Panel discussion

Mr Mozilla
Paul Golding, Consultant
Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

DB: I don't think Google Android will important. Symbian will remain valuable. Fragmentation is here to stay.

MM: On next-generation handsets the browser will be the overshadowing application.

DB: More people use the alarm clock than the browser.

MM: The alarm clock could be a widget :)

PG: Discovery is still a big problem on mobile devices.

DB: 28% of Apples cost of manufacturing the iPhone goes into the screen. So "bumping into content" becomes easier, when there's more screen real estate. One of the themes that came out of our earlier discussion: for services which are critical or valuable, a dedicated client is worthwhile - as with Youtube on the iPhone.

Bena: What about Mozilla on mobile?

MM: We started late last year, we're finalising and releasing later this month. We think there are things that can be improved on the UI, even over iPhone.

Q: What platforms?

MM: We can't do it on the iphone thanks to the license terms - you can't write any application which runs code. So we're targeting Windows mobile, Symbian S60. We already have offline capabilities. We have another project called Prism which does offline web-based applications.

DB: There'll be opportunities and problems in giving applications access to device capabilities.

Q: What about distribution? How can we develop for something which doesn't exist in the field? Will it be preinstalled onto phones in the future?

MM: Our first releases come out in partnership with (didn't hear). We're working with operators.

PG: Firefox on the desktop always asks to download new versions of itself...

MM: Yes, the mobile one will too. (This is a really good thing IMHO - faster software updates for mobile would be a very good thing indeed).

Q: Will you support all access points the phone offers? How do you intend to explain to users why they can't be recognised or authenticated when using certain access points.

MM: We don't do anything about this, all of this is platform-specific. We don't know whether they're using Bluetooth, wi-fi or GPRS.

Bryan has put another one of his cracking presentations online: "Going Mobile - A Pragmatic Look At Mobile Design" is available from SlideShare here.

Mobile Web 2.0: Two Tribes or One World?

Panel discussion on "sharing content between web 2.0 and the Mobile Web 2.0 experience" with

Professor Ed Candy, Chief Technology Officer, 3 Group

Kai-Joachim Boyd, Senior Manager Strategy and Development, Telefonica O2 Europe

Anil Malhotra, SVP Marketing & Alliances, Bango

Josep Aliagas, CEO, Arena Mobile
Mathieu Saccharin, Head of Web 2.0 & UGC services, Bouygues Telecom

Bena (moderator) talks about Taptu encouraging sharing of web sites between friends.

EC: the opportunity is to go beyond Web 2.0 and improve on what we get on the fixed web. Scrap the type of UI we have today and go analogue. The digital watch face failed and now we use analogue watches: it'll be the same for mobile UI. Mouse-and-cursor is a very analogue experience. Scrap open source: everyone claims to be open, but they're all different and the term is becoming meaningless. OMTP is doing some good stuff to work towards "sameness" - OSs don't need to be identical, they just need to agree on common points.

MS: You can't even share content between mobile and mobile today, never mind mobile and PC.

KB: We need to offer converged services. We're preparing our customers for a seamless experience.

AM: Sharing has always been a driver for internet usage; look at early content-free web pages which were sets of links. Mobile will define how web content is produced eventually (as in Korea/Japan).

Bena: How would you promote social sharing? O2 have partner tariffs, Wii have online play.

Bena: Is sharing going to be the key for social networking?

AM: Some similar things to fixed internet. We've let individuals create personal WAP pages on wap.com, to let users open up their own content to each other.

Audience: Is content important? Isn't 2.0 more about communication?

AM: The 2.0 services which work well on mobile have content at their core (do they?).

EC: When we started 3, we built a service-independent network to let us distribute content. Initially we created menus of content for customers - and no-one came. When we started to do X-Series products, which encouraged users to do what they wanted to do, we saw an explosion in traffic. The ones which worked best were the ones which established a level of communication first, then encouraged content sharing: these are my friends, my family, and now I'd like to share my photos with them.

Quadratura are doing an event in London in June. Go see their showreel, it looks amazing. Mr BigFug does lovely things with light :)

(and guitars)

So, Google has 'fessed up how they've been building their database of cell IDs. Apple use such a database of cells to location-enable the iPhone v1 mapping applications; whilst the spangly new iPhone has onboard GPS to improve accuracy in this respect, I've found cell ID to be extremely useful when combined with a decent map.

And for the rest of us, there are stirling efforts like OpenCellID to help build an open database of cell ID to lat/long mappings... with a nice downloadable client to let those of us with GPS-enabled phones to contribute.