MomoLondon: Living in a Multi-Platform World

Another Mobile Monday on fragmentation of platforms, but this time hosted by a big company just about to launch yet another platform… The Microsoft reps seemed to come on a little strong tonight. So much so that I started to tune out when it was their turn to talk.

Nick Lansley from Tesco.com was a new face at Mobile Monday — and had some good things to say. He seems to have his head screwed on right about where to take Tesco.com in the face of multiple platforms and a wide spread of consumers (it’s the API, stoopid).

Tom Hume of Future Platforms also gave some interesting insights — I like his idea of using an AdWords campaign to figure out the target platforms for a new product. It’s always better to measure than to guess — and the internet lets you measure everything.

Alex Reeve - Director of Mobile Business Group, MSFT UK

• it’s fair to say that MS have had their challenges in the mobile industry
• they’re fully aware of that and they’re aware that “a new dawn is coming”
• mobile is enormously important to MS
• Windows 7 coming this side of Xmas
  • integrating contact details & social connections
  • options to show thing separately or together
  • keeping pictures together (including Facebook, etc)
  • “people want Internet Explorer on their phone”
  • do they really? don’t they just want Facebook/Yahoo/BBC, etc
  • fully-editable Word documents
  • email works the same as Outlook
  • I hope not… that would be horrible
  • “Zune is mainly a product in the US only”

Panel session

Panel (and their phones):

• Chair: Marek Pawlowski
  • this is no longer just about mobile — platforms to support now extend to TVs, games consoles, etc…
  • nearly all devices can do voice
  • most can do SMS, and a lot have browsers and Java
  • Q1 this year about 18% of mobile sales were smartphones
  • 11% of market by end of this year will be smartphones
  • 3/4 of developers use an Android or an iPhone as their primary device…
• Oded Ran - Windows Phone in the UK
  • Windows Phone - HDT HD2
• Tom Hume - MD of Future Platforms
  • Nexus One
• Nick Lansley - Head of R&D at Tesco.com
  • iPhone, Nexus One (which crashes 3 times a day)
• Jerry Ennis: CEO at Flirtomatic
  • #1 mobile social network in UK, if not in Europe, according to Comscore
  • though I guess it’s dwarfed by Facebook & twitter, which are social networks that people access on mobile…
  • iPhone
• Ilio Uvarov - lead UX practice at RG/A London
  • clients such as Nike, Nokia
  • iPhone

Which mobile platform would you develop for first and why?

• NL: probably give a different answer every couple of months
  • would like to choose most common in Tesco customer base, but that would mean a phone that’s incapable
  • started with iPhone “because I had one”
  • iPhone is a “hero device” — you get much more marketing for your buck
  • but need to balance with what devices customers are using
• JE: started believing they could use downloadable Java apps
  • but wasn’t really possible
  • target market are not using Java apps, even if their phone is capable
  • have instead gone to mobile web
  • also seeing some startling usage growth from iPhone (Flirtomatic have an iPhone app that wraps a browser)
• TH: would probably cheat and spend £50 on an Adwords marketing campaign to see who was interested…
• IU: depends on target
  • business people in NYC — Blackberry
  • teenagers in middle east — Blackberry
  • hipsters in London — iPhone

What can platform providers provide to developers to attract them?

• OR: don’t want to write once, debug across multiple hardware
  • want to make money
  • choose to piggyback on a platform launching (someone else’s marketing muscle)
• NL: iPhone and Android offer push update notifications
  • really important — bug fixes are v. important to customer experience
  • Ovi falling down massively here
  • Apple also making things difficult by making updates take up to two weeks
• JE: Flirtomatic app is just a wrapper around mobile web app
  • can’t take advantage of native aspects
  • but changes can be deployed very quickly without going through Apple

Who in the audience had a bad experience of starting out on a mobile platform?

• TouchNote: went for Nokia 3rd edition (Symbian) & Ovi store
  • just not a lucid, easy experience for customers, even in comparison to Blackberry, let alone iPhone & Android

Who’s had a good experience?

• No one put up their hands!!

Do customers really take updates?

• TH: 60-70% take updates for android
  • would imagine iPhones are about the same
  • Java apps are almost impossible to get customers to update
• NL: always offer new features with bug fixes
  • every time Tesco update the Tesco Finder app, they see 99.9% of new version by the end of that day!
• IU: have about 100 pending updates on his iPhone
  • end up not using 90% of apps that you’ve downloaded
• MP: 70% of mobile web users went to 10 major brands

MS have developer lock-in for tools, will they lock-in legally like Apple?

• Silverlight & XNA plus mobile web are main ways to market on Windows Phone 7
• Haven’t finished Ts&Cs yet

Is it sustainable to support so many platforms, or will we see consolidation?

• TH: we are seeing consolidation around the web
  • don’t feel intimidated by number of platforms, as only have to deal with those that provide an audience
  • feel locked in to Apple not by legal language, but by the audience that they provide

What can platform providers do to make a new platform attractive?

• don’t make us write the app in Silverlight — let us write it in C#
• reveal the number of apps in the store — no hype
• charge less than Android & Apple (30%)
• make it easy for customers to buy cheap things with enough money going to developers

Which platform gives the best ROI? How does mobile web compare?

• JE: make money with virtual currency (80% revenues), rest from advertising
  • how do we bill people to buy virtual currency?
  • operator billing (reverse SMS), credit card, paypal
  • still 60/40, 70/30 — not so good
  • credit card still cheapest for business
  • Apple don’t let you use in-app purchases for virtual currency…
• TH: not sure that there’s a link
  • look to introduce customers with operator billing and then convert repeat customers to credit card later
• JE: operator billing is a terrible UX — sometimes a 12-step process
  • not as bad in UK, but US can be really bad

What about emerging markets? What are platforms doing?

• OR: active in two sides, services (Hotmail, etc) & devices
  • phone becomes 1st screen
  • exploring new ways of getting hold of the phone, since Windows Phone is not targeted at emerging markets
• NL: when Tesco arrives in a market, it could be said to have “emerged” already…
  • “Tesco in a box” — all systems for a new country shipped out
• MP: discussing India with major internet brand, responsible for UX
  • because device is becoming primary, there are increasing number of smartphones
  • also multiple SIM cards for each user (up to 12!!)
  • Italians have 1.77 SIM cards per subscriber, cf. 1.4 UK & 1.3 in US

Multiple platforms outside of mobile

• IU: depends on the use-case
  • things that work nicely across channels: e.g. instapaper
  • boxee: combining web, mobile & TV (can use mobile as remote)
• NL: did ethnographic research in people’s homes as to how they shop
  • calling on phones, SMS, writing messages on paper
  • wanting to allow people to add things little and often throughout the week
  • have cheated by building an API to get other people to create apps
  • e.g. Yahoo widgets on TV: watch cooking show, and add ingredients while you watch
• TH: big fan of opening up API, but how does that work as a provider? are you worried about the customer contact being mediated via a third party?
• NL: grocery shopping is not really exciting to customers
  • would rather get great ideas in front of customers
  • customers still have to login and checkout on Tesco site

What about voice as a platform?

• TH: Google introduced voice search and changed his behaviour
• MP: need to be very careful about experience:
  • experience was significantly enhanced when interacting with an avatar
• JE: tried out a voice part of app a year or two ago
  • watched my teenage daughter who never talks to people, but uses text & facebook instead
• MP: is that an opportunity? getting people to use their unused minutes!

How do you handle that your app is living on a phone with others?

• NL: Nexus One had an app using up all his minutes when in US
  • data hogging apps rapidly become unpopular
• TH: it’s one of the important things that makes the difference between mobile and desktop
  • number one feature on the iPad is battery life

What about upcoming standards: JIL, BONDI?

• NL: if you don’t make your app the best it can possibly be for that device then don’t bother
• MP: customers have one device — they’re not bothered by fragmentation

Brief summary

• IU: kept going back to UX
  • do you want to be good enough or delightfully different
• JE: all about UX — the best possible UX is using the latest features of any platform, rather than going cross-platform
  • payment is crucial, runs across different platforms
  • needs to be improved, simplified and cheaper for business
• NL: has to be relentlessly good design for every make and model of handset
  • gives you brand consistency
• TH: root causes of fragmentation are a good thing
  • mass market (2/3rds of world’s population) and extremely fast rate of change
  • developers have to get used to it
• OR: successful developers are embracing the fact that fragmentation is here to stay
• MP: “can economise on plumbing but make sure your bathroom is pretty bling”

Announcements

• Microsoft BizSparkCamp: June 22nd 9.30-5.30
  • “they want to give you things…”
• July - MomoLondon: Marketing your mobile app
• August - MomoLondon break
• September 10th & 11th - OverTheAir 2010

O2 Litmus: Palm Pre Mobile Web Developer Event

Tonight was a really impressive event organised by O2 Litmus. The two guys from Palm did a very good job presenting WebOS and Palm’s plans for the future. The food and drink was excellent. And they even gave us a Palm Pre each to take home! Certainly makes me want to at least try out making an app.

As usual, here’s my notes for the evening in a vaguely coherent manner…

• webkit appearing all over the place on mobile
• as well as opera (there were a couple of people from Opera at the event)
• HTML 5 is providing standardisation for web applications in the same way that HTML provided standardisation for web documents
• web applications are escaping the browser:
  • fluid, prism — single app browsers
  • adobe air, appcelerator titanium — provide additional features
• why not flash, javafx or silverlight?
• because:
  • canvas
  • fonts in the browser
  • javascript engines — with JIT compilation
  • access to native graphics
• “When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better — you've made something new” — Stephen Levy
• Palm Pre uses V8 javascript engine, just like Chrome
• WebWorkers provide background threads
  • came from Gears worker pool
  • invented to stop database access causing hangs
• Chrome uses WebWorkers for extensions
• Firefox hasn’t implemented SQLite, but may go for a JSON-based database, like CouchDB
• CSS Transforms
  • e.g. http://satine.org/research/webkit/snowleopard/snowstack.html
• “it’s not javascript people don’t like, it’s dealing with cross-browser issues”
  • anyone mention IE…?
• “it’s not just going to be developing apps for Palm — it’s making things for the web”

some detail

• Mojo Framework is open-source
• Mojo uses prototype.js at the moment, but will be made nicer to use other alternatives later
• dashboard items and popups are just DOM items
• want to integrate apps into system — background apps

security

• web browser provides normal web sandbox
• applications get access to native services
• certain APIs still need permissions granted
  • e.g. location
  • can get app to ask when API is used
• would like to push local APIs to browser windows
• apps are packaged and signed
  • working with developers to encrypt apps in different ways
  • would anticipate that developers would be able to opt-in to encrypt their app
  • protect against people uploading a copy of an app as their own
  • balanced against the benefit of view source on the web

app store

• Palm would like a “web app store” to emerge
• Palm doesn’t feel that it’s the right company to make this move
• creating a Palm catalogue & developer program for mid-December
  • charging $50 for each app to be in the catalogue — as a spam filter
  • money goes to funding developing programme & catalogue service
  • interested in finding other “friction points”
• can get an immediate acceptance into the web distribution of the Palm app catalogue
  • submit and get a URL straight away
  • can email/tweet other people
  • no review process
• opening up the backend too — feeds of all the apps and charts
• would like digg-style rating
• a developer can choose to make an app available for specific markets
• also aiming to provide metrics for developers, so they can see how users are choosing or not choosing their apps
• payment:
  • right now they have PayPal
  • would like to support several options
  • want to decrease the friction

BONDI & others

• palm works with them
• including W3C widgets & geo
• Palm way will be there originally, but will be switched out when
• order depending on developer requests
• native-accelerated CSS transforms are higher at the moment
• “Palm pays us, but they didn’t pay us enough to sell out”

supporting open source

• waiving cost for anyone working open source
• $99 for developer

testing

• O2 Litmus will be recruiting Palm Pre users for testing availability
• DeviceAnywhere will feature Palm Pre in O2 VDL

feedback

• devrel@palm.com
• they already use Jira and want to open it something to the public soon
• homebrew community will patch things before Palm do it themselves
• there are differing viewpoints internally…

personal usage

• like multi-tasking
• don’t like UI latency
  • hardware is roughly equivalent to the iPhone 3GS
  • don’t have access to hardware GPU — so CSS Transforms is really important
  • will happen with a over-the-air software upgrade

multiple devices

• Palm Pixi seems a lot nicer
• different screen size (80 pixels shorter)
• should design liquid layouts…
• the future is devices in all kinds of form factors

tooling

• there are tools for Flash — what about tools for WebGL, etc?
• mozilla is making tools
• e.g. Atlas from 280North
• this week there may be something new released…
• should flash be a native platform for apps on Palm Pre?
  • nearly supported for web pages — Adobe has shown something working already

MomoLondon: Mobile Web & Widgets

This was a great Mobile Monday London. Short, snappy presentations; an exciting and relevant topic with a real buzz going on; announcements that you heard here first; and really useful networking afterwards.

Many thanks to Dan, Alex, Jo & Helen!

GSMA One API

Kevin Smith — Vodafone

Kevin works closely with Dan Applequist.

Aim to produce network enabler APIs across mobile operators — charging, location, messaging, user profile, connection profile. They’re a network-level complement to OMTP BONDI, using a RESTful and lightweight web services system.

Major European & Asian operators all involved.

Have a reference implementation (beta) available at http://oneapi.aepona.com. Go try it out!

OMTP BONDI

Nick Allott — OMTP

I went to the OMTP BONDI codefest back in January (sorry, I ran out of time to blog about it). So I didn’t take many notes on this presentation.

OMTP is an organisation of mobile operators working together (who would have thought!), with manufacturers and system providers joining in the fun. They’re working on defining a javascript API through which a web runtime environment can access and interact with device-specific information.

So there’s a location API (compatible with the W3C spec as it goes), access to calendar and contacts, etc. Crucially, they’re actually building a reference implementation in order to figure out how the API should work. That way they can change their spec as they discover that it doesn’t quite work in real situations. The spec so far looks good — more details and the downloadable SDK at http://bondi.omtp.org.

The only problem is that the reference implementation is built on Pocket Internet Explorer. Great access to device information, but really hard to make a good-looking, functional widget using web standards…

They’ve got one demo widget so far:

• EMCC Gig Guide w/last.fm
  • location
  • cached feeds
  • syncing calendars

And here’s where to find the latest widgets: http://bondi.omtp.org/widget-gallery/

Ikivo Enrich

Samuel Sweet, VP Sales

T-Omnia widget solution launched November 2008 in Korea. Based on Samsung, Windows Mobile & Ikivo Enrich.

• SVG display engine (provided by Ikivo)
• Javascript w/device APIs & AJAX support
• Aiming to support HTML display engine later
• W3C widget spec

“Putting lipstick on a pig” for Windows Mobile!

SK Telecom have had 300% increase in shipments month on month since they’ve launched the new interface.

Importantly, the W3C Widget spec now allows SVG as an alternate rendering option for widgets. This means that the Ikivo widget engine can be W3C-compatible.

Announcement tonight: Ikivo will be supporting BONDI

Firefox Mobile

Christian Sejersen

Currently called Fennec but will be called Firefox when it gets released. It runs on the same codebase.

Some countries currently have more than 50% Firefox usage. Mozilla are starting to wonder what they should do when they get a monopoly…

Fennec for Windows Mobile coming out soon (April?); Symbian version started not so long ago.

Shows a demo of running Fennec on Nokia N810 (Maemo) — Fennec Alpha Walkthrough on Vimeo

Browser controls are off the edge of the page to the left and right. Just scroll that way to see them.

Firefox Addons can be made compatible with Fennec. 20 or 30 Addons are available after a month, with no promotion from Mozilla.

There is full API compatibility between mobile and desktop, so once they add location & camera access to mobile, these APIs are available from the desktop build too.

My thoughts

As per Bruce Lawson’s talk at the Betavine birthday party, the browser writers don’t see the difference between mobile and desktop. I agree with them that the APIs and browser can be very similar, but I still think there’s a difference in how you would design a service.

A mobile service needs to take one particular function and “polish the hell out of it” (as goes the recommendation for iPhone app design). A desktop web app still needs to be polished, but has more leeway in its design. There’s also the interaction styles: a mouse is not a finger is not a d-pad, and you need to make the interface appropriate for each of these styles. Sure some of this can be done with stylesheets, but when you’ve got less screen space you want to deprioritise certain content off the screen completely.

Panel session

Chaired by Dan Appelquist

• Francois Daoust (W3C)
• Graham Thomas (T-Mobile)
  • 8 years at Nokia on UI & UX
  • Also bringing games into market (Club Nokia)
  • Been at T-Mobile for 7 years, now Head of Multimedia
  • T-Mobile very active in mobile internet — have iPhone and G1
• Christian Sejersen (Mozilla)
• Kevin Smith (Vodafone)
• Brad Sipes (CTO, Ikivo)
• Nick Allott (OMTP)

T-Mobile widget roadmap — want to have develop once, run across all handsets. Enabling the long tail…

SVG helps to bridge the gap between different screen sizes — since scalable. But Brad sees it more to “make things fun”.

Q: How does BONDI fit in with other web runtime initiatives, like Adobe AIR or Mozilla Prism?

• CS: Prism currently in labs (local look & feel for web-based content). But don’t really have anything to say as Mozilla…
• NA: OMTP did due diligence and found 25 different ways of doing the same thing. Operators decided on a common standard and then broke it in 25 different ways…
• NA: 3 parts to standardisation
  1. APIs
  2. Display engine
  3. Security (one of the big problems for Java on mobile — see signed apps…)

Q: Sounds like lots of separate bits. Do they fit together?

• NA: Yes. At least all the people on this panel do… OMTP working with W3C. SVG long-established as rendering tech. OMTP location API is W3C compatible, and could use One API as implementation by getting location from http query.

Q: How do I make money out of writing a widget?

• GT: Key benefit of widgets — start using internet more, like iPhone & G1.
• KS: Earn £20K from Voda competition…?
• FD: sell the widget like the iPhone app store.

One advantage of interoperable widgets is that you can buy your widget from anywhere. You can have your own payment mechanism

• DA: Can we build interoperable application stores? Micropayments never really went anywhere with the web. Will we get there with widgets?
• FD: There were some standards about micropayments 10-15 years ago, but they werer never finished… Maybe it’s time to dust them off and complete them.

Q: What benefits do I get from a widget that I don’t get from HTML5? (Hugo from Google)

• FD: Widgets give you more context, but it’s just a wrapper.
• CS: A lot of the widget issues have come up because of security issues. But in essence it’s the same thing that needs to be solved across mobile and desktop.
• BS: Widgets give you local application feel that HTML5 isn’t aiming for initially. But HTML5 will converge in the longer term.
• NA: Some of the widget stuff has been created as a sticking plaster to avoid 15-20 different solutions while HTML5 gets itself ready.
• DA: BONDI allows HTML5 over https to take advantage of secured APIs.

Q: My question: widgets on the standby screen? What about battery life?

• GT: want them on the idle screen, with notification etc. Want eBay etc event-based dynamic.
• CS: Palm Pre will be fully web-based
• BS: T-Omnia has widget framework attached to button on the side of the phone. Can have lightweight widget framework on low-level phones that aren’t capable of running full HTML5 browser.
• NA: battery notification & event APIs planned for BONDI 1.1

Q: What sort of security model?

• NA: BONDI — consumer delegates trust to an entity. Doesn’t work to prompt the user for everything. Instead they should be able to trust Norton, Google, T-Mobile, etc.
• DA: using XML digital certificates within the widget

Q: If you had one widget, what would it be and how would you interact?

• BS: weather. would beep at me if thunderstorm coming in.
• KS: widget that tells me if my 8 year old daughter has turned off her light…
• CS: can I have a browser instead?
• FD: tells me which way I should vote on W3C…
• GT: M25 road traffic info
• NA: a widget that syncs my contacts
• DA: location-based ski conditions. What’s important is that the bar is lowered. I want my mom to write widgets!

Q: Have Palm come up with a way to make webapps feel like native apps? (Hugo, Google)

• CS: Mozilla often have discussions about how to make the browser look native. But people don’t care. They want Facebook to look like Facebook, not a T-Mobile application.

Q: What do operators feel about making widgets more available? (David Stone)

• GH: Shortly launching service with idle screen. Demo on idle screen. Gallery also available.