Planet Mobile Web

There's a lot of buzz these days about how "touch web" browsers, especially the iPhone's Safari, but also the WebKit based browsers on Android, Palm WebOS  and recent Symbian devices are  revolutionizing mobile browsing.  It's certainly true, especially in the US and other developed countries, that advanced smartphones with powerful "full-web" browsers have opened a lot of eyes to the fact that using the Web on mobile phones is not only practical but fun and useful.

But not everyone can afford an iPhone and the expensive data plan that it and other smartphones require.  An the iPhone's great browser is not so great on slow GPRS or even Edge networks.  If you look to the developing world you won't see many iPhones. In the US prepaid market you won't see any at all.  In places like Africa, India and the Philippines millions of people are using and enjoying the "touch web" and the full web on slow networks with basic feature phones or old smartphones.  They are using Opera Mini, a great little Java ME browser that runs only almost any phone.  Opera's server assisted technology reduces page size and bandwidth by up to 90%,  saving money of metered data plans and making even large pages load quickly on creaky networks.  It's not just the developing world either, Opera Mini is popular everywhere.  It's usage is growing rapidly with over 46 million people using it every month! This is approximately the same number as the iPhone's estimated installed base of about  42 to 50 million devices.

With Opera Mini being as popular as the iPhone, you would think that it would be on every mobile web developer's radar and  that sites and web apps would be tested on and optimized for Mini as they are for the iPhone.  Strangely the opposite seems to be true.  While Opera Mini can render almost any site, many pages do not look their best in it.  The biggest culprit is pages that are designed to fit screen width on the iPhone and other touch web browsers but overflow the window and require horizontal scrolling to see the whole page in Opera Mini.  Here's are a few examples:

The culprit in most cases is wide images, especially header banners. In many cases, the  fix is as simple as one line of CSS: style=" img {max-width:100%;height:auto;} I don't recommend hard-coding that into the page though as Mobile Internet Explorer and some other browsers will resize image width but not height resulting in skewed images.  It's easy enough to detect Opera Mini, every version sends "Opera Mini" as part of the User-Agent header.

Mobile web designer's ignorance of Opera Mini goes beyond delivering less than perfect layout. In some cases, entire sites are totally broken in the browser. Two major mobile focused sites, Boy Genius Report and IntoMobile actually serve pages to Opera Mini users that are devoid of any content! Both sites detect Mini and send it a supposedly mobile optimized view of the site.  The only problem is that the entire body of every single post on both sites is missing when viewed in Opera Mini. The image on the left shows how BGR looks in Firefox when using the User Agent Switcher extension to impersonate Opera Mini.  On the right is BGR in the real Opera Mini.

I'm not sure what is wrong with these pages that causes the post bodies to disappear.  The html for the bodies is present in the source code but somehow it's getting hidden, probably by some broken CSS or Javascript.  The only way to view the posts on these sites is to go back to the front page and hit the button that lets you turn off the default mobile theme. The desktop version of BGR works fine in Opera Mini.

It's pretty obvious that the people who build these sites never once tried viewing them in Opera Mini!

If you build web sites for mobile or desktop, please do 45 million Opera Mini users a favor and test your pages in it. Not only is it good for the users, but it ought to give your page views a shot in the arm as well. It's not that hard, Mini runs on just about any old Java capable phone.  And while I don't usually recommend testing with mobile browser emulators, you can run the actual Opera Mini code in MicroEmulator on a PC.  Microemulator even has a re-sizable device skin that lets you quickly test with various screen sizes.

Incidentally renowned web design consultant PPK (Peter-Paul Koch) published a piece yesterday titled "The iPhone obsession" which is all about the folly of designing sites only for the iPhone.  It should be required reading  for everyone working in mobile.

Last year in October I wrote in a blog post about smart phone applications coming to cars. Today I read an article about Deutsche Telekom and tyre maker Continental joining this market as well.

They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!

Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.

According to the website of AutoLinQ, Continental plans to work with Android developers and automakers to certify a core set of applications. An AutoLinQ SDK is scheduled to be released already by the end of the first quarter this year - probably due to its closeness to the regular Android SDK.

In the second half of 2010 Continental plans to demonstrate first applications and of course the new app store to automotive customers (yes another app store…).

Sources:
AutoLinQ
AutoLinQ (Continental Website)
computerweekly.com

The key to success as always will be to pre-select and prioritise carefully which events to attend (there are simply too many good ones to attend, unless you happen to have a body clone out there!) . This will depend on personal and company preferences and your specific objectives for the event. I recommend jotting down between 3-5 things you want to take away from the show (and side-events) and then matching that to your planned timetable. Is your key objective to learn about open development environments but have no time booked in to learn about Android? It could be worth re-jigging your agenda.

A few events on my agenda so far:

Innovation Exchange 2010

I've been invited to take part in a Panel Discussion at the Innovation Exchange 2010 (Applications & Monetization) event hosted by Qtel with support from the GSMA and MEF on the 13th\14th of February at the Hotel Skipper.

Social Media Round Table

I'll also be taking part in a Social Media Round Table discussion on Monday 15th February hosted by ACS at the Gran Marina to talk about "Capturing the Power of Social Media to Revolutionize the Customer Experience"

App Planet

I'm looking forward to the App Planet event in Hall 7 at the Mobile World Congress on Weds February 17th where SonyEricsson will have a 'Creation Day' for developers. The Xperia X10 Android device has had some rave reviews, so I'm interested to see whether developers are excited about generating content for it.

WIP Jam

The WIP Jam session at the Congress (registration now closed) on the 18th will feature a discussion panel on Augmented Reality applications and will help answer the question of whether the hype is justified. As AR is a hot topic, this is an unmissable session (more info here).

TechCrunch Europe

Finally, there is the Techcrunch event on the 17th Feb (offsite from the Congress) featuring Ilja Laurs of GetJar amongst others, and bringing investors and start-ups together (more info here).

I'll also be exhibiting in the Innovation Zone of the MWC at the GeoMe Stand: if you're a blog reader and you're at the fair or one of the other events, come and say hello! If you can't find me, send me a tweet @ricferraro.

Launching JEDEC.org isn’t the only reason we have standards setting organizations and associations on our minds lately.

This week is the ASAE Technology Conference & Expo 2010 in Washington D.C. and Cloud Four is going to the conference for the first time.

Despite the snowpocalypse plaguing the city, John arrived safe in D.C. earlier today after a long flight from our home base in Portland, Oregon.

He’ll be in town all week. If you’re at the conference, we please say hello. If you’d like to set up a specific time to meet with John, please contact us or connect with John via Twitter.

When we’re not working on mobile projects, there’s a good chance we’re working with a standards setting organization or an association on their public web presence.

More often than not, we’re building that site using Drupal. We believe Drupal is a perfect fit for organizations and associations.

Before we started started Cloud Four, Aileen, Lyza, John and I had all worked for several years at Kavi which is focused on providing software for organizations.

John was one of the co-founders of Kavi. Lyza was one of the first employees. And Aileen and I had been at Kavi for over seven years.

Needless to say, we have a lot of experience working with these organizations.

After we left Kavi, we searched for a new web platform that would fit the needs of these organizations. Our experience had taught us that while there are some common characteristics of organization web sites, that each organization has unique goals and functionality that they need implemented on their site.

With that experience in mind, we tried many different solutions before settling on Drupal. Drupal provides:

• Top-notch content management features
• Support for simple or complex user management
• Foundation that provides for future expansion
• An active development community
• Ability to build custom solutions on top of Drupal if needed
• Integration ease including the NTEN favorite membership management suite, CiviCRM¹

In addition to these core features, we found that Drupal supports other things that organizations often talk about such as:

• Revisioning
• Authoring Roles
• Content Syndication
• News Aggregator
• Tagging
• Localization
• Blogging
• Forums

All of this goodness wrapped in an open source platform that is widely used by both companies and non-profits.

We’ve been talking to our customers and partners for quite some time about why Drupal makes sense for organizations, but have been waiting for the perfect showcase site to make the point to a larger audience.

As you can see from the recently launched JEDEC.org site, Drupal makes it possible to build beautiful and powerful web sites that accomplish the objectives of standards-setting organizations and associations.

If you’d like to learn more about how Drupal can help your organization, association or your company (Yes, it works well for corporate sites as well!), please contact us.

We’d be happy to talk to you more about how Drupal can help your organization.

1. As an aside, if you run an organization and haven’t looked into CiviCRM, we highly recommend that you do. It is a full-featured, open source membership tool that integrates fully with Drupal. Not only that, but our friends at raSANTIAGO + Associates provide a great service called CiviServer and are experts in helping organizations utilize CiviCRM effectively.

Carnival #210 is now up at Martin Wilson's blog

There are some great posts here and for the first time Martin has two awards: the award for Best post by a Carnival newcomer to Emma Vernon for her post on how the iPad fails to excite Generation Y. Post of the week honors go to Carl Martin at Redweb for his cry for 'Back to basics'.

This is a great idea and congrats to Emma and Carl

Last week, we finally got to take the wraps off of one of our favorite projects of the last year: JEDEC.org.

While on our blog we mostly talk about mobile, we also do a fair amount of traditional web site development work.

In particular, we’ve helped many standards-setting organizations and associations like JEDEC with their public web sites.

JEDEC came to us with substantial issues that needed to be addressed. The current site had long outgrown its information architecture and had three different navigation systems and site maps.

We performed a full content audit and combined web analytics with information architecture analysis to create a new site structure that focused on helping people find information more quickly.

In particular, web analytics showed that the majority of people coming to the site wanted to download standards. The new design brings the search interface right onto the newly designed home page.

The search interface was reworked to provide people with the ability to narrow their searches. When documents are uploaded to the site, they automatically show up on the related committee pages and other sections of the site where the documents are relevant.

We worked with JEDEC to define technology focus areas that help people new to the organization understand the current hot topics for the organization and get a quick sense about what JEDEC does. These technology focus pages are all dynamic are constantly updating with new information as documents, press releases, and events are added.

We also collaborated with other vendors to integrate event data coming from another system and to provide a single-sign on strategy with a membership management system.

Perhaps most importantly, we had a great time working with JEDEC and its staff. In particular, Emily Desjardins and Arnaud Lebegue became part of our extended team over the last few months. We’re grateful for the opportunity to work with them and to see their vision come to finally come to life.

This week is still all about Casual Connect Europe but then it is off to Barcelona for the annual mobile fest that is Mobile World Congress. I will be there from Sunday night onwards and you should...

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We said it before: mobile is the biggest mass medium on the planet, and now game developers (and not only the sometime masochists that have been there for years) flog to it. According to a fairly...

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There's another great Carnival of the Mobilists this week. It's hosted by Martin Wilson at Indigo 102. As always, it's a must read for everyone interested in any area of mobile.

The latest edition includes Tomi Ahonen's annual mobile industry statistics extravaganza plus a couple of items analyzing 2009 handset market share data. If stats aren't your thing there are a variety of thought provoking posts on other areas of the mobile world including a critical look at  iPad, discussions of mobile marketing and advertising, Nokia's location strategy, Alcatel's cross platform developer APIs, the future of Windows Mobile and a detailed report from the M-Days conference in Munich.

Contratulations to Carl Redmon who took Post of the Week honors for his plea to the mobile industry to "Return to Basics".  Further kudos to Emma Vernon whose "Gen Y Passes Over iPad, Looks Forward" was chosen Best post by a Carnival newcomer.  And a big thank you to Martin for including my piece on what the N900 browser portends for the future of the mobile web.

Carnival of the Mobilists #210 is recommended reading for anyone  who wants to  broaden their mobile knowledge and keep up with the latest trends in  the field.

Some interesting stats about smart phone sales…

Worldwide sales of smart phones grew 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 53 million phones, according to researcher Strategy Analytics.

Nokia led market volumes, ahead of Research in Motion (RIM) and Apple, and shipped 20.8 million smart phones during the fourth quarter – up 38% from one year ago.

Sources:
c114.net
areamobile.de

After mobile phones and cars we now will be able to access our mobile apps on TV - This really is exciting news:

At CES 2010 in Las Vegas Samsung announced the upcoming availability of of free and paid apps in Samsung’s Apps store, including apps for Televisions, Blu-Ray Players, Home Theater and Mobile Phones. The download service for TVs will be available in July 2010.

I found two interesting videos from Samsung’s press conferences:

I guess other manufacturer will enter the market pretty soon, too. It seems the web is getting more and more ubiquitous…again.

Sources:
tv.samsungapps.com
www.mirror.co.uk

Amazing Super Bowl win by the underdog New Orleans Saints!  But theres no time for sports fans to rest as the next big event on the sports calendar is the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, starting the Friday.  This week's Found on the Mobile Web is an Olympics special bringing you the best mobile sites to follow all the games action.

Found on the Mobile Web is a weekly WAP Review feature listing newly added and updated sites on the YesWAP.com mobile portal and WapReview mobile site directory. With these latest additions the directory and portal now list 2119 mobile sites.

All the Olympics sites listed below  can also be found in the  Sports/Winter Olympics section of the directory and portal for easy access with your mobile phone.

Vancouver2010 vancouver2010.com/mobile/ The official mobile site of the 2010 Winter Olympics has ticket information, live results, medals, schedules, athlete bios, teams, news and photos. The news section uses a feed from the AFP news agency. The feed items are nicely formatted for mobile and are full items not excerpts. The sheer quantity of news in amazing and a bit overwhelming. The games haven't even started yet and the site already has 65 pages containing over 900 articles in its news section! Unfortunately there is no way to search the news. At 80 KB this works best with smartphones and maybe too large for the  embedded browsers of some feature phones..

Vancouver2010 also offers a free iPhone app featuring a location-aware spectator guide, maps to all the venues and real time results.
Content Usability

NBC Olympics m.nbcolympics.com NBC seems to have one of the biggest and most feature rich Winter Olympics sites. It has news, photos, videos, live results, schedules, medal counts, athlete profiles, video, polls, trivia, TV and online programming grids and Vancouver information.  You can sign up on the site to receive a variety of free Email and SMS alerts (US Only) and to customize the mobile site content to emphasize your favorite sport.

NBC also promises free iPhone and BlakcBerry apps that are "coming soon". With the games five days away lets hope that's real soon!

There are about six stories covering today's events plus athlete interviews and prognostication on the likely outcome of upcoming events. The stories are quite in depth for a mobile site. Not surprisingly, coverage emphasizes US athletes.

The site works best on smartphones. It looks great and is easy to navigate on my Android phone,  Nokia N95 and using Opera Mini.  NBC and their mobile design partner, Starcut Media, made some effort at adapting content to a variety of handsets by varying image and video size and quality but the homepage weighs in at 64 KB, still too large for the embedded browsers of many feature phones.
Content Usability

BBC Sports news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/mobile/olympic_games/vancouver_2010 generally has  excellent Olympics coverage and I expect this year to be no different.. The site offers news, results, photos and Olympic quizzes. At this point there are only a handful of news items on the site but this will surely change once the games get started.

The BBC also has some free Olympics mobile wallpapers for download in various sizes.

Typical of BBC Mobile, page and image sizes are small enough  to work with virtually any mobile browser.  There's even a version of the site for old WML-only phones.
Content Usability

ESPN m.espn.go.com dominates TV, online and mobile sports coverage especially with US audiences. The dedicated ESPN Olympics 2010 page has comprehensive coverage with in-depth, sport by sport analysis, news headlines, polls, trivia and extensive background features covering Olympics history and page for each Olympic sport with the event's history, rules, 2010 schedules and top competitors.

ESPN does extensive content adaptation to make the site is usable even on five year old feature phones.  Newer phones and better browsers get more and larger images and ESPN automatically delivers a slick, touch version of the site to Android and WebOS devices and the iPhone.
Content Usability

The Score m.thescore.com/olym Canadian cable TV sports channel, The Score's mobile site has an unusual design with an auto-refreshing front page that displays the latest live scores for a specific sport. For the Olympics, The Score has built a page dedicated to Canada's nation sport, hockey. It will provide full, in-game coverage of men’s and women’s hockey along with medal standings, hockey tournament standings, men’s hockey stat leaders, and news updates from all Olympic events.
Content Usability

The Guardian m.guardian.co.uk Big UK newspaper and major online news outlet The Guardian has a hit on it's hands with its $3.99 iPhone app which has been widely praised for its usability and overall quality. I don't have an iPhone but The Guardian's recently revamped mobile web site is pretty slick too. The site (and I presume the app too) has a dedicated Olympics page with 20 well written news items with photos.
Content Usability

The New York Times mobile.nytimes.com is the premiere US newspaper and one of the best of the old media at adapting to the online world, including the mobile web. The "Gray Lady" can always be counted on to deliver timely and comprehensive cover of the news, including sports. In advance of the games, the paper's mobile site has a large collection of current and archived Olympic 2010 news items and background pieces. I expect the New York Times will provide some of the best and most balanced Olympics coverage on the mobile web.
CContent Usability

The Vancouver Sun www.vancouversun.com/mobile/ The Winter Olympics' hometown has two daily newspapers, The  Sun and The Province which are under common ownership. Both papers have mobile sites with virtually identical coverage including a dedicated Winter Olympics page with over a dozen news stories with photos. With lots of reporters and photographers on the scene and local expertise, I expect The Sun and The Province to have outstanding Olympics coverage with an emphasis on the local angle including  features on local Olympic athletes, tips on finding tickets and the impact of the games on residents and local businesses. The two paper's sites are very similar. Both are rather slow loading, but the Sun's seems a little faster.
Content Usability

Sports Illustrated m.si.com has one of the more interesting mobile Olympics sites with loads of original, in-depth articles from the magazine's stable of award winning sportswriters along with news, results, photos and the latest medal count.

SI and their mobile publishing partner, Crisp Wirelsss have done a good job aof adapting the site's content all all devices with, WML, XHTML and Touch versions of the site.
Content Usability

The Washington Post mobile.washingtonpost.com The Washington Post has good mobile Olympics 2010 page that promises to deliver the latest news, scores, features and photos from the games.
Content Usability

Using the N900's MicroB browser is really an eye opener.  The combination of a relatively large screen, 800x480 px resolution, very good JavaScript performance and full desktop Flash is turning my my mobile browsing pattern upside  down.  When I use Opera Mini on an N95 or the Android browser on the HTC Magic, I typically spend 75% of my time on mobile sites and the rest on "full" web sites.  With the N900 it's more like 50/50 and the percentage of desktop sites is rising as I find more and more that deliver deliver a richer browsing experience on the N900 than their mobile equivalents. The screenshots are a representative sampling of how desktop sites look on the N900.  Click the thumbnails for to see the images in their original 800x480 glory.

The N900 reinforces something that I've long believed would eventually happen, the merger of the  mobile and desktop webs. This doesn't mean that users will simply switch from using mobile sites  to desktop ones on their phones.  Rather it marks a fundamental difference in the way that we look at the web and mobile devices. Going forward, web designers, developers and publishers will need to take into account that a rapidly growing percentage of their users will be visiting their "desktop" sites with phone browsers.

It's not just a matter of tweaking the CSS and layout of desktop pages to  ensure that they render attractively and are usable on mobile devices.  Having a  significant percentage of mobile visitors means taking into account the different needs  of mobile visitors and their device's extra capabilities. As Tomi Ahonen has been pointing out for years, mobile phones are actually more rather than less capable and powerful than PCs. Tomi has identified 10 "C"s (capabilities) of mobile phones, several of which are especially relevant to the web sites and web services. What Tomi calls Context (where, when and what)  Charging (seamless payment), Community (social networking)  and Creation (citizen journalism, micro blogging, photo and video sharing)  are four that stand out.  As mobile users flock to desktop sites, publishers and designers need to enable these special mobile capabilities to the highest degree possible.  For example:

• The desktop sites of bus, train or rapid transit services must take into account the time of day and the user's location when providing route and schedule information.
• Local shopping and services search engines should emphasize what's near me and open for business now.
• eCommerce sites and payment processors  need to  exploit  the phone as a payment device.  It shouldn't be necessary to key in 10 different bits of credit card information in order to buy something using your phone.
• Social networking sites have to ensure that all their services, especially text, photo, video sharing, are available and usable when mobile.
• News gathering organizations have a huge opportunity to effectively use the  mobile citizen journalists' ability to be on the scene of a breaking story with commentary, photos, videos and audio.

Does all this mean that the mobile web as we know it is going away? Yes, eventually I believe it will.  But that time is several years away.  The N900 is a harbinger of the future.  It alone of the phones I've used delivers a near desktop browsing experience. Others come close like the the Nexus One and Droid/Milestone. They match the N900 in screen size and resolution but not JavaScript or Flash performance. The iPhone with its lower resolution screen and lack  of Flash is not even in the same class.

At the moment the N900 is a bit of a niche device. It represents the next generation of mobile browsing but has  minuscule market share.  For the foreseeable future the vast majority of web access will be with less powerful devices. This is true in the developed world and especially in the developing one where slow, expensive data and a preponderance   of  low-end and very old handsets mean a continuing need for lightweight web sites.   I believe  that traditional mobile web traffic will continue to grow for a long time thanks to a sort of trickle down effect that will occur as high end devices make mobile browsing acceptable and fashionable combined with the trend to include unlimited data with the cheap unlimited voice, text and data plans that US prepaid providers  like Straight Talk and Boost Mobile are offering feature phone users.

If anything the rise of  phones that can browse like PCs means more rather than less work for publishers and designers.  Not only do they have to build, enhance and maintain traditional mobile sites to exploit growing mobile traffic but they have to work to ensure that their desktop sites meet the needs of advanced users. No matter how you look at it the web is going mobile.

A week before the mobile craze will hit Barcelona again, here’s my list of *places to be*: the events and networking cocktails – next to the classic big industry players mega parties – where the early adopters and bloggers on mobile hang out… The places to discover more about the early-stage innovations happening in the [...]

Our friend Peggy Ann Salz's blog msearchgroove
has been named amongst the top 50 blogs by konector magazine. Congratulations to Peggy! Well deserved. Her post is HERE

Bitstream, the company behind the popular BOLT mobile browser, has announced that version 1.7 of its browser will have the ability to run Web applications - known as widgets.

BOLT already supports Ajax, Javascript and other web-based languages. But the widgets will be installed directly into the BOLT browser and thus will load and execute faster. The BOLT widgets are written in standard W3C code. Users can access their widgets from within the browser via a new widget menu.

“As many of the recent mobile and wireless trade shows have demonstrated, mobile applications are part of the mainstream mobile experience,” said Sampo Kaasila, vice president of research and development at Bitstream. “However, the vast majority of phones in use today are ‘feature phones’ not smartphones. Unfortunately for the users of these billions of feature phones, it isn’t easy to find, install and run mobile applications. By adding Web apps to BOLT, Bitstream is not only improving the usability of our mobile browser, we are also making it possible for literally billions of people to partake in the mobile apps revolution.”

According to Bitstream, more than 3.4 million BOLT accounts have been created since last year, and the browser delivers over 2.8 million pages each day.

The new version of Bolt will be launched at the Mobile World Congress on February 15, 2010, and there will be a small set of beta widgets available at launch.

Sources:
news.softpedia.com
tech2.in.com