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Year: 2007

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0 No Comments Tagged with

So unfortunately I wasn’t able to get out a timely blog post on Le Web 3 last week. Others have said a lot already but I just thought I’d write a brief post on it. It was a really great event and Loic and team deserve massive kudos for putting it together so well. First I have to rave about the near-flawless execution. The food deserves special mention because it was fantastic. Of course – what did I expect? This is Paris, after all. The production of the event itself, especially on the main stage, was fantastic, with a camera crew and staff that kept scurrying around keeping everything running smoothly. There was a fleet of BMW cars, sponsored by BMW, taking speakers back and forth from the conference site to the hotel. Very nice touch. The conference site itself was laid out very nicely with a chill-out “networking” lounge (where local artists were also working to add a bit of color). There were the usual sponsor booths but lots of space. There were a lot of people at this event but it never felt crowded. It was well produced but also managed to maintain a good community feel – no mean feat. The speaker line-up was really an all-star cast. I won’t go into too much detail here. I was lucky to be asked to participate on a panel on Mobile-Web convergence (chaired by Ouriel Ohayon) which was notable not only because I was on it, but because it was really well attended. I was …

Notes on Le Web 3 Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Mobility, Travel No Comments Tagged with , , , , ,

[ad] Why, in this day and age, when they can send a man to the Moon, is it so frickin’ difficult to tell what time it is? Specifically, what makes it so seemingly difficult for mobile devices, which are connected to a public network, to tell what time it is? Surely mobile connected devices should be our most trusted time sources. The network they’re connected to is constantly pumping out a time-sync. So what is the problem? Three examples: I normally carry around a couple of devices. Most recently, these have been consistently unreliable sources of the time. The Blackberry has two time-sync options: network and “blackberry.” Neither of them ever yield a correct time (as measured by my Mac, whose time-sync works flawlessly when measured against the BBC). The N73 also has a “network sync” option which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I have often found that the time is wildly off – by as much as a few hours. It also doesn’t help matters that a change of this setting requires a reboot. I have to manually set the time zone on the Blackberry but the Nokia N73 somehow can figure that out for itself. I just came out of the other end of the Channel Tunnel and my iPhone hasn’t picked up the fact that I’m now in Central European Time – so it’s still showing an hour behind. In this fast-paced world, it’s more important than ever for your device to know the correct time. This becomes especially important when you’re sharing …

What Time is It? Read more »

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

Yes. Believe it or not, there is something that has overshadowed the launch of the iPhone around the world. It is the story of the developer community that has come together around the iPhone to create a whole ecosystem of applications and clandestine methods for loading these applications onto this platform. In a matter of months, loosely organized individuals and companies with names like Nullriver, Conceited software, drudge and “Erica,” have managed to unravel the turtleneck of iPhone security and in the process they have created something entirely new in the industry: a mass-market mobile phone platform that is completely open to the application developer community. They have also created application loading tools for over-the-air installation which have no rival in terms of their sophistication and ease of use. Indeed, there’s no tip-off, except for the author names, that the software you’re using wasn’t developed and pre-installed by Apple – they’re that good. Along the way, we now have a few new words in our mobile lexicon. Of course, there’s “brick” as a verb, as in “to brick your phone.” Of course, most iPhone users who found their phones bricked after the first software update have since “de-bricked” their phones through various widely available methods. There’s also “jailbreak,” which has come to mean to enable third party software to be loaded onto an otherwise closed platform. A platform so prepared can be called “jailbroken.” The rest of the lexicon is still being worked out. The popular press can’t seem to figure out the difference between SIM-unlocked …

The Biggest Mobile Story of 2007 is not the iPhone Launch Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Misc 2 Comments

My Yahoo not working on iPhone Originally uploaded by appelquist Just thought I’d note this. My Yahoo! doesn’t appear to be working on the iPhone. Same result on the S60 browser. To be fair, though, the kind of user experience that My Yahoo! provides isn’t particularly suited to the mobile browser. What would be much better would be to provide a mobile-specific experience of the same content (for example, tabs instead of columns, a-la the fantastic iPhone Facebook app).

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I have a confession. I have been a user of “My Yahoo!” since its original release. I was one of the early beta users when beta really meant beta. For some reason that I cannot comprehend, as more sophisticated personalized Web portals and more recently RSS aggregators have developed, I have stayed with the tried and true My Yahoo! – a site that has essentially not changed its look and feel since the last century. Well watch out. My Yahoo! is back in beta, and it’s about time. What’s new? First of all, there are some outrageous new styles on offer, like this Leopard-print (incongruously named “faux fur” – as a colleague pointed out, why do they have to call it “faux fur” when it’s on a computer?). Unfortunately, many of the styles on offer are not very readable, and readability of text is pretty important in an application like this. It also offers a reader pane built into the application so you can read full blog entries (for those that publish a full feed) right in My Yahoo! This, and the UI tweaks are probably the nicest features. The other bits, such as a page-dominating animated ad (see upper-left-hand-corner) I am finding a little hard to swallow. Even as a long time, user I was about to give up and move to Google Reader, Netvibes or Pageflakes. The new release is keeping my attention. I’ll definitely give it a spin around the block, but I’m thinking that what they’ve delivered, feature-wise, may be too little …

Pimp My Yahoo? Read more »

By Posted on Posted in mobile 2.0 2 Comments Tagged with

So I attended this Future of Mobile conference on Wednesday. In general it was a great event. The one criticism that was thrown around at the event after-party which I kind of agree with is that it may have been a little heavy on Web topics. That might sound surprising, coming from someone such as myself who spends his days (and increasingly his nights) working on Mobile Web stuff, but I actually think there should have been some more material outside the Web topic. I did really enjoy a number of the presentations, including Brian Fling’s fantastic presentation on how the iPhone is changing the mobile space and great presentation from David Burke from Google which included live Java coding on stage (which in any other circumstance is sure to put people to sleep). Apart from all that, Carsonified just runs really great events. In particular, they seem to have an intuitive grasp of the user experience of the events. Everything down to the badges is meticulously designed with a professional sheen that nobody else seems to be able to manage. In the case of the badges, they are printed on both sides (how often are you at a conference and you realize the person you’re talking to has no idea who you are because your badge has turned itself around), they are clearly printed and color coded based on whether you’re a developer, designer, speaker, etc… It’s just one of the many Carsonified touches that makes their events so pleasant. Great work!

By Posted on Posted in Mobile Web, W3C No Comments Tagged with , , ,

I just spoke at Mobile Internet World here in Boston (as part of the W3C Mobile Web Standards track). Being part of this event brought me back to the first “Internet World” conference I ever attended in, wait for it, 1993 in New York City. I had been invited up there because my magazine, Quanta. At the time, the Web was a fringe at best. The event was meager, at best, but there was a definitely a sense that something important was happening. Mobile Internet World, in Boston in 2007, was considerably more impressive, but yet I had the same feeling of excitement. People were coming to this W3C session to learn about mobile Web standards and development. This crowd was not mobile industry people – I did not get the idea that I was preaching to the choir. I think that’s signifigant in the “mainstreaming” of the Mobile Internet. I’m interested to see if I get the same vibe at Future of Mobile tomorrow in London.

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 Web 2.0 1 Comment Tagged with ,

The Web 2.0 Summit had an awful lot of content that didn’t really have much to do with … well … the Web. Besides the whole 700mhz spectrum issue, there was an awful lot of empasis on green tech. Now – I know green is cool. I have no issues with green stuff. However, it doesn’t seem to me there is much overlap between green tech and Web 2.0 — or rather if there is it wasn’t being explored at the Web 2.0 Summit. Was this tendency towards scope creep because there wasn’t enough to talk about at Web 2.0? I don’t think so. For example, the program could have tried to tackle the thorny issues around privacy and social networks, made even more accute by the proliferation of location-aware systems. There are about a hundred topics like this that should have been delved into in more detail. Instead what we got was a very uneven program with some really good bits and some material that frankly seemed more like advertorial. For example, the panel on the future of TV featured a very long presentation and demo by the CEO of Current.tv. Mike Volpi from Joost seemed a bit bemused by the whole thing and as much as said “well – I’m here to talk, not to demo Joost.” The conversation that ensued was quite interesting but could have gone more in-depth and featured more players as well (how about Daniel Graf from Kyte.tv)? In short, I wanted more debate, less pitch.

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 »