Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Open Business Model Panel at Mobile 2.0 Europe moderated by Mike Butcher

It’s the final panel at Mobile 2.0 Europe, featuring panelists from Blyk (Leif Fågelstedt), Admob (Laurence Aderemi), GetJar (Ilja Laurs), Bango (Ray Anderson) and Fjord (Chris Liu) and moderated by an ebullient Mike Butcher. The theme of openness has been a central one here in Barcelona. Everyone seems to agree that openness is good, but nobody can agree quite what openness means or what should be open and what can remain closed. The iPhone, for example, has been held up as a beacon of innovation, but the iPhone is also closed in a number of respects, especially around native application development.

Interesting comment from Chris of Fjord - do we need a “Microsoft” for Mobile (i.e. a single vendor who can dominate the operating system space)? Ray Anderson’s response (which I agree with) is that that common platform could be the Web (and I would add, mobile Widgets which run on top of a runtime environment). Coming back to the iPhone, the thousand+ mobile Web applications in Apple’s directory should be a indication of this trend. The only problem with Web apps is - no access to device capabilities (camera, location, PIM etc…). But this is coming. Both Ilja and Laurence have spoken up on the power of mobile advertising to help bootstrap mobile innovation. We haven’t heard too much from Leif about open business models — they are pretty focused on their basic “voice and text” proposition. My question was: will mobile (Web) advertising morph from simple banners into “branded experiences” such as mobile widgets where the widget itself is the advertisement? No clear answer from the panel but I’m convinced this is the way forward.

Phew! What a day! Lots of contraversy, lots of industry expertise, lots of startups. In short - a fantastic debut for Mobile 2.0 Europe! I need a drink!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:55 under London, mobile 2.0
Tags: m20eu, mikebutcher, mobile2.0

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We didn’t announce the startups on the agenda for Mobile 2.0 Europe - we had to keep something back to make for a little suspense. As I write this, the startups are now on stage presenting:

Aka Aki: an exciting mobile social network platform that uses location and proximity (through Bluetooth) to encourage unanticipated interactions - such as looking up the profile of someone you happened to bump into on the street. It does this by tracking the unique Bluetooth addresses of everyone around you and checking these against registered profiles. Creepy? Possibly, but very cool.

Dial2Do: a voice-based platform for access Web 2.0 services (with a special emphasis on hands-free usage, such as from the car).

Shout’Em: A mobile social network out of Croatia that enables micro-blogging, media sharing, the whole shebang.

ViaMobility: A mobile widget play - taking PC widgets from a varierty of platforms onto the mobile. From the mockup of the experience they presented, it looks pretty compelling.

YouLynx: Converging  the mobile / Internet / PC experience, focusing on messaging, blogging, media share and incorporating Geolocation.

Zipiko: Another social utiloty focusing on organizing adhoc social activities, meetups, and enabling “spending time with friends.” Making it easy to communicate your intentions (like: “I’m going to go get a coffee now”) among a circle of friends. I think they’ve got something - the user experience and design is spot-on. Plus it “improves your sex life.”

There you have it. Time for a coffee break!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 10:27 under Misc
Tags: m20eu, mobile2.0

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Pekka Pohjakallio of Nokia Keynoting Mobile 2.0 Europe

In late 2006, I helped to run an event called Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco. Run up against Web 2.0 Summit, the event was first conceived as a kind of mobile “meet up” for people attending Web 2.0 - people who were interested in mobile innovation, and especially the growing convergence between Web and Mobile (which in 2006 was still quite contraversial). We ended up drawing a crowd of 300 industry professionals. In 2007 we re-ran the event and established Mobile 2.0 as a conference series. Today in Barcelona, Mobile 2.0 Europe is kicking off due to the not inconsiderable talents of Rudy De Wale. In the mean time, the topics we’ve been covering in Mobile 2.0 have gone main stream. Mobile Web, mobile social networking, social media, and other innovations that were seen as fringe in 2006 are now coming into the mainstream of industry thinking. Pekka Pohjakallio from Nokia spoke this morning on how his company is becoming an Internet services company. Alistair Hill from M:Metrics has presented dramatic growth in mobile Web usage in western markets. Now we have on stage a panel on Mobile Social Networking including Zyb (now part of Vodafone) founder Tommy Ahlers and Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO of Itsmy.com (a mobile-only social network that is taking off like wildfire). The rest of today’s program is packed with real industry experts and startups across the spectrum of mobile innovation.

Exciting times? Yes.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:04 under mobile 2.0
Tags: Barcelona, m20eu, mobile2.0

2 Comments

Just made a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. This presentation was a bit of an experiment - combining some “vision thing” stuff about the Mobile Web with some specific recommendations for building Mobile Ajax applications (and thanks to Óscar Gutiérrez Isiégas, Scott Hughes and Jonathan Jeon for their contributions). I got a lot of requests for the slides - so here they are for anyone interested!

 

| View | Upload your own

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:59 under Misc
Tags: mobile2.0, mobileajax, MWI, W3C, Web2Expo

6 Comments

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

2 Comments

This year I’m more excited than ever about Mobile World Congress (née 3GSM). But the excitement at this year’s event won’t be at the event. It will be at two amazing side-events: the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards happening on Monday the 11th and the Mobile Jam Session on the 12th.

At last year’s Global Peer Awards, we had 23 mobile start-ups from 23 Mobile Monday cities around the World presenting on stage. We had companies like Skyhook Wireless (which has recently achieved some fame as the technology behind the location awareness function in iPhone), RealEyes3D (which went on to be selected as a Red Herring top 100 companies in Europe as well as other accolades), and MobileComplete (which was also selected by Red Herring and took the world by storm with their DeviceAnywhere product). A full list of 2007 participants is available here. This year, it’s your chance to see more early-stage companies and innovative mobile services - before they become famous and stop returning your calls.

The Mobile Jam Session will be a unique industry event, bringing together a spectrum mobile developers for a kind of un-conference that will combine a “code camp” style with a creatively driven workshop structure. After hearing who has so far signed up, I’m more fired up than ever about this event.

W3C will also be out in force at the conference itself, promoting the release of MobileOK as a “Candidate Recommendation” and the release of an open source code library that allows content developers to more easily test their content for mobile friendliness. If you’re at the conference, go visit them in Hall 7, stand 7D56 and get the real deal on MobileOK and the future of the Mobile Web. We’ll also hopefully see W3C folks at the Mobile Jam Session.

See you in Barcelona!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 11:20 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0
Tags: 3gsm, globalpeerawards, mobile2.0, mobilejamsession, mobilemonday, mobileOK, MobileWeb, mwc2008

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Thanks to all those who told me I needed to read Walt Mossberg’s article on the state of the mobile industry v. the Internet. It is a really great piece and sums many of the problems facing the mobile industry. As I said last year, I do believe that openness is an inevitable trend. I also realize that there are significant stumbling blocks to openness in mobile data. Some of these problems are “imaginary” (such as the customer service issue, which was also highlighted as a problem by the closed portals of the last century as a reason why they had to keep the Internet at arms length and “protect” their customers from it). Some of the problems are very real and have to do with the physical limitations of the bearer. You can’t treat a wide-area “mobile broadband” (e.g. HSDPA) connection in the same way that you can an ADSL or local-area WiFi connection, especially when it comes to applications like P2P or VoIP. However, both the service model and the technology are evolving. We have already made great strides forward in the last year. I see the pace of change accelerating in the coming year, especially if the (U.S.) regulatory issues that Walt highlights in his article are addressed.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:18 under mobile 2.0
Tags: mobile2.0, mossberg

3 Comments

I started the week with Mobile 2.0. Rudy De Waele and Mike Rowehl posted great summaries of that event with lots of links to coverage all over the Web which I won’t replicate here. Suffice to say: it was a great day. My one complaint was that I don’t think we served the developer community very well. Next time, we may need to expand the event into multiple tracks and get some real developer interest topics going.

As for the Web 2.0 conference which is just closing down today, it has been a mixed bag, but on balance I actually think it was better than last year. Lots of the conference has been focusing on APIs and the whole “Web as a platform” concept, which I think is a key area of innovation in the Web. We’re already seeing how efforts like Amazon Web Services and Facebook’s APIs are creating waves of innovation and that’s only accelerating.

I found Facebook’s announcement on allowing users to export their data particularly interesting. Openness like this will be the trend for social networks moving forward and Facebook has clearly decided to be a part of this disruption. Devil is in the details, of course.

Of course, the mobile content at the summit has been very superficial and disappointing. The panel on mobile social media could have been interesting but it was a little too much Nokia-focused (how could it not be as it was sponsored and organized by Nokia and featured Anssi as a panelist). It still could have been interesting but the panelists had to spend too much time explaining the mobile social space so we couldn’t really get into the meaty issues.

Another low-light was the “conversation” about the 700mhz auction between Verizon Wireless (Thomas J. Tauke) and Google (Ram Shriram). Martin Varsavsky from FON was incongruously placed into this conversation as well but really this was an argument between Google and Verizon. (As a sidebar, what FON is doing is really really cool, and I am especially excited about their partnership with BT, which Martin unfortunately was not able to get into in any detail.) The problem with the 700mhz discussion is that Google is trying to frame this as them championing the little guy (”no blocks, no locks” is their mantra) and Verizon is trying to frame the discussion as their crusade against government intervention and regulation. This might seem like a big story in the States but from an international perspective, I am scratching my head a bit. I don’t think the spectrum auction has anything to do with open access (which is an inevitable trend). The whole thing seems to be about control and money — it’s a crass power-play by Google into the carrier space. Which is cool, but call a spade a spade.

Anyway, I’m now sitting in probably the most interesting session of the event, stuck in at the tail end named “The Semantic Edge.” (Presumably Tim O’Reilly couldn’t stand to name it “Semantic Web” which is what it’s about). What’s exciting about this panel is that we are hearing about cool new technology available now that is leveraging the semantic Web. Twine is a semantic application just coming out of stealth that ties together information from other sites and social networks. Very cool. Freebase (interesting choice of names) provides a semantic search which can provide impressively deep information using a combination of natural language processing and semantics. This is easily the most interesting stuff that’s been presented at Web 2.0. Taptu (who came out of stealth at Mobile 2.0 on monday) should be up there as well as they are actually using some of the same technologies to enable a remarkably better mobile search experience.

Another side-bar: it’s very good to hear people talking about the importance of W3C semantic Web standards as an interoperable glue between these semantic platforms.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:49 under Web 2.0, mobile 2.0
Tags: fon, freebase, Google, mobile2.0, mobile2event, MobileWeb, semanticweb, taptu, twine, W3C, web2summit

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I can’t believe it was almost a year ago that we ran the first Mobile 2.0 event. Mobile 2.0 was originally conceived last year as a meet-up for the mobilly minded ahead of the Web 2.0 Summit. It quickly turned into much more than that - an event in its own right that put the spotlight on innovation in the Mobile Web and mobile data space in general. I wrote a post before the event trying to put a definition together for Mobile 2.0. Why? Not because I care about creating a new meme (actually the Mobile 2.0 moniker was already been thrown around by many so all I was doing was trying to consolidate it a bit) but because I wanted to highlight a trend that I saw building in the mobile industry. That trend, which has only gathered pace over the past year, is all about the collision of the Mobile and Web industries. This collision is creating huge market disruption and huge opportunities for established and new players in both industries. Take Jaiku, for example. Five guys in Finland create a Twitter clone and the world shrugs. The Google folks who bought them understand that the value Jaiku brought was in the sophisticated way they weaved together the mobile and Web experience. Jaiku was in some ways a prototypical “Mobile 2.0 Company” - a next-generation service offering that brings together the Mobile with the Web in a seamless way such that the sum is greater than the parts.

The Crowd at the Mobile Panel at Web 2.0 Summit (2006)

One reason we developed the Mobile 2.0 event last year was the appalling lack mobile-oriented content on the agenda at the Web 2.0 summit. I was on a panel on mobile (the only panel on mobile) at Web 2.0 Summit last year which packed the room. Later that year at their own Web 2.0 Expo, Eric Schmidt told John Battelle that the Web’s biggest growth area is “Mobile, mobile, mobile.”

Well John and O’Reilly Events apparently haven’t got the memo, because once again at this year’s Web 2.0 summit, there is only one single solitary panel covering mobile topics.

Well. If you are attending Web 2.0 this year (as I will be) all I can say is this. If you want to hear the real deal about the future of the Mobile applications, services and the future of the Web itself as it becomes a mobile medium; if you want the rest of the story about the evolution of the way people will create, consume and interact with digital services and communities; if you want to get a glimpse of the future, come to this year’s Mobile 2.0 event on Monday the 15th, up the street at the Hyatt on Union Square Park. You will not be disappointed.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 10:23 under mobile 2.0
Tags: mobile2.0, web2summit

1 Comment

This weekend, I was sending out a Jaiku message (or updating my presence, depending on how you think of it) during a brief lull at the playground with my kids. There I was, in the middle of Highgate Wood in north London, and I realized something: Jaiku knew where I was. In fact, it had k known where I was all day as I went from East Finchley to Muswell Hill, then back to East Finchley and then to Highgate Wood. As I had briefly updated my presence in each location, it had attached my location information. Big deal, you might say, so what? Yes, but it’s the kind of location that Jaiku was tracking that started to intrigue me. Locaiton to Jaiku is not a GPS coordinate but is tracked entirely by Cell ID. If I travel somewhere new and set my location (as I did in “Vodafone HQ” today, for example) it remembers this, not by X, Y coordinate but simply by the text that I’ve entered. This way of thinking about location actually maps much more accurately on to the way that real people think about location. When you tell your friend where to meet you for a drink after work, you don’t say “meet me at lat xxx, long xxx plus/minus 30 meters.” You say “meet me at such-and-such pub.” In fact, this kind of casual location is most suited towards social applications like Jaiku. Different social groups might call the same location by different names. This is bcause location is a social construct. Sure, you can measure location against strict x,y coordinates and for some applications this is fine, not for applications like Jaiku. Even GPS direction finding applications need to map x,y coordinates into a human-consumable form of street names and landmarks (”turn left at the next intersection.”) So for apps like Jaiku and Plazes (and social media sharing such as Zonetag), cell-id based location is actually ideal. It doesn’t require additional battery, it maps very closely onto the granularity that people care about in this sort of social app, and it’s free.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:40 under mobile 2.0
Tags: jaiku, mobile2.0

5 Comments