Just came across this news item this morning. Very interesting news, I think. I saw these guys present at Future of Web Apps and I have to say it’s a great application of “user generated content” — in this case, user generated metadata - and “leveraging collective intelligence.” It’s also a good news for the UK startup scene.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 8:53 under London, Web 2.0
Tags: last.fm
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I have started a new blog, “Mobile Web Review,” where I’ll be reviewing mobile Web sites. My first victim is FlickR mobile. For what I had to say, go on over to Mobile Web review, hosted on Vodafone Betavine. Also, take a look at what my comrade in arms Kevin Smith is saying on the Mobile Web Technologies blog.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 18:34 under Blogs, Mobile Web
Tags: Betavine, flickr, MobileWeb
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Whether we like it or not, touch-screen phones are on the way in. Apple iPhone has made sure of that. There were some out there in the market already but by far the one that’s gotten the most press has been the Prada Phone. So I had an opportunity this week to handle a Prada phone. It’s a slick little phone. I like the UI — the way it animates between different states (for example, from main menu to phone book). However, some of my theories regarding the utility of a touch-screen phone definitely played out. First of all, I was handling this thing during lunch and it picked up a lot of grease - to the point where I didn’t want to touch it any more. The touch screen has the kind of finish that looks great in a crystal display case in Harrods, but the minute it touches the open air and starts getting used, or (gasp) being pressed up against your face, it starts to get really gross. I think this will be a problem for the iPhone as well.
So — what about the browser? I fired up the default browser on the thing (Obigo). It took a while to load up but when it did and it started to display content, I got a real shock. I tried “tapping” on a link — no response. I tried scrolling the page by sliding the scroll bar — no response. What the heck? They I looked down at the bottom of the screen — where four buttons appeared with up, down, left and right arrows (in a row). I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Yes on the Prada phone, you have to use a badly re-created four-way navigation (a “soft joystick”) at the bottom of the screen to navigate the browser.
It really reinforces my view that even the most advanced phones still ship with cruddy browsers or in this case obviously rushed implementations. These problems are still holding back the mobile Web.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:15 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: MobileWeb, obigo, pradaphone, schmutz, touchscreen
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Having Mor from Yahoo! Resarch pimp my phone up with the latest and greatest Zonetag. Thanks, Mor!
Ok — I’m going to sleep now.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:24 under Mobility
Tags: www2007, ZoneTag
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Apart from MobEA V (and meeting Dick Hardt — my quote: “Hey. You’re famous!”), the other highlight of the event for me was the panel I got to chair on Mobile Ajax. Now — this is an interesting topic, and we had some great speakers on the panel (the inset photo is Arun from AOL being his usual irreverent self) with a lot of interesting things to say. We also had Mark Birbeck from x-port, Rhys Lewis from Volantis, and Song Huang from SoonR. The panel kind of explored two alternative visions of how Web Apps will be built and deployed — declaratively (such as with xForms) or (as they are now) through script and currently deployed Web standards. This same conversation is playing itself out in the regular Web world, but one twist that Mobile adds is the issue of processing power and battery life on the devices themselves. If you want to create a Web application that runs on the phone using Ajax, that will eat up your battery pretty quickly. Now that may just be an issue of optimization of the underlying engine, but the fact remains (especially for applications that you want to sit there and poll periodically like … say … widgets that sit on your phone’s screen and provide glance-able information) it’s just not practical to do it in Ajax right now.
Song from SoonR gave a great opening presentation and demo of that product which really opened peoples’ eyes to the possibilities of Ajax on the mobile device - in this case, both Opera Mobile and the Series 60 Open Source browser. I myself has been shopping a video of this application in action around various conferences and events and it never fails to draw gasps. Most people don’t actually believe it’s running in the browser, it’s so slick. (It does.) What SoonR have done with Ajax on the mobile is truly revolutionary.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:21 under Mobile Web
Tags: Ajax, mobileajax, www2007
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People that I have never met came up to me and told me that they read this blog. Like… regularly. That’s frickin’ weird.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:01 under Blogs
Tags: www2007
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Highlight: wisdom from Dick Hardt (”don’t use the ‘I’ word unless it’s as an adjective or an adverb.”) Very deep.
Lowlight: The whole idea of “Web History.” Ok ok — I know this is actually a good idea, but something at me just bristles at the whole thing. I mean, do we really need Web History yet? Can’t it wait until after I’m dead? I did visit the exhibit briefly and I added some important (to me) dates into their timeline. In seeing what others have added, it occurred to me that the history of the Web is actually quite fragmented and quite personal. Sure — there are some key influential events and decisions, but especially with the rise and fall of the dot-coms, it’s all about stories of individual success and failure, and more often than not really bizarre individuals.
Anyway, the real highlight of the week for me was the MobEA V (Mobile Emerging Applications) workshop which I helped put together with Rittwik Jana. This workshop focused on the role of the mobile Web in developing regions. We had great presentations from a number of attendees, including Ken Banks, the ubiquitous Charles McCathieNevile (he also presented at Mobile Monday London this week on Mobile Widgets — this guy gets around more than I do), and Galit Zadok. Most interesting presentation of the day had to have been from Krithi Ramamritham at IIT Bombay covering what they have done with the Almost All Questions Answered project (aAQUA). Among other things, this Web-based system allows rural farmers to send in agricultural questions (sometimes accompanied by digital photos) and get them answered by domain experts as well as their peers. Very cool stuff. The whole workshop was like a firehose of information — I hope to publish some notes soon. I’m also looking forward to working with Stephane Boyera over at W3C on this topic as they ramp up their initiative on this important topic.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:53 under Mobile Web, Web
Tags: mobea, www2007
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Great presentation on use of the Mobile Web in combination with geospatial information to turn your mobile into a “spatial information appliance.” Not only is this work using location, device orientation combined with building geometry information harvested from Google Earth in a completely innovative way, but the presenter also made reference to the Mobile Web Best Practices and specifically to thematic consistency. Awesome.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:53 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: geospatial, MobileWeb, www2007
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Now sitting in a session at WWW2007, listening to a paper presentation on some research on anonymous location-based services. This research addresses a key issue with location-based services: user privacy. They have articulated a very sophisticated approach to this issue which takes into account the issues with traditional “anonomizer” type systems. These issues became front-page news (registration required) last year when it was revealed that information on search terms revealed to researchers by AOL could be used to identify individual searchers by correlating it with other easily obtainable data. AOL’s CTO was fired as a result.
The previous presentation on this track, from KDDI, was interesting but essentially boiled down to another way to render the so-called real Web on small screens. Interesting work, but a problem that I believe has a short shelf-life for two reasons. First, more and more Web sites are developing more sophisticated mobile versions, and second screen size, resolution and processing power on smart phones is making it increasingly likely that the Nokia S60 browser (and iPhone) approach to rendering the non-mobile-optimized Web will win out.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:23 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: KDDI, PRIVÉ, www2007
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I was excited to read today that Comeks, a great application for creating comic-book art on your phone, picked up some funding. Of course, I was talking about this app a year ago. I still think it’s one of the coolest content creation environments I’ve ever seen. Congratulations to Arto and the whole team up there. Don’t spend it all in one place.
Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:20 under Mobility
Tags: comeks
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