Eclectic Brain Salad

What follows is my report on the first Future of Mobile conference, held in the rather plush BFI IMAX cinema in Waterloo, London. Obviously at Opera we care a great deal about the mobile web, so I was looking forward to seeing what the overall feeling would be about this rather nascent area of web development/design.

It was nice to see Opera represented in such a positive light at the conference, with Chaals delivering an excellent talk on the future of mobile browsers, and lots of Opera love being spread around, particularly about Opera Mini.

The whole "iPhone/WebKit is the only mobile browser worth talking about" message that certain people were delivering was annoying - let's face it, it's not really a mobile browser anyway; it's a desktop browser squeezed into a small box. And there are other browsers aoround that can give a comparable experience, such as Mini and mobile. If you are you are going to go around creating iPhone only apps that rely on things like WebKit-specific CSS3 properties, then that's your major malfunction.

So, I got to the conference and has a good chat with Gareth Rushgrove. We took to our seats, and Ryan Carson introduced the conference, and passed the mic to Brian Fling, the speaker chair. He talked about how important the mobile web is, because 1/5th of the world have mobile web access, which is a higher number than desktop web users. There is also a prediction that by 2010, more than 1/2 of the world's population will have a mobile phone. He also mentioned that LBS (location based services) are important - I definitely agree with this.

He then introduced the keynote speaker.

Tony Fish - Tuning into mobile culture

I'd not come across Tony before, but from this talk I found out that he is coauthor of the "Mobile Web 2.0" book. I don't know about you, but "Mobile Web 2.0" sounds like an even more pointless piece of hype to me than the original Web 2.0 ;-)

His talk was basically about the modern mobile web, what kind of people are using it, and why. What do mobile web communities want from the mobile web? etc etc. There were some useful bits to it, but it seemed a bit scatty and fragmented to me.

He mentioned that mobile is different to desktop because your mobile is always with you, unless you lose it. Web 2.0 is all about collective intelligence, relationships and connecting data sources together. If we try to apply this to the mobile web, we immediately come across some differences - it is a challenge to develop for, as the standards support is not as good, the screen is smaller etc.

Next he talked about convergence - in short, it is a mess, as it assumes there are people who want to be converged on. We are no longer consumers - we are creators, and want to be allowed to create things, be they relationships or content. The mobile device is perfectly balanced between consumer and creator; the line blurs, compromising the tradition notion on IP. IP is seriously compromised.

Another thought - when you are creating content, you will be more likely to put up with a slightly poor user interface because you have that emotional attachment to the content being created. It is part of you.

Advertising controls everything we do on the web. The ages of advertising have been assertion, then engagement, then attitude. Google knows that it needs to control the mobile web. Mobile adverts are completely new; they can also be tailored to where people are looking at them (location based.)

Luca Passani - Monetizing the mobile web

It was good to get a chance to see the infamous Luca Passani speak, after reading some of his rants on various corners of the web (don't get me wrong - I actually have quite a lot of respect for his work - WURFL is a great idea.) His 2-3 slide rant against Vodaphone for their recent activities, and against W3C for "not doing anything about it" was amusing, and led to him getting moderately chastised by the W3C guy during the question period...I have to say, I don't think that's the right way to deal with it either.

Anyhow, he first said some words about usability and development being an issue, because mobile devices are so different in terms of standards support etc. He then talked about different approaches to mobile web design - the W3C has the one web idea (which I happen to agree with,) and Open Mobile Alliance have UAProf. Luca created WURFL to help with capability detection (see here for the public repository.) Luca also moderates the WMLProgramming list, plus it's sub communities - WURFL and J2ME, WURFL and FlashLite and WURFL and Video. These are good places to discuss mobile issues.

Last of all he discussed WALL, and showed some examples of coding with it. It seems like a good idea, but now rather outdated. He then covered the new WALL (with the new WNG namespace.) This seems like a good idea for coding cross-mobile browser applications, but I do take issue with it - it goes across some of the principles of web standards, for example css_ref attributes putting style information in the markup. I don't really get this. is it just to support really old WML phones? Only 5% of devices only support WML.

He showed an example of rebuilding eBay using WNG. The iPhone and some other browsers apparently have XHTML support level 3 or 4...simple XHTML (1 and 2) was supported by Opera 8 and NetFront 3.1. I don't see why Opera Mobiloe wouldn't have the same support as the iPhone...oh, and then he explained that these XHTML support levels take into account CSS and Ajax support as well. Rather mistitled surely?

Anyhow, I'm not going to speculate any further; I'll probably drop Luca a mail to discuss this at some point.

Andrea Trassati - The truth about mobile web standards

Andrea from dotMobi gave a very interesting talk on mobile web standards support. He first talked about the W3C initiatives he is involved with, such as MobileOK, best practices and the core vocabulary group. The best practices group has published a list of 60 best practices to follow when developing for mobile. He also has a book, "The mobile web development guide", which looks worth checking out.

There are various "mobile validation tests" to put your mobile sites through, including ready.mobi, mobileOK basic tests 1.0 and TAW.

Creating standards is a very hard job, and at dotMobi they are working hard to try to create standards that provide interoperability and direction.

They are also working on an API, available in December-January, to help develop mobile sites, and they are working on a device database, similar to WURFL. Andrea said that this is worth doing because WURFL lacks trust from people.

Overall a very useful talk.

After this talk I had a rather lovely chat with Gareth, and my dear friend Jen Hanen, and I saw Kenneth Himschoot. I also talked to a really nice Belgian lady called Inge de Waard from the Institute of tropical medicine, who is currently developing an application designed to propagate information about tropical diseases to mobile handsets in the 3rd world.

Panel - Will content be king on mobile?

Steve Page from Mobile Commerce was up first - he said yes to the question, but also highlighted the issue of SEO on mobiles - a lot of mobile sites aren't indexed the same as desktop sites, and the experience on mobile.google.co.uk is poor. It tends to put WML sites at the top of the list, which is just plain wrong, and they have to do some clever things to get their sites to the top of the list. It can take ages for mobile sites to be indexed, unless you pay Google a bunch of money.

The second guy talked about content already becoming king on mobile, because of improvements in standards support, and support for services like RSS and blogs. Monetization is also happening early, as there is a whole new advertisement audience to exploit. Check out Mippin for a good example.

Third was a guy from from Dialog, a company that provides a lot of mobile services such as payforit.org, a web bidding service. This was basically about monetization, but it annoyed me a bit - it was a bit too much of a sales pitch.

Dan Applequist - Mobile Ajax

I was anxious to see what Dan from Vodaphone would say in response to Luca's earlier outburst.He handled it pretty cooly, say that he was not there to defend the indefensible ;-)

He then quickly got on with his talk, first reiterating some stuff about standards, best practices, mobile web growth, tests such as MobileOK and what the W3C is up to in the mobile/Ajax space.

He then went on to say that mobile Ajax is currently limited because of standards support, and the fact that a lot of JavaScript/Ajax libraries don't play very nicely on mobile, Dojo being one of the exceptions. It made me think of Frost as well, a JavaScript library deliberately aimed at fixing mobile Ajax issues.

The aim is to start replacing some of the Java apps with Ajax stuff, take Soonr for example, and Facebook, which works rather nicely on mobile, plus it has it's iPhone only version (grrrrrr.)

Other issues with Mobile Ajax are:

• Lack of access to device features
• Privacy/Security
• CPU power
• JavaScript Optimization
• Battery life
• Developer guidelines
• Network reliability - what happens to an application when the phone suddently loses network?

He also plugged SVG a lot as the ideal system for delivering graphics on the mobile web, and also talked about WICD, and told everyone to check out betavine and dotmobi.

Charles McCathie Nevile - The future of mobile browsers

Next up was our very own Chaals, talking about mobile browser evolution. He was nothing short of fantastic (yes, I am slightly biased, but even so,) talking in a very animated fashion about the full spectrum of mobile browsers around the world (yes Brian, the iPhone is *not* the mobile web, only a small part of it) and also pointing out that the mobile web also includes mobile access in the car, and in interactive Kiosks and billboards (this happens a lot in Japan.)

Next he talked about about standards support on mobile improving, with technologies like SVG, CSS, EcmaScript 4, Widgets and APIs looking to improve things for the mobile web, and also about some of the most important issues - security, portable code etc.

Take home messages:

• Open standards help developers, so we need to make sure mobile browsers support them
• Adaptability = good mobile design
• Labelling content is particularly important on the mobile web (eg tagging and metadata
• Diversity is increasing
• There is one web. Period.

He got in some plugs for Opera Mini and Mobile and dev.opera.com without being too sales pitchy, and also included some nice subtle iPhone and Microsoft bashing ;-)

Brian Fling - iPhone lovefest

I like Brian, and I respect his design work, but his talk annoyed me. Unlike Chaal's talk, his talk basically made out that the iPhone is the only phone in the mobile web. What about all those 3rd world countries that can't all afford them? It is nice to see the iPhone as an example of what a mobile device is capable of wrt web access, and in future, if all phones become that powerful (and more affordable,) "the mobile web" will basically disappear. But that's not going to happen for a while.

He spent rather a long time obsessing over what Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Mobile (Web) 2.0 mean (the term web 2.0 is one of pet hates,) and at one point he even said that the iPhone is the only mobile browsing device worthy of the Mobile Web 2.0 term. I don't even think you can count the iPhone/WebKit as part of the mobile web!

He also went on about Blue Flavor's iPhone-only Leaflets application (cross browser development? Web design best practices anyone? Has the iPhone turned us all completely mad?)

Anyhow, I'd do him a disservice to say that the talk itself was bad - it was well presented, and contained some useful information about the iPhone, and particularly carrier lockdown. Roll on the API so we can put Opera on it...that's what I say!

I met an interesting guy called Kai Hendry, who talked a lot about open source, and where the mobile web fits into it.

Dave Burke - Andriod and the Open Handset Alliance

This was the talk I was really looking forward to - Dave Burke from Google talking about Android. In short, I am very impressed. It looks like the clever bastards have done it again ;-)

It is so awesome having an open mobile plattform available. You can swap out any applications you want for others, for example if you wanted to view photos using Flickr instead of Facebook...it basically uses a system that receives the command of what you want to do (eg view an image) and then finds the most appropriate appliciation available to do that. The demo images looked really impressive - certainly comparable to iPhone.

He also showed an 8 minute demo in which he build an Android application - it uses a special markup language, along with Java for the dynamic stuff; it looks really easy.

Remember the $10 million competition to design the best Android app!

Simon Rockman - Remembering the future

Simon Rockman from Sony Ericsson was really quite an engaging, witty speaker. It was basically a talk about how he attempts to work out what people want from their phones, and what therefore what phones to create. It contained several amusing anecdotes about sucesses and failures. For example, by turning the Razr pink, Motorola sold millions, whereas the first Nokia 3G phones bombed - it is impossible to say for sure what will work and what won't.

Texting is another good example - it was introduced as an experiment to see if phones could steal a bit of the pager market. It bacause the biggest mobile cash cow the world has ever seen.

He also mentioned that techies seem to think technology adoption is a lot faster than it actually is (take note, iPhone obsessed developers/designers.)

Lastly, he talked about how sales of mobile are being driven because people tend to compartmentalise their devices, and get multiple devices for different roles - eg music, phone calls, web browsing - even though devices are multifunctional. So we will see less ARPU per phone, but people will own more than 1.

Julie Strawson - Mobile typography

I thought this talk would be interesting, as typograhy is obviously a big problem for mobile web design, with most phones only having 1 or 2 fonts available. She talked about text performing well when it overcomes language barriers, and enhances reading comfort. file size is a big problem for mobile fonts - particularly asian languages, where a full character set can be up to about 3.5mb for a true type font. Scalable fronts are needed, to cut down file size (ie, you don't have to store multiple font sizes.)

She presented a lot of her company's products that solve some of these problems - this talk started to get on my nerves because it was a bit overly sales pitchy, although it did contain useful content. She got a lot of flak during question time because of the fonts being expensive, and open source variants not being available.

Matt Millar - next generation UI

Matt Millar from Adobe was an ok speaker, and it was interesting to see what he had to say, although I was surprised at the lack of Flash Lite content - he did mention it as being a good solution for providing good UIs on mobile devices - I am a Flash fan, and think he has got a good point, although of course he did get some flak for Flash being proprietary, not open source, and not very accessible.

He also talked about mobile carriers being a bottleneck for mobile web browsing, but this becoming less of a problem as time goes by, with larger bandwidth and better data rates becoming available. The iPhone provides a good experience, but it is a minor product in the mobile world. Google Maps and Yahoo widgets are providing a good experience on mobile devices, as is SVG and Flash Lite. The big issue really is managing to create a consistent user experience across devices.

Panel - keeping users happy and coming back for more

Barbara Ballard, Tom Hume and Marek Pawlowski

The final talk of the conference was a rather interesting discussion about how to give users a good mobile web experience, with Barbara Ballard leading the talk. The first question was "How do we make phones easy to set up for users to access services?"

The answer given was that we need to get phones more like the iPhone, which aligns the interests of handset creators and network providers more - more usable handsets is in the interests of both, because they can for example both get revenue from Google searches.

Also, there needs to be more trust in implementing high risk features that might generate returns, like over-the-mobile firmware updating. These sorts of features are often not put in handsets because of the risk involved, but they can make the user experience better if done right.

Next they discussed accessibility. Unsurprisingly, accessibility for the mobile web shares all the issues that the normal web does, but there are also issues to consider such as making it easier for users wearing gloves when it is cold outside.

Next they talked about the success of Flirtomatic, a flirting social networking site where you send e-flowers to other people. Flirtomatic is the biggest florist in Britain, despite the fact that the flowers are electronic ;-)

This is a very good mobile web site, because it's fun, usable, and has a good business model. It is ad supported, and you pay a few pence each time you send a flower. You can also buy customizations for your flowers and user area.

Another good example of a good mobile experience is the BBC's web site - it works well on pretty much any device with web access.

Last of all they gave some tips for good mobile web applications:

• Use real handsets to test, not emulators, because on an emulator you don't get the full experience.
• Mobile web applications need to be consistent in behavior with other applications on the same device, more than they need to be consistent with themselves across different devices.

Evening

The evening was spent most talking to Jen and Gareth, although I also had a chance to have have a good chat with Ryan Carson, and Chaals, before he left to get a bus to the Paris web conference - he is the most hardcore conference traveller I've ever known! I also had some nice conversations with Gill Carson, and Lisa Price from Carsonified, and briefly met the creators of the myMobi mobile social networking site - seems like a good app, guys.

Thanks to Ryan et al for a nice, informative little event - I had a blast, and I'll definitely come again.