Dan’s Blog (2.0)

Dummies everywhere are rejoicing today. Finally, they will be able to know the joys of the Mobile Internet, thanks to a new reference book, of which I am proud to announce I have been a co-author, Mobile Internet for Dummies. Based on the structure of Internet for Dummies (and co-written with that book’s author, John Levine, Michael O’Farrell, Jostein Algroy, James Pearce), Mobile Internet for Dummies takes you through the ins and outs of getting connected and using the mobile Internet (and the mobile Web) from chosing the right phone to mobile blogging and photo sharing, to developing your own mobile Web site. This book demystifies the whole topic of the mobile Internet and hopefully gives people a lot of timely and useful information they can use to get online on the move and make the most of the medium.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:09 under Mobile Web
Tags: Dummies, mifd, mobileinternet, MobileWeb

3 Comments

W3C are producing an online training course for mobile Web developers: “An Introduction to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices” which will run from May 26 to June 20 2008. This will be a great chance to get more information on mobile Web development practices from the experts — highly recommended for any Web developers out there who are interested in getting into mobile.

W3C is organizing an online course to introduce Web developers and designers to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices.

In this course you will:

• • * learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform
  • * learn how to use W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to mobilize existing content
  • * discover the relevant W3C resources for mobile Web design

Participants will have access to lectures and assignments providing hands-on practical experience with using W3C’s mobile Web Best Practices. They will have direct access to W3C experts on this topic who are the instructors for this course. Participants will also be able to discuss and share experiences with their peers who are faced with the challenges of mobile Web design.

More information at
http://www.w3.org/2008/03/MobiWeb101/Overview.html

Register now at
http://www.3gwebtrain.com/moodle/

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 13:23 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: Mobile, MobileWeb, MWI, Training, W3C, Web

3 Comments

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

5 Comments

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

1 Comment

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

I got “video blogged” at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week by Dennis Howlett. Dennis captured me talking about the landscape and future of the mobile Web. Unfortunately, he edited out the bit where I was talking about the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, which was kind of the point of the whole thing (from my perspective). The material that made it in was some scene-setting for why we created the Mobile Web Initiative and developed the Mobile Web Best Practices and MobileOK, both of which were being showcased at the W3C booth at the congress.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 9:22 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: dennishowlett, MobileWeb, mwc, mwc2008, MWI, W3C, zdnet

3 Comments

I’ve just had confirmation that, for my flight out to Beijing for the upcoming WWW2008 conference in April, I will be flying the first leg on a Singapore Airlines Airbus A-380 “superjumbo.” The flight will be London to Singapore on the 18th of April and will kick off a round the world trip that I will be taking that week, first hitting Beijing for the W3C Advisory Committee meeting and the WWW2008 conference (where I will be co-chairing a workshop on advanced mobile Web applications) and then flying on to San Francisco where I will be speaking about the Mobile Web and Mobile Ajax at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo event. It’s going to be a very exciting week, tackling two very different Web conferences and helping to bring a mobile flavor to both, while simultaneously circumnavigating the globe and hopefully taking in some more sights than just hotel rooms and airport lounges along the way. But clearly, one highlight (for me) will be getting to fly part of the way on the A-380. I have to admit: I’m a bit of an air travel nerd, and I’ve been following the saga of the A-380 ever since it was announced by Airbus.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:06 under Mobile Web, Travel
Tags: A380, Airbus, mobea, MobileWeb, W3C, Web2Expo, WWW2008

6 Comments

In June 2005, I wrote in these pages about an issue I knew we were going to have to grapple with in the Mobile Web Best Practices group that we were then kicking off. What is the intersection of mobility and accessibility when it comes to Web content? In fact, the initial approach and early work of the group that set the foundations for the Mobile Web Best Practices and for MobileOK was based on the work of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, and specifically the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document.

This week, we have followed up the release of MobileOK with a new document that details exactly that: describe the relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Why should you care? If you’re trying to provide a service on the Web, you need to care about both accessibility and mobility. Both of these topics require some investment in skills, tools, and development time, so understanding where the overlaps are should greatly help to reduce development costs and time to market. At the end of the day, it’s also about maximizing the potential audience for your service, regardless of a user’s disability or the device used to access that service.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:33 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: MobileWeb, MWI, W3C, wai

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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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So I’ve been doing some research on mobile blogging, trying to find the best solutions out there. The situation is pretty dire. So far, it looks like the best solution out there is actually from Windows Live (née MSN) Spaces. Windows Live actually lets you register, create a blog and start publishing it all through the mobile browser.

In contrast, Blogger has some information on mobile blogging that involves a convoluted “email to post” (which only works with U.S. carriers by the way — HELLO PEOPLE - THE WEB IS GLOBAL). TypePad claims “industry leading” mobile features but doesn’t seem to have any way to sing up or create a blog from the mobile and it’s also e-mail based. You can use Nokia Lifeblog with Typepad but you need to have a Nokia phone to do this. Wordpress is likewise a wash. Vox doesn’t have obvious mobile support either.

What’s going on here? It’s pretty easy to write a Web form that accepts a blog post. Even Microsoft can do it! I thought we were further along here, as a society I mean. Am I missing something? Are there other turn-key solutions out there for mobile blogging?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 17:04 under Blogs, Mobile Web
Tags: blogging, Blogs, mobileblogging, MobileWeb

29 Comments