Mobile Eco-System: The Need for a Mobile Markup Language

The market for mobile devices is fragmented and there are many barriers to development and deployment. At present, it is difficult to create efficient and attractive mobile services that make use of advanced capabilities of modern terminals and servers, such as absolute location, sensors, near-field communication, proximity of other users or services, etc. We call these Mobile 2.0 services, since they represent as much as a quantum leap from current mobile services as Web2.0 represents from the original World Wide Web.
In this project, we as members of the Mobile 2.0 group at the Mobile Life Centre envision a new type of environment where advanced mobile services run on a common platform, similar to a web browser on traditional computers, but with added capabilities for the mobile domain. We want to make it easy for creative actors to create new services quickly, making mobile service development more like web design than application development. We also want to make it possible to distribute services to a large number of different services, and thus achieve critical mass.
We are approaching this problem from two angles: first, by prototyping a set of examples of Mobile 2.0 services based on a variety of different platforms and technologies; and second, by creating a standardized environment for rapid development of such services.
We have prototyped a number of example services, including native applications, Java applications and completely web-based mobile services. The applications use a range of technologies, such as location awareness and local sharing. They cover various media and domains, such as photography, chatting and social awareness. We are now going to user test these services and deploy them to a wide range of users. This work will help us understand and hopefully address some of the problems that are currently facing developers when trying to reach mass-market.
Furthermore, we are developing an environment that will make it easy to develop advanced mobile services as it already is to create advanced web services, and builds on the expertise of web developers and interaction designers. This requires a standard that is closer to HTML and existing Web development tools such as Javascript, Flash and Ruby, than the advanced development environments of iPhone and Android, or web add-ons like Google Gears.
To this end, we are now in the process of specifying a Mobile Markup Language (MML), which takes the form of an HTML extension that expands standard HTML to include mobile hardware and sensors, such as location, camera, accelerometers, and near-field communication. We will also develop an MML-capable browser, which runs on a large number of terminals and is capable of interpreting the MML extension. Finally, we will specify an MML server environment, which would off-load important work from the mobile terminal, such as relative location finding, push messaging, etc.
If this environment becomes sufficiently standardized and open, and there is a free browser software that runs on a large numbers of handsets, it would have the potential to bring both the creativity and high number of users of Web2.0 to the mobile domain, thus creating an explosion of new Mobile 2.0 services.


Nicolas Belloni & Mattias Rost
Future Applications Lab/Mobile Life Centre, Stockholm, Sweden
http://www.mobile-life.org

nicolas.belloni@gmail.com
rost@viktoria.se