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By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 1 Comment Tagged with ,

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.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Web 2.0 No Comments Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

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 …

[Mobile|Web] 2.0 Week: From Mobility to Semantics Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 No Comments Tagged with ,

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 …

Mobile 2.0 – T Minus 3 Days Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 3 Comments Tagged with ,

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 …

Location is What You Make of It Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 2 Comments Tagged with

We’re baaack. On October 15th, in San Francisco, Mobile Mondays Barcelona, London, and Silicon Valley together with the Open Group and SomeBazaar will present the 2nd Mobile 2.0 conference. This will be a one-day event, held at the Grand Hyatt in Union Square, covering the latest in mobile innovation and disruption and bringing together real mobile industry thought leaders from around the world. All this, plus a smattering of great Mobile 2.0 startups presented in the Mobile Launch Pad. We’ll feed you breakfast and lunch. We’ll buy you drinks. We’ll give you a super-concentrated tonic of mobile information that will leave your head spinning. If you aren’t there, you will have to answer to future generations. Your doe-eyed offspring will look up at you one day and ask “Why? Why didn’t you attend Mobile 2.0?” Do you want that to happen? I didn’t think so. If you only attend one conference on the mobile web and disruptive mobile innovation this year, make it Mobile 2.0. Registration will open shortly is up and running at www.mobile2event.com.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Mobile Web 7 Comments Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the mobile user experience, particularly the experience of the Web on the (typical) mobile device. I say “typical” because I’m not talking about the iphone here — I’m talking about the kind of mass-market device that billions of real users hold in their hands every day. Increasingly these are devices that are capable of a reasonable data services experience, but they are still not being used to their potential. What is the new user paradigm that will truly kick start the mobile Web? The essential innovation of the Web itself was putting together two existing technologies: hypertext and the Internet. Hypertext had been around for a while, in library-science and computer science circles and even in such products as Hypercard. Likewise, the Internet was around and widely used (mostly by academics and students) through well understood but essentially plain text paradigms such as FTP, Telnet and Gopher. Both these technologies by themselves were limited in their appeal. But somehow, layering Hypertext on top of the Internet (the Web) created something that was greater than the sum of its parts, and the Web as we know it was born. Yes, there were other factors at work in the birth of the Web but I believe it was the marriage of these two technologies that was the crucial factor. When we come to the mobile Web, however — that is, usage of the Web on devices which are intended to be used one-handed, often with a four-way rocker switch instead of …

Wanted: a New User Experience Metaphor for the Mobile Web Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 No Comments Tagged with , ,

Attended a great panel chaired by Ryan Carson on the ins and outs of building successful businesses out of Web applications. Of all the Web 2.0 ringmasters, one thing you can say about Ryan is that he definitely has the coolest hat. Lots of good insights for entrepreneurs here. The other highlight of today was Justin Oberman’s great panel on using mobile technology for activism. Good insights and great chairing from Justin, but a little too much US-centric thinking among the panelists (with the exception of Roger from Rave Wireless), especially when many of the opportunities for social impact from the mobile are to be felt in the developing world. Also: too much focus on texting.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Mobile Web 1 Comment Tagged with , , , ,

Now sitting in a panel on geospatial data on the Web. Slightly less interesting in that we seem to be celebrating what has been done (particularly with Google Earth). Well yeah – but where is the talk about where this is all going? Frankly, what about the possibilities for mobile applications of location and use of geospatial data? Ok — some good stuff from Dan Dubno of “Blowing Things Up” (great name for a company). He’s talking about using personal agents to use spatial data and external data to negotiate with vendors as you walk down the street to get you the best price on, say, a cup of coffee. Interesting twist on the age-old “mobile marketing” standby of getting a Starbucks coupon as you walk down the street: turning around to the use of agents that use location and proximity data on the user’s behalf. This meshes with my view of how digital identity (of which location is a facet), privacy and security will evolve along Web 2.0 lines. Clearly, this is an important use case for the burgeoning effort on the Ubiquitous Web within W3C.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Mobile Web, Travel 1 Comment Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

So here I am, sitting in a panel at South by Southwest on “designing for convergent devices.” As I walked in, I caught the tail end of something that seemed really cool – a service called Zannel that does user gen video content with a mobile and Web UI. Forget Youtube for mobile – these guys have already done it. They’ve designed for simplicity, and it’s great that the designers and app developers here at SXSW are getting that message. Also interesting to see that the SXSW.mobi site is getting a lot of discussion here – and people aren’t asking “what is dotMobi?” – there really seems to be a lot of recognition here of what dotMobi is and more generally what a mobile friendly Web site is (works on your phone). That’s pretty cool. Just now listening to Denise Burton from Frog Design talking about the challenges of 4-way navigation based design (especially with regard to focus state). She stressed the importance of animations and transitions. YES. This is exactly the challenge that the WICD mobile profile seeks to address – being able to design consistent user experience that responds in a coherent way to user input, and be able to use SVG-based animations and transitions to respond to user feedback. Other notes: I had joked that they would probably put all the Interactive content off in a back room somewhere to keep the nerds away from the film and music people. Well, it’s no joke. These SXSW Interactive panels are off in what seems …

South by Southwest Live Notes Read more »