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.
  

What kind of applications will win the mobile battlefield? Well, if I knew it probably I would try to raise funds to build it, but I don't know. I guess that services around presence in the network, location, instant messaging, targeted marketing can be the mobile applications of the next decade.
What do you think?

One of the most annoying things of a Blogger.com blog was how difficult was to add AdSense ads in your blog. Currently this is not an issue anymore because you can add automatically AdSense ads in your page thanks to the Blogger dashboard. But if you read blogs you will realize that some blogs embed Google AdSense ads inside the post. Most tutorials on how to monetize your blog recommends it. But it's not possible in Blogger. Why? Because the content of every post is wrapped by a DIV element with the style 'clear:both;'. And it's not possible to modify it in the template, it's created by the Blogger.com's render engine.
So here goes the steps I have followed to embed AdSense ads inside a Blogger.com post:

• Edit your template
• Find this tag: <div class="post-body">, inside you will find this tag <$BlogItemBody$>.
• Insert your Google AdSense code wrapped by a floating layer between both tags. You can change to style="float:left" if you want to align at the left hand side:

<div style="float: right;">
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "XXXXXXX";
google_ad_width = 234;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = "234x60_as";
google_ad_type = "text";
google_ad_channel = "XXXXXXX";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "0000FF";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "008000";
//-->
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>

• Now you have to find the DIV tag that contains the id to the 'sidebar'. Normally it's after all the comments stuff. Insert BEFORE this DIV tag the following javascript code:

<!-- START: Remove the stupid clear: both; added by blogger render engine -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var nodes = document.getElementsByTagName('DIV');
var size = nodes.length;
for (var i = 0; (i<size); i++) {
if (nodes[i].style.clear=='both') {
nodes[i].style.clear='';
}
}
</script>
<!-- END: Remove the stupid clear: both; added by blogger render engine -->

And that's all folks. Test it before publishing. I have tested it in FireFox and Internet Explorer in Windows. If you can test it in Safari or Opera, please send me some feedback.

Comments, improvements and problems will be welcomed!

Update 1: A colleague sent me a CSS hack. You can find it here.
Update 2: To restrict the effect of the script to the posts avoiding the sidebars and other effects, this version modified of the script only affects the post bodies.

<script type="text/javascript">
var nodes = document.getElementsByTagName('DIV');
var size = nodes.length;
for (var i = 0; (i<size); i++) {
if (nodes[i].style.clear=='both') {
if(nodes[i].parentNode.className=='post-body') {
nodes[i].style.clear='';
}
}
}
</script>