Andrei Popescu, Google Gears

Gears insulates applications from the network connection: they don't know whether they're offline or online.

Gears: OSS library with JS APIs. Local storage, expensive background computations (i.e. a basic threading model), allows access to local data using SQL. Google Docs uses Gears.

IE 6/7, Firefox 1/2 (3 soon). 1mb download on Firefox/MacOS.

Mobile is intermittently connected, slow CPU, little RAM, slow stable storage.

Gears web apps read and write to local store, changes queued for later synchronisation. Server communication is completely decoupled from the UI and happens periodically (perhaps a model for other mobile apps?). Interesting, this seems to partition all networked interactions into "storage" (async) and query-based (sync)... which I guess we have to do anyway.

Seems to have a read cache too ("resourcestore").

Then I got too hot and left :)

My notes from todays talks - a bit briefer than normal, mainly because I've been paying attention to most of them...

Overall themes

A few years ago I remember mobility alone being justified as a reason to charge for mobile content. This notion seems to have been dropped, there's an acceptance that "internet thinking" is prevailing.

A few speakers have mentioned the idea that "all the enablers are in place": networks, handsets, etc.

Thomas Husson, Jupiter

iPhone is a positive trend but numerically weak: 200k sold in the UK, 90k by Orange in France, 80k by T-Mobile in Germany. iPhone users in France average 110mb pcm downloads. In the UK 60% of iPhone users download > 25mb pcm.

Web'n'Walk, the flat-rate T-Mobile tariff, has been around for 2 years and has 3m users: 5% of T-Mobile's overall customer base. Flat rate date might be clamoured for in our circles, but it's yet to reach the public at large. Low internet usage on mobile is driven by fear of cost and ignorance of benefits; 57% of consumers aren't interested in anything beyond voice and SMS (corollary: 43% want more). Mobile broadband won't hit >50% penetration until 2010 - in Japan is took 5 years to reach this rate too.

Users aren't prepared to pay for content, so it becomes ad-funded.

Triple digit growth doesn't mean much when you start from zero.

Click-through rates are high due to early-adopter audiences; they will come to track online rates. 47% of advertisers have trouble measuring their mobile ad spend. Now til 2010 will be a period of education; early growth in the mobile ad industry will occur after 2010. Ad spend isn't proportionate to attention given to a medium - TV gets lots of attention and lots of spend; print gets lots of spend and little attention; online gets lots of attention and little spend. In Japan ad revenue is roughly 2.5 euros per customer per year.

Antoine Couret, Bouygues Telecom

Bouyges have 2m I-mode users, 400 official sites, 50% of their I-mode users are active spending 3mb/customer pcm at a flat rate price of 9.9 euros. Previously PAYG customers used to download 1mb pcm.

Wow: only 3mb per month? That sounds v low and works out as 3 euros per megabyte - quite expensive for the user. Not that mb is a great measure of usage when a single video download can severely skew figures

Mainly email and "practical sites". They're now transferring elements of I-Mode to WAP handsets: flat fee, subscriptions for content, portal structure and free-to-receive email. PAYG customers have their bills capped. Content that's free online can't be premium on mobile.

Oliver Schmidt, O2 Germany

Not much that O2 has done with regards to data revenues has worked. This is an exception. They're the #4 operator in Germany with an unusually high 20% data ARPU.

If you price many separate services sensibly, customers still end up being very confused by a tariff incorporating many price plans. So O2 have 3 data plans: S, M, L.S is a PAYG package, time-based for occasional internet use. M is for 3G use on a handset. L is for laptop owners.

A new mobile portal has better UI, more prominent search, multi-column layout. Aims to generate more revenue beyond traffic and guide the customer to the wider internet.

Panel discussion: Gabor Nemeth (Magyar Telecom), Alexander Franz (3 Austria), Dan Rosen (AKQA)

Moderator: what's missing for a company like Coke to go for a mobile strategy?
DR: They're going for it already. Lots of others haven't, they're waiting to go in. There's a lack of good mobile marketing people. Ad inventory isn't as large as some big brands would like.
M: What are the other key enablers we need?
GN: Sub-laptops are important.
AF: As an operator, we're not just interested in selling megabytes.

M: What else would be needed from a brands perspective?
DR: Advertisers want common standards from carriers. We've been having this conversation for 6 or 7 years and it's holding things back. Flat-rate data obviously. iPhone has disproportionate impact - is it the device or the accompanying package of data? It's difficult to separate the two.

M: Why is something as simple as QR Code not simple to implement?
GN: For Hungary, standards aren't the problem. Hungarians don't read Yahoo or Google, they just use their own sites and services. These are our 4.4m customers.
M: But QR code doesn't mean "English speaking content". I hear contradictory things about capacity of the networks: 3 offer to air TV channels and do Skype over the network whilst others say TV and video could threaten networks. Do we have the capacity to grow the mobile Internet?
AF: Maybe for a GSM operator, capacity is an issue. But at 3 we have only a 3G network, so we'll use it as much as we can.

DR: Get things out there, test them, and then worry about monetising. It's possible to hypothesise too much. Top 5 mobile search terms in the UK are "drinking", "supermarkets", "mcdonalds", etc... completely different to the top search terms on the fixed web.

Tim from Youtube: how fragile are the networks when affected by large data traffic?
GN: When there are too many users in 1 cell.

So, we've just completed our 9th fortnightly sprint at Future Platforms, it seems like as good a time as any to write an update on where we are.

We had an excellent session at the end of Sprint 8: the team (nearly) unanimously asked for standups to start earlier in the day. We had been running them at 09:45 - basically because I'd felt, despite not being a morning person myself, that this is a reasonable time to be in, thoughts collected and ready for work. So I was a bit surprised to hear everyone wanting to get cracking earlier - but no complaints :)

One other thing that came out of sprint 8 was that the review section of the day (where we run through work from the last 2 weeks) didn't seem too useful: we were asking each member of the team to show off some work, which led to a few folks demoing bug fixes (not that interesting for the rest of the team), and our in-house QA showing off things that look normal. So we resolved to change the format of this section of the day - see below.

Sprint 9 wasn't so good for us. We under-performed significantly compared to our work rate on previous sprints. There wasn't a clear reason why this might be, I suspect a combination of losing 2 members of the team who are consulting full-time for another client (and are therefore less available for project work), and the sprint being 2 days short thanks to a Bank Holiday falling in the middle. We'd factored in the raw loss of time the latter would cause, but not the loss of rhythm.

Joh's been down with the lurgi, so I took on the task of facilitating the sprint 9 retrospective/sprint 10 planning day. The review went much better - this time around, we had our Product Owner (currently Sergio) specifically request what he wanted to see demonstrated... and the whole affair felt much more coherent. QA presented an overview of all the projects we're working on (bug counts, progress, etc.) which seemed worthwhile too - we're going to keep both of these amendments for next time around.

What came up in the retrospective? As they go, this one was quite negative: the pair consulting for another client have felt disconnected from the rest of the company and didn't see much value in contributing to standups where their work has nothing to do with anyone else - particularly when, as it happens, they attend another (Skype-facilitated) standup with the clients team. So we've excused them from these events for the rest of their time consulting - and done the same for anyone else who's working solo and dedicated to a single project.

A few technical items for discussion came out in the retrospective, which we'll be gathering to discuss - mainly specific to MIDlet development or specific projects, so I won't go into them here.

The debilitating effect of interruptions was once more noted - we suggested that team members who repeatedly experience this attend standups and offer themselves as available after these standups - a bit like "surgery hours". We'll see how this goes.

We need to think through how we run projects with external contractors.

Lunch followed, then planning - slightly frenzied as we rushed to gather together the fortnights work. The planning session itself involved only the development team (as they're the only folks collaborating on anything in this sprint, all our design team are on solo projects) and was probably the quickest and least painful we've had to date. We completed planning in around 90 minutes, which is a record. As for why? We had fewer people in the room this time around, the projects we were planning out are reasonably well understood and we're clearly focusing on a couple of areas this time around.

So there we are... better reviews, better planning, but uncharacteristically poor recent performance and still questions over integrating design and development disciplines into a coherent unit.

A lovely Easter weekend:

• 4 days of lie-ins, catching up on sleep I'd bartered away over the first 3 months of 2008;
• 3 films - Invasion, Rendition, and Cloverfield - and I found something to enjoy in each of them;
• 2 and a half books read: finally finished Bruce Chatwins Songlines (which was absolutely fantastic), Presentation Zen, and started on The Player of Games (to my shame, the first Culture novel I've read);
• 1 tech sabbath: I switched off my mobile and laptop for Sunday, and kept them switched off. It felt horrific for the first 12 hours, lovely for the second 12 :)

All that plus a night out with the Good Doctor, Dangermouse Dave's birthday bash and a succession of meals and cake.

So now I'm rested and relaxed - a good thing, with a busy few weeks ahead: our fortnightly planning day on Wednesday followed by a Girl Geek Dinner, Mobile Internet in Berlin the following week, Over The Air in London the Friday after I return, the first "Chatham House" software meet the following week and a trip to Airenjuku London (mob-handed, I suspect) to say au revoir to Chris on the 12th April...

I love this article about conquering the galaxy through self-replicating probes (via Mr Jones, I think). I reminds me of trees. In less lucid moments I've often wondered what it must be like to have to grow somewhere in order to go there.