Well – BlueVia are actually doing that: taking the capabilities of the network and making them available to developers through an accessible developer program. If you combine that capability with the emerging idea that applications will exist in the cloud and be accessed by users through a range of connected devices, the important role such a provider can play becomes clear.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. Vodafone is a great company and working there has been a fantastic experience. I’ve worked with some great people on some amazing projects. I’m immensely proud of the work I’ve done there. The work I’ve been engaged in at Vodafone has often focused on bringing the Web to the mobile – the w3c Mobile Web Initiative and dotMobi were early examples: making it easier for Web developers to engage with users across a range of mobile devices.

But now it’s time to move on to a different set of challenges – to look at things from a different angle: how can we bring the mobile to the Web? How can we make mobile networks more transparent and more useful for Web and app developers – to enable new kinds of experiences that are uniquely mobile.

People have asked me a lot of questions about the move so I though a short FAQ might be in order:

What about your W3C activities? I’m not going to be playing an active role in W3C in my new role. However, Web standards and advocacy thereof are are part of my DNA. Telefónica are a W3C member and I will continue to play a role from the sidelines.

What about your role on the W3C TAG? Will you run again? As I’ve told the W3C community already, I’m not going to be putting myself forward for another term on the TAG. However, with agreement of all parties, I will be serving out my current term until the end of January.

Are you moving to Madrid? No. I’m staying in London. The role is based in London at Telefónica Digital’s offices (once they find suitable offices). In the mean time, I’m going to be working out of places like TechHub and Adam Street where I will be more than happy to chat in person about what’s happening with BlueVia.

What’s going to happen to Over the Air and Mobile 2.0? These were always side projects for me (though thankfully projects that were allowed by my employer). I’m going to continue to be involved with putting these together at my new role.

What about MobileMonday London? I had already stepped back from direct involvement in MobileMonday London at the end of last year. Since then, I’ve played an advisory role to MoMo London and I will continue to do so.

BlueVia looks like it’s about Apps – I thought you were the Mobile Web guy? BlueVia is about helping developers do cool stuff using network APIs (apologies to James Parton if I am mangling the marketing message right there but you get the idea). This includes Web and App developers. One of the things I’m going to be working on is making BlueVia more friendly for Web developers so if you have any suggestions along those lines, please send them my way.

I noticed a mistake on the BlueVia web site. Can you fix it? Er. Give me a minute to get settled in… :)

I have a suggestion about BlueVia. Interested? Absolutely.

Photo Credit: Ariff Shah

[This is a re-posting of a two-part blog post originally published on the Mobile 2.0 blog. For a discount code for mobile 2.0, please DM me on Twitter or leave a comment here and I'll send you one.]

If you’ve ever seen one of those NASA simulations of galaxies colliding, you’ll know it’s a messy business. Symmetric spirals, serenely evolving and progressing through the universe on their own, suddenly encounter each other. The result is a violent conflagration. Plumes of previously well-ordered stars go shooting off into space, only to be drawn back in and shot out again in another directions; seeming child galaxies form, only to be absorbed again in more churning cataclysms. The time-scales over which this occurs are, of course, astronomical. At human-scale time, all we can ever perceive is a moment, frozen in time.

We are in the middle of such an event right now in both the Web and mobile industries. Our galaxies are colliding; they have been colliding for a number of years; and they will continue to collide for years to come. The result will be a new landscape, a new ecosystem, a new industry. What that industry will look like is not clear, but we can guess at its shape. At this year’s mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, we are once again going to take a stab at doing just this.

In 2006, before our first Mobile 2.0 event, when I first sensed the colliding of these two galaxies, I wrote a post about what I thought that future might look like. I stole a page out of the book of Tim O’Reilly in trying to define Mobile 2.0, attempting to use the same approach he used for the (then newly-minted) term “Web 2.0” to get a hold of what I saw happening in the convergence between the Internet/Web and Mobile worlds. One of the key ideas in this post was that the future of mobile was both the Web and connected applications. That view of the world was driven by what I saw happening with the fledgling app ecosystem on (then primarily Nokia / Symbian) connected smartphones and the fledgling mobile Web ecosystem, especially what was going on with webkit-based mobile browsers (also pioneered by Nokia). In my 2006 view of the future, the Web and connected applications would co-exist and (importantly) the Web would be the vector whereby these applications would be discovered, downloaded and installed.

Well, I almost got it right. What I didn’t anticipate was the rise of paid app stores. The bundled app stores (which are apps themselves) has created a gravity around downloadable, installable apps. So – while it has now become possible, on modern smartphones, to find and download apps from a universe of choices, that universe is actually constrained in some very important ways. What you can discover is constrained. How you can pay is constrained. And importantly for the developer, the tools they can use, types of applications they can build, and ways they can make money are, to a greater or lesser degree, constrained.

HTML5 is being touted by many as alternative approach to building apps – apps that would live in the browser in the same away that browser-based apps have started to appear on the PC Web. In some ways, this is true. Some in the mobile industry have jumped on HTML5 as a panacea, finally delivering “write once, run anywhere” apps. It also is being seen as a way around the vertically controlled app ecosystem promoted and maintained by the platform providers.

HTML5 is not primarily about mobile. It is about the evolution of the Web. It is about the consolidation of the Web platform. The Web has been on an evolution path since the first browsers, roughly speaking from a Web of documents to a Web of applications; from the Web as a document sharing system to the web as an application development and deployment platform. HTML5, and the related APIs, protocols and formats that are often lumped together with it, is simply the latest sign-post on that evolutionary path. The Web has had a profound impact, not only on commerce and industry but on humanity, on the way we now expect to consume information, interact and communicate with others. The Web by its nature is open. It is built primarily on royalty-free standards, it is closely (though not exclusively) tied to open source projects and software, it is diffuse and does not allow for a single point of control. This open Web platform of technologies includes new features that start to bring the Web on a par with native approaches to application development – specifically, off-line use (launching and using a Web application even when not connected to the network), access to device features (geolocation now with more APIs quickly following behind) and fluid UI (smooth animations, touch events, 2d graphics and other technologies needed to provide compelling user experiences). Building Web applications with HTML5 is still software engineering and it is still hard work, but it may make it possible to leverage the abilities of an engineering team already skilled up in the ways of the Web to build (and more importantly revise and maintain) mobile services more easily and at lower cost than maintaing separate teams (or outsourced teams) to build apps on different architectures.

What’s more, the same parties, the same companies, in many cases the same people who promote the “closed” app ecosystems are also pouring resource and money into this open Web ecosystem, a parallel ecosystem. This can make companies like Google and Apple seem schizophrenic at times. But look at the bigger picture. The apps world looms large in mobile, partially because it is the fulfilment of an idea that many people evangelized for many years, but which stubbornly refused to come true. Yes – finally people are using the mobiles for something else other then voice and text. And this use has become mainstream. That’s one way to look at it. But look at it from the Web industry point of view. The developer of a service or application on the Web wants reach – reach to as many platforms as possible for as cheaply as possible. They see mobile as a channel to customers and to more usage of their application. Mobile is only one piece of the puzzle to them – and mobile apps and app stores are only one channel to market.

So what does HTML5 really mean for mobile? If we are to glimpse an answer to that question then we have to move beyond the “web vs. apps” mentality. Application developers need to consider the Web platform along side of the various “native” application development platforms out there as one approach, one potential set of tools, one possible way to reach users, with its unique set of plusses and minuses.

In the end, it is clear that HTML5 will play an important part in this cosmic collision between Web and mobile of which we currently find ourselves a part. The lasting legacy of HTML5 in mobile, however, may be the linking of the evolution of the Web to the evolution of mobile apps. And while the Web may be evolving to be a better platform for mobile apps, and this is a positive step for the Web and for mobile, the more exciting development will be how the Web disrupts app stores by providing a compelling alternative to app stores for service and application discovery.

At Mobile 2.0 this year, I’m glad to say we’ll be exploring some of these issues with a galaxy of stars – people who have been working at the sharp end of the convergence between the mobile and Web and at the sharp end of disruptive innovation in mobile. At one of our afternoon workshops (“Mobile Web Present and Future”) we will be delving deep into the issues of the impact of HTML5 on mobile. We’ll be looking at current best practices for building great mobile applications using HTML5 and related technologies (with James Pearce from Sencha and Mat Womer from W3C – the standards body responsible for HTML5). Then we’ll switch to thinking about the (mobile) Web platform of the future. What’s missing from from the Web platform from a mobile perspective? Scott Jenson, who wrote a compelling piece on this topic earlier this year, will lead this part of the workshop. The intention of this workshop is to “move the needle” – to create help to create a community of practice around these technologies that will last beyond the event itself. I hope you’ll join us.

But what relevance does the “Mobile 2.0” conference have in 2010?

Hard to believe that this will be the fifth Mobile 2.0 event running in Silicon Valley. In 2006, after discussing with Mike Rowehl and Gregory Gorman the fact that the Web 2.0 Summit (and many other industry events focusing on disruptive innovation) had no mobile-related content to speak of, we decided to create Mobile 2.0 – a day-long event that would take the format we had helped develop with MobileMonday and expand it to a day-long event. The result was Mobile 2.0 – ok, not the most original name, I grant you. But behind the name, there was and continues to be an ethos that is different from other industry events. We are informal. We are emphatically not pay-for-play. We are people who work and live in this industry. We value people with knowledge they are willing and excited to share with others. We are passionate (and I don’t use the word lightly) about innovation in mobile and we have borne witness to a great era of change in that industry. We strongly believe in the importance of holistic thinking – bringing together entrepreneurs, developers, strategists, VCs, designers and marketers to talk to and learn from each-other. We understand that we live on a planet and that innovation is happening around the globe. We shy away from hype and try to expose the realities of what’s going on. We agree that the convergence between the Internet and the mobile platforms is creating a new medium with aspects of both. We are trying to move the needle.

Will you join us?

Leave a comment here or drop me a note through the Social Web to get a discount code if you’d like to come along.

By the way, get in touch with me by dropping a note here or through the Social Web to get a discount code for Mobile 2.0 if you want to come along.

photo credit: Charlotte Gilhooly

I’m an early adopter, or possibly a serial alpha tester. I’m always willing to give something new a go, especially when it comes to new ways to get around my city, London. I was first off the block to get an Oyster card – a fantastic innovation that has transformed Tube and Bus travel, in my opinion. I was an early customer of the “OnePulse” combined Oyster-Visa-contactless payment card – less than fantastic, but that’s the subject of another post. So it should come as no surprise that I was one of the first to sign up for the new “Cycle Hire” scheme in London – cheerily called “Boris’s Bikes” by the press. (Us Londoners know they’re really Ken’s bikes but “Ken’s Bikes” suffers from a lack of aliteration so “Boris’s Bikes” it is.)

They probably had enough work to do just launching the service and getting basic e-commerce systems up and running to worry about mobile app development and I’m aso guessing they didn’t have the expertise in house (though that’s just a guess). Many companies and organizations launching new services, particularly in government, might be in similar situations. They could have decided to bag mobile all together, but that would have been shortsighted. Clearly, this is a service that needed a mobile component.  So, as reported in the Guardian, TFL decided not to roll their own mobile app associated with the service but rather opened the field up budding mobile developers. They did so by releasing their data as an API to the developer community and seeing what emerged. And what emerged was a host of mobile applications, some of which have been reported on in the Londonist and CNet UK.

To guide me on my (so-far) three cycle hire journeys, I’ve used the Android Cycle Hire Widget by Little Fluffy Toys. It gives you instant feedback on your home screen on the location, direction and status of the 3 nearest docking stations: invaluable information at the beginning and end of your journey. (I’m also glad to report that we will be featuring a session from Little Fluffy Toys at this year’s Over the Air on how they built that app.)

The main take-away here is that by opening up their data through an API, TFL enabled a market to develop around how to best visualize and package that data for mobile use. And what we’ve seen emerge so far is only the tip of the iceberg. I fully expect to see mashups and other creative uses of that data in the near future.

Prediction #1: I have seen the future, and it is Android. Or rather, the Android model is going to be the model that “wins out.” Right now, especially for those who tote iPhones around, that might be difficult to see or understand. The iPhone seems like a device which embodies all the mobile 2.0 ideals I first wrote about in 2006. It provides access to a wealth of applications and services. It’s easy to use. It’s connected. It has created new product categories (apps) and new routes to market. But, as iPhone detractors often point out, it’s a closed ecosystem. I submit that no matter how “insanely great” the iPhone is, the ecosystem that Apple has created around it cannot scale. So, we are back to another prediction I made, at 2008′s Future of Mobile conference: Android will be to the iPhone what the PC was to the Mac. Why? User choice. You can download and install an app on an Android phone without buying it from Android Market. You can download it directly, or from an alternative app store such as GetJar. I predict 2010 will be the year that Android apps will begin to rival iPhone apps – maybe not in terms of sheer numbers, but in terms of consumer and developer mindset. This will be the year in which “download our Android App” buttons will join “download our iPhone App” buttons on sites across the Web. Don’t believe me? Check out this interesting data point (take a look at the “customer satisfaction” graph – I predict Android and iPhone will change places by the end of the year).

Prediction #2: At the same time, richer functionality (enabled by the HTML5 platform and APIs such the geolocation API) within to the browser and web runtimes will enable the creation of a new class of WebApp  (and Web Widgets) that will work interchangeably between Android, iPhone and other emerging smartphone platforms. The result of this trend will bolster the growth of Android as consumers will begin to perceive that they don’t have to buy iPhone to get a rich mobile Web experience.

Prediction #3: The Social Web will rise. This is hardly a surprising prediction coming from me. But what will it mean for the (mobile) industry and for consumers? We have already seen a rise of social apps and webapps on mobile, such as Brightkite, Yelp, Rummble and Foursquare: applications that take advantage of unique features of the mobile platform to bring real-time social connection into new places and to new user communities. We will start to see these applications weave together using emerging social web standards such as the so-called open stack and activity streams. For users, it will mean easier and  more seamless social sharing, especially for long-tail social apps. The social web will make it easier for people to choose the right tool for the job without being as constrained by “where their friends are.” The mobile industry, however, is generally more used to thinking about scale and market-dominating players (yes, e.g. Facebook), so the tools the mainstream mobile industry puts in front of people will continue to orbit around these market-dominating social networks. (Ironically, the Facebooks of the world very much understand the social web trend so are actually on their way towards dismantling their walled gardens just as mobile industry players are building more functionality on top of them.) Meanwhile, predictions #1 and #2 will mean that people will have more and more choices and will increasingly go “off-piste” and choose their own social tools and applications.

It all adds up to 2010 being the year of user choice: choice of handset, choice of platforms, choice of social networks, choice of apps.

So be it! If you want to find out more about these topics and others vitally important to the future of the mobile and Web industries, come join me in Barcelona on June 18^th and 19^th for Mobile 2.0 Europe. Day one will be a developer day featuring presentations, tutorials (and unstructured sessions) on key software technologies and innovations in the mobile and mobile Web space and day two will be more strategic, focusing on disruptive innovation in the mobile space and featuring startups and innovators from across the spectrum. It’s going to be an exciting two days.

Betavine (Vodafone R&D’s developer community portal), with some help from the inimitable folks at Carsonified, have laucnhed a new blog dedicated to Mobile Widgets and Web Apps.  The idea is to get as much information out as possible about what Betavine and Vodafone are doing in the widget space and what’s going on with the latest widget standardization efforts. We’ll also be featuring information on upcoming events, like the W3C widget camp at WWW2009 in Madrid next week and the upcoming Vodafone Mobile Widget Camp in Amsterdam on May 2nd. We’ll also be posting on Twitter on @MobileWidgets on Twitter. Stay tuned!

Prediction two: mobile widgets and Web applications will rule the day.  W3C-standard Web widget platforms and downloadable widgets will proliferate and begin to eclipse the current proprietary platforms for downloadable mobile applications. This will be accompanied by increasingly capable Web and widgets platforms (with hooks into device capabilities and functions like the camera, location, etc…). Yes, there will be fragmentation in this space that will have to be reigned in. Nobody said reinventing the Web was easy.

All the best for 2009!

Email as a medium is not keeping up with how we interact, how we do our jobs, how we live in the modern world. It’s overtaken by spam (encouraged by its nature as an open and free medium and the relatively little it costs to send out emails in bulk). It has no intrinsic trust mechanism (and developments like sender policy framework are basically a band-aid and do not address personal trust circles, only whether an email is from where it purports to come from). Email has no intrinsic semantics that allow email clients to do anything useful with them. Even advanced email clients can do little to help with this mess. Email is actually follows a typical trajectory for innovation. In the book Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner takes us through a history of technological innovation and why some innovations have “unintended consequences.” The unintended consequences of Email have become all-to-clear: lost time, “inbox anxiety,” spam and “BCC cultute” are only some of them. My view is that email is fundamentally mismatched with an “always connected” world – and these days we are always connected – and it’s been hopelessly outpaced by the far more powerful social paradigms of social networks. Email is a monster which has grown to enormous proportions and which we are all spending our time feeding, to the detriment of our real lives. Email can also be ambiguous. I receive so much email that I have to filter my CCs into a separate folder which I don’t look at as often – but then people will CC me on a message that requires my urgent attention and get annoyed when I don’t respond right away. Email woes are accentuated by the fact that no significant innovation has happened in the world of email clients in 10 years.

Imagine a life without Email.

Need to get in touch with a friend?  Use Twitter “direct message.” It’s much more difficult for you to be spammed, because you control who connects to you. Bonus: you have to be terse. Need a longer conversation? Use Skype or another IM solution. Need to send someone a file? Again – IM. More immediate and you KNOW the recipient has received it. How about you need to arrange a meeting or a drinks out?  Social networks provide all the mechanisms you need for this. Need to share a file with a large number of people?  Use a Web-based sharing service like Google Docs or Zoho and then alert them using one of the means above.

Ok – technically most of the services mentioned above require access to an email account (for registration and identity verification). Zipiko is an example of one that doesn’t – you can sign up with only a mobile number.

I imagine an email-free world as a kind of utopian existence where people no longer spend hours and hours of their time each day “clearing their inbox” or methodically filing mail away into meaningless folders. Close your eyes and visualize it with me.

Crazy? Someone at IBM is already living the dream.