Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Last year, I predicted that 2006 would be the year of the mobile Web and that the mobile Web would “go main stream.” I think I can say that this prediction has largely played itself out. The rise of the mobile Web has become a topic in the mainstream press. Products like the X-Series from 3 and the Nokia Series-60 Web browser have addressed both the functionality and the cost issues. Opera launched Mini, opening up sophisticated Web browsing to a much wider range of handsets. The work of the Mobile Web Best Practices working group and the W3C Mobile Web Initiative have also played a role in providing guidelines to Web site developers and generating awareness of the mobile Web.

Although it continues to be controversial, dotMobi, which also launched in 2006, has played a key role in raising awareness of the mobile Web. I’m proud to have played a role both in the development and launch of dotMobi and in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative.

What I couldn’t have predicted at the end of 2005 was the rapid growth of other sophisticated Web and Internet-linked applications. Mobile photo-sharing and video-sharing are becoming as ubiquitous as their “traditional” Web counterparts. Web powerhouses like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (Windows Live) have launched their own custom mobile applications for mail and messaging. Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets are also starting to play a role in bringing sophisticated and rich user experiences to the mobile handset. The walled gardens are opening up. Mobile Web advertising is rocketing forward, showing a possible path to revenue in this burgeoning space. These were the trends and innovations we focused on at the mobile2.0 event last month in San Francisco, and it was clear from the crowd we drew there and the overwhelmingly positive feedback on the event that we have come to an “inflection point” for the mobile Web.

My second prediction had to do with the use of the mobile Web in the developing world. We haven’t really seen any staggering advances here, although clearly mobile telephony itself is taking off in the developing world, and there are some interesting data points, such as the BBC article I referenced earlier in the year, to indicate mobile Web usage is becoming an important part of this trend. The W3C also ran an important workshop earlier in the month focusing on this topic (for which they just issued a workshop report that is definitely worth a read). There are really two stories here: one of them is about the usefulness of the Web in the developing world and the other is about how the mobile phone is bringing sophisticated technology into the hands of users there - helping to bridge the digital divide. I’m going to be co-chairing another workshop on this topic with Rittwik Jana of AT&T research at the upcoming WWW2007 conference. There we hope to build on the work of the W3C workshop and continue to throw light on this important subject.

More to come soon on wrap-up for 2006 and predictions going into 2007.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:52 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0

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I’ll be at 3GSM this year again. I’m expecting (and hoping) this year’s event to be more interesting than last year’s. At the last event, it was all about MobileTV. This time, the Mobile Web will be front and center. I will be attending mainly in support of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, which will have an increased presence (at the ignominiously designated 7D56 booth in Hall 7 - hopefully better placement than last year). We will also hopefully be featuring a special speaker this year on the mobile Web which I think will get people talking.
We will also be running a Mobile Monday “Global Peer Awards” event there this year, which is certainly a step up from the informal gathering around the Finpro booth we held last year. Rudy at Mobile Monday Barcelona has put together a great event with some help from Helsinki and some of the other chapters. I’ll be acting as a judge at the awards. This will be the 3rd annual Global Peer Awards, although the first to run at 3GSM (the last two ran at the Mobile Monday Global Summit in Helsinki). The awards will once again be throwing the spotlight on innovation in the Mobile community by featuring an array of start-up companies put forward by Mobile Monday chapters from around the world. If you’re going to be in Barcelona, I urge you to register early to be a part of this event before the space fills up. I guarantee it’ll be like nothing else you’re likely to see at 3GSM.

Also find more info on Upcoming.org.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:29 under Mobile Monday, Mobility
Tags: 3gsm, mobilemonday, MobileWeb, Mobility, momobcn, peerawards

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I’ve just added a label (as it happens, an ICRA label) to my site. Why? Because content labeling (or “labeling” depending on what longitude you reside in) is going to be an important building block of the future of the Web. If you pick up a box of breakfast cereal at the supermarket, you can look at a label and quickly determine if its ingredients are going to be suitable for you. For example, many products these days contain a warning label if they contain nuts for those of us that suffer from nut allergies. Even if you don’t have food allergies, but just prefer to eat organically produced food, you can look at the label. A content label for a Web site is analogous to such a food label, but is primarily intended to be processed by machines. The most deployed site labeling technology is ICRA (Internet Content Labeling Association) which was developed for child protection. Hence, ICRA is most appropriate for labeling “adult content.” The result has been that the adult content industry (keen to show they are supporting child protection and thereby avoid regulation) have embraced labels. And that’s the current state of labeling on the Web: lots of porn sites have labels. Most other sites do not.

But adult content is not the only possible application for content labels. For example, a content label can tell you whether a Web site is accessible (has it followed the W3C’s WAI guidelines?). A content label can tell you if the content is appropriate for educational needs. A label can also tell you if content is mobile friendly, and that’s the theory underlying the work that the Mobile Web Best Practices working group is undertaking with mobileOK. Content labels can also be an important enabler in the field of content search and discovery, particularly on the mobile Web. This is what Google mobile sitemaps (for example) are all about — explicitly telling the search engine (the content discovery agent) about the content so the user doen’t have to wade through pages of search results to find what they’re looking for.

So it’s clear that a number of industry requirements are converging on the idea that some kind of metadata will be fed upstream from content providers to browsers and content discovery agents. But can these content labels be built on top of open, inter-operable standards? And will they be trustable? These are some of the questions that the Web Content Labels incubator group (WCL-XG) has sought to answer. This group is likely going to transform into a fully fledged W3C working group some time in the new year in order to develop its initial recommendations into a new W3C standard. This standard could enable a whole ecosystem of labeled content, labeling authorities and label verification services. You can already see glint of how this could work by downloading the Search Thresher Firefox plugin.

Bottom line: content labels built on top of open standards mean more machine-readable data on the Web, which translates to better user experience and ease of use. Verification of these labels mean a more trustable Web. Labels are definitely coming into the mainstream. I fully expect content labels to be a ubiquitous within the next two years — users won’t necessarily even know they exist, but they will be silently improving the trustability and usability the Web. If you want to be ahead of the curve, hop to ICRA.org’s label generator and generate yourself an ICRA label.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:46 under Blogs, Mobile Web, Web
Tags: ContentLabel, ICRA, mobileOK, MobileWeb, searchthresher, W3C

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The Mobile Discussion
Originally uploaded by R.J. Friedlander.

While I’m posting images from San Francisco week, here’s me at the Web 2.0 panel (”The Mobile Discussion”) with Om Malik and Ansi Vanjoki from Nokia. I’m saying “this is the future calling” right after Anssi talked about running Bittorrent on his N93. Om’s thinking “Why do I always get stuck with the weird ones?”

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:45 under Web 2.0
Tags: gigaom, mobile2.0, Nokia, web2.0, web2summit

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Krunk!
Originally uploaded by Mike Rowehl.

Well, it’s a month on from the mobile2.0 event in San Francisco (only a month? It seems like ages ago) and what have we learned. The mobile2.0 meme seems to be taking hold in a fairly distributed fashion, which is good.

We’ve had good press coverage and the linkbacks keep appearing on the “what is mobile2.0″ article on this blog, which I think is an encouraging sign that I was making some kind of sense. That post, by the way, was written on a Virgin Atlantic 747 on the way to San Francisco from London.

By the way, this is a picture of Mike Rowehl and myself enjoying some richly deserved gin martinis at the reception after the event. The grins on our faces say it all: “thank god it’s over!”

We’re now talking about doing another one next year around the same time (sandwiched between Web 2.0 and CTIA which returns to San Francisco next year). Please post thoughts and suggestions about format, etc… either here or on the event blog.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:17 under mobile 2.0
Tags: mikerowehl, mobile2.0, mobilemonday, MobileWeb

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Great post on Mobile 2.0 today on ReadWriteWeb by Rudy De Waele (who happens to be one of the organizers of Mobile Monday Barcelona).

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:01 under mobile 2.0
Tags: mobile2.0, MobileWeb

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Christmas seems to have come early this year for Nokia N73 owners. When I downloaded and installed the latest software build yesterday, I was surprised to find a new application - a search application that allows you to search Yahoo! and Windows Live as well as local directories (such as Yell.com in the UK). The search results are provided quickly and clicking on each result brings up a quick summary of the page before offering to bring it up in a browser (the Series 60 Open Source Browser) or bookmark it. It’s a great, simple UI for mobile search that’s well integrated into the phone and the browser. And it allows you to download updates over the air. It reminds me a bit of Apple’s Sherlock application. The update, by the way, also seems to speed up the phone UI and so far it also seems more stable (no phone crashes yet, but I’ve only had it installed for 24 hours or so).

The only issue I have here is about the phone update process itself. I had to somehow know that an application (PC only) exists, download it, and then connect my phone via the USB cable in order to update the software. There is no over-the-air update available, even though it seems like this should be feasible with a big enough memory card to store the image. But the bigger issue is just getting the word out about this update — this could be a major quality of life improvement for N73 owners, but the only reason I know about it is because I’m in the industry. It seems like Nokia needs a better way to get these updates out there into users’ hands.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 21:44 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0
Tags: mobile2.0, MobileSearch, MobileWeb, NokiaN73, Search

2 Comments