#meshin

[glitterystarlightpirate]

[themeshapp-blog]

You're over halfway through the week! Clear your head by getting outside and exploring today! // 📷: @austintiffany 

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[themeshapp-blog]

Did you know that Madrid's Coat of Arms has changed numerous times in the course of the city's history? We found the current Coat of Arms at a lookout point from the City Center! 

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[nednotes]

The Future of Mobile Productivity?

Spec is Dead - Bring on the Apps CES 2012 was notable for the heavy emphasis on Android ideas of all sizes, shapes and attitudes. Top of the list was the Amazon Kindle Fire. Last year, I was at CES as well. That year, there were the hip young MotoBlur-wannabes, like the HTC Sense interface and the Galaxy Tab. Hardware, hardware, hardware.  But as MG Siegler pointed out earlier this year, the hardware spec is dead. Great kit doesn't matter without great applications. And that's where I come in. On Point with Aro Mobile App Over the last five years, I've worked on some pretty amazing mobile applications, with some incredibly bright engineering and design teams. Last year at CES, I was lucky enough to be the man-on-point to showcase Aro Mobile, a new Android communications management system of AI-empowered apps (whatever "AI-empowered" means to you). Master of hyperbole Robert Scoble called Aro Mobile "the most innovative thing I've seen done for mobile phones lately" and "quite remarkable." Scoble noted that Aro Mobile was "like Rapportive or Xobni, but done much better." With this first review, Scoble put his finger on the value proposition of Aro Mobile. The product was designed to solve the overarching mobile productivity problem. It aimed at being the app that would make great hardware worth buying. Problem Still Unsolved Yet one year later, the problem of many apps and too much data still hasn't been solved. The whole smartphone communications experience is still really siloed and chaotic - even in 2012. It's still hard to get things done when you're on the go. The problem is compounded by the size and performance issues of small mobile phones and the ever-increasing flood of information. Today, I live in mobile communications madness. There's too much information incoming to my inbox, my email, my Twitter stream. This is MY information - it's my communications - but it's just too unwieldy and too disorganized for me to grapple with effectively. There's a reason very busy people declare email bankruptcy (like Dave McClure and Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble). The NY Times Bits Blog noted that "efficiently searching through [your phone] to quickly locate contacts, coming events and addresses is still time-intensive, confusing and often frustrating."  The Aro Mobile Solution To solve this communication chaos problem, the Kiha team developed Aro Mobile to act "as a kind of personal virtual assistant for a phone" (NY Times). The way Aro Mobile  worked was by use of semantic technology that mined through your information and created a "social network from all your services on the phone." Then the complete set of information was uploaded to a "cloud computing platform" (MIT Technology Review). I probably can't tell you precisely what the go-to-market plan was. But knowledgeable sources like Jon Lazarus (CEO) said that Aro Mobile could be "tightly built into a phone" (MIT Review) and that he was working to "strike deals with carriers and handset partners" (All Things D, WSJ). Pretty clearly, Aro Mobile was destined to be "acquired and baked in," perhaps by "a manufacturer of Android devices" (Nova Spivack, MIT Review). Other options included the possibility of providing a downloadable app that could generate revenue from advertising or from referring users (Lazarus, MIT Technology Review). Since Aro Mobile was more than just a client application though, the whole system would constitute a service delivery platform for a mobile content provider or a major telecommunications carrier. The client might first be available on Android, and then later on the iPhone (we had both -- as can be seen in the Aro Web 2.0 demo). Where Could Aro Mobile Have Gone? Aro Mobile was built on some significant intellectual property - employees and past employees list patents on their LinkedIn profiles related to semantic analysis of data sets, machine intelligence (whatever that is!), and mobile User Interface improvements - like the unique MindJet-like "action menus" that popped out from recognized terms. Ultimately, the relevancy engine(s) and semantic analysis tools are probably the most interesting from an acquisition perspective, as the UI elements have existed in one form or another for quite a few years. You can see similar and more subtle "smart menus" in Apple OS X Lion -- these are based on pattern recognition though, not semantic analysis of related terms. The effect for users is much the same.  The leading technology companies are going to this place very quickly. And if the price point was right, I could definitely see Apple or Google snapping up Paul Allen's little venture. As the NY Times Bits Blog noted "Playing around with Aro makes me think about the potential for a smarter mobile phone that combines Aro-integrated apps with something like Siri's voice-activated commands... You can start to imagine how a phone would understand a lot more about its owner, and actually get things done."   Next Steps One year ago, after the stellar coverage from Robert Scoble and the NY Times, TechCrunch got on board by releasing private invites to the closed Aro Beta. What was more, MG Siegler described how Aro Mobile  "weaves itself into the OS and uses AI and machine intelligence to make sense of what you're doing with your phone" ( TechCrunch). The Aro Mobile marketing team created a series of videos to explain the product in even more detail. First my colleague Matt Haugh and I created a basic - and clear - product demo.

Then Aro Mobile released an incredibly cheesy fake-people-on-the-street video (Thankfully, I can't claim much credit for this one!) 

What was interesting about this video though was that journalists finally seemed to get the complete vision of the product once they watched this video. I'm not sure what this says about the intelligence of your average journalist... Casey of Digital Fewsure was probably the best of the earlier reviewers. He wrote: "Picture it as a computer that reads all your activity, is aware of the tools that can help phone users, then organizes and provides sensible solutions to make your phone experience easier and more seamless." This nicely summed up the Aro Mobile value proposition. 

All this blogging activity drove more coverage. GigaOm covered Aro, saying that "Aro's platform helps make smartphones more intelligent and useful by tying the basic applications [on a phone] dynamically to the cloud." (GigaOm) ReadWriteWeb described our system as providing "the ability to understand" your communications, and said that our "machine intelligence" added a "smart layer of data and understanding to your communications" ( ReadWriteWeb). The Axe Falls Unfortunately, around that time, TechFlash announced the departure of founding CEO Jon Lazarus. Clouds of doom were on the horizon for Aro Mobile, but still the team moved forward. Finally, the last article of news coverage arrived just as the team ramped up for CES. Mashable wrote that Aro Mobile "seeks to become the central nervous system of your phone, processing... information to help improve overall function" because the system can "understand context and then make intelligent recommendations" (Mashable). Thank you, Mashable! But less than a month after CES last year, with a lot of momentum, Aro Mobile was killed by Kiha Software.

The promise of Aro Mobile was still there, but without a product. 

What's Next? I left and joined PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to work on similar problems as part of the Meshin team. One of the first things I did was attend the InBoxLove conference about email and how to manage communications better. While I was at the conference, I heard quite a number of questions about Aro Mobile. People wondered what happened to an amazing product with great coverage.   I can't share all the details (bound as I am by onerous NDAs), but I can tell you that Aro Mobile is no longer available on any phone, and that many of the original team members departed.

However, it's interesting to notethat some of the smartest minds in terms of datamining and data analytics are still at Vulcan -- so perhaps that smart team are still coming up with the next big thing! During this past year, I've done nearly 200 user interviews, discerning use cases and understanding pain points around communication and email overload. Given my knowledge of what might have been, I desperately miss the Aro Mobile - the problems with mobile communications are still there today. Today, the field of realtime data analytics for your inbox is hot, and growing. Google Priority Inbox has taken off -- Apple keeps adding functions and features. And Microsoft wants to play here too.

Let me set some context by pointing out that there are two small bright teams with significant head-starts. Kiha created and killed Aro Mobile in a pell-mell 3 year sprint - and I wouldn't discount that team yet (they've taken the name Aro for the company now). The other solid tool is Meshin, and was started by PARC nearly 6 years ago. This year, I took Meshin from the desktop to mobile -- first on Android, and soon to be on iPhone too.

Aro Mobile didn't succeed. But Meshin is available today, who knows where it will grow? Communication chaos is a real problem, and we need a real solution. Who will get there first? 

------------------------- (NOTE that in regards to Aro Mobile and Kiha Software, I've only referenced publicly available information - no proprietary or confidential information is revealed in this blog post. See the list of my sources below.) SOURCES: (listed first at Exit Strategy News) 11/29/2010 - First Look at Aro for iPhone: Can This Semantic Software Replace Your Core Mobile Apps? Sarah Perez, Read Write Web. 11/15/2010 - Aro Mobile Uses the Cloud to Build Smarter Smartphone Ryan Kim, GigaOM. 11/15/2010 - Aro Offers a Parallel Universe Where Mobile Apps Work Together Liz Gannes, All Things D - Wall Street Journal. 11/9/2010 - Aro Organizes the World Inside Your Smart Phone Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review. 11/9/2010 - Aro Smartphone Application: A Personal Assistant in Your Back Pocket Tammy Wolf, TMCnet. 10/28/2010 - Aro Mobile and the Next Generation of Business Phones Casey Fictum, Digitalfewsure. 10/27/2010 - Aro Mobile Shows Some Skin - Some Android Skin. And We Have Invites. MG Siegler, TechCrunch. 10/26/2010 - Aro Mobile Wants To Simplify Your Mobile Phone Bits Blog, Jenna Wortham, New York Times. 10/25/2010 - First look at Aro: another example of why chaos on Android is good Robert Scoble, Scobleizer.