MWI Team Blog

I'm just back from 4 weeks in Africa, participating in different conferences and visiting different countries (report on that trip soon !) and now i'm at the W3C Workshop on Declarative Models of Distributed Web Applications . what's the relationship between the two ? Originally, i thought there would not be any... but eventually i'm a bit stunned to hear almost the same message from mobile players here in Dublin and 2 weeks ago at 3GSM east and Central Africa: "the focus should be on providing full web browsing on phones".

I don't subscribe to this point of view.

What do you need for "full web browsing" from mobile phones? for sure, you need a full browser, which means quite lots of memory and cpu power, a good sized screen, and a good network(GPRS-E at least, 3G most probably). So, based on this view, all browsing capabilities have disappeared from new low-end/emerging markets mobile phones and powerful browsers are now on mid/high-end phones. That's a real pity!

I strongly believe in the great potential of the mobile Web to help bridging the digital divide, and to help improving the lives of rural communities and under-privileged population. That said, the fact is that this is not Web surfing which would improve their lives, but the access to specific services that that would eg save travel times, save money by allowing producers to talk to their customers directly skipping intermediaries, help curing people, animals and vegetables, help people finding jobs,.... There are incredible success stories all over eg Africa or India (look at eg Manobi foundation cases studies) demonstrating how such services really help people, and also bring enough extra revenues to allow people to invest in the handset and communication costs. The cost by itself is not the real point, but the difference between the cost and the extra income is. I encourage people to watch the impressive talk on this subject from Iqbal Quadir (The power of mobile phone to end poverty). All these successfull services are today relying on SMS-technology. This is good because all phones are sms-capable, but the fact is that even if there are successful stories, it is always concerning a small community, a small area, and it is very specific. SMS-based applications have inherent limitations that would prevent large scale deployment and availabilities of a big numbers of such services. Among the problems, i think they are 2 major ones: discoverability and hosting.

• Discoverability: when arriving somewhere with my mobile phone, i've no idea what could be the services available, how to interact with them (format of the message), what number to call, and so on...
• Hosting: if today i want to create a new service which may help some communities, it would be quite easy to create the application. However, hosting and running the service is another story: no hosting services for sms-applications ie either i would have to deal with a specific operator, or i would have to have a pc with a gsm modem and a subscription to run the service: this would stop 99.99% of people willing to develop services for cost or easiness reasons (and not mentionning the need then for advertisement due to the above mentionned discoverability problems).

Clearly the Web, and Web technologies are just direct answers to these flaws: search engine and portals are answers to the discoverability problem, and the tons of free or very cheap hosting services existing for Web applications is the answer to the hosting problem. But for that evolution to happen, phones have to have browsers! For now, we don't need full browser, but just something that would be as good as what sms offers: text. Just a simple text-browser xhtml-basic capable will be enough to bootstrap this process. Is it costly or hard to achieve on very-low end phones? i doubt it. Since ages, all phones had minimal browsing capacities with WML browsers. Achieving the same level of capabilities with xhtml-basic is so probably possible and cost-effective. I agree that this would not be enough to ensure a successful transition, configuration of handsets, localization and internationalization, portals, illeteracy,... there are lots of other issues to cope with, but there is no point tackling these issues till a minimal web browser is available on all phones.

To conclude, i've no doubt that Web technologies are the future of the current sms-based applications. The question is to know if it would happen in 10 years or now. Betting on the 3G-High end phones horse will, for sure, postpone this migration to the next decade for the misfortune of the poorest.

Is there any chance that we could influence handset manufacturers to change their minds and enable (xhtml-)basic mobile browsing on all phones?

Stephane