Connected Devices Weekly Update/2016-04-19

• Product
  • Setting the Hypothesis to prove this week
  • product and UX teams have a work week in Portland
• Engineering
  • Getting ready to show Vaani at the exec event in Berlin
  • Set up tasks for this sprint
    • Getting Vaani working on RPi
    • Working on the addon API. Discussion Here
    • Creating Vaani build repository and script
• UX
  • Work week in Portland
  • Looking at doing user testing with Vaani
• General
  • You can see the sprint items on Trello
  • You can see the weekly meeting notes here
  • Next Demo will be 4/27 it is on the CD calendar

Product and Research

• Brainstorming on product differentiators
• Worked on user segment research and kick-started user interviews to gather user pain-points
• Evaluation of voice integration options
• Planning discussion for targets for next phase is scheduled for the week of April 19th

Engineering

• Yay! We have the motion sensor, open/close window sensor, hue lights, and door locks integrated into fox box. And notifications enabled via Web push!
• Team sprinted very hard this last few weeks to wrap up the two pilot scenes. We had a successful dry run demo of our progress so far and this week marks the end of first phase of Project Link

Participation

• Will discuss and prioritize how volunteer contributors can help at London All Hands
• Wiki has been updated with additional information for participation

• TV resource: http://bit.ly/1X66usX
  • 2.6 milestones:
    • 4/25 branch
    • 7/15 FC
    • 9/1 CC (confirmed w/ Partner)
• Osaka trip
  • 2.6 features locked down
  • Web apps enhacement - TBD due to resource
  • region / language
  • categories

• The new proposal for TV, Fusion TV, is planned for April 27th pitch at the Product Innovation Board.
• WIP to polish the slide

• Last week we had our first progress report meeting. Slides and video ( included also in our wiki).
• Focus on Babysitting Age audience
  • Define next hypothesis and validation plan:
    • Finish synthesizing research around interruptions and connecting with people.
    • Look into research around habit formation.
• Ongoing tech explorations to fill our implementation toolbox in NFC (this week) and BLE.

• Last Wednesday we had our Kick off meeting
  • All agree that a research plan is a priority as we need to see what needs arise and user cases that fit real problems.
  • In the short term a client (standalone app) will be developed based on React Native that will help us to create experiences and validate our hypothesis
  • In the long run we don't know yet in which product could be magnet integrated, browser, flyweb...
• First Backlog prioritization of the tasks to build the client.
• First Development Sprint started yesterday. The goal is having a very basic client in Android and iOS (if it's possible) and also downloadable builds
• Requested help to the Research team to investigate more about different kind of beacons vendors, analysis of beacons depending on size, power, energy consumption..

• SensorWeb
  • MVP ongoing (http://sensorweb.io/) and to be done by this week. including some new stuff below
    • intro video to put on landing page
    • user management (front end + back end)
    • device (sensor) management (front end + back end)
    • most importantly: bug fixes, polishes; it's expectedly buggy now
  • What’s next
    • deployment plan in new taipei city in May; we got budget for 50 sensor kits.
    • maker faire taipei on 5/7, 5/8
  • Upcoming Milestone:
    • Planned second PIB update on 5/5
    • London ww: hackathon (in planning), open session (in planning)

• Nexus Player Port
  • moving forward to provide a build that can be easily flashed to people's existing Nexus Player to make things easier for the community
• RPi2
  • Working with Dietrch to host the RPi2 Build
  • have the ability to "create" builds but the resulting builds do not *run* because the platform itself is broken. Once the transition project is up and running, we can use that branch.
  • Naoki advised that we can use TaskCluster to generate builds, which are then hosted on Amazon servers. Once we get the Transition branch working, we'll need to figure out how to create TaskCluster jobs to get regular builds generated.

• Had a meeting with members of the Fennec and Desktop team (UI/Product)
  • Have agreed to move forward with having the APK a system add on for nightly and aurora.
• Have a meeting with Dees from Platform to see if we can get FlyWeb in the hands of partners.

• We continue with the tasks committed to Sprint 3 to be able to format and send a core ping with Linear Histograms (Trello tracking)
• Last Friday we had a meeting with John Jessen as we requested help to query and dashboard CD data sent to the Telemetry pipeline (some skills in iPython notebooks and Scala are necessary)
  • They don’t have any resources to help in that area right now.
  • He suggested that maybe we should use Google Analytics instead of Telemetry because:
    • The benefits of using Telemetry are clear for Gecko-based projects, but this might not apply to other projects.
    • The CD projects are intended to be initially small projects and Google Analytics offer kind of dashboards really easy to be used.
    • Some other projects have started to use GA (e.g. Tofino) in Mozilla
  • However, he also pointed out that this might lead to Privacy issues.
• We have started to have a look at Google Analytics and similar third party services just in case we could use it to benefit from the easiness to create dashboards on top it. We plan to do that assessment during this week.
• In parallel we are trying to contact Marshall Erwin, to check what are the legal implications and consequences of following such an approach.

• Technical Research
• Smarthome
  • Looking into NFC for SmartHome
  • https://github.com/mozilla/smarthome.iot/wiki/NFC
  • Initially on Arduino, demo video: https://youtu.be/GQGm6bZe1D0
• SensorWeb
  • Writeup going out today about the research findings
  • Next research meeting has been set up
• Vaani
  • Technical review happening with the team today
  • Notes and information being shared today
• Magnet
  • There was an ask for technical and possible market research. That work will be assigned in the next few days
• Market Research
• Smart Home
  • Looking into addressable market size for the 12 - 15 years old target and research about their lifestyle
  • Looking for research about habit formation
• New train candidate (by Ben Francis)
  • Active inquiry with Strategy Analytics into tablet market growth and forecasts
• Working on market deep dive into conversational UIs and digital assistants
• User Research
• Just hired a new contractor to work in User Research
• During the Portland work week, Product and UX are working to see what the best case for user research would be.
• Will likely work on Vaani first

• Smartphone Commercial Transition Wiki
• Confirming level of support for services

• Smartphone Code Transition Wiki
• Lock screen working as chrome
• Utility tray now works on both debug and non-debug builds
• Can configure WiFi and set the date and time in Settings
• Removed the dependency on apps status in the audiochannel code
• Started work on a new Places database without DataStore and getting the radio functions working
• System Messages and Web Activities APIs removed from Gecko

• B2G OS Transition Wiki
• Lots of community meetings coming up next week, starting with the monthly transition meeting on Monday, then working group meetings on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday
• Working to identify build and test requirements for volunteer community
• Staff member to join meetings for volunteers group focused on build and test