PavingWays

Some more interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress:

• Google’s new strategy “Mobile First”
  Google’s new strategy: “Mobile First”  The company now focuses more on smartphones than on desktops. That means giving mobile top priority and launching new products first on mobile platforms before creating PC versions.

  (Source: brighthand.com)

• 60,000 Android phone a day
  Google’s Android launched a year ago and is now available on 26 different devices in 48 countries. 60.000 Android devices running this operating systems are now being sold on a daily basis … meaning about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21 million per year. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter and 25 million in 2009. Seems like Android is gaining ground, hopefully internal fragmentation will be taken care of (if that’s possible).

  (Source: mobilegamesblog.com)

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At MWC a number of the world’s leading telco companies including Vodafone, Orange, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Deutsche Telecom, SK Telecom, Verizon, AT&T or China Mobile have announced the formation of an international alliance called “Wholesale Applications Community” (WAC) - to battle Apple.

They are aiming to build an open platform for mobile apps to all mobile phone users and want to solve the massive fragmentation problem.

They try to develop a common standard for applications within the next 12 months. The WAC is supposed to be a platform NOT an app store.

Of course, the app market is still a lucrative business and growing. Analysts at Gardner predict that the number of app downloads will rise to 4.5 billion (from 2.5 billion last year), yielding almost $30bn.

So far so good. But what does that mean, especially for us developers? Is this the right approach in the “write once, run anywhere” direction?

The good thing is that the group intends to use existing open standards (JIL, BONDI, W3C) and that will make it a lot easier for developers creating apps across multiple platforms. Besides developers then have only one single gateway to access a vast potential and international customer base. It also saves a lot of time and resources. And the new alliance has access to more than three billion customers.

Well, does this sound too perfect to you? There are still a lot of questions and even doubts, right? (more…)

Last year in October I wrote in a blog post about smart phone applications coming to cars. Today I read an article about Deutsche Telekom and tyre maker Continental joining this market as well.

They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!

Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.

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After mobile phones and cars we now will be able to access our mobile apps on TV - This really is exciting news:

At CES 2010 in Las Vegas Samsung announced the upcoming availability of of free and paid apps in Samsung’s Apps store, including apps for Televisions, Blu-Ray Players, Home Theater and Mobile Phones. The download service for TVs will be available in July 2010.

I found two interesting videos from Samsung’s press conferences:

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Bitstream, the company behind the popular BOLT mobile browser, has announced that version 1.7 of its browser will have the ability to run Web applications - known as widgets.

BOLT already supports Ajax, Javascript and other web-based languages. But the widgets will be installed directly into the BOLT browser and thus will load and execute faster. The BOLT widgets are written in standard W3C code. Users can access their widgets from within the browser via a new widget menu.

“As many of the recent mobile and wireless trade shows have demonstrated, mobile applications are part of the mainstream mobile experience,” said Sampo Kaasila, vice president of research and development at Bitstream. “However, the vast majority of phones in use today are ‘feature phones’ not smartphones. Unfortunately for the users of these billions of feature phones, it isn’t easy to find, install and run mobile applications. By adding Web apps to BOLT, Bitstream is not only improving the usability of our mobile browser, we are also making it possible for literally billions of people to partake in the mobile apps revolution.” (more…)

As you can see in our Widget and App Store Wiki, a lot of phone manufacturers and operators have already joined the mobile applications battle or are planning their move in this direction. To promote their platforms and app stores and to attract new developers many of them have started competitions, usually with nice prizes to be won.

Have a look at the following currently ongoing competitions:

1. NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge
   PRIZE: global prize pool currently at $8.2 million USD in cash and licenses
   DEADLINE: November 6, 2009 (EMEA region)

   The NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is focused on driving the development and visibility of innovative location-based solutions (LBS) for wireless devices. From business applications to sports, travel and security, integrating the accuracy and richness of NAVTEQ digital map data facilitates the discovery of the next wave of LBS using dynamic positioning technology. Winners are chosen by a panel of distinguished judges in each of five regions (EMEA, India, South America, North America, APAC).

   Registration for the LBS Challenge, EMEA Region has been extended to November 6, 2009.  A completed solution is not required at the time of  registration. The winners of the EMEA Region will be announced on February 14, 2010 prior to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The global prize pool for this year’s competition is currently at $8.2 million USD in cash and licenses.

   Read more: NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge (more…)

Handset makers Research in Motion (RIM), LG Electronics, Sharp and Samsung Electronics have joined the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) and will support JIL widget specification in future mobile handsets from Q1 2010.

“The decision of LG, RIM, Samsung and Sharp to incorporate the JIL widget specifications in their future product roadmap is proof of the tremendous potential that JIL offers both to developers and customers,” said Peters Suh, JIL CEO. “All four companies are innovation leaders and this is another strong affirmation of both JIL strategy and its robust technical specifications.” (Verizon Wireless)

Other members of the JIL include Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, China Mobile and Softbank (Japan) who are claiming to be able to reach a combined user base of more than 1 billion around the world (North America, Europe, Asia and Africa). (more…)

At the IAA in Frankfurt (Frankfurt Motor Show) in September 2009 BMW, Nokia and Parrot SA unveiled plans for bringing smart phone applications to cars.

“For software developers, this opens a whole new domain to sell their apps. For car makers, apps provide new ways to deliver infotainment and telematics services to customers. For motorists, apps allow them to enjoy their infotainment systems to the fullest, while paying only for the applications they want, thus saving them money. With apps so critical to the automotive market, companies are pushing approaches that benefit their specific goals. While the solutions shown at IAA were only concepts, they clearly reflect what will soon be on the market.” said Kevin Hamlin, analyst for automotive electronics at iSuppli Corp.

Sounds good? Yes. Where’s the catch? Doing it right!

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When hundreds of bean bags, big and small Daleks, The Beatles Rockband, Gears of War 2 and hundreds of geeks interested in mobile technology come together, it can only be Over The Air!

This year’s OTA in London was a great event, both in terms of the sessions held and in terms of the organization of the event. Daniel Appelquist’s team succeeded in gathering a batch of speakers who were able to cover a diverse, yet focused set of topics - thanks a lot for all this!

So what were all these experts and enthusiasts talking about? Widgets and app stores of course!

We enjoyed many interesting sessions and right from the keynotes by speakers from OMTP/BONDI, Vodafone and WIP one thing was clear: mobile widgets and application stores are what the mobile industry is all about right now.

For us at PavingWays this is not different, ever since we thought mobile widgets would make the mobile web more ubiquitous we have been looking at this area very closely.

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Back in April we were invited to participate in the Nokia WRT Widget Hackathon in Monaco. The event took place during the Nokia Developer Summit and it was all about hacking a WRT widget together within 24 hours. 12 teams from around the world implemented widget ideas nominated in beforehand by the Nokia community. We chose to work on the travel planner idea because it relates pretty well to one of our upcoming services called Panda Route - a travel diary service.

With this article I want to provide some basic insights on Nokia WRT widgets, how they work and how to implement and deploy them to handsets.

WRT stands for Web runtime and it enables you to create small applications, namely widgets, entirely built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Widgets are packaged and then deployed and installed on the device alongside native applications where the run in a chrome-less web browser, the web runtime environment. (more…)

On July, 31, RIM has officially launched their app store Blackberry App World 1.1 now also in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands with enhanced features, such as:

• sorting options (newest, name, price, vendor, popularity and relevance),
• filtering top 25 free and paid apps,
• additional categories and sub-categories and
• SD card archiving for downloaded and purchased apps (customers can now reinstall deleted apps from their memory card). (more…)

We have been eagerly awaiting download stats for Panda Route, our travel planner widget, ever since it passed QA and was published in the Nokia Ovi store.

By the end of last week Nokia finally launched its reporting tool for the Ovi store. Now publishers can measure their application’s success (or failure). The tool is pretty basic, yet very useful. It shows you the amount of downloads and/or purchases - sorted by devices and countries - and your estimated revenue. I am sure there will be more reporting options coming out soon.

The process of publishing on Ovi is pretty straightforward: you create a new content item, upload a file (the widget package in our case), then you define which devices the content is compatible with and submit it to Nokia’s Quality Assurance department. After about a week or so your content will have passed (or failed) QA and goes public after a few more days. A couple of days later you can then see statistics about your content item - download numbers being the most interesting ones for us (our widget is free), but of course also gained revenue etc. (more…)

Our Panda Route Travel Planner widget has made it to Nokia’s Ovi Store. The basic idea behind the widget is that you have all your important travel data with you while you are on the go. It works pretty easy: before you start your journey, you enter all the details of your upcoming trip that you need to remember (e.g. airline, flight times, hotel address, rental car reservation number etc.). Then the widget shows you the current step of your journey with all the needed information depending on the current time. On your Nokia N97 home screen this information will be shown too. So you have access to this information without interaction with the application and even when not connected to the Internet.

We also integrated a Twitter feed matching the location of your upcoming destination. It is a great source for any kind of information, such as events, news, things to watch out for or people nearby; and you know what is going on there before you arrive.

The widget is free and available for Nokia N97. So, before you start your next trip, try it out and let us know what you think!

PS:
You will find our widget in the Ovi store under “Nokia N97 devices” under “Applications” -> “City Guides/Maps” or by searching for “panda”.

The ads for Nokia’s N97 have started to appear and in Germany as it will hit the first shelves by June 18th at 5 pm in four selected cities. With the release of the N97 our travel planner widget “Panda Route” will be launched, too, and we are pretty excited about it!

Widgets are now becoming more and more popular on mobile phones and we think it’s gonna change web- and application development quite a bit too. Nokia’s new touchscreen phone comes with several widgets already pre-installed, but you can also download more from the Ovi store. With this step Nokia is especially addressing web developers. Recently they launched new mobile development tools that take advantage of three of the world’s most popular software development environments used by web designers and developers.

• Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) Extension for Adobe Dreamweaver,
• Nokia WRT plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio and
• the newly updated WRT plug-in 2.0 for Aptana Studio that we have been using too

“These new Nokia WRT tools open up the mobile development market to more than 10 million web developers and creative professionals worldwide who work with these widely used development environments every day to create web applications and content,” said Craig Cumberland, Director of WRT Tools and Technologies, Nokia. “These WRT plug-ins enable the easy creation of feature-rich widget applications for the enjoyment of mobile consumers around the globe, providing new horizons to untold numbers of individuals and organizations seeking to extend their web content and Internet presence into the mobile space.” Nokia says.

We absolutely agree and we were also mentioned in Nokia’s press release: (more…)

We were invited by Nokia to attend their Hackathon Widget coding contest alongside the Nokia Developer Summit in Monaco/Monte Carlo (we mentioned that earlier). It was a great chance to get to know many interesting people in the mobile development space and especially in the area of widget development based on Nokia’s Web Runtime (WRT).

The hackathon contest was all about implementing ideas of customers in a 24h period and we implemented an idea for a travel planner widget by Bruce Hopkins from Joplin, Missouri, USA. The basic idea was to create an application to collect all travel related information, such as flight numbers, times and car rental reservation info of a trip to have that handy while you are on the go so you would not have to mess around with printed paperwork. But let’s tell Bruce the whole story (and myself a bit about PavingWays and the contest):

Related to one of our new services, called Panda Route, which is a travel diary service (with a planning part), we created the Panda Route WRT widget - (more…)

On Tuesday the Nokia Developer Summit started. The conference was opened by Rob Taylor, Head of Forum Nokia. At the beginning he showed us a demo of a coming service (powered by qik) where consumers will be able to share videos live from their mobile devices.

The topic of this conference was mainly Nokia’s Ovi Store, which will launch this month. 500 people were at the event, mainly developers from all over the world, but also bloggers, press, analysts, students etc.

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We’ll be going to Monaco by the end of April to attend the Nokia Developer Summit 2009.

During this summit in Monte Carlo on 28-29 April, Nokia is holding a “N97 24-hour Hackathon” competition. I am one of 10 developers selected by Forum Nokia who is gonna hack together a Web Runtime (WRT) widget for the home screen of the new Nokia N97.

The Hackathon session will be streamed live and I will be in action 24h competing face-to-face with the other developers. At the end of this Hackathon, all widgets will be judged by a panel of experts from Nokia Forum & Nokia’s N97 team. The winning designer will get a Nokia N97 pre-loaded with the app. Also, the next to cash prizes, “[...]The winning widget will also be awarded premium spotlight status on the main page of the new Nokia Ovi Store, which is opening in May. It will be free to download in Australia, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. The apps which come second and third at the Hackathon judging panel will also get spotlight placement on the sight.[...]” (Source: Nokia).

Nokia is going through quite some replacements on the widget and content distribution front these days: Their WRT Widgets will replace formerly well received WidSetsâ„¢ and maybe other apps too, and Nokia’s new Ovi store will replace their current offering called Mosh.

I am really looking forward to the event - not just because I can spend some exciting days in Monte Carlo :), but also because it’s a great opportunity to get in touch with many people in the mobile and mobile web area since a long time.

Sources:

Nokia Developer Summit 2009
Nokia N97 Widget Competition
Nokia N97 Data Sheet
Forum Nokia

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!

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?

Finally I get to post something about my visit to Paris and specifically the XTech conference 2007. I went to XTech to speak about “Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous” and of course to attend as many of the other sessions as possible. Here’s some of my observations:

The location (Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel) was ok, I liked the last location in Amsterdam better though, because the different tracks were closer to each other. The organization was excellent as usual, special thanks to IDEAlliance and Edd Dumbill for that. I even did not have a problem accessing the wireless network - contrary to many others.

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