MomoLondon: The Mobile Web One Year On

Someone wants to flirt with you - Mark Curtis @ Flirtomatic

• abandoned Java (stayed with web & wap
• only thing that’s on web but not mobile is video
• 80% of our customers are not interested in dating, just fun
• very important to show web users which users are mobile (as their responses will be slower)
• revenue from ads + value added services
• high usage on mobile
  • 2,500 page view per user per month since last Aug/Sep
• started over a year ago, making zero revenue at beginning of this year, break even by Q3 next year
• started off completely off-portal
• Andrew Odlyzko - content is not king (it’s communication between people)
• small groups market seems like an opportunity (Zygo looking at this hard)
• why social network?
  • everybody’s doing it
  • intrigue — “somebody wants to flirt with you”
  • theme specific e.g. Chelsea footballers
• but why go on?
  • my friends are there
  • it’s fun (people like to feel wanted; voyeurism)
  • sex / lifetime romance
  • content habit - e.g. discussing rugby world cup
• lost money and time by taking mobile site and taking almost straight to the web
  • continual struggle to keep the two products divorced
  • e.g. “look at me!” people pay to appear at the top — totally different presentation on mobile than for web
• bare essentials of registration — every additional info
  • flirtomatic use: sex; target flirts; date of birth
• abandoned flash on the web & java on phones as they stop you deploying new features quickly
  • absolutely impossible to move fast if you have loads of devices to test
  • therefore mobile app has to be only something that isn’t possible on wap — and rest is a link to wap site
• not yet come across a case study of viral working on mobile
• operator portals very powerful
• admob was only channel available on mobile, but now have 7 channels
  • advertise on wap to get onto a wap service
  • 80% register once they’ve clicked through
  • difficult to advertise on web / other as
• took the opinion that subscription suppresses usage, so ads & value ad services only
• advertising now beginning to work; May / June beginning to work
• advertising model on wap currently slavishly copying web, history shows that model always changes
  • expecting a bumpy ride but don’t know which way
• value added services:
  • e.g. selling pictures of roses
  • bidding for points etc.
  • users will pay to delete their worst rating (delete my freak)
• shifting to PayForIt using MIG… otherwise PSMS most popular payment method
• 65-70% of revenue from value added services — expecting to decrease to 50-55% with extra advertising next year
• payment by mobile is understood and embraced — making more money from mobile users than web
• flirtomatic pre-moderate all visual material (moderation is a big issue for operators)
• finding that SMS is a good tool for CRM
• wap vs web:
  • overlap in users is 15%
  • if you log on to web, you automatically get logged off wap (and vice versa)

Mobile Web Initiative - Crossing the Chasm - Philipp Hoschka @ W3C

• W3C have mobileOK automatic tests and best practices checker (online version still in beta)
• Working on a new open source Java version available to download (released fairly soon) — Mobile Test Harness / Open Mobile Web Test Suite
  • community submits tests
  • can be used for browser manufacturers as well…
• Mobile AJAX Workshop chaired by Dan Applequist
  • discussed API to phone internals…
• Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group
  • Device Independent Authoring Language
• Next exciting area — developing countries:
  • 2006 BBC: 61% of international WAP users came from Nigeria
  • India: many more mobile web users than desktop web users

Content Transformation - Ed Moore @ OpenWave

• OpenWave transformation product is called OpenWeb
• Operators are saying that “45% of traffic / 1.8 million requests a month off-portal”
  • trying to make point that people are trying to go to URLs that don’t work for phone
  • but doesn’t that say that portal is not the be all and end all…?
• weirdies:
  • www.vnexpress.net — loads images using javascript timer 8 seconds after page load!
  • microsoft mobile site, sends wap content type then html content!
• operators seem to be 2:1 in favour of network proxy over portal URL field
• wap.* or *.mobi does help to identify mobile sites
  • need to identify site before you make the request, as may need to fake the user agent…
• operators: simple marketing message & enough capacity — 1 week of traffic went up 9 times in data usage
  • where adaptation has been deployed, there has been at least twice the traffic
• entering a URL will probably work — increases user confidence — encourages operators to spend more on mobile web
• predictions:
  1. mobile web will merge with PC web
  2. operators will stay with open gardens and will continue to offer more flat rate
     • admob — internet revenue models
  3. end of the mobile web only brand
     • mobile only services will very specific niche

Content Transformation - Richard Blades @ Novarra

these guys do the content transformation for Vodafone

• do Java and BREW clients as well as server-side
• some operators are talking about using both client and server
  • if client — what are the default bookmarks…?
• operators are using this change as an opportunity to move to web2.0-stylee
• moving to server-side enables faster deployment of new technologies (e.g. new video codecs)
• average usage after transformation: 0.6 MBytes / day (from 0.18 MBytes before)
  • top 100 sites on alexa show up high on mobile
  • social networking, email
  • similar time profile to flirtomatic: peaks from 11.30pm
  • not unusual to find sessions of up to 30mins
• www.novarra.com/faqs — will be available shortly
• mailto:mobilecontent@novarra.com

Internet Made Mobile - Andrea Trasatti @ dotMobi

• phone.mobi is the definitive device database on the web
• trying to build
  • mobile web test suite
  • web interface to device database
  • standards-based API to embed into application
    • easy to install, but keeps in sync with central server
• create & manage tests on the mobile device
• contributing opinions — from UAProf and actual experience
• http://ready.mobi provides emulators for phones

mippin makes it mobile

http://mippin.com/preview

• used to make mobizines
• can’t cross the chasm with a client so switched to server-based
• off-portal portal providing access to RSS feeds
• also has mipplets to provide widgets on mippin customised home page

Next momoLondon

• November 6: 2nd Anniversary + “Mobile Advertising”

Mobile Camp London: CuteCircuit wearables

The Hug Shirt

bluetooth t-shirt with touch sensors & heat+vibration actuators

hug yourself & send action to application on phone, then send that hug to other people

can also send hugs to friends if you don't have a shirt -- use the HugMe software

can send to multiple people

when you connect after leaving it in your cupboard for a while, the phone prompts you: "there is a hug waiting. do you want to feel it now?"

children wanted to invent a touch language to communicate in class

power mesh rather than wires (silver coated mesh) with low power

bluetooth brain on back (only hard piece -- rest is soft)

can wash by removing battery & hug pads -- circuits are waterproof

unfortunately, demo shirts were left behind after they visited Wired NextFest -- a film company wants to use them in film (with Hiro from Heroes in it)

question: when will the shorts will be released...?

Mobile Phone Dress

When you swing the arm up to your ear it answers the call -- swinging your arm down, hangs up

Microphone and headphone in sleeve; aerial in hem of dress so doesn't give you high radiation

(side comment: jawbone -- world's best noise cancelling bluetooth headset: $100 but leagues ahead of anyone else)

SkateHoodie

problem: listening to music while you skate -- don't want to have iPod hanging around so it doesn't get bashed

instead have a hoodie that is a music player -- transfer music into it by plugging a USB stick into it

also enables sharing USB sticks with your friends (don't want to lend them your iPod, but a stick only costs a few quid)

headphones are embedded in fabric in the hood

controls are little indentations on the arm, have to learn which indentation is which

Mobile Camp London: The Astonishing Tribe

license rich graphical user interface middleware & tools for phone manufacturers
offices in sweden (hq), korea, san diego, tokyo, taipei

focus on user interface for mobiles

• kastor: rendering engine -- images, rectangles, etc
• cascades: UI design -- lists, etc
• motion lab: UI authoring tool for cascades or kastor

proprietary tech, selling as a product
motion lab currently approaching release 2.0
cascades available as a library & headers for symbian, windows for mobile, etc.
can integrate into a third party app

UI driven architecture to enable a seamless UI combining lots of different services (MVC architecture)
background services such as MMS service, main menu service, media player service
UI layer controlled with XML config, separated from background services
generic callbacks to service code

can try out interface without back-end on real device
allows you to test performance of UI

also have a win32 viewer that allows you to preview on windows

define a control element and tie to a visual layout and a model using ids
can specify model using model element in XML, or using a dataService element that gets data from C
dataservice defines a class and the C code registers such a class
callbacks are basic tree access methods: get root data element, get child at index, get name, get property, etc.
whenever you change something in the data structure, you can tell cascades about add, remove or change and it will update the appropriate controls and visuals for you

can define a frame that maintains a history of pages
also allows you to define transitions between pages
pages can have commands that invoke handlers
handlers can be to services and also to functions within cascades itself (e.g. navigation between pages of a frame)

action elements define animations by acting on attributes of visual nodes

also have a testing framework for the UI
have expected frames and compare by pixel
also hopper test with random clicks

next release of motion lab will move further away from page design and towards flow design