People that I have never met came up to me and told me that they read this blog. Like… regularly. That’s frickin’ weird.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the most exciting projects I’ve been involved with this year has been the launch of Vodafone Betavine. Betavine is a collaborative portal for the developer community focusing on mobile and communications apps. Although mobile operators have launched developer sites in the past, Betavine is different because it’s aimed at individual, small company and student developers – the real grass roots. It’s also the first Vodafone group Web site to feature a blog, user-generated content.
Betavine is now launching three exciting features: student competitions, APIs and the open source zone. The competition offer students the opportunity to win up to €5000 just for developing and uploading an innovative application in one of four categories (Social Networking & Communications, Information & Entertainment, Office & B2B and Social Impact). Very cool stuff.
The API section (which will be previewed at JavaOne next week by Stephen Wolak, the pioneering soul behind the Betavine initiative) will feature, well, APIs. APIs into network functions, such as location and messaging functions, have been something small company developers have been asking about for years. The Betavine APIs will be initially provide SMS messaging, WAP push and access to Betavine itself (to allow for Betavine mashups). Watch the site for the launch and to find out more details.
Finally, the open source counterpart to Betavine has now launched: Vodafone Betavine Forge. This is a fully functional open source community site featuring CVS, bug tracking, etc… the whole shebang. Along with the launch of the site are three internal Vodafone open source projects that have been released, including a Linux driver for the Vodafone Connect Card and something called Vodafone Mobilescript (an extension to JavaScript for Windows Mobile devices). Both of these are being released under the GPL.
All in all, it’s a big step forward for Vodafone into the developer community. Next week, I’ll be talking it up at WWW2007 and Stephen will be presenting and demonstrating the site at JavaOne. Let the evangelism begin!
On Sunday I head off to Banff, Canada for the WWW2007 conference. This is going to be one busy week — I’m attending and giving a “lightning talk” at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting, then co-chairing a workshop on the role of the Mobile Web in the developing world with Rittwik Jana from AT&T research, then speaking at the conference itself on the progress and future of the Mobile Web Best Practices working group and finally chairing a panel on Mobile Ajax before heading back home. In between all this, I’ll be trying to soak in some of the raw innovation and excitement at the WWW conference. The thing about WWW is that it’s not a glitzy place where you go to mix with rockstars and digerati. It’s where academia and industry meet to hash out the future of Web technologies. I am really looking forward to it.
There are two particularly annoying bugs in the Nokia Series-60 (Webkit-based) Web Browser:
Check-boxes don’t work. In order to “check” a check-box in a form and make it “stick,” you have to click it (so it appears checked), click it again (so it appears not checked) and then move the focus off of the check-box (at which point it will change its state back to checked).
There is a big with the time or time-zone. I have not figured this one out, but on some pages times are misrepresented. In particular, on the “my itineraries” section of the British Airways web site, when I bring up an itinerary it shows me the times of the flights with a one hour off-set (as if I were in CET). The time zone of the phone is set correctly and the time on the phone reads correctly and the same web page brought up on a PC web browser shows the correct time. This bug could have been particularly disastrous for me as I was trying to book a car to the airport yesterday. I brought up my itinerary on the phone and was booking a taxi based on those times. Thanks to a thoughtful American Express employee who bothered to look up my flight numbers, I was saved from probably missing my flight.
And while we’re on the subject of things that piss me off, why does Google (on Firefox on the Mac) insist on showing me pages (such as maps and docs) in German? I’m logged in. It knows who I am. It knows my preferred language is (US) English. But it insists in bringing up pages in German (presumably on the strength that I am in Germany right now). Not helpful.
There’s a great article in today’s IHT on the whole bees vs. mobile phones issue. Are mobile phones to blame for the mysterious “Colony Collapse Disorder” afflicting North American bee colonies? Actually it looks like some journos latched onto a tangentially related scientific study and (without actually contacting the researchers) decided to run the original story. Anyway, it seems to me like we would have seen this effect before now. Typical story, really but you never think of the poor scientists: “Ever since The Independent wrote their aritcle [...] none of us have been able to do any of our work because all our time has been spent in phone calls and e-mails trying to set things straight.”
Most surprising presentation (at least for me) at the Forum Oxford event was from Jeff Sonstein at Rochester Institute of Technology’s “Center for the Handheld Web.” Center for the Handheld Web? I couldn’t believe my eyes — these guys have been dealing with all the issues that we’ve been working through in the Mobile Web Best Practices group and it seems like they’ve come to many of the same conclusions. They’ve gone one step further though and worked through some recommendations regarding the use of scripting in the mobile context (read: “Mobile Ajax”). Very cool stuff.
Well done Ajit and Tomi for putting together a great event!
