PavingWays

Not the latest, but still some quite interesting news:

• Apple plans to release an SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch in February 2008. The company wants to create “a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for (their) users”

• Orange will sell the iPhone in France without SIM-Lock, because the French consumer rights forces Orange to offer the iPhone also without contract and without SIM-Lock

• Google bought Jaiku

Sources:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/97556/from/rss09
http://www.jaiku.com
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/97537/from/rss09

I was attending the Mobile Ajax Workshop at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. The whole workshop was very interesting and I met many interesting people from Japan, Korea, USA, UK, India and companies such as NTT DoCoMo, NHN, Vodfone, Aplix, Motorola, SitePen, NEC and many more.

The event, being a workshop not a conference, was structured a bit different from what I experienced until now. There were different moderated discussions around topics related to Mobile Ajax.  These discussions were conducted in the form of panel discussions, where up to 4 panelists came up on “stage” and held a 5-minute introduction about their position papers that were handed in before the event. I was up in a panel about “one web” with Alan from AOL, Dave from Google and Goro from DoCoMo. Honestly, it  felt a bit strange being in a panel with people from these major players, but it was cool and my presentation went ok too.

Some lessons learnt:

• AOL is using Mobile Ajax in their mobile search (works in IE) on http://wap.aol.com/search
• Aplix is working on a Java based tool that can provide access to device hard- and software to web aplications in the browser through a browser plugin, e.g. web app<->browser<->plugin<->Java<->GPS on phone
• Japan is cHTML (iMode) all the way, but there are full web browsers too, many phones with 2 browsers
• in Korea it’s all XHTML (WAP2.0), many carriers develop their own Flash-like VMs to make content developers use their tools
• Motorola will soon have a widget engine and Ajax support in their browser too
• Content adaptors use many different ways to detect the user-agent, also, but not mainly WURFL, more on DDGW
• Solutions for “offline” detection/browsing/management/handling are crucial, needed and Google Gears looks promising

The minutes of the workshop can be found through the W3C website. Here’s the slides on the Frost Ajax Library from my lightning presentation.

All in all it was a great day and I want to thank Microsoft for hosting the event and lunch, the W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance for putting this event together and especially Daniel Appelquist, Michael(tm) Smith and Jon Ferraiolo for their great work moderating and running the event. Looking forward to the next one.

Last week 3jam and Virgin Mobile announced their partnership. That’s really amazing news! Virgin Mobile is promoting that deal heavily, e.g. on their homepage and via messages to subscribers.

What is 3jam?
In 2005 Andy Jagoe and Enlai Chu started developing a new way of text messaging communication. Let’s name it SMS 2.0. It improves the basic text messaging by allowing friends and family to stay connected with group communication. The 3jam service is free, only SMS charges may apply. But the cool thing is that each text message you send or receive through 3jam is counted as 1 standard text message, even when your message may be received by multiple recipients in the 3jam conversation.

How does the 3jam service via Virgin Mobile works?
The Virgin Mobile customers have first to sign up on the menu of Virgin Mobile’s WAP deck or at www.3jam.com/virgin.Then they can start sending SMS to any number of friends simultaneously. The receipients of the SMS can reply to all at once.

How big is the market for SMS?
For this year Informa analysts suggest the value of global SMS traffic at 60 Billion USD; Gartner forcasts 1.8 Trillion USD by 2010.

In the US we already talked to some carriers and most of them are pretty interested in partnerships with service developers, since they can help them to attract more customers and also increase their ARPU.

Currently, 3jam is building a global service for transiting, billing and clearing multi-party SMS messages. They are also working on some new features. Rocco already met the 3jam Andy and Enlai. Way to go 3jam!

Sources:
us.blognation.com
3jam.com
virginmobile.com