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Phoload interview

Monday, December 1st, 2008
phoload main page

Phoload is a new website where you can download free mobile software. We recently interviewed Phoload CEO Jamie McDonald.

What is phoload?

Phoload showcases free-to-download mobile games and applications that have been uploaded directly to the site by software developers. Users of the website can download, rate, review and recommend the software. We’re hoping to build a community around the software, with participation from both users and developers.

What does the name ‘phoload’ mean?

Contrary to some articles about us, it has nothing to do with ‘pho’ noodles! It is an amalgam of ‘phone’ and ‘download’. We wanted a name that was short, snappy and did not have many existing search results. We also rather liked the aesthetic appearance of the letters.

Why did you decide to create phoload?

We’ve been mobile software enthusiasts for a long time, but I think it is only in the last few years that we have seen the emergence of a whole raft of startups and individuals creating free-to-download location based mobile apps, mobile social networks, and messaging software. We wanted to create a site that made discovering and downloading all this fantastic new mobile software as easy and enjoyable as possible for users.

What are the most popular downloads?

As of today, the most popular download on Phoload is amazeGPS, which is a mobile satnav application. In our top ten we also have another mapping application, a language translator, a music player, a scientific calculator, a couple of apps that interface to various information feeds, as well as several games. I think that the top ten really shows the diversity of mobile software available today.

Which phones are people downloading software onto?

Principally, Nokia, Sony Ericcson, Samsung and Blackberry phones (in that order of popularity). The most popular phones are almost all smartphones or other high end phones, with the most popular phone with Phoload users being the Nokia N95. Since launching support for Android last week, we’ve also seen a large number of T-Mobile G1s browsing and downloading software from the site.

What are your mobile software predictions for 2009?

I don’t think we are going to see anything revolutionary in 2009, just a continuation of the trends that have already started. That is to say, increasing usage and awareness of mobile software, increasing smartphone adoption, and the increasing popularity of mobile social networks and location based applications. I also think that the Android platform has a bright future. It certainly has enthused the developer community.

What technology is behind the site?

Phoload is written in Java. We use the excellent Stripes web framework, and Hibernate for mapping our Java objects to the database. As Phoload is a read-mostly site, we do a lot of caching using Ehcache both as a Hibernate second level cache, and for caching frequently accessed results that have been detached from Hibernate.

How is the site hosted?

On a dedicated server in Dallas in the US. We host with an excellent New Zealand based company called RimuHosting.

What challenges did you face in getting the site launched?

From a development perspective, the toughest challenge was creating a mobile software distribution system that handles the device fragmentation (especially in J2ME devices) in the best possible way. The system had to make it as easy as possible for developers to upload, and specify phone compatibilities for, multiple versions of a single item of software, while masking this complexity from users. I think that we have done well in this area.

Another challenge was sourcing the initial portfolio of mobile software, which was a lot of work. We spent many hours searching for and emailing developers.

What strategies have you used to get people to visit your site?

To promote the site, we started by emailing mobile industry and news site blogs, telling them about Phoload. We’ve found that this strategy has worked pretty well and we’re pleased with the press that we have received so far. We also try to promote Phoload by promoting the software on the site, highlighting relevant software to bloggers, and to users on forums etc. etc.

A search on Google for ‘phoload’ on currently gives 11200 results, how did you manage to get mentioned on so many web pages?

First of all, I think Google might be exaggerating a little, as when you click through to the last page of search results, there are actually far fewer results. But, there are still plenty, and I think one of the reasons for this is the blog coverage that I previously mentioned. Many of articles written about Phoload have been syndicated all over the web, so this accounts for a lot of results. These articles also prompt follow up articles and interviews, so there is a large ripple effect there.

How is the site funded?

We are self-funded.

What are your plans for monetizing the site?

We don’t plan to have any software sales on the site. We want to keep it purely focused on free-to-download software. Eventually, we’ll put some non-intrusive ads on the site. We’ll probably do this once our hosting costs start increasing.

Why should developers give their software away for free on this site?

phoload atomic

Primarily, developers will gain users and publicity. We hope to provide an excellent service to developers, and those who upload their software receive pages showcasing their products on the site, regular download reports, and feedback from the user community.

Also, we don’t just accept freeware, we also accept ad-supported and demo/trial software, and demo software can be associated with a purchase link to an external website.

How did you find the initial mobile software for the site?

On the whole, we used Google. We scoured the internet searching for mobile software that we liked and then contacted the developers of the software directly to ask if they would like to upload their software to Phoload.

What kind of testing do you do on the submitted software?

If it’s compatible with a phone we have, we’ll give it a try and report any feedback we have to the developer. However, we don’t make any guarantees to our users that the software has been tested.

Currently you support J2ME. Are there plans to offer software for written in other languages – e.g. Symbian, Android?

Yes, we launched Android support on the site last week and are really pleased with the amount of traffic the Android section of Phoload has received so far. We plan to add support for more software platforms soon, starting with Symbian.

Where do you want the site will be in one years time?

Hopefully, Phoload will be established as one of the best places to download and discuss the latest free mobile software. Also, by then, we will support all of the major mobile software platforms.

And finally can you give us a few tips for anyone setting up a new website of their own?

I think that virtually everything, from starting the company, sorting out the legal documents, contacting developers, and of course developing the site, took longer than we anticipated. So, I would encourage people to be realistic about how much time everything takes.

One specific mistake we made was with regard to search engine optimisation. I think if you anticipate that you will receive most of your traffic from search engines, then you have to think deeply about this from the start and during the whole design process. We thought we had done this (with search engine friendly urls etc.), but we still found that we received duplicate results in the Google index due to session IDs creeping into the urls unnecessarily, and both the www.phoload.com and phoload.com domains being indexed separately. We’ve fixed these issues now but wish we had fully addressed them before launch.

Thanks for your time.
You can visit Phoload at http://www.phoload.com/.

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Are your website and blog earnings at risk?

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

There are a lot of websites out there telling you how you can make money out of your website or blog. You may have decided to try some of these ideas to make some money out of your web presence. Perhaps you even rely on your web-generated money for a significant slice of your income. If you have then have you ever analysed how secure this income is?

Let’s look at a five such risk factors.

Relying on a single income stream

Like many sites out there you may use Google AdSense. It is quite likely that it is responsible for most / all of your web income. Just imagine if that income suddenly stopped!

Is this likely? Well, if you read the many AdSense forums out there it seems that there is certainly a chance of this happening to you. Many people wake up to find an email from Google in their inbox to tell them that their AdSense account has been terminated. The usual reasons for this include either click fraud (clicking on your own ads), or not obeying the AdSense terms and conditions.

Unfortunately a lot of people seem to be getting banned through no fault of their own. This usually seems to be as a result of their site being ‘click bombed’. In other words other people deliberately click on loads of the adverts in order to get the site banned.

This kind of account termination could happen with any kind of income programme that you use. I’m just using AdSense as an example as there are a lot of documented cases of people having their accounts banned.

To protect yourself from this you should use a variety of income generating programmes.

If you can you should construct your website in such a way that you can easily switch from one programme to another if you should become banned from one. This also has the advantage that if one programme proves to be a better earner than another, you can switch more of your site to the higher earning one.

Relying on one main traffic source

Another risk factor is related to where your traffic comes from. If most of your traffic comes from one source then you are at risk. As an example it wouldn’t surprise me if 80% of your traffic came from Google. Let’s imagine that next week they introduce a major search algorithm update which sends your site plummeting in the rankings. You could suddenly find that you have hardly any traffic!

Other risks include having your site identified as a spam site and being penalised in the rankings or even dropped.

Mitigating the risk involves looking at where your traffic comes from and working to get visitors from more sources. For instance getting links on related websites, or getting coverage in other search engines.

This particular risk can be very hard to reduce due to the dominance of Google. Your best defence could well be to keep in Google’s good books. Simply sake sure that your site complies with their webmaster guidelines and you should be ok.

Having just one website

All websites go through highs and lows. Sometimes there will be an obvious reason. Your Christmas related website is unlikely to do well in the Summer. Other times you may not be able to work out why your traffic goes up and down.

With only a single site you are susceptible to these kind of changes. In general if your traffic goes down then so does your earnings. If you have multiple sites then it more likely you will be sheltered from the peaks and troughs as when one site decreases in popularity another site may be rising.

You can think of it like having a balance portfolio of investments. You wouldn’t invest all your money on the stock market would you? If you were sensible you’d probably spread your money through a mixture of stocks, property, and cash accounts.

Having just one web host

Another kind of risk comes from using just one web host. Think for example what would happen if they went bust? All your sites could disappear in an instant. You may then find it quite hard to get your domains back. Even when you do you may find that you have lost all your search engine rankings, links and visitors.

It can happen – about 10 years ago I lost a domain of mine when my host went bust. It was very inconvenient.

To reduce the risk first be careful about who you trust to host your website and domain names. Don’t go for a company that looks in any way financially unstable.

The second more extreme risk reduction strategy is to use multiple web hosts. This is only really relevant if you have multiple sites. If you have two hosts then you can spread your sites between them. Of course you may now have double the chance of one of your hosts going bust, but at least you aren’t in a all or nothing situation like you were before.

Forgetting to renew your domains

Keep a careful record of which domains you own and when they need to be renewed. Hopefully your host will automatically renew them for you. If they do then make sure that they have your up to date credit / debit card details.

Good hosting companies will re-register the domain even if they don’t have the correct payment information from you. Not so good hosting companies will release expired domains back into the wild. This can be disastrous as someone else can then quite legitimately register your domain. They will then inherit all your traffic, links and search engine placements. There could be no way for you to get it back.

Conclusions

You may notice a theme throughout all my risks. They are mostly about removing the single point of failure to spread the risk. Whenever you rely on just one factor you are at risk of losing everything if that factor should change.

Stay safe, and spread that risk around!

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Batch processing photos with DOS and ImageMagick

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

For my recent walking project I knew I was going to be taking lots of photos. I wanted a DOS script which would batch process the JPEG photos from my camera into the ‘full sized images’ (which are much smaller than the raw camera images), and the poloroid-like thumbnails.

The excellent ImageMagick tool provides a way to generate poloroid-like thumbnails automatically. I also wanted the thumbnails to be rotated at random angles which ImageMagick can do as well.

However the ImageMagick instructions were missing a few things 1) they seem to be aimed at people using Unix / Linux scripts whereas I’m using DOS scripts and 2) they show how to do this processing on single images rather than on a whole directory of them.

Poloroid rotation with ImageMagick Poloroid rotation with ImageMagick

It is quite easy to generate a random rotation angle with a simple bit of perl. The below line will generate a random floating point number between -7 and +7. I want both negative and positive numbers so that some of the poloroids will be tilted to the left, and others to the right.

perl -e "print rand() * 14 - 7"

I wanted to do all the processing through a DOS batch file so the next problem was how to get the random number into a DOS environmental variable. The answer is to use the ‘for /f‘ command to assign the output of a command into a variable:

for /f %%i in ('perl -e "print rand() * 14 - 7"') do set ANGLE=%%i

At the time when I wrote this script generating a poloroid involved a whole sequence of commands. Something like below!

-bordercolor white -border 6 -bordercolor grey60 -border 1 -background none -rotate %ANGLE% -background black ( +clone -shadow 60x4+4+4 ) +swap -background white -flatten

My script still uses this long poloroid command, but you might want to use the new one word ‘poloroid‘ command which is built straight into the latest versions of ImageMagick instead.

As well as generating the poloroid thumbnails it will also generate the full size website friendly images which are tagged with the website URL.

Prerequisites:
Your JPEG images are in an ‘images’ directory.

Usage:
ProcessPhotos.bat [path of directory that contains 'images' directory]

Output:
A new directory called ‘generated’ in the input directory containing a full size image (which has been tagged with the website URL), and a poloroid thumbnail.

Notes:
In order to use this script you will have to customise 1) the location of the ImageMagick executable 2) the reference to the drive – it is assuming a ‘f:’ drive here and 3) the website URL.

ProcessPhotos.bat
setlocal
pushd .

goto :skip_functions

:makeThumb
	echo %1
	set jpg=%1
	set jpg=%jpg:~0,-4%
	echo %jpg%
	for /f %%i in ('perl -e "print rand() * 14 - 7"') do set ANGLE=%%i
	set ANNOTATE=-gravity south -stroke "#000C" -strokewidth 2 -annotate +0+20 "www.reviewmylife.co.uk" -stroke none -fill white -annotate +0+20 "www.reviewmylife.co.uk"
	set POLOROID=-bordercolor white -border 6 -bordercolor grey60 -border 1 -background none -rotate %ANGLE% -background black ( +clone -shadow 60x4+4+4 ) +swap -background white -flatten
	D:\apps\ImageMagick-6.3.6-Q16\convert %1 ( +clone -resize 600x -auto-orient %ANNOTATE% -compress JPEG -quality 70 -write %jpg%_full.jpg +delete ) -resize 180x -auto-orient %POLOROID% -compress JPEG -quality 80 -sampling-factor 2x1 -strip %jpg%_th.jpg
goto :EOF

:skip_functions

f:
cd %1\images
for /f %%i in ('dir /b *.jpg') do call :makeThumb %%i

md %1\generated
move *_full.jpg ..\generated
move *_th.jpg ..\generated

popd
endlocal

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