Predictions for 2010

The first Mobile Monday Edinburgh of the year focussed on the attendees' predictions for the key trends, opportunities and issues affecting mobile in 2010 - and in some cases beyond! This was in part inspired by Rudy De Waele's excellent Mobile Trends 2020 compilation.

• Garry Irvine of Connected Day started us off by a simple prediction that the iPad will have a disruptive effect on the marketplace.
  
• Richard Marshall of Rapid Mobile noted that there is an ongoing huge increase in smartphones in the market in Europe, but that the entrenched nature of the platforms means that this will lead to more fragmentation, not less.
• Alisdair Gunn of Wireless Innovation views the education sector together with the move of traditional print publishing into mobile as being a key combination - with the children in the schools very much leading the way driving the uptake of new approaches and models.
• Ben Hounsell of nio predicted the continued rise of web based platforms (e.g. Palm WebOS, HTML5 widgets, etc) as developers seek to avoid the fragmentation predicted by Richard.
• Rachel Lane of Blonde optimistically predicted an increased understanding of the mobile usage characteristics of the actual audience of mobile apps and services, as well as noting that mobile is simply an extension of the user's existing digital activity.
• Jessica Williamson of nio and StartupCafe predicted an increased prevalence of and more sophisticated use of sensors to allow the phone to detect its environment and thus provide context sensitive behaviour. In particular she hopes by years end that her phone will be able to tell when she is in a bad mood and warn her friends to avoid her ...
• Alan Paxton of Isomaly succinctly stated that in 2010 mobile is now in the mainstream - not a niche any more.
• Gordon Povey of Artillium noted that in Benelux in particular there is an upswing in the number of MVNOs, and that they are more open to taking risks with cool and innovative new services than the traditional telcos - though he conceded that this isn't currently happening in the UK. He also predicted that more sophisticated mobile app revenue models will start to become truly viable this year - e.g. freemium etc
  
• David Richardson of Edinburgh University Informatics expressed a frustration with the large number of companies who want to engage with mobile but don't understand it - an iPhone app is not always the answer - needs to address the mainstream.
• Ronnie Forbes of Mobiqa felt that geolocation will be a key trend this year. He also stated that it is ridiculous that you need to buy apps from the company who sells you the device - and somewhat contentiously stated that App Stores are a passing fad.
• Graham West of Mobiqa stated that mobile web will overtake J2ME this year, with web tech used to create an app like experience for the end user. He also predicted that this will not be the year for NFC.
• Adrian Williamson predicted that this will be the year that end users start to volunteer to pay for content they really want - shaking up the publishing value chain and freeing the industry from the "everything is free" days of the internet.
• Annette Leonhard of Edinburgh University Informatics noted that for many of the big ideas in mobile to succeed data coverage needs to be ubiquitous, reliable, and affordable, including international roaming.
• Paul Wilson of Edgecase will be interested to see how the iPad blurs the distinctions between mobile and personal computing, and between the traditional and mobile web.
  
• Adrian Astley-Jones of Reality Gap agreed with Ben and Graham that this will be a key year for growing mass market acceptance of the mobile Internet.
• Jim Wolff of the Leith Agency predicted a massive rise in the number of "personal apps" based on tech such as iSites. In digital marketing he predicted a move away from simple gimmicks such as iPint, into branded utility apps that will have longer term traction.
• Anthony Ashbrook of Mobile Acuity notes the start of a trend away from simple textual search and towards visual search on mobile - with many examples ranging from simple barcodes, through AR, into Google Goggles, Amazon remembers, and Nokia Point and Find.
  

My own prediction is rather more general and is about how real people (normob - not promob) perceive their mobile devices. I see this as moving away from being about simple communications towards being pervasive connected computing - perhaps towards the form predicted by Ian M Banks in his Culture SF novels.

Interestingly the reaction from the majority promob in the room was one of "so what, that is already here". My observation would be that isn't yet true for the majority, but perhaps by the end of the year we will see the same reaction there too? Only time will tell!

PS. Carnival #209 is up over at WAP Review.

OMTP coming to Mobile Monday Edinburgh

Am delighted that we will be having our first external speakers at Mobile Monday Edinburgh at our next event on 31st August.

OMTP's BONDI has been quietly making progress for a few years now towards defining a standard interface for providing secure access to handset features from inside web apps and widgets. They have suffered from the usual chicken-and-egg problem for such new standards with low developer interest due to small number of supported devices, and low support due to lack of apps, so I was pleased to see recently that a swath of new LIMO devices have been launched with BONDI support, to add to their existing Windows Mobile footprint.

Looking forward to hearing more about their work both at MoMoEdi, and at the mobile barcamp they are running on 3rd September.

metaTXT: Aiming for one web and gaining discoverability!

One particularly interesting new contact I made at MWC last week was Sinead Quealy of visibility mobile - the mobile SEO company founded by Bena Roberts. As well as telling me about their work on mobile SEO she mentioned they were involved with pushing the "metaTXT" spec through W3C in order to improve discoverability of mobile sites.

Now I have got back and the dust has settled I have had a look at the metaTXT white paper and it seems to be promising stuff. Fundamentally it is an attempt to solve the problem of supporting multiple versions of a site for different classes of device in a way that is transparent to the user - creating a practical step towards the one web ideal I have blogged about before.

What is interesting is it does this by adding a small file (meta.txt) alongside the existing robots.txt at the top of the site providing metainformation about the site. The primary use of this is to provide different paths for the root page for various different device classes - which is all well and good though one webbers may quibble about not driving them via the same markup.

Perhaps more interesting is the ability to provide further meta information about the site within meta.txt - in a standard form independent of any device and/or markup specifics. This can include the usual title and keywords, and intriguingly things like the location the site is related to which opens interesting possibilities for the return of context specific results for the mobile user.

The primary challange they will face with all this is obviously the usual chicken and egg one of convincing sites to publish meta.txt files, and convincing search engines to look for and use them. That said they have already got a couple of mobile search providers deeply involved in the associated working group which is a good sign.

Discovery is one of the key problems that needs to be solved in mobile and this may be one part of the solution to that problem.

Yet another mobile browser

Interested to see that well known blogger and ex Mowser teammember Mike Rowehl is now working for Skyfire - the 3rd party windows mobile browser.

I guess in some ways it is questionable whether or not we need another browser choice, but the state of mobile browsers on average is still fairly ropey and a little competition may well stimulate some more improvement.

PS. Registration is now open for MoMo London 3rd birthday party on the 10th of November.

Mowser is now in dotMobi

I am late as ever in noticing but am delighted to see that the Mowser assets have been acquired by dotMobi. Great to see those ideas continuing on as part of a greater whole! It is well described by Russell Beattie, Mike Rowehl and James Pearce.

The feed aggregator approach - Mippin

Following on from the demise of Mowser which went for full on transcoding of sites to allow efficient access from mobile my attention was caught by Mippin. They portray their service in the same way but require that the site provide an RSS feed so in fact what they are is a feed aggregator.

That said they do it very well - all nicely tied together and a nice widget to help people get your site onto their phone etc -

Monetisation is via advertising - with some careful validation done to ensure that a user isn't trying to monetize a feed that isn't theirs - and implemented in conjunction with admob so the site publisher gets the primary revenue.

All in all a very smooth experience - though the key question as ever is whether they can get enough footfall to make it all worthwhile.

PS. Carnival #126 is now up.

UPDATE: After my messing around yesterday I got as far as enabling advertising but then didn't have time to go and create an admob account so left it without one defined. It turns out that in these circs Mippin will serve ads from their own account - and a number of them were of the sort you tend to see in late night TV or spam email - not ideal!

This morning I have created my own admob account - with "age appropriate ads" disabled. The short term effect is that no ads are yet appearing but hopefully when they do they will be a little more appropriate!

UPDATE2: This is apparently not intended (see comment below) and they plan to fix it today so that ads don't appear at all until a valid admob id is provided.

Surfing the web on mobile

Sad to see that Russell has had to throw in the towel over at Mowser. Rather emphasises the fragile nature of startups and how they are completely dependent on the belief of their backers, but also, as Russell himself says, it also brings the whole mobile web proposition into question.

Mowser acted as a proxy which reformatted conventional websites for viewing on mobile. It is thus related to, though much less intrusive than, the various transcoders being inflicted upon users by various mobile networks.

These have generally caused problems for mobile content and site providers due to their indiscriminate deployment and lack of any coherent and consistent way for a site to avoid transcoding.

For the last few months Luca Passani of WURFL has been driving a campaign against indiscriminate reformatting and has proposed a standard methodology for mobile optimised/aware sites to avoid transcoding. Recently one of the major transcoder providers, OpenWave, have signed up to this. Hopefully more will follow!

In a few years time everybody will have a device and connection which allows full on web browsing and we will be looking back on all this somewhat bemusedly wondering what all the fuss was about. In the meantime the mobile web sadly must remain a somewhat brittle thing, and thus unlikely to really crack the mass market.

PS. The latest carnival is up at 3-Lib.

One Web or Mobile Web?

Managed to sneak away from the stand for a couple of interestingly different presentations at 3GSM the other week.

The first was part of the .mobi thread in the wireless developers forum. Stayed for the first few items until they started to talk about the value of the .mobi domain for email addresses (and if anybody can explain the sense of that to me I would be grateful) and I gave up in disgust! As I am sure most folks know the underlying premise is that sites for mobile devices need to be built for mobile devices and the .mobi domain is intended (and restricted) to contain such sites.

The day after I attended the first few talks in Ajit Jaokar's technology breakout on mobile web 2.0 and listened to Jon von Tetzchner of Opera Software tell us at great length how it was "one web" and that all devices, from mobile phones through consumer electronics up to desktop PCs should be able to browse the same material, handling it in a way appropriate to the device in question.

These are at first glance two fundamentally opposed views, of which I would say the former is a useful and pragmatic approach for the short term with a healthy emphasis on supporting end-user confidence, while the latter is a nice long term ideal.