Welcome to the Jungle (Redux)

Yesterday we discover that Mowser, the project founded by famous blogger Russell Beattie (and former colleague) was in the deadpool. Russ claimed that he ran out of money and had serious trouble with his finances.
Everyday startups are created and abandoned, but the point in this story is that he could not raise funds to continue with the project. We see almost everyday projects raising a lot of money for nothing, so why an authority in the mobile world cannot pass the first round? Well, honestly I don't know, but from my experience in Amplia, mobile and M2M markets are really really hard. Everybody recognizes the potential but nobody knows what are the killer applications of the mobile business.
Mobile applications are radically different of 'Fixed' applications, and they should have different attributes:

• Mobile applications don't need permanent interaction. You only interact with the application when an event occurs that requires your attention.
• Mobile applications are by the lack of reliability of the wireless networks- error prone. A good mobile application should hide the user of the status of the underlying connection. When the connection comes back, then it should restore the status with the remote services transparently.
• The mobile application must be 'always on'. Again, event driven interactivity.
• Mobile applications must be fasts. The less time the user is interrupted by the mobile device, the better.
• Data traffic shall not be a concern. Help users to know how much will they pay to their operator. The success of RIM comes of the fact that users know in advance how much will they pay for the service.
• If a user is always connected to the network or 'always on', don't make them login again in your service. Use the authentication and authorization services of your operators if possible, or find a smart way to keep the user information linked to his/her device.
  

I have not been able to use Skype for more than 24 hours, just like the rest of the world. It seems that the problem is serious. It has been reported that it's an issue with a new version of the application. But it's not so clear. Such a long outage must come from (and I'm speculating):

1) A failure in the data migration from the early version of the application and a bad (or nonexistent) rollback process.
2) Massive failure in the storage and problems with the recovery process (I have seen this problem a lot of times).
3) Skype has been hijacked by malicious hackers. I don't believe it.


Whatever it is, it's costing eBay one billion dollars. That's more than $11000 per second. Let's see if they can fix the problem before the markets open.

Update 17/08/2006 13:16 GMT+2: It seems that an exploit that causes a denial of service was published by an anonymous user in SecurityLab.ru.

If you are above thirties, do not visit chat rooms very often or English is not your mother tongue, then you probably waste most of the time trying to decipher that abbreviation lingo.

Here goes a brief dictionary of words.