Expanding the horizons of Mobile Web 2.0 to boost the developer ecosystem: An overview of the latest work and progress to move on to the next stage of evolution

"The Mobile Web is a Disruptive Innovation": this is not business as usual, we need new practices for how we develop and engage with the community.

• New markets: e.g. social networks opening up customer segments not served by web players (e.g. ItsMy);
• New players (Google, Apple);
• New business models (e.g. app stores);
• New customer expectations (UX, working out-of-the-box, sharing with friends);

We have turned a corner in the industry: as of yesterday, Dans wife is using the mobile web :) We don't need to talk about how to get people using it any more.

Current industry trends:

• Location apps and the location-based web;
• Social apps going mobile;
• Web browsers become runtimes - web as platform, more application development moves to the web with HTML5, widgets, rich APIs; this decreases fragmentation. As an agency you don't have to think separately for mobile - the same skills are transferable for PC web and mobile;
• Open source;

Clash of civilisations between web and mobile:

• Web: fast, software driven, scripting, APIs, iterative;
• Mobile: market size, scale, control points, regulation, customer ownership;

Mobile web apps

• Web has moved from page-metaphor to application metaphor;
• Mobile web is going the same way;
• Widgets are at the epicentre of mobile/web convergence;

Presents the Twiggy Widget: they got Carsonified, a web shop, to build a widget that does Twitter search.

Location is one of the most important device APIs right now. Working within W3C to build geolocation APIs for the web,

Widgets are made for the mobile web.

Ends with a personal please to end version numbering of web sites.

Panel discussion

Tim Green

Dan Appelquist

Raphael Gourmot from Orange

Sten Minor, VP of software and platforms, Sony Ericsson

TG: Dan showed a vision of web applications and open standards. How much of a hindrance can the device be, with different form factors etc. - Stan?

SM: We need to improve on standards. We have middleware, web runtimes, application ecosystems. In an ideal world you can combine these layers in ways you want. In practice you have vertical clusters (Apple). It's a nightmare to develop apps in this environment, advanced applications have to be made specifically for different clusters or across J2ME.

DA: The widget and runtime environment works well. It's easy to build an app that only makes sense in one screen size/form factor. There's skill in doing device-independent UI. There are tool chains underway to help developers here.

RG: We're helping developers with porting to devices and operating systems. Things have improved a bit, in 10 years. We still face fragmentation. W3C with device APIs runs the risk of following J2ME, with manufacturers implementing standards differently. We're working with middleware to do multi-publishing (e.g. Celsius). But who is the audience.

DA: Regarding the comparison between JSRs and web apis: there's a rabid web developer community intent of ensuring browsers support standards correctly. We need to engage early adopters and developers first, to try and bring this culture to mobile.

SM: We should differentiate on top of standards, not by supporting them.

TG: How?

SG: In services on top - not by locking in users.

DA: Users want a consistent experience when they pick up their phone too.

RG: People are buying devices for form factors, looks. Some of us might buy for features, but we're geeks. For services, differentiation is difficult: how do you do it? You update your browser on the desktop every year, but you don't tend to do this with your mobile. I'm seeing lots of single-platform developers at Orange, who want to reach beyond where they are now. To be more positive, the real benefit from the web.

Panel discussion: impact of form factors. Role of the mobile browser. Ideas on how a more open web might enable more social applications. Where does the handset company sit in a mobile-web dominated future?

Group 1: lots of industries will be trying to apply their industries to the mobile web. Look at broadcasting, say - the mass market want content from broadcasters, aren't fussed about technology. We need to be talking more to the content industry.

SM: Within Sony, there's a lot of collaboration - Sony Pictures, Music, Playstation

DA: It's always good to get the content industry involved earlier on in the standards process. It's hard to engage broadcasters in sometimes-speculative standards work, because it's not really part of their business model. The BBC is definitely on the leading edge.

RG: Content providers were very involved with standards, but it was all push-based. Now they're waiting for standards to be ready. What about DRM? The content industry want their content protected.

Group 6: We collectively wailed when standards were mentioned. The consensus was that they don't work.

DA: I completely disagree. The whole value of the web - the most succcessful interactive media ever - is interoperable standards.

Group 6: Yes, but the web is a case of an individual driving standardisation. But in a business environment the dynamic is different. Telecomms industry has thousands of useless standards.

RG: Standards covers a wide number of layers. The web industry creates upper-layer standards, transport-level layer standards are lower layers. The web industry is moving down the stack whilst the mobile industry moves up.

Q: When we talk about mobile web, we're often thinking about firing up a browser: Safari is one app on the iPhone. Need the mobile web be about the browser? Is the browser the only way to go or will individual mobile applications be it?

DA: The UX of the web runtime environment is that you invoke an application; this is the widget experience. The stock and weather widgets on the iPhone are built in this environment, but Apple don't open them to developers.

Funding the Future of Mobile Web 2.0: The Investors viewpoint in 2009 – is Mobile Web 2.0 the next growth opportunity?

Tony Fish, AMF Ventures, Angel investor

Roberto Bonzaninga, Balderton Capital

Mark Gracey, Scottish Equity

Daniel Waterhouse, Welington Partners

Hugh Fey, OpenVantage

Hugh Campbell, GP Bullhound

Moderator: Tim Green

TG: Why are you an awkard git, Tony?

TF: I'm independent so I can challenge assumptions.

TG: Give me an example of counterintuitive thinking.

TF: The last panel. Standards for applications at the edge are bollocks, driven by people who own the infrastructure.

RB: We as an industry would be better if we thought about consumers. Forget about technology, standards, consume.

TG: Why are there fewer fast-growing mobile companies in your recent list Hugh.

HC: There were 5-6 out of 50. Our table was based on revenue growth; startups in mobile are struggling to deliver this here. Mobile advertising is shot for the next 18 months.

TG: Is it getting harder to generate investment interest?

HC: It's hard for mobile, software and content businesses to raise money right now. VCs have made bets which didn't work out and it's a tough ecosystem for a young company - very busy value chain, problems getting a big enough revenue cut to support yourself.

MG: We've invested in Surfkitchen for longer than we would've liked and they've been through ups and downs. In the last few years we've seen interest in this company grow, operators have long-running projects that have wasted money - they want valuable companies to help them transition to what the iPhone has done. It's tough for startups in mobile infrastructure as well as apps.

DW: The investment community has been scarred by history - mobile gaming, music, LBS have all unravelled in a bad way with few success stories. The ecosystem is improving but there's hesitancy.

TG: Do investors hunt in packs?

TF: No. Mobile has to interface with lots of other things. To talk about it in itself is naive. The industry is scarred because operators promised lots of data consumption and failed to deliver: people create more than they consume. This is where mobile is relevant.

DW: I'm not seeing mobile being an adjunct to the web service. We invest in Qype who have a simple iPhone app contributing a significant percentage of content to the service, though still a small number of users.

RB: VCs are guilty of a bit of homogenous thinking. We need to look at things with fresh eyes: the world changes, ecosystems change.

HC: If you'd have taken the Crazy Frog to an investment committee, it wouldn't have gotten funded.

MG: Jamba wouldn't have made it past our investment committee.

TG: What's the current situation like, in terms of quantity of available funding, and approaches from mobile startups.

RB: We've started a new $100m fund. I spend a lot of time on mobile startups. We don't see much truly new stuff. I'm a bit disappointed that Twitter was created in San Francisco - we had SMS here for years. But today it's exciting that When we look at something, it's not about what I, or operators, think... it's about what consumers think. You can see consumer traction - we can be wrong, but the consumer is normally right. We see lots of small startups, 1 or 2 guys with 1m downloads.

TF: There are fewer startups now, I'm happy about this. We've stopped seeing the same startups come back again and again. Folks are leaving corporates with good ideas.

RB: From an investment POV, App Stores have given us data to work with as to what users are downloading. There's money in the big funds in Europe, but we need great ideas!

TG: Are companies coming with next-generation ideas, or ideas for folks with feature-phones or with wide distribution across the world?

MG: On-device portal is a dirty word these days, it's v operator-centric terminology. We're seeing a lot of companies, but the plans are more plausible. Applications have been proven. It's easy to test, tweak and improve businesses; to invest less and see how it goes.

Q: What areas of the value chain, and what subsectors, do you think are most interesting for investment?

TF: Don't care. Is the market big enough, can it work, is there an exit?

HC: Mobile communities is an area seeing tremendous growth, there's so many interesting things here. Micropayments, smart ad tracking,

RB: As a fund, we don't think like that. OpenVantage are using an old technology; it's the consumer proposition that's working. I think less about the space they're in, and more about the proposal. But it's time to do disruptive consumer propositions now.

HF: Yes, VCs hunt in packs. City events last year made things tighter, valuations are lower. The technology doesn't matter; we're supporting the accessibility and support of spontaneity. We bring this to sports betting.

Q: How many mobile investments do you expect to make this year, when did you last do a new investment?

DW: Last time was 6m ago, first question don't know: we don't have an allocation.

MG: Twice this year. Again, we have no allocation.

RB: Same for us; last one is *now*, we're closing a round. No quotas for us.

TF: 60 days ago.

Q: What's the one thing you'd like to see change in the industry to help you invest more:

RB: Consumers.

TG: What's the most common mistake.

RF: Operator deal: that one deal will change the world. I'd like operators broken back down to providing capacity.

Beyond SMS voting - mapping the future of Mobile Media 2.0

Barry Houlihan, CEO, MIG

SMS voting isn't happening in the UK right now, but the future is optimistic.

MIG: 120 staff, £65m revenue, organic growth, no funding. Freemantle Media, Comic Relief, etc.

Jigsaw: mobile interactivity agency, doing mass-participation in the UK. NewToy, a live experience technology agency.

Kilrush: mobile internet publishing platform, making it easy to integrate mobile with web. Drag and drop, feeds, etc., to help team build services easily.

Walkers crisps activity geneated 60/40 activity in favour of mobile, all by SMS.

47% of all written communication between 15-24yo is by text.
UK consumers send 28 textx messages a week, only make 20 calls.
24-44 year olds are 70% of UK mobile browsing.
67% of the UK mobile browsing internet in the UK is male.

Freemantle aren't seeing a return on their mobile content investments, and are publicly saying they're going to cut back. Endemol have said their biggest challenge is working with application providers: ensuring that apps deliver engagement.

Are You Ahead of Time? A Crowdsourced Vision of Mobile Media, Monty C M Metzget

An interactive session....

If you're in Brighton and interested in this sort of thing, Joh and I will be running a dress rehearsal for the workshop we've running at Agile2009 in Chicago this August. It'll be held at The Mighty Skiff on Monday 13th July, 7:30pm onwards. The theme for the workshop is exploration of constraints within an iterative design process. That's a posh way of saying that we're going to get you designing stuff for phones in 90 minutes, and look at how how form factors affect what you make.

Expect measured quantities of chaos: we've not run this format before, and one reason for doing a dress rehearsal is to iron out the kinks and, guess what: note what works, what doesn't, and what we don't yet understand.

Despite the daunting quantity of work remaining to prep, I'm really looking forward to it. And a friendly carpenter I happen to know is already busy churning out some of the props for the evening:

Sign up here, thank you please.

So, I've been using an HTC Magic (the new Android phone that Vodafone have just launched) for about 2 days now - and so far it's been fantastic.

I'd had a little play with one when Voda first launched them, but in the few seconds run-through I received in the Vodafone store I'd not really had much of a chance to get into it - and I came away feeling slightly "meh". That all changed when Mr Hugman won one of the little beasties in a promotion that Vodafone have been running on Twitter, and I had a closer look.

I won't bore with a full review - there are plenty of those out there - but some highlights for me:

• Build quality seems good. It feels nice in the hand (I never liked the heavy and bulky feel of the G1), and is small enough for one-handed use;
• Flipping between horizontal and vertical use is extremely smooth, and most apps seem to allow horizontal use. In particular the on-screen keyboard works much nicer horizontally, with a bit of extra space to play with. That said, I find the keyboard usable in vertical orientation too;
• It's *fast* - subjectively, I think it's faster than an iphone. Switching between applications is very smooth, and I find myself doing this routinely to a degree that I never have with an iPhone;
• As you'd expect, syncing with Google is seamless. We're using Google Apps a lot at FP, and I had my contacts, calendars and emails on the phone within 5 minutes. They've stayed synced beautifully ever since;
• A decent camera, at last. Whilst the iPhone had me accepting a poorer-resolution camera in exchange for the rest of its loveliness, I don't feel that compromise here. Picture quality is good;
• There's some real innovation in the UI - the notifications bar which can be pulled down wherever you are to see recent emails, messages, alerts, tweets, etc., is incredibly helpful: no switching between applications necessary. I can be browsing, receive an email, and make a decision as to whether it's worth bothering with without breaking my flow of concentration in the browser. I suspect that this is the kind of thing the Palm Pre is aiming for, too;

Beyond the above points that stand out for me, everything else seems to work just fine.

It's not perfect, of course: battery life is poor, though post-iPhone I somehow accept that 1 day of usage is acceptable, and I'm told that if I disable GPS and 3G I can get massively improved battery life. In strong sunlight I can detect what looks like some faint burn-in of pixels (a ghostly outline of an on-screen keyboard), but only faintly. The headphone socket is mini-USB not a jack (remedied using one of these). And a flash for the camera would be nice.

But those are niggles; this is a lovely piece of kit which has already changed the way I'm using email (I find myself checking and reading email on the phone, even when I'm sat at my laptop). And I've yet to play with the development kit or get into that side of things, all of my experiences so far are as a consumer.

My experiences with the device, married with news on numbers of Android launches in the coming 6 months, are making me think twice about Android as a platform. Subjectively it feels about 90% as good as iPhone (though in some areas a little better, and there's lots of very visible improvements being made), and I suspect that Apple will maintain their position as the best overall product. Let's not forget that as a percentage of overall mobile ownership, iPhone is *tiny*, leaving plenty of room for Android to take a chunk of the rest.

The only two downsides I can see for Android as a platform are:

1. It may not be easy for vendors using Android to differentiate their products from those the competition are launching. AT&T appear to be doing a much more customised version of the OS than anything we've seen so far for an upcoming handset launch; it'll be interesting to see how deep this customisation goes. My gut feeling is that differentiation won't be difficult (or at least, it'll be cheaper and easier for a manufacturer to differentiate Android than maintain their own OS or license an alternative). And let's not forget that differentiation isn't much use unless it leads to a product which is at least as good as the competition - at a time when the telecomms industry is being redefined by new entrants, can we assume the alterations that incumbents want to make will be the right ones?

2. Anecdotally, I'm hearing that the Android Marketplace isn't generating equivalent sales of applications, when compared to the iPhone App Store. I think that this will improve over time; I don't see why, as it moves beyond early adopters, Android will appeal only to a customer-base who think everything should be free and won't pay for applications. But I also think Apple have done a great job of creating - and let's not forget, heavily promoting - the economy of the App Store. This is where I think Google may have more trouble; not all Android phones will include the Android Marketplace (many will no doubt include pale App Store imitations from operators), and unpopular though they are, the editorial decisions that Apple makes regarding what makes it into the store do act as some sort of quality filter.
   

In any case, interesting times... and once again I'm driven to kick myself into remembering that we're still at the beginning of something incredibly exciting.

I forgot to post about BOGFest - Brighton Outdoor Gaming Festival, the inaugural event of which was held last weekend in Brunswick Square - curated by Richard Vahrman of Locomatrix fame.

There was a programme of events running all afternoon; after a diary clash with a 5th birthday party, I managed to make it along at 4, missing Tai Chi Twister and Clock the Doc but arriving just in time to kick off some games of Fruit Farmer, one of the Locomatrix formats.

It was really interesting seeing Real People playing Fruit Farmer. We cheated completely, of course, and presented each player with a phone and GPS unit that had been preconfigured with the application installed - in real life they'd have to do this themselves, which we know to be a bit of a barrier (though the geocaching crowd seem to use applications on occasion, so it's not completely out of the question).

We had 6 pairs of players run off for a game. All bar one of the pairs managed to locate themselves quickly and orient themselves against the on-screen map - working out what direction they had to run in to do anything useful. A few players noted that their position was a little laggy, and we were slightly embarrassed to find out that the game layout we'd chosen for the day was slightly too large for the playing area - meaning that players would've had to climb onto the roofs of local buildings to collect a few of the larger pieces of fruit. Memo to self: next time, check map first.

But that said, players seemed to enjoy the game - particularly some of our younger participants:

Also throughout the day we had some treasure hunts running, a scavenger hunt at the end of the day, and Tristan brought along his Hunt the Wumpus QR-code game - he's written a great post on how it went for him, which you can find here.

Time constraints meant that I never got to show off ArchaeoloGPS, the game I've been doodling with recently. Perhaps next year... :)

• Moblin, a project the esteemed Mr Richards has been beavering away on, is launched - looking extremely tasty, particularly for a 1.0 ...
• The Big Lunch, a nationwide social eating project. None near us... yet. Any takers?
• Groundhog day for NFC: "it could all work really well if we viewed mobile phone apps a bit more like ring tones and made them as easy to obtain and dispose of"
• Mobile literacy, an Adaptive Path research project in rural India;
• Software development advice for startups: "Software development is complicated, expensive, error-prone, regularly boring and complicated. As a programmer, here’s what I think you should know before we meet for coffee"
• The clean sheet of paper: "two ways to work with talent"
• Frank Lloyd Lego sets, beautiful.
• Equally beautiful in another way, SickCity - realtime disease collection.
• The design with intent toolkit, "features 12 design patterns which recur across design fields (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website. Some of the names will be unfamiliar, but we hope the patterns and examples will be understandable, and inspire your own concepts."