A curious affliction of the mobile blogosphere is its propensity for annual predictions about what will happen next in our industry. It’s a badly-kept secret that this frustrates me. Mostly because:
- A year really isn’t a very long time, whatever the cliché tells you… very little surprising happens in 12 months an industry dominated mostly by large companies and continuous market dynamics.
- It doesn’t take a lot of research into any topic to be able to make a handful of sensible predictions about it. (Flat rate tariffs more common? Really? I should think Antarctic will thaw quicker than last year too, and there will be progress in HIV research.)
- They’re rarely actionable. I’m unlikely to buy shares on such vague tips, and I can’t wager against their accuracy at my local bookmakers. Do these lists exist to bolster the reader’s wealth or knowledge? Or perhaps demonstrate how perceptive the writers think they are?
- Wouldn’t it be better to spend the same effort actually helping to make the future come true in the first place?
But this week saw the publication of a collection of 40 or so pundits’ predictions mobile trends for the coming decade. Should I dislike this 400 times more? Well, fortunately no! Ten years gives more room for the predictions to breathe, and the collective nature of the project should mean broader trends can be spotted.
The document is curated by Rudy De Waele, for whom I have lot of respect. He’s got the enthusiasm and boundless energy that fits well with the promise of mobile. It must have taken a fair bit of effort to pull this project together: a set of slides containing the predictions from a large number of contributors. The document has already been very successful and well circulated. And there are some very clever people involved.
In choosing the contributors, Rudy describes them as his personal ‘mobile heroes’. Fair enough – but how has that affected the overall roundedness of the project? This, to me, is potentially a worry.
For example, it might have been interesting to have heard from at least one handset manufacturer. This will be a decade of bitter rivalry in that market between the old telecoms guard and already-successful new entrants. Exciting times: and I would love to know what the contenders foresee? And only 3 network operators? However conservative their ambitions, the networks’ plans and predictions are quite likely to shape mobile’s decade somehow.
Facebook is a good scalp – although not as revealing as I’d hoped – and so are the financier contributions. Most of the remainder of the contributions are from small startups, bloggers, authors, entrepreneurs, ’strategic thinkers’ and ‘keynote speakers’.
Now, I have nothing against such individuals (since I know many of them, they’re very smart, and that’s how I’d probably describe myself too!). But having so many casts a slight pallor over the project: the patina of the developed world’s well-trodden mobile conference circuit. Punditry that’s been trotted out for years: affluent, Western, urban- and professional-centric reflections of how we’d like the industry to fulfill our own personal use-cases.
This is a shame. I wanted this document to surprise me more. The entire world – economically, politically, climatically – will change a lot in ten years. I would expect the mobile medium will flex to adapt to those seminal changes far more interestingly than it does to some tactical contemporary challenges.
In the same vein, a missed opportunity may have been to look further abroad. True, there are valid mentions of mobile’s cultural impact in Africa, but try keyword-searching the document for ‘China’, ‘India’, ‘Brazil’, ‘Russia’ (or even ‘Japan’!) and you’ll be out of luck. Who thinks nothing of interest will happen in those places in the next decade? (Now that would be a surprise).
This all made the predictions, a little, erm, predictable. Yes, yes, I think we all know battery technology will improve, but who was brave enough to make predictions like this?:
- most mobile web sites in 2020 will be in Chinese
- at least one major European operator will have been bought by an Indian conglomerate
- the Rio De Janeiro Olympics’ web site will have more mobile visitors than non-mobile
- Google’s home page will default to being mobile in all countries except the US
- roaming agreements will be used as collateral in carbon trading markets as the mobile-wielding populations of low-lying countries are resettled
Crazy? Sure. But these are just off the bat. I think the aims of such a project should be to inspire, question and provoke. Don’t give me some short-term platitudes about app stores and widgets. At least not when history is on the move like it will be in this decade.
OK, so perhaps I’m protesting too much. Despite these flaws, there are some real gems to be found in this document. “Digital syllogomania” is a brilliant piece of insight. A few touch on the very likely “always-on backlash”, and the promise of mobile-device-as-sensor is tantalizing. I also applaud those predictions that wonder whether mobile technology can change basic human behavior. I’m doubtful, but it’s a good question. As Tom Hume asks: “What happens to conversation when it’s all recorded, or any fact is a 5-second voice-search away from being checked?”
Anyway, it’s a few days old now, but do go read the document here. And more importantly, make up some of your own. Even more importantly, go and try make them happen. “It’s good to talk”, but the mobile world in the next decade probably belongs to those who make. And those who make the predictions come true.
Just a quick post to confirm that the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin is back online at wordpress.org.
Most WordPress plugins, if ‘GPL-compatible’, are hosted on wordpress.org – it provides an easy way for people to view and upgrade them. The increasingly popular Mobile Pack is no exception, and we’ve been happily listed there for over 6 months.
But what do you do when it suddenly disappears? About 3 days ago, that’s exactly what happened. I’m the administrator of the plugin and could see it when I logged in. But suddenly none of my collaborators – nor the general public! – could see or download the plugin.
Our sole channel for software distribution had mysteriously dropped into a black hole – without a word of notification from WordPress themselves.
- Assuming it could only therefore be a bug with the wordpress.org web site, I filed a number of support tickets. No response.
- Assuming it could only therefore be a permissions or licence issue, I raised a number of forum threads on the site (as, kindly, did Dennis Bournique, over at WAP Review). No response.
- Assuming I was somehow falling between the cracks, I even emailed Matt Mullenweg. Less surprisingly, no response. UPDATE: I received an apology shortly after this post.
Hmm. All rather unsatisfactory.
Well, this morning, a breakthrough. My WPMP partner in crime, Andrea Trasatti thought of joining the WordPress IRC channel. (Obviously he’s a bit more old school than me). But finally found someone who would be prepared to answer the puzzle.
At this point, I need to point out there there are (true!) other mobile plugins out there. One particularly popular one has been Andy Moore’s. He hadn’t hosted his on wordpress.org due, I guess, to his choice of license, and his – disclosed – use of automatic ads in the resulting pages, which WordPress does not permit.
For whatever reason, Andy recently closed down his plugin’s page, and had kindly redirected it to ours. This probably accounts for our nice increase in traffic in mid-November. Thanks Andy!
However, one of Andy’s previous plugin downloaders apparently complained about an error message they had received. The WordPress administrators investigated by visiting Andy’s site, and of course got redirected to our Mobile Pack page. Thinking our plugin was at fault, they then disabled our plugin for violating the no-ads rule.
Oh, and no-one thought to drop me an email to tell me.
But Andrea’s investigations and protestations prompted us to get re-approved, and we’re back!
(In the process of investigating this, it also turns out that when WordPress says ‘GPL-compatible’ and points you to a list of licenses, that doesn’t mean much at all. You also have to work out that they actually mean ‘GPL2-compatible’, and not ‘GPL3-compatible’, as our more permissive Apache license is. So I guess we’ll have to change our license too – which is a shame.)
I don’t think WordPress covered themselves with glory here. In the interests of constructive criticism, I would suggest the company should:
- Inform a plugin owner whenever there is a complaint raised against it. I would have been able to point out the complaint was aimed at a different piece of software.
- Inform a plugin owner when – or better, before – disabling a plugin from the listing. I could have had a grace period to have investigated any issues, rather than hear it first as complaints from users.
- Respond to ’site bug’ tickets raised on the site.
- Make the licensing requirements for plugins more clear. The phrase ‘GPL-compatible’ here, (and its link), is certainly not precise enough.
- Remember that plugin authors work hard to support your business of running the most popular blog platform in the world. Those individuals’ reputations, to a fair extent, rest on your responsible syndication of that code, and they get the grief when you pull the plug.
Anyway, thanks guys (and Mark in particular) for putting it back. And special thanks to Andrea, who now overtakes me in the chocolate-for-favours race.
Now… back to the roadmap of Mobile Pack coolness. Stay tuned.
–or–
“How your mobile site may not be much more complicated than building one with a data API or AJAX”
I am working on a project called ‘IvyRoot’ that is predominantly mobile and which is going to make me fabulously rich and famous.
OK, OK. It’s predominantly mobile, at least. It’s all in Django.
There’s a ‘desktop’ web site to go with it, and this contains panels within pages. Some of these panels might take a few moments to process and so I use XHR to call back to get them once the main page has loaded, displaying a pretty spinning icon in the meantime.
I also use XHR to populate in-page tables which might have many rows – so that pagination and sorting are fast without having to load the whole page again.
I also want to expose a number of data APIs (providing XML, JSON, basic HTML and the like) so that people can build 3rd party clients, their own consuming sites, and widgets.
Finally, I want to provide a mobile web version of the site. I’ll probably do some sort of device detection to refine the behaviour, but I should assume that plenty of browsers will not be able to do the XHR bit, and should have the page (containing all the panels) in one go – admittedly after a slightly longer wait.
Well, it occurs to me that these requirements can all be solved at the same time. Switching templates based on URL (or other HttpRequest clues) is pretty easy, so one thing I could do is have a filename extension convention for all my URLs. Imagine a ‘things’ view that lists things.
- http://ivyroot.com/things – this is the human-consumable page: the view surrounded by menus, logos, graphics and the like. Knows how to switch outer template, based on various things, between desktop and mobile.
- http://ivyroot.com/things.html – this is the table at the heart of the page, perhaps using unstyled markup containing the list of things itself.
- http://ivyroot.com/things.xml, http://ivyroot.com/things.json etc – data APIs that list things in various serializations.
So perhaps we can set up URL routes like this:
... (r'^things$', things), (r'^things.(?P<mode>[a-z0-9]+)$', things), ...
And have a view that looks something like this:
def things(request, mode=''):
if not mode:
mode = desktop_or_mobile()
template = "things.%s" % mode
...
(Or, I suppose we could pass the mode into the template via the context and have some sort of a switch statement in the template itself. It might be good to pass it in, anyway, in case there is any further refinement required within each template.)
Anyway, let’s also assume that the things list is very long and takes a while to generate. For the desktop users, we might want to either load the table as HTML asynchronously using XHR, or paged into a jQuery grid control. For these two approaches, I can call back to /things.html or /things.json respectively (and do a little extra plumbing to make sure the JSON is in the right format for the grid control to consume).
But what of mobile? Well, for many devices, I can’t expect any XHR activity to be supported, so we need to insert the table HTML into the body of the things.mobile page before it departs for the client – and we may need to pre-page it too (if it’s long). But the good news is that, if I made it simple enough, the HTML generated by things.html might be good enough for either type of browser.
(And if not, I could easily do a little adaptation on that view too – perhaps turn my table into a list.)
So what I would like to have a is a way of embedding the output of one view (or even URL) into another, whilst the response is still being put together on the server. Try as I could, there didn’t seem to be anything in Django to do this.
Enter my first DjangoSnippet!
This basically allows me to put a template tag into the mobile template that pulls the output from one of the other views (identified by view name, with arguments; or a verbatim URL which would be the same as the one used in the desktop’s XHR request – nifty!)
It also makes sure that the context for that view is sandboxed with what it needs to render itself – so that I don’t have to worry about getting the context ready in the ‘outer’ view. That’s not necessary in our simple example above – but it might be useful later on if I am dynamically choosing which panels to place on a page, and I want them to gather together their own context prior to template rendering.
Now, I’ll need to be careful to make sure that any interaction elements within the table – say, some actions available on each item in the list, or a paginator – behave suitably for their location. But this may be as simple as toggling between further XHR requests (for desktop) and simple anchor links (for mobile). Forms-in-panels will be harder but similar.
So… there we are, a glimpse at the inner workings of a mystery application that’s many weeks away from seeing the light of day.
But hopefully I’ve raised a few thoughts about how you can treat the mobile version of your site as being a cousin of the data APIs that you might have written anyway. And also how you might be able to sneakily bring some of the funky XHR – that you wanted to impress your friends with on the desktop – up into the server to keep your mobile pals happy too.
I’m somehow dissatisfied with mobile cartography.
On the Hollywood Walk of Fame site, we’re currently using Google Maps. When I first saw Google Maps on the web, I was thrilled with the cartography. The craft of good map-making started to shine through after a decade of turgid MapQuest vectors.
(In a previous life, I lived for maps… so I take this very seriously!)
And on HWOF, sure, it does what it should. The now-familiar style has a comforting effect for users I suppose.
But, both with and without the ‘mobile’ option set in the API (shown on the right – worse I think!), and despite the huge watermark on the limited real-estate, I’m personally tiring of it.
vs 
Maybe it’s the burnish of familiarity. I’ve seen this style so much that it holds no allure or beauty any more. Maybe because it appeals more to drivers than pedestrians. Maybe because of the uninspiring Arial font. Or maybe just because I’d like to be more in control? All of the above.
Anyway, I’ve started to look at alternatives. On one hand we’re looking at some commercial possibilities with other map (and location data) providers.
But on the hand, I’ve been sucked into the thought of using CloudMade. Built on top of the excellent OpenStreetMap project, it allows everyone to become a cartographer – or at least, to apply new themes and styles to the map structures from OSM.
A great example? Check out Matt Jones’ lovely map:
Which, interestingly, immediately made me think of John Speed:
Nothing new in the world, eh?
Anyway… this is now interesting. I’m no graphic designer, but I’ve done my fair share of map-making. I do know how to make important features rise to the foreground. And make irrelevant aspects fade to the back. Serve specific purpose. A map is not just a dry record of geographic fact: it should be created entirely with the context of the user in mind.
Hey! Just like mobile web applications.
So I am on a crusade to in find the perfect mobile map. A cartographic style that jumps out of a handheld screen. A visual vocabulary that caress a mobile user’s spatial awareness. Maps that blend seamlessly into the device’s user interface, rather than merely rectangular crashups. A panache that brings vectors to life. That crosses the boundary into art.
And that can do so, effortlessly, in 176 pixels or less.
The world is full of brilliant maps of many kinds. But do any of them cut it in the mobile medium? Is that medium so different that we have to start again with some of our cartographic assumptions? Will I ever be satisfied?
Well, I don’t know yet. But I do know that I’m going to have a lot of fun fiddling with CloudMade.
What’s your favourite mobile map, cartographic style or service? And why?
I was amazed to discover that Google don’t currently support Python as a language for their mobile ads. AdMob doesn’t either (thinking it’s more likely that people might use perl or VBScript for a contemporary web site).
But it’s a particularly strange omission for Google, since it’s one of their three ‘official’ internal languages (together with Java and C++), and because their Google App Engine platform mandates it. Do they assume that no-one would create a mobile application in their cloud?
I don’t know – it’s probably just left-hand and right-hand out of sync.
Anyway, The Hollywood Walk of Fame mobile site has been a recent hobby for me, and I chose Django on Python for a bit of educational fun.
It was going well until I decided to throw some ads onto it.
So of course I needed to port the ad code. It’s very simple, although cuts a few corners (this does not support AdSense’s custom colour feature for example):
def google_ad(request, publisher_id, format='mobile_single'):
scheme = 'https://' if request.is_secure() else 'http://'
params = {
'ad_type':'text_image',
'channel':'',
'client':'ca-mb-' + publisher_id,
'dt':repr(floor(1000*time())),
'format':format,
'https':'on' if request.is_secure() else '',
'host':scheme + request.META.get('HTTP_HOST', ''),
'ip':request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR', ''),
'markup':'xhtml',
'oe':'utf8',
'output':'xhtml',
'ref':request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER', ''),
'url':scheme + request.META.get('HTTP_HOST', '') + \
request.META.get('PATH_INFO', ''),
'useragent':request.META.get('HTTP_USER_AGENT', '')
}
screen_res = request.META.get('HTTP_UA_PIXELS', '')
delimiter = 'x'
if screen_res == '':
screen_res = request.META.get('HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_SCREENPIXELS', '')
delimiter = ','
res_array = screen_res.split(delimiter)
if len(res_array) == 2:
params['u_w'] = res_array[0]
params['u_h'] = res_array[1]
dcmguid = request.META.get('HTTP_X_DCMGUID', '')
if dcmguid != '':
params['dcmguid'] = dcmguid
url = 'http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?' + urlencode(params)
return urlopen(url).read()
I presume I’m allowed to do this, I know it’s only 15 minutes saved – but if it helps someone, great. No warranties – but it works for me!
Incidentally, in Django, I am placing this in a context_processor so that it gets put into a template variable that I know will turn up in every view when the site is in mobile ‘mode’. I use a switcher like this to toggle between http://hwof.com and http://hwof.mobi.
Hm. This post looks terrible in this theme. I think I need to change WordPress template soon.
After someone I respect got banned from the WMLProgramming mailing list, I wrote to agree with one or two other members who were disappointed with the state of affairs.
I’ve been a member since, I guess, the first few weeks of the group’s existence – even if I haven’t been a day-to-day contributor. Sadly it’s gone downhill over the last year or so.
Why? It’s a long story. The mobile developer community has a desire to have a strong position on unprovoked content transformation. This is a good thing.
But the approach taken to get their message across involves some of the most inflammatory, derogatory, and unprofessional behaviour I’ve ever seen online. This is not a good thing.
I was disappointed that the reputation of the group was sinking so low. It also occured to me that, as a member, this behaviour was implicitly in my name.
But not for long! I was promptly banned from the group. Well, I suppose I was leaving anyway, so maybe it was no big deal.
But shortly after, a rather rude mail was written in response, making some outlandish claims about some corporate conspiracy I’m supposed to be part of. But could I respond? No! I’d been banned. I guess to make sure you get the last word, the best way is to limit the other party’s ability to respond.
So anyway, I don’t really want to labour the point. But here’s what I wrote as my last post to the group and couldn’t send – thanks to the membership button being grayed out.
After all that fruitless typing, and in the interests of free speech, I just feel it needs to see the light of day somehow 
—————————————-
Luca,
You do indeed deserve huge thanks for the many years of hard work and success. The manifesto and it could have been a memorable agent for good on behalf of the industry as a whole. It may still become so.
I fully admire your goals, but with them comes an attitude that ruins the external reputation of the group – and the chances of those goals ever being met. Further, the reputation of the group is projected onto its members.
That is why I’m leaving. This brand of militarism does not represent my broader interests in the growth of the mobile web.
Let me also state clearly that my opinions about the situation have absolutely nothing to do with my recent employer or its investors: I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there really is no conspiracy.
I hope that one day this famous list will return to being positive and friendly again.
(Doubtless you’ve more positive and friendly things to say on the matter too. But since you banned me, do note I won’t be receiving further replies.)
James
So, my wife has a new job in India. We’re leaving Dublin to have a flavour of life in the sub-continent. It was a dilemma to figure out how to fit this in with my own career.
After much deliberation, we figured that it wouldn’t really be possible to continue my current role of CTO. As well as the traditional CTO-like activities (evangelism, slideshows, strategy, whiteboard death-match), I’ve also been leading the, now quite large, development team at dotMobi. Doing that properly needs someone nearby, and not offset by five-and-a-half hours. So the CTO (aka VP Technology) role is now in the hands of a very able replacement – there’s certainly a world-class team to continue the good work in Dublin.
But the good news is that I’ll still be involved with dotMobi, despite my geographic and temporal displacement. I’ll be consulting for the company as VP Emerging Technologies – which makes me a sort of a one-man research team. I’ll be slightly decoupled from the engineering activities of course – but, because there are still lots of innovative things that the company needs to do, I can make the most of my slightly remote perspective by pushing those inventions forward.
There are a couple of things I’ve got in mind. Firstly, I’d like to to help understand how dotMobi’s existing tools can be better used. I’ve got a DeviceAtlas WordPress plugin up my sleeve, for example – and I think there’s lots more we can do to make that platform easier to use in familiar runtime environments. We’d like to push DeviceAtlas further in the area of AJAX and CSS support. I expect I’ll rattle off a few posts for mobiForge. And I expect I’ll also be chipping in some ideas for Instant Mobilizer.
Although it will be a change not to be in the office every day, bouncing thoughts off everyone else, I think I’ll be very able to see these projects through without too much day-to-day distraction. Of course we’re a heavily connected team, so (Indian broadband permitting) I’ll still be able to stay in touch via Skype, email, Twitter and so on.
Co-incidentally, I’m pleased with the word ‘emerging’ in my role as I think will be wholly appropriate for my locale. We’ll be in a place called Nashik, a few hundred miles north-east of Mumbai. It’s small enough not to appear on most maps, but it’s got a population of 1.5 million or so. India of course, is emerging as both an economic and mobile phenomenon, both in the cities and rurally, and I think I’ll be well placed to watch these developments unfold.
What do I mean by by mobile phenomenon? Well I don’t know what that means on the ground yet – but I do know the country’s been gaining something like 10 million new subscribers a month. (That’s the population of Dublin every, um, working day). As well as the staggering numbers involved, I fully expect to discover that these millions of newly-connected mobile users are using the medium in exciting new ways. And surely many of them won’t already own a PC: so mobile web usage is undoubtedly going to feature heavily.
But I don’t really want to say too much about what I think I will see and experience – I know it’s going to be a huge adventure, but I also know that most of my assumptions (whether about the local mobile market or India in general) will be wrong. I’ve been a few times on holiday, but this is an altogether different kettle of fish, so I’m going with an entirely open mind. My Twitter account and blog are a blank canvas upon which I will try to describe what I see, smell and observe once I get there. (I’ll endeavor to keep a regular ‘mobile letter from India’ going).
Anyway, all in all, it’s daunting, but the situation looks like it will work out well. I’ll be spending more and more time researching some of the technical challenges that face the company – and the mobile industry as a whole – and hopefully coming up with some innovative solutions and neat technology. I’ll be able to see, first hand, a completely different side to the evolution of mobile communication, and I’m looking forward to blowing some of my Western preconceptions out of the water. Finally, of course, I’m hoping this will be a great experience for my children – who, after all, will consider India to be one of the major world economies when they are my age.
So, as of next week, good bye Europe (for a little while) and stay tuned!
This New Year marks my second anniversary of being CTO at dotMobi.
I’m making a big deal of this because, as of Thursday, I won’t be CTO at dotMobi. My wife Jayne, has landed a marketing job at a vineyard near Mumbai in India, and both of us, together with our two young children, are emigrating to live there.
Everything changes. So humour me. Rather than endless industry predictions you’ve been reading everywhere else this week, I’m going to indulge myself in a retrospective.
In my next post I’ll talk about what’s happening next. (Clue though: I’m not leaving the company!)
dotMobi was a fairly different place when I joined two years ago. The .mobi domain name had recently gone on sale, the company was focussed on being a domain registry, and most of the company’s technical capabilities were outsourced. But not entirely. Ronan and Ruadhan, who were both incumbent technologists when I arrived, had already started developing early versions of the developer community and the ready.mobi test tool. And through the work of Jo Rabin, the company was keenly supporting the mobile work of the W3C too. The seeds had been sown for the organisation to be able to play an important role in the mobile world – as well as for the domain community – and that’s why I took the job. During my two years, I’d like to think we stayed true to those ambitions.
Looking back, I spent relatively little time on the domain registry business per se – when I did it was mostly evangelism, blogging, and a bit of data mining. Of course we like to articulate why a mobile URL or domain is important if you want to let your users choose their experience via their address bar, and how you can use such a trustworthy mobile domain in conjunction with your existing web properties.
But dotMobi has other missions. For example, we want to help designers, web developers, marketeers, and businesses appreciate the potential of the mobile web as a whole. I’m passionate about the role that mobile will play in our on-line lives of the future, but I also recognise that someone’s got to actually build it. Given my recent career, it was natural that that agenda would shine through – and that’s been a large part of my work. With its highly reputable investors (not to mention a decent cashflow from the domain name business), the company’s uniquely placed to offer assistance to mobile developers and other companies throughout the ecosystem. It’s able to solve some nasty problems that would be unrewarding for, say, a more financially-backed company to undertake.
The hassle of mobile handset diversity, for example, is a huge pothole in the mobile web superhighway. We felt dotMobi had an obligation to help fill it in for the good of all the travellers on such a road. And so was born DeviceAtlas: designed to become the world’s leading database of mobile device information. I was lucky enough to be able to recruit WURFL founder Andrea Trasatti to the team in the summer of 2007, and convince him that dotMobi was the place to build such a thing. We launched just over 6 months later, and, although it’s a work in progress of course, we’re thrilled by what the team have created so far. (I still suspect it might end up being what we are all remembered for in years to come).
ready.mobi has also changed hugely in the last two years. It’s gone from being a fun little mobile rating tool to becoming an important part of many mobile developers’ toolkits. We’re supporting thousands of testers every day from around the world who are committed to producing quality mobile sites. With full site testing now available, and the recent release of a machine API, it’s never stood still. It remains the tool that many people know dotMobi for most.
The jewel in dotMobi’s crown is undoubtedly its developer community mobiForge (nee dev.mobi). Well over 20,000 developers regularly turn to the site for a stream of high quality material about the state of the mobile development world. Editor Ruadhan, together with all the team members and authors who contribute, deserve the credit for this. (I merely pull a few levers and press a few buttons behind the scenes; plus the occasional article). Sister site mobiThinking is also starting to make real strides.
In 2007, one of our major, if left-field, projects was find.mobi. At that time, we thought that mobile search was really an unsolved problem and that a lot of traditional search companies didn’t really understand mobile – and what mobile users want. (Hint: it’s not mangled PC web sites). Since we had to crawl an awful lot of .mobi sites for compliance reasons anyway, we started crawling other top-level domain sites as well, looking for made-for-mobile sites to flesh out a contextually-targetted directory and search service.
The technology is clever and at the time the UI was pretty unique: as an experiment it was very worthwhile. Not surprisingly, we weren’t able to give it the love and care it needed for a consumer launch. Also, incumbent services have improved since then. But… well, I still think mobile search is unfinished business: there are still some exciting possibilities being explored for the find.mobi technology.
Another technical excitement this year was the purchase of Mowser from Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl. They’ve moved on to other things now, but the Dublin engineering team have been pouring effort into its reincarnation, dubbed ‘Instant Mobilizer’. Yes, it’s a transcoder that takes non-mobile content and adjusts the syntax to better suit a mobile device, but it comes with a few twists.
Firstly, it’s an opt-in service: small businesses for example can subscribe to the service instead of having a new site built for themselves. Secondly, we don’t just perform markup gymnastics to hack a site to pieces: we also enhance pages with additional services that might be useful for mobile users. Thirdly, we don’t think that transcoding non-mobile sites is a particularly satisfactory end-game for the industry anyway. This, if you like, is a taster service that can open businesses’ eyes to the possibilities of mobile – but one which, if it does its job well, will help to promote the advantages of building mobile services properly subsequently.
Anyway, Ronan’s been leading that project, and it’s due for a launch in the New Year, so I’m not particularly due any credit! But it’s very neat, and keep an eye open for it in months to come.
I’ve had a fantastic couple of years living in Dublin. The city’s been warm and welcoming to both me and my family. Professionally, the city has been a great base for the company. Although it’s been hard hiring world class people, we’ve always made that a non-compromisable priority – and I’m really happy with the large, talented team of mobile-centric engineers that we’ve cultured. Outside of the technical team too, there’s a great team of people at dotMobi overall. It’s always been a pleasure to work with smart, international colleagues from across all the disciplines: Neil, Trey, Paul, Amy, Norbert, Vance – and many, many others.
The last two years have seen dotMobi play a more mature, supportive role within the mobile industry, and it has broadened its brief from domain names to many other, perhaps more altruistic, activities. I won’t ever be able to say that the mobile web has taken off because of us, or because of the small part I personally played – but I certainly know that when it comes to mobile, I’ve been in the most exciting place at the most exciting time.
In the next post, a bit more about the next chapter of our lives.
It feels strange blogging these days. Everything appears to fly past on Twitter instead.
But just an update on some things going on here. Firstly my movements, recently and soon:
- Mobile World Congress, Barcelona (it was OK)
- SXSW, Austin (not much mobile zeitgeist, and I felt old)
- A family skiing holiday (amazing snow for late March)
- CTIA in Las Vegas (my favourite city, ahem… but Mobile Jam will be cool)
- WWW2008 in Beijing (4 years since I was there last – will I recognise it?)
- MoMo Summit in Malaysia (2 years, but ditto)
There’s certainly no shortage of mobile-related shows on at at the moment. Plenty of gigs containing the words “mobile”, “web”, “2.0″ again this year. I think there are another two Spring events in London that I’ve missed from my list – and after all that I know I’m still, sadly, missing another sponsoree, Over The Air.
Secondly, things going on at dotMobi and elsewhere:
- DeviceAtlas (launched last month, roaring success, 1,000 users already, yes I wrote some of the code)
- Find.mobi (none of my code! but try flight codes and currency questions…)
- Dev.mobi (going from strength to strength…. 10,000 users)
- http://447867554666.mobi/ (and similar… interesting idea, no?)
- MetaJam (already paying some of the household bills; thanks AdMob!)
- HotTwit (a bit of malformed fun; probably could do more with it)
- IvyRoot (not even ready for prime-time on my own brain yet)
- Erlang (a solution looking for me to find a problem for)
So, I guess this blog post is sort of an almanac of what’s going on in my life, circa Q1 2008.
If you’re at any of the upcoming events above, I’ll see you soon. If you have any comments on these various projects, let me know
