The Web on the
MoveThe Web on the
MoveThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the sponsors of the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) are organizing a morning of presentations related to challenges and opportunites for the mobile Web, on Tuesday 15 November 2005, at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), central London.
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web
"The Mobile Web Initiative's goal is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality. W3C and mobile industry leaders are working together to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater Web."
The rich Web environment is one that users now expect to access from mobile devices as well as the desktop. Yet interoperability and usability problems persist, and mobile Web access still suffers as a result. Compared to the Web 10 years ago, the mobile Web will benefit from crucial advantages such as: many potentially connected users, lots of available content, and important interest from the industry.
With the support of international mobile industry leaders, W3C recently launched the Mobile Web Initiative, which aims to use existing standards in documentable ways to improve the mobile experience on the Web.
The Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) is one of the twenty-four W3C Activities. MWI is composed of two Working Groups:
The Mobile Web Initiative is led by key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, adaptation providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.
Authoring tool vendors will benefit from MWI through an increased demand for tools that generate mobile -friendly content. In turn, by supporting MWI Best Practices, authoring tools will enable the creation of content that works independent of aparticular handset or browser.
Content providers will benefit from MWI through more reliable device descriptions. Also, the cost of content creation will be significantly reduced by authoring tools, browsers and handsets that are compatible with Web standards. By following MWI Best Practices, content providers will reach a larger and more satisfied audience.
Browser vendors will benefit from MWI through reduced browser development costs. Strong liaisons between standards organizations will lower the risk of an expensive divergence between mobile access to the Web and desktop access. In turn, by implementing Web standards, browser vendors will provide a reliable and interoperable target fo content and adaptation providers.
Adaptation providers - those who supply tools and services to allow content to be selected, generated or modified - will benefit from MWI by sharing the cost of developing and maintaining high-quality device descriptions. In turn, by supporting MWI Best Practices, adaptation tools will be more valuable to content providers and other players in the mobile production chain.
Device manufacturers will benefit from MWI through increased sales of handsets that provide mobile Web services on emerging mobile data networks. In turn, by making descriptions of device characteristics such as the screen size readily available, device manufacturers will enable a high-quality user experience across a wide range of devices with very different capabilities.
Mobile operators will benefit from MWI through increased take up of data services, resulting in an increase in the average revenue per user (ARPU). Reliable mobile Web access will also lower the cost of deployment and reduce costs for customer support. By encouraging the use of MWI Best Practices throughout the mobile content production chain, operators will be able to improve the mobile Web experience for all.
Daniel K. Appelquist
is a senior technology strategist for Vodafone Group and also serves as
Vodafone's W3C Advisory Committee representative. He has been a pioneer in
online media and in content delivery to mobile devices. At Vodafone, he
helped to launch the award-winning Vodafone Live! mobile portal in the UK. In
his current role, he is responsible for Vodafone's participation in content,
browsing and Web Services standards and industry initiatives. He has been a
key participant in the development and launch of the W3C Mobile Web
Initiative and currently chairs the MWI "Mobile Web Best Practices" Working
Group.
Tim Berners-Lee has served as
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since its inception. A
graduate of Oxford University, England, Tim is a Senior Research Scientist at
the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
(CSAIL). With a background of system design in real-time communications and
text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web,
an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. While
working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, he wrote the first
Web client (browser-editor), first Web server, and first version of Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML) in 1990.
As Head of Business
Development for S60 Browsing at Nokia, Franklin Davis has
global responsibility for working with 3rd parties to build a rich mobile
browsing ecosystem. Previously he lived in Helsinki for 2 years as head of
the Infotainment Service Capability Area, managing end-to-end technologies
for mobile Browsing, Java, Content Download, and Remote Service Discovery.
For his first 3 years at Nokia in Boston he developed and showcased WAP 1.x
and 2.0 applications, working with operators, device manufacturers and
content developers. Earlier in his career at Thinking Machines Corporation he
built text search and database applications for the Connection Machine
massively parallel supercomputer. At Avid Technology he was responsible for
creating and guiding the standardization of OMFI, a specification for
exchanging movie and video editing data among digital post-production
applications. He holds a Masters of Software Engineering from the Wang
Institute of Graduate Studies.
Rotan
Hanrahan has been with MobileAware since its foundation. He is the
Chief Innovations Architect and is responsible for R&D and technical
standards. He represents MobileAware in the W3C. He is the Chair of the W3C
Mobile Web Initiative Device Description Working Group (DDWG) and is also an
active member of the Device Independence Working Group (DIWG). He has been
involved in many hi-tech activities including the WAP Forum, the Java
Community Process and Apache and is a regular seminarpresenter. Prior to
joining MobileAware, Rotan was a senior consultant for Telenor and earlier
held the position of Senior Academic at the Institute of Technology. He was
also the Technical Administrator of the National Institute Network, now known
as ITNet. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the National University of
Ireland.
Philipp
Hoschka , W3C Deputy Director, is responsible for technical contacts
with European research and development. In addition, Philipp heads the W3C
Interaction Domain, which delivers W3C's key user interface specifications,
e.g. HTML, SVG and VoiceXML. Philipp currently focuses on making mobile Web
access work and was instrumental in the creation of the Mobile Web
Initiative. In the past, he spearheaded the development of the SMIL
Recommendation at W3C. Previously, Philipp was responsible for the W3C
Architecture Domain, which issues all core XML specifications from the W3C.
Philipp chaired numerous W3C workshops that explored new Web developments,
most notably the Workshops on the Mobile Web Initiative, Web Services,
Television and the Web, Push Technology and Real-Time Multimedia and the Web.
Philipp holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, and a Master's Degree in
Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Rhys Lewis
is Chief Scientist for Volantis Systems Ltd. He is chair of the W3C Device
Independence Working Group. He is also Volantis' W3C Advisory Committee
representative and member of the Mobile Web Initiative Steering Council. Rhys
has been with Volantis since the beginning, and has helped it to grow into
one of the world's foremost providers of software and services that deliver
the mobile web. In his current role, Rhys leads Volantis product and
technology research efforts as well as being responsible for its involvement
in standards development. Prior to that, he lead the Volantis' product
architectecure team. Before joining Volantis, Rhys had a long career with
IBM, which included spells in research, in development and in consultancy. He
was one of the original designers of IBM's Websphere MQ message queuing
middleware product. He has also published books on message queuing and on
digital image processing. Rhys holds a degree in Biophysics from the
University of Leeds, and Ph.D. in Biophysics from Kings College, University
of London.
Charles McCathieNevile works for
Opera Software bringing the experience of developing a multi-platform browser
to the ongoing development of the Web. A generalist by nature, with a degree
in medieval history, he has worked extensively the information technology
industry since the early 1980s. His technical interest is in ensuring that
Web technology is developed in a way that allows it to be used by anyone,
anywhere, with as wide a range of technology choice as possible. Prior to
joining Opera in 2005 Charles worked for W3C for 6 years, primarily in the
areas of Semantic Web and Accessibility. In his spare time he is
Vice-president of Fundación Sidar, a non-profit organisation working in the
Iberian languages to improve standards and practice for ensuring an
accessible Web.
Jo Rabin is currently
on assignment with Mobile Top Level Domain Limited (mTLD), the registry for
the new .mobi top level domain. .mobi has a special emphasis on providing an
enhanced user experience of the Internet from mobile devices. As part of this
role he represents .mobi at W3C, and is co-editor of the Mobile Web Best
Practice Recommendations. Other recent assignments have been with AmbieSense,
Flirtomatic and Markup Systems. He worked for a number of years with Reuters
Limited where he held various roles, including CTO of Reuters Mobile as well
as being responsible for the development of Reuters foreign exchange trading
network. Earlier in his career he helped start the UK's first public
electronic mail system, Telecom Gold.
Paul Walsh
is the co-founder and CEO of Segala. Using a method called RDF-Content Label,
Paul has helped Segala become the first company worldwide to deliver a
trustmark that enables search engines, browsers and other tools, to filter
search results based on ‘trust’ for Web accessibility and mobile content.
He has also helped Segala to be the first testing and conformance specialist
worldwide to become an Associate Member of the GSM Association. Prior to
setting up Segala, Paul worked for a number of mobile companies such as
Vodafone, Orange, ADC Metrica, CMG and others. His roles spanned strategy
realignment and auditing through to radical cultural change. Previous to
working in the mobile industry, Paul was an executive at Eqos, a pioneer in
the development of Web technologies for B2B Supplier Management. Prior to
that, Paul was one of the very first employed by AOL in Europe during the
early 90s as the International Beta Coordinator and Technical Accounts
Manager for the UK and Sweden. Paul is Segala’s W3C Advisory Committee
representative and member of the Mobile Web Initiative Steering Council. He
is also an executive of the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) –
a trading standards body for the Interactive industry.
Keith
Waters is Director of Research at France Telecom's R&D
laboratory in Boston, USA, and he also holds the title of France Telecom
Senior Expert. His specialty is usage and services focusing on multimodal
access and mobile browsing. Keith has been involved in the W3C for several
years; most recently in the Device Independence Working Group as the lead for
Delivery Context Interfaces (DCI) activity. Prior to France Telecom he was a
senior reseacher at Compaq's Cambridge Research Laboratory where he built
prototype systems including the first Smart Kiosk. Keith holds a Ph.D. in
Computer Graphics from Middlesex University in the U.K.
Jonas Wilhelmsson is Co-founder
and VP, Partner and Alliances at Drutt Corporation, a leading provider of
MSDP solutions to mobile operators. Drutt Corp was founded in May 2000 as a
result of the successful partnership between Telia and Oracle, which Jonas
initiated and directed at Telia. At Telia Mobile, Jonas was in charge of
Wireless Internet, VAS and Mobile Commerce services. He was director of
Telia's WAP deployment and sat on the Executive Board of the Global Mobile
Commerce Forum. He was also a founding member of the Mobile Data Initiative
in 1998, one of the first cross-industry attempts to push mobile data
services. Before joining Telia, Jonas was a strategy consultant with Andersen
Consulting (now Accenture), working with leading players in the
communications industry in the UK, Scandinavia and South Africa. Jonas has an
MBA from Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.
W3C established the Mobile Web Initiative through the MWI sponsorship program and
with the financial support of the following Sponsors:
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The mission of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (W3C MWI) is to make Web access from a mobile device as simple, easy, and convenient as Web access from a desktop device. Through the MWI Sponsorship Program, key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, adaptation providers, browser vendors and mobile operators lead the Initiative. MWI participants develop authoring guidelines, checklists and best practices, as well as a database of descriptions that can be used by content authors to adapt their content to a particular device. For more information see http://www.w3.org/Mobile/