Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Great blog post at the New York Times last week about the disproportionate percentage of iPhone users (84.8%) who use the iPhone regularly to access the Web (compared to users of other smart phone devices). Mark Donovan of M:Metrics is quoted in the article saying that this is because the iPhone is particularly well suited to “people who are jacked into the Internet all the time.” Doesn’t putting the Web front and center on the device, bundling the device with very Internet-friendly price plans, and making the thing so damn easy to use have just as much to do with it? It’s no surprise to me that Google has seen 50 times more searches from the iPhone than from any other mobile handset (as reported in the FT last month). I’ve spent the last 3 years in lamenting the fact that device manufacturers make it so difficult to find the place to enter the URL into the browser that most people simply give up. My three year old daughter picked up my iPhone for the first time and within seconds she had brought up the browser, found the space to enter a URL and had started typing away. That was a an ah-ha moment for me about the iPhone’s usability. Mark kind of implies that iPhone owners are using the mobile Web because only because they are naturally predisposed to such use. My gut feeling is that the iPhone is actually “crossing the chasm” into the general public. There is a latent demand for the mobile Web and the iPhone is tapping that demand, where others have failed and continue to fail.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:46 under Mobile Web
Tags: iPhone, M:Metrics, MobileWeb

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I’ve been working for a while now with the folks at BBC Backstage, Imperial College London and Betavine to put an event that has had many incarnations, but has now coalesced into its final form: Over the Air. With an expected attendance of over 450 and multiple conference tracks including talks on a range of Mobile technologies and disciplines, it’s safe to say that this is the most logistically complex event I’ve ever worked on. The result, I’m hoping, will be something entirely new: a new kind of mobile developer event that brings together the best aspects of a “code camp” with some great talks and hands-on “master class” session from thought leaders in mobile development. We’ve got Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, Google, Sun, Thoughtworks, W3C and that’s just for starters. We’ve also got a strong element of user experience and design with speakers from Idean, Fling Media and more. Speaker list is on the site and program details will be posted to the Web site soon.

If you want to get a glimpse of the future of mobile platform innovation, register for this event and come join us at Imperial College London campus in South Kensington on the 4th and 5th of April. Did I mention that registration is free?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:39 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0
Tags: mobilemonday, MoMoLondon, overtheair

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I was very lucky this past week to have been invited to Seoul (along with the other members of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices, Device Descriptions and Ubiquitous Web working groups) to participate in something that came to be know as Mobile Web Week.

The week of W3C working group meetings was punctuated by a day-long open workshop which we named W3C Mobile Wednesday. (Yes, my intention is to mobilize every day of the week - already we have had Mobile Monday and Mobile Sunday. Now Wednesday has fallen. Can Thursday be far behind?) Mobile Wednesday was actually a unique opportunity to hear from people working in Korea on the sharp end of the Mobile Web and to do a little bit of a sales job about the work we’ve been doing in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative and why it might be relevant there.

One factor that greatly helped create a feeling of open dialog was the presence of simultaneous translation during the whole event. It’s a luxury I almost never get to experience, but it really can help to facilitate discussion when someone else is worrying about the burden of translation. The translators were a wonder - deftly dealing with sometimes very thick technical discussion, especially during the panel sessions.

Besides Mobile Wednesday, I also had the pleasure of speaking to many Koreans living and breathing the Mobile Web, including representatives of the Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, the Korean W3C office, ETRI, and of the Korean companies involved in W3C activities, such as SK-Telecom and Samsung.

So - what impressions am I left with after this week?

I have more questions than answers, but my overall impressions are that the challenges to the growth of the mobile Web in Korea are similar to the challenges the world over. Perceptions about usage and comparisons to the “real web” are also a problem. I have to respectfully disagree with a statement made by one of the other conference speakers that Korean use of the Mobile Web hasn’t taken off because “Koreans already have very high speed access to the Web at home and at the office.” Yes, Broadband penetration is really high in Korea. However, the use cases for using the Web on the move are different from the use cases for using it in front of a computer. Other speakers at the event highlighted some of these, particular social gaming and one-to-many messaging. Interesting side-note, nobody seemed to know what Twitter was but there are apparently a couple of similar Korean services.

One basic challenge Koreans might have to bringing the Web to the phone is the high use of Flash. Seems that most Korean (PC) Web sites are full of Flash content. Even the photo of me that appeared in the Korean tech news article was embedded in Flash for some reason. The fact that these sites aren’t working on even highly sophisticated mobile browsers is no doubt putting people off the concept of mobilizing the Web.

In any case, it was a very educational an informative week. Special thanks go out to Jonathan Jeon (전종홍) for his role in putting it all together and for posting some great video of the Mobile Wednesday event (see link).

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:22 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWednesday, MWI, Seoul

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François Daoust of W3C and I were interviewed by the Korean press about the work of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group.  Unfortunately,  the article hasn’t been translated so I have no idea what they said about us, but hey — any publicity is good publicity, I suppose.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:45 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: ETNews, Korea, MobileWeb, MWI, Seoul, W3C

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I’m sitting in the Korean Airlines lounge in Narita (Tokyo) airport after an 11 hour flight from London, watching a seemingly endless succession of JAL 747s taking off. When I arrived, there were no promised uniformed agents showing me the way. All the doors marked “international connections” were closed. In the end, I had to find my way through a very forbidding looking corridor and I was sure I was going to be turned back and possibly detained, but the airport staff I eventually found were very helpful and guided me to the checkpoint I needed for my connection. So, here I sit, stealing WiFi from the Northwest lounge next door.

In an hour I’ll be on another flight on my way to Seoul, South Korea. I don’t speak a word of Korean, I have no local currency and I’ve most likely packed the wrong plug adapters. But on Monday morning, I will convene the next face to face meeting of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group. After that, I plan to participate in an event called W3C Mobile Wednesday, a kind of east-meets-west open conference-style event bringing together people working in mobile Web standardization and those working on the sharp end of the mobile Web in Korea: people from manufacturers and operators, yes, but also entrepreneuers, bloggers, developers. It’s all thanks to the Korean Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, ETRI, and the people at the W3C offfice in Korea. I’m very excited about this event and this whole week. Besides making some real progress on the work of the Mobile Web Best Practices group, I hope to get a real flavor for how the mobile Web (and other digital services) are being delivered in Korea, a place that showcases (according to Jim O’Reilly and Tomi Ahonen in their book Digital Korea) the “Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home”.
That and enjoy some good kimchi.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 2:06 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: Korea, mobile2.0, MobileWeb, MWI, W3C

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