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Recently, Opera released its interesting and insightful “State of the Mobile Web” report. In this report, Opera analyzed the traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Opera Mini: the world’s most popular mobile browser

Since its worldwide launch in 2006, Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile web browser with millions of users and billions of page views:

Social Networking Services drive mobile web usage worldwide

Interestingly, almost 40% of all visited web pages with Opera Mini were social networking services. In the US, South Africa and Indonesia even more than 60% of the user were visiting these services with their mobile devices. That shows social networking services are very popular worldwide.

Top 10 Sites in the US, India, South Africa, UK and Germany

You can find more information and the whole report here: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report

We’ll be going to Berlin on Sunday to attend the Mobile Internet Conference. The event is organized by IIR Telecoms and they asked me to chair the sessions on Monday 03/31/2008.

The topic for my introduction for that day is ‘Mobile Web 2.0′. I’ll start learning all the buzz words of the past 3 years by heart over the weekend to be prepared ;)

Maybe I can slip in a little announcement concerning the long awaited launch of the Groupile Beta that’s due in April. We have about 140 people waiting, they signed up without really knowing what to expect, some of them are waiting since last year. April will clear things up.

The conference is gonna be a big opportunity to network and get in touch with many great people in the mobile and mobile web area. The speaker roster looks great even though CTIA/IEEE WCNC 2008 in Las Vegas is at the same time. On Monday the following companies will be presenting and hold a roundtable discussion at the end of the day:

• Google YouTube
• Bluenove/Orange
• trutap
• Cyworld
• itsmy.com
• Yahoo!
• emap
• Zed
• Telecom Italia
• Eyeka
• blinkBox

The W3C, Jamba and many international carriers will also be there and present throughout the conference.

We’re looking forward to meet you there, too!

I met Cameron after his first conference talk in Europe at the @media conference in London in June 2006. He was talking about the same thing there - Mobile Web Design - and I really liked his presentation. Since then we both kept on doing research in the mobile area and Cameron just released his first book and it’s a great one!

Early chapters entitled “Mobile Web Fundamentals” give a great amount of background information on the mobile web market and usage, the concept of being “mobile” (it’s not the device, but the user that’s mobile) and on the fundamental limitations in this area (screen size, input methods, carriers etc.).

I especially liked the focus on what I really feel is important about the mobile web, even though it is in contrast to the newest developments in the browser and handset market: it’s not about bringing the desktop web to mobile devices, people, it’s about creating mobile web applications that serve people’s needs while they’re on the go!

Browser differences are also thoroughly covered in Cameron’s book and even Microformats are mentioned as a possible way to solve context-related problems in browsers, i.e. adding contextual info to things like contacts and phone numbers in the markup, so the device knows what do do with this type of content (add it to the address book/call the number).

The main section is divided into four approaches how to implement mobile web sites and applications: do nothing, reduce images and styling, use handheld stylesheet, create mobile-optimized content. It also covers topics like testing and validation as well as advanced techniques, such as SVG and Ajax (I’m mentioned in a book, yeehaa!). The final chapters contain things like promoting your mobile content, dotmobi and semacodes.

Overall the book is an excellent summary of the current status in mobile web design and a great resource for anybody who thinks of creating a mobile version of his existing website or better yet, a new, web based, mobile service (that should actually be almost everybody in the web design/development community).

The book is a must-buy and it is available as a PDF at the book’s homepage: http://www.mobilewebbook.com.

Last Monday we’ve been to the Mobile Monday at the AOL building in Mountain View. Too bad that we missed the Demo sessions (we arrived a bit late). But still we met some interesting (mobile oriented) people there, like Donnie Flood from AdMob or Tim Kay from Boopsie, and many more.

As expected the Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley was more casual than it is in Germany and we definitely met more mobile startups here. We liked it very much. Not too much organization (no registration in advance), pizza for everybody, good location and you could get in touch with people easily.

Still, the Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley has not as many attendees as its German counterpart (but again, the crowd is differently structured). But it seems a better place for showing around your mobile apps, even if your are not a big player in the industry. Great event! More!

Last week we attended the monthly held Mobile Internet SIG: Mobile User Experience at the ACCESS building in Sunnyvale. The event started at 6:30 pm with pizza and free T-Shirts and it was our first mobile-oriented event here in the Bay Area.After 30 minutes of networking with quite some interesting people, e.g. Dr. Paul James of Nokia Inc. (Nokia also sponsored this event), the presentations started. The first one was held by Sergei Krupenin, Director of Business Development at ACCESS. Sergei showed some interesting innovations which we will soon see in upcoming versions of the NetFront mobile browser:

• Smart Swing Navi: By using the captured image of phone camera, you can scroll or zoom contents by tilting phone vertically and horizontally.

• Visual Bookmarks: Visual bookmark helps you to select bookmarks by showing page thumbnail together with page title and URL.

NetFront also supports web standards for web applications. They developed a widget framework that supports the creation and use of dynamic Web applications based on open standard Web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript/Ajax - sounds familiar, but they actually showed a widget in action on a windows mobile device. It was quite impressive to see how the widget was launched from the top menu bar and then became usable on top of the currently open application. In this case an excel sheet, just like a widget should work. Here you can find some more info and pictures of the NetFront browser in action.

The second presentation was held by Deborah Johnson, Technology Manager at FrogDesign. She introduced her company and their Celltop technology, which enables users to access, manage and organize a wide range of information already available on their Alltel Wireless phones. Celltop is only available on Alltel phones, free-of-charge and features 10 “cells” that come pre-installed and via download. Each cell is a category- specific half screen comprised of graphics and text that provides shortcuts for wireless users to navigate through information and applications including: call log, weather, news, baseball, basketball, football, rodeo, stocks, text messaging inbox and ringtones.

Both talks were very interesting and caused a lot of questions. It is very interesting to see how slowly data plans grow in the US. Mobile internet still seems like being in its early stages to some extend around here. Also if you compare the numbers of visitors (it were about 30) to the ones of Web 2.0-centered events like geekSessions, you get this impression.

After all it was a great evening in a nice location and hopefully there will be more of those - thanks to ACCESS and SDForum!

I am speaking at the Mobile Web Americas conference, in October in Orlando, Florida. The Mobile Web Americas conference will take place 2 - 4 October 2007.

I am pretty excited, because this conference is all about the mobile web. My presentation will be about “Pragmatic Mobile Ajax - an Ajax Library for constrained browsers in action”. I am speaking about Mobile Ajax and how it can improve the user experience in mobile web applications. I will introduce the Frost Ajax Library as a tool for Ajax development on constrained browsers, such as those on mobile phones or gaming consoles. The session will show how and why the Frost library came to life and sheds some light on the underlying approach, which is quite different from other Ajax libraries.

If you are attending or speaking at Mobile Web Americas too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

The Mobile Ajax FAQ is created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger and is maintained at the Horizon Channel. We welcome comments and feedback at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com.This post has been moved to a page on PavingWays - the following questions link directly there.

• What is Mobile Ajax?
• Is there a Mobile Ajax checklist/minimum requirements?
• What does Mobile Ajax look like?
• Why should one do Ajax on mobile phones / what problem does it solve?
• What are the options to Mobile Ajax?
• How do Flash Lite and Java compare with Mobile Ajax?
• What is the difference between Ajax Platforms, Frameworks, Toolkits and Libraries?
• What existing Mobile Ajax frameworks, toolkits and libraries should I use?
• Can I use existing frameworks, libraries and toolkits?
• What is the relationship between Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets?
• Which browsers support Mobile Ajax?
• Which enterprise applications employ Mobile Ajax?
• What is the role of the Apple iPhone with respect to Mobile Ajax?
• How do applications like mojax or bling software fit in?
• How can you develop for and test on all those browsers?
• What are the (current) hurdles in implementing and running Mobile Ajax applications?
• What is AHAH / AJAH?
• Is there any standardization initiative for Ajax?

The latest research from Telephia shows that around 4 % of U.K. mobile users have uploaded content created on their mobile phones to social networking sites, video and picture sharing sites, blogs and personal web pages.

Still, uploading content from mobile phones is not yet mainstream, probably because of the still expensive data plans for using the mobile web. But Telephia says it is already ranking close to watching mobile video in popularity. An interesting fact is also that users are finding ways to send their content even to sites that do not yet offer a facility to upload direct from mobile phones. That shows the strong demand mobile and should be integrated into social networking services.

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On April 16, 2007 Nokia announced their S60 platform would support widgets in subsequent releases. This means, using their WebKit based browser under the hood, newer phones (S60 3rd ed. with Feature Pack 2) will have support for those small applications, mostly serving not more than a single purpose (e.g. show the weather or an RSS feed) that are well known on the desktop since a couple of years now.

In preparation to my talk at this year’s XTech conference I want to point out some important things related to this announcement. I think widgets on (mobile) devices are a major step in the right direction and I feel the mobile web can finally get the boost it so desperately was waiting for since a couple of years now. “The Ubiquitous Web” is this year’s XTech topic - I feel the mobile web will become ubiquitous pretty soon…This article can be seen as a primer to my talk at XTech: Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous.

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There are some interesting news from the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany (15.- 21. March 2007). The CeBIT is a leading business event for the digital world, and the mobile industry is an important part of the CeBIT. Especially this year is a lot of going on mobile + internet. Here are some facts:

T-Mobile:

T-Mobile has dramatically dropped their prices for mobile surfing. Here are the prices for their time- and volume-based rates.

time-based rates:
The time-based rate is called “web’n'walk“. You only pay 0.09 EUR/minute for the “web’n'walk Starter” rate. There is neither a basic fee nor a volume limit. In August 2007 T-Mobile plans to offer the “web’n'walk Surfer” rate with 120 minutes for 5.00 EUR, which means 0.04 EUR/minute.

volume-based rates:
T-Mobile has also dropped the prices for their volume-based rates:
“web’n'walk BASIC“: 200 MByte for 20.00 EUR/month
“web’n'walk MEDIUM“: 400 MByte for 35.00 EUR/month
“web’n'walk LARGE“: 5 GByte for 50.00 EUR/month

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I was asked a couple of times to post the slides from my presentations (1, 2) about Mobile AJAX, so here they are.

Since I think it can be quite difficult to get valuable information out of these slides without further explanation, I want to use this chance to write a little more about the whole topic from my perspective. I see the topic being discussed in the internet everyday - obviously always from a little different angle, I also see that in some cases the term “Mobile AJAX” is used quite inflationary.

So I created a page about Mobile AJAX, on one hand because I feel the topic is too big for one post in the blog, on the other hand because it is “sticky” on the page and I can keep on editing it there.

Here’s my own opinion on the topic and the current status of my insights into Mobile AJAX. Since I am the developer here at PavingWays and since I have a strong web development background, I will accordingly focus more on the technical side than on business-related areas. I also feel that there is way too few information about the technical side of the whole topic around, so maybe my two cents will even help someone understanding what this mysterious “Mobile AJAX” is all about.

Check out the page here.

As of February 1st there have been massive price drops amongst some of Germany’s pay-as-you-go / prepaid offers such as blau.de, Symio and Aldi talk. Aldi talk even offers UMTS / 3G SIM cards, so users can profit from the new cheap rates while using fast connections. All these discount MVNOs are using the network and infrastructure of E-Plus. Apparently E-Plus has dramatically lowered the reseller tariffs for data traffic.

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Today Steve Jobs unveiled the long-anticipated iPhone to the public. We gotta say this thing is amazing! Featuring a new input method called “Multi-touch”, which allows you to use several fingers at once to input “gestures”, the phone also features Wi-Fi (and EDGE) along with a version of Apple’s web browser Safari - this is possible, because the phone’s operating system is MAC OS X!

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In my presentation at the XML 2006 conference in Boston I tried to show that AJAX - as a technology in part based on XML - is a useful and promising tool to create web applications on mobile devices.

To emphasize this, I updated our event finder application that we had used on this year’s Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. The application basically is a website for mobile phones that shows the currently running events of a trade show or conference. In the updated version for the XML 2006 conference I added some AJAX stuff to show and test it’s usefulness:

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Additional to co-moderating the Vendor PechaKucha Night at the XML Conference in Boston I also co-presented a talk on Mobile AJAX and the Mobile Web in general at the XML 2006 conference in Boston together with Michael Smith from Opera.

This was my first presentation at a conference except a lightning demo at this year’s XTech conference about CarCulatr (price finder for used cars to demo mobile AJAX using Opera Platform) and I have to say it could not have been worse…

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We kicked off our stay in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley with the Mobile 2.0 event organized by the folks that normally organize the Mobile Monday here in the Bay Area. There were around 300 people attending, the location was great as was the lunch and the free drinks afterwards.
So what does Mobile 2.0 stand for? As Dan Appelquist described it, the concept or the idea behind this term is: “mobile web connected apps on the mobile platform”.

The whole event, apart from the keynotes, was held in panel discussions with panelists also taking some time for presenting on their own. The most interesting topics for us obviously was everything related to the mobile web and to browser based applications of which there were not many to be seen. The highlights were the presentations and demos of:

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I found an interesting list of the most downloaded mobile games in the UK.

Top 10 mobile games downloaded in the UK in July:

•    1. Tetris — EA Mobile / Blue Lava Wireless
•    2. Sonic the Hedgehog: Part One — Sega/Glu Mobile
•    3. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 — EA Sports / EA Canada
•    4. Worms — THQ / Kiloo
•    5. My Dog — I-play / I-play
•    6. Street Fighter II — Capcom / Capcom Mobile
•    7. The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo — I-play / I-play
•    8. The Sims 2 — EA Mobile / Ideaworks3D
•    9. Ms Pac-Man — Namco Mobile / Namco Networks
•    10. Blockbusters — Player X / Qbranch Wireless

source: http://www.moconews.net/uk-top-10-mobile-games-july.html

Top 10 mobile games downloaded in the UK in June:

•    1. Tetris — EA
•    2. Worms — THQ
•    3. Sonic The Hedgehog — Sega/Glu Mobile
•    4. FIFA World Cup Germany — EA
•    5. The Sims 2 — EA
•    6. Who Wants to be a Millionaire 2nd Ed — Glu Mobile
•    7. Championship Manager 2006 — Eidos
•    8. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift — I-play
•    9. Block Breaker Deluxe — Gameloft
•    10. Monopoly — Glu Mobile

source: http://www.moconews.net/uk-top-10-mobile-games-june.html

Today we received an interesting newsletter from 1&1 Internet AG, a German ISP. 1&1 now offers a Pocket Web Flat for 9.99 EUR per month (powered by Vodafone). There are no time or volume limitations and no additional basic fee, the offer is valid until 30 September 2006.

The service comes with a mobile handset that lacks the ability to make regular phonecalls, except if you are using a bluetooth headset (and pay from 0.29 EUR/Minute) and can therefore be best described as a PDA with phone abilities. However it supports push E-Mail and sports a webbrowser which is “optimized for the mobile internet”. It also has a calendar and a contact manager installed. There are no further information available about the platform or the software, so we will probably have to buy one of these to get more info.

Probably this whole offer is Vodafone’s way to get real-life data about people using the mobile internet and to figure out if they could offer a mobile flatrate within their own data plans. At the moment what you get from Vodafone for 9.95 a month is 30MB and that’s not a lot and quite a difference to a real flatrate or other offers - BASE offers a mobile flatrate for 25.00 EUR / month, but only if you are a BASE customer which makes another 25.00 EUR / month for  the voice service (also flat).

So let’s hope the test works well and we’ll see the mobile flatrate available as regular data plans soon.
For more information see http://pocketweb.1und1.de

What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?

What is important to consumers, both for mobile and voice services?

What implications can be drawn from usage differences between segments, geographies or even between the distinct customer bases of operators and device manufacturers?

These questions were examined in the 2005 A.T.Kearney Mobinet study, which is an assessment of global consumer trends in mobile usage. By interviewing mobile users in 21 countries the company researched the degree to which consumers are adopting mobile data services.

Mobile phones - only for making phone calls?

Nearly 60% of the customers expect to use their mobile phone to make the majority of their calls over the next year. Only 4% of consumers expect to use VoIP for the majority of their calls next year. Alarmingly a significant number of consumers are not convinced that their mobile operator should offer anything more than basic voice service. The majority (80%) of the 65-year olds (or older) reject data services compared to 25% of the under 24-year olds. Probably one reason for this is, that older people are more afraid of new technologies/services.
Another important aspect is the price. 70% of mobile phone users see the price as the primary factor in choosing operator.

What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?

Because the penetration of data-enabled, multimedia phones has increased to 53%, more consumers across all age groups are adopting mobile data services. Most of them (56%) use it (more…)

Our hosting company (Schlund) informed us about the .mobi time frame:

Sunrise Phase 2 (Trademark Sunrise)
=================================
Start/End: 12 June - 22 September 2006
Duration: at least 2 years, after that yearly renewal

Landrush Phase (Live Registration with increased pricing)
=====================================
Start/End: 26 September - 10 October 2006
Deadline: 26 September 2006
Duration: at least 2 years, after that yearly renewal

Live Phase
==========
Deadline: 11 October 2006
Duration: at least 2 years, after that yearly renewal

For more information see our earlier post.