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FAQ
By Jonas Lindeborg, VP Mobile Platforms
As with many new technologies we first ask ourselves what it is good for and how we could benefit from it. Once we start to get out heads around these questions and start to think about opportunities we also start to see limitations and risks associated with this new technology, quite natural. Below we provide some thoughts around the most common concerns we picked up regarding the Mikz offering, none of them come as a surprise to us actually.
Q: What’s so unique with your technology?
A: We think the package as a whole – the web server, infrastructure, security model and unified APIs across phone platforms is what makes a difference. Running a web server on the phone has been done before and is done by others (in fact we use open source projects for this). Finding out the current IP address of a phone and setting up gateway solutions are done by others as well though we hold some patents on how to do this distributed and efficiently in large scale and without vulnerable central dynamic gateway/DNS solutions .
However, we think the value provided by Mikz is packaging all these things together into one offering making it really easy, both on a technical and commercial level, to create software solutions that access and write data to mobile phones in real-time, the web way. With Mikz, the initial and incremental costs for web solutions interacting with mobile phones are really low.
We want to manage your connectivity, so that you can go focus on your customers.
Q: Who would open their phone for everyone to browse?
A: Not many, if anyone. Mikz is not about running a public web server on mobile phones that anyone can browse into. The web server is used to offer a mainstream well known paradigm to pull and push data, why invent something new for this?
To actually access the phone, you need to use certified API keys that each defines which data you may access. These API keys may be combined with popular authentication methods to fully control the access to your phone. Also, since all traffic to the web server flows through the Mikz network, we can warrant that no random requests reach the phone. This is of course over and above normal user/password based access control seen on any web service of today.
Q: Allowing the outside world to access my phone will probably drain my battery, right?
A: If you had a phone with very popular content and allowed masses to continuously access it without utilizing caching – yes, of course. However, Mikz is not about hosting a mobile YouTube for the masses but we think it’s about yourself, family and friends. On the technical level we will cap the concurrent number of visitors to the phones, monitor the number of calls made from potentially malicious clients, etc.
Combined with full support for caching and the fact that Mikz actually can avoid running recurring and lengthy sync processes that may result in uploading data that is not necessary to upload at that time, you can actually conserve battery.
In addition, the Mikz Device Server is carefully designed to use minimal system resources for the job as well.
Q: Will this not bog down my phone?
A: Basically the same precautions we take to conserve battery also work to limit the CPU usage of the phone. We will simply tune the Mikz Device Server so that it will not go wild even if there is huge demand for accessing the phone. Making the Mikz Device Server behave as a good citizen at all times has been a design principle since day one and will take priority over serving clients if needed. Hey, it’s still primarily a mobile phone!
Q: So I cannot use this since I don’t have an unlimited data plan?
A: If you don’t want Mikz to be connected when your only data bearer is over cellular (2.5 or 3G) you can simply set Mikz to only use Wifi or USB. Mikz will then only connect when these bearers are available.
The cost for data traffic is of course dependent on the actual application. Running a Google Latitude alike application that subscribe via standard RSS feeds on friends' GPS positions, pushing dispatch orders to a mobile workforce or playing Hangman between two mobile widgets will not consume much data traffic.
It’s also our belief that data plans will be commonplace eventually as your phone’s Internet connection will increase in importance as we see more and more new services.
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