit frustrating that 12 beta users results in a major blog covering the issue, but I guess we deserve it, sending another user your personal data is very, very bad. We do try to get real-people using new functionality as early as possible, and we clearly released googlevoice a bit early so user’s could try out the sending functionality. I apologize.

As for the other issues mentioned in the article – there was a load-related outage on July 4th for several hours. Annoyingly we had been having quite a good stretch of availability until that happened.

I’m also slightly annoyed that crunchgear said they tried to reach out to us, I’m still waiting for the email myself. Its not like we hide our results… I even posted our uptime stats for about 6 months in straight a while back.