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Year: 2006

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Mobile Web 4 Comments

Last year, I predicted that 2006 would be the year of the mobile Web and that the mobile Web would “go main stream.” I think I can say that this prediction has largely played itself out. The rise of the mobile Web has become a topic in the mainstream press. Products like the X-Series from 3 and the Nokia Series-60 Web browser have addressed both the functionality and the cost issues. Opera launched Mini, opening up sophisticated Web browsing to a much wider range of handsets. The work of the Mobile Web Best Practices working group and the W3C Mobile Web Initiative have also played a role in providing guidelines to Web site developers and generating awareness of the mobile Web. Although it continues to be controversial, dotMobi, which also launched in 2006, has played a key role in raising awareness of the mobile Web. I’m proud to have played a role both in the development and launch of dotMobi and in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. What I couldn’t have predicted at the end of 2005 was the rapid growth of other sophisticated Web and Internet-linked applications. Mobile photo-sharing and video-sharing are becoming as ubiquitous as their “traditional” Web counterparts. Web powerhouses like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (Windows Live) have launched their own custom mobile applications for mail and messaging. Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets are also starting to play a role in bringing sophisticated and rich user experiences to the mobile handset. The walled gardens are opening up. Mobile Web advertising is rocketing forward, …

Revisiting 2006 Predictions Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Mobile Monday, Mobility No Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

I’ll be at 3GSM this year again. I’m expecting (and hoping) this year’s event to be more interesting than last year’s. At the last event, it was all about MobileTV. This time, the Mobile Web will be front and center. I will be attending mainly in support of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, which will have an increased presence (at the ignominiously designated 7D56 booth in Hall 7 – hopefully better placement than last year). We will also hopefully be featuring a special speaker this year on the mobile Web which I think will get people talking. We will also be running a Mobile Monday “Global Peer Awards” event there this year, which is certainly a step up from the informal gathering around the Finpro booth we held last year. Rudy at Mobile Monday Barcelona has put together a great event with some help from Helsinki and some of the other chapters. I’ll be acting as a judge at the awards. This will be the 3rd annual Global Peer Awards, although the first to run at 3GSM (the last two ran at the Mobile Monday Global Summit in Helsinki). The awards will once again be throwing the spotlight on innovation in the Mobile community by featuring an array of start-up companies put forward by Mobile Monday chapters from around the world. If you’re going to be in Barcelona, I urge you to register early to be a part of this event before the space fills up. I guarantee it’ll be like nothing else you’re likely to …

3GSM: Mobile Web and the Mobile Monday Invasion Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Blogs, Mobile Web, Web 3 Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

I’ve just added a label (as it happens, an ICRA label) to my site. Why? Because content labeling (or “labeling” depending on what longitude you reside in) is going to be an important building block of the future of the Web. If you pick up a box of breakfast cereal at the supermarket, you can look at a label and quickly determine if its ingredients are going to be suitable for you. For example, many products these days contain a warning label if they contain nuts for those of us that suffer from nut allergies. Even if you don’t have food allergies, but just prefer to eat organically produced food, you can look at the label. A content label for a Web site is analogous to such a food label, but is primarily intended to be processed by machines. The most deployed site labeling technology is ICRA (Internet Content Labeling Association) which was developed for child protection. Hence, ICRA is most appropriate for labeling “adult content.” The result has been that the adult content industry (keen to show they are supporting child protection and thereby avoid regulation) have embraced labels. And that’s the current state of labeling on the Web: lots of porn sites have labels. Most other sites do not. But adult content is not the only possible application for content labels. For example, a content label can tell you whether a Web site is accessible (has it followed the W3C’s WAI guidelines?). A content label can tell you if the content is appropriate for …

This Site is Labeled Read more »

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

The Mobile Discussion Originally uploaded by R.J. Friedlander. While I’m posting images from San Francisco week, here’s me at the Web 2.0 panel (“The Mobile Discussion”) with Om Malik and Ansi Vanjoki from Nokia. I’m saying “this is the future calling” right after Anssi talked about running Bittorrent on his N93. Om’s thinking “Why do I always get stuck with the weird ones?”

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

Krunk! Originally uploaded by Mike Rowehl. Well, it’s a month on from the mobile2.0 event in San Francisco (only a month? It seems like ages ago) and what have we learned. The mobile2.0 meme seems to be taking hold in a fairly distributed fashion, which is good. We’ve had good press coverage and the linkbacks keep appearing on the “what is mobile2.0” article on this blog, which I think is an encouraging sign that I was making some kind of sense. That post, by the way, was written on a Virgin Atlantic 747 on the way to San Francisco from London. By the way, this is a picture of Mike Rowehl and myself enjoying some richly deserved gin martinis at the reception after the event. The grins on our faces say it all: “thank god it’s over!” We’re now talking about doing another one next year around the same time (sandwiched between Web 2.0 and CTIA which returns to San Francisco next year). Please post thoughts and suggestions about format, etc… either here or on the event blog.

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Mobile Web 2 Comments Tagged with , , , ,

[ad] Christmas seems to have come early this year for Nokia N73 owners. When I downloaded and installed the latest software build yesterday, I was surprised to find a new application – a search application that allows you to search Yahoo! and Windows Live as well as local directories (such as Yell.com in the UK). The search results are provided quickly and clicking on each result brings up a quick summary of the page before offering to bring it up in a browser (the Series 60 Open Source Browser) or bookmark it. It’s a great, simple UI for mobile search that’s well integrated into the phone and the browser. And it allows you to download updates over the air. It reminds me a bit of Apple’s Sherlock application. The update, by the way, also seems to speed up the phone UI and so far it also seems more stable (no phone crashes yet, but I’ve only had it installed for 24 hours or so). The only issue I have here is about the phone update process itself. I had to somehow know that an application (PC only) exists, download it, and then connect my phone via the USB cable in order to update the software. There is no over-the-air update available, even though it seems like this should be feasible with a big enough memory card to store the image. But the bigger issue is just getting the word out about this update — this could be a major quality of life improvement for N73 owners, …

New N73 Software Drop Includes Wizzy Search App Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0, Mobile Web, Mobility 2 Comments Tagged with , ,

Opera arguably reinvented the mobile browser with the original release of Opera Mini. The innovation of Opera Mini was to be able to fit four quarts into a one pint jug. By putting most of the guts of the browser into a smart proxy layer, they were able to create a smart browser that could be downloaded and installed on most phones, not just so-called smart phones. Opera’s new Mini, announced this week, isn’t just an incremental upgrade. The new Opera Mini plugs directly in to the phone camera to allow photo blogging directly from within the browser environment. See here for an example of this (Charles McCathieNevile snapped this at the W3C Advisory Committee meeting here in Tokyo – I think he got my good side). So why is this revolutionary? Of course, it allows users to bypass MMS and other operator-sanctioned photo sharing mechanisms, but that’s no big news. Other downloadable applications have enabled photo upload and mobile blogging, but in integrating this function into the browser, Opera has turned Mini into a read/write application. The browser, traditionally the tool used to consume information, becomes a sophisticated content creation mechanism as well. Users who otherwise might not go through the trouble to download and install a photo blogging application will suddenly find they have this capability. Of course, desktop browser users already enjoy this kind of capability through Ajax applications and browser plug-ins but these capabilities have not been present on the mobile platform. And by the way, photo blogging isn’t the only new …

New Opera Mini Integrates Photo Blogging Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Blogs, Mobile Web, Mobility No Comments Tagged with

So, the million-dollar question in this migration to WordPress has been: will this enable me full mobile-Web-base administration and content creation? Well – here I am, using the native browser on the Blackberry 8700 and I’m happy to report the answer is “yes.” Not only have I composed this post, but I’ve also been able to moderate comments (OK – delete spam) and perform other admin functions entriely within the mobile browser. Kudos both to the WordPress folks for making such a great admin and authoring console and to the Blackberry browser team for the great browser environment. The full keyboard on the Blackberry also makes it particularly well suited to mobile blogging. It may not seem like such a big deal, but this is the first time I’ve managed to successfully write a blog post of any signifigant length from a mobile device. Yet another sign that the mobile Web is coming of age.

By Posted on Posted in Technology, Web 2.0 2 Comments

Don’t worry, I am not trying to define another “2.0ism.” However, I attended an event earlier in the week at which the term Enterprise 2.0 was defined by a speaker, but the definition he gave stuck me as more like “Intranets 1.0” — that is, knowledge management tools applied to the enterprise space. Yes — corporates have been trying to get better about knowledge management for years — why is Enterprise 2.0 any different?  It strikes me that Enterprise 2.0 will actually be tools and applications that run on the Web and are made available to knowledge workers through the browser. These applications will enable all kinds of knowledge sharing and office automation but totally free to the corporate and funded by ads. This model totally undercuts the traditional IT software / services providers and empowers the workforce to self-organize and use the tools that best fit their unit / group / activity. Of course, savvy knowledge workers are already doing this — using IM to conduct business against corporate IT policies, or using Google docs & spreadsheets to collaborate between different office locations. When these applications really do become as powerful as their desktop and enterprise-network-bound equivalents and when CIOs and CFOs wake up to this fact that and realize the whole corporate IT and enterprise applications ecosystem has suddenly become irrelevant, that will be Enterprise 2.0. Just my €.02.