No Powerpoints, No Panels, No Ties - A day for Mobile Developers
This week’s Carnival, brought to us by AntoineJRWright, comes complete with a Carnival image from Venice. Featured articles including: Will Mobile Phones Replace In-Store Retail Salespeople? by Mark Jaffe, Mobile strategies for small business by Jose Colucci and an article from our own Caroline Lewko, Open Innovation Gets a FAIL with Mobile Developers.
Tweet This Post
Launch of the App STore Wiki at ITU and CTIA
Came back from Geneva where I was 2 weeks ago for ITU Telecom World! And haven’t had found to finish this blog… but here it is now! In a self admitted mixed bag of thoughts and things seen.
For those of you who cannot remember ITU Telecom World, it used to be the craziest / biggest / unmissable event in the telecom space! Well of course it was in 1999, we were all going to be wheeling in our personal optical cable behind us to get our necessary 100M/s dose of “bits”… Now we know better and have realized that carrying a mobile phone is much better than carrying a cable wheel… So the show had to rethink about itself… So the ITU Telecom World now concentrates a lot more on mobile than it has done before moving away from its fixed roots (can one have mobile roots 
).
So it’s all mobile.. It’s all about cyber
security… It’s all about about governance and standards… it’s all about ICT being a key driver for overall economic development especially in times of recession… It’s all about the next 1 Billion users and the deployment of mobile in developing countries… And… a lot of suits, lots of ties and lots of government representatives. (I even had to put a tie on to participate to a videoed Telecom TV debate on the subject on “Show me the Money” available here)
A different crowd then different discussions for sure but still mobile application and services development was at the center of many discussions, as the mobile phone becomes a quasi universal information, communication and computing device. So a lot of attention and demand for application and content providers which was also reflected in the official theme of the conference “open innovation” or more exactly “Open networks, connected minds”. Developers and content providers were praised by all as being the future of the telecom industry and critical to further economic development either through eHealth, sensors, mobile banking. Unfortunately examples of activities, exchanges, lessons learned in the field of open innovation were rather spurious.
WIP on the invitation of NGMN organized a panel to bring in those very practical examples: our objective being to cover the various aspects of “open innovation” with the developer community and how to deliver on this innovation in a sustainable way (scoring high at the ITU buzzword bingo here). Or in more down to earth terms “how can operators, OEMs and all platform providers work more collaboratively with developers rewarding risk taking more appropriately and facilitating decision making for developreneurs”. A great panel then covering a wide range of subjects from open source, to appstore, to end-user analytics sharing, to the importance of mobile to redefine customer relationships, to the increased importance of making mobile data available on the cloud. The panel available for NGMN members here , thanks a lot to the panelists :
And for those of you interested in the geeky stuff on the show floor, they were sparse but here are a few cool things spotted:
OPhone OS = a variant of Android, -2 hardware buttons, + China Mobile APIs and improved navigation + JIL widgets + Chinese character hand writing
Looking forward for your views on the mental pictures… In the mean time here are the physical pictures:
Tweet This Post
We are pleased to bring you an interview with Erik Starck, Community Manager, Developer World, Sony Ericsson. Sony Ericsson is a Developer’s Choice sponsor at WIPJam @ CTIA taking place on October 8th in San Diego.
1. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the industry as a whole?
Definitely the move over to open source platforms. That changes the logic behind innovation creation. As it drives the cost of the platforms down it moves the resources of the entire industry over to applications and services.
2. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in mobile development specifically?
Well, as a consequence of the above application developers are in a better spot than ever. The playing field has been leveled between developers, carriers and device manufacturers. It’s a better time than ever to be a mobile developer.
3. It’s pretty tough for small mobile development companies to survive on just one device and/or one market. What’s your advice to our mobile developers for growing a successful company?
It’s no different than for any other business. Know your customer and your markets, don’t focus on technology but on the value you can create for your customers. As always, user experience is key. If your coming from a web paradigm there are some things you need to rethink. A person should be able to use your application with one hand while riding a bike. If that’s possible you have a simple enough UI. 
4. What do you think are the top 2 - 3 mistakes mobile development companies tend to make?
- Don’t be afraid to charge for your product. Free only gets you that far.
- “Distribution, distribution, distribution.” How easy is it to find your app, recommend it to someone, spread it?
- There are lots of “me too”-applications out there. Be innovative, try something new, test the limits!
5. In the global marketplace – what are you seeing that are hot geographic markets?
There’s lots of interesting stuff happening in Africa. In many ways they are ahead of the rest of the world especially when it comes to mobile payments. There are many emerging markets all over the world where the phones on the street are still quite basic, but they will be moving over to more advanced platforms in just a few years. These are markets where the mobile phone will play a key part in peoples’ lives in ways we haven’t fully realized yet.
6. How do you think our mobile developers can take advantage of these hot/growing areas?
The mobile phone is actually the personal phone. Since it such a personal device you really have to understand the cultural context in which you’re trying to sell your application. Maybe you should leave your keyboard and start traveling for a while to get some new ideas.
7. What’s your current role at Sony Ericsson? And how do you think you can support our mobile dev? I’m the community manager at Developer World. We run a developer forum, blogs and have a Twitter account. Join us there!
Tweet This Post
At this stage if you have missed OSIM / WIPJam… there is no consolation other than reading the #osim tweets or consulting some of the great summaries written on the subject, and to quote just a few see the links at the bottom of this post, with hopefully more links from you soon…
A lot of OSIM summaries but no WIPJam summary so far which this post sets to correct… with a quick overview of the 2 unpanels.
This should be followed by a short series of posting summarizing the various discussion groups…
Open services architectures
Open Source is all about community and developers… and sometimes developer communities (*)… And thus they should be a key part of Open Source in Mobile ! That’s why we partnered with Informa to bring WIPJam to OSIM, invite developers to participate for free, and have a bit of collaborative thinking and exchange during the day!
Our first unpanel focussed on openness and all its variants… The session covered a lot…
A lot covered, but also a lot of subjects to be explored in more depth… Anyone wants to continue the conversation?
Choosing the right niche (and carpet) is sometimes baffling
Discussion groups brought their usual brouhaha and debates… with results sometimes esoteric, but discussion group leaders have promised to post out more details on the subject soon.
Stay tuned for more summaries from our various discussion group!
Our second unpanel for the day was about mobile web development… trying to shed some lights on the complex world of widgets, mobile web, application or not application… or as represented on our panel, JIL (Vodafone) , BONDI (OMTP), html5 (W3C), transcoding (Siruna) or offering a pure web service REST (Layar).
A bit of clarification was needed first of all to define what widgets are after the debate earlier on this year (still on?)… Which Francois Daoust (W3C) gave explaining what a widget was as per W3C standard which sounded very similar to “an application written by a web developer !!!” ; followed by an unanimous consensus that:
Does it sound too easy, too simplistic? Waiting for opinions…
Big thanks to all who joined us! With a special WIPThank to the unpanel, the discussion group leaders, and all of you who had to face their fears of microphones! We look forward to seeing you all the future! CTIA maybe??
Gracious party thrown by Nokia and Tmobile
As promised here are a few summaries of OSIM, feel free to post more!
- Peter Vescuso : Observations from the 2009 Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) Conference: Open Source…Perfect and Free?
- Philipp Deprez : Review: OSiM World, Open Source in Mobile, Amsterdam
- Roberto Gallopini : Effective Commercial Open Source Strategies Reloaded
- David Wood : Five reasons open source won’t work in mobile(?)
And a final special thanks for Nokia and T-Mobile for organizing a great party on the last day of OSIM… or was it gate crashing?
(*) Thanks to Tony from Mobile Sorcery for the inspiration with his famous “Symbian is open source as in open and source!”
Tweet This Post
With only 10 days to go before the WIPJam at OSIM I’m all too busy polishing my best trainers for the event to think about anything else… but making sure that the event will be as interesting and entertaining as possible to all! Call it the stress of the organizer… So in need for reassurance I gathered a few of the hot topics of mobile development today that should spice up our conversation.
Open is the new closed writes Andreas Constantinou from VisionMobile hi-lighting the fact that nowadays everyone claims to be open if not open source. But then adds that we’d better become informed shopper when it comes to openness and stop believing the “Wash whiter than snow” blanket statements coming from various open source and open projects in mobile. This is just what our first unpanel will set-out to do! With 4 representatives from various projects, Symbian Foundation, Access for Limo, Eclipse Foundation, and Motorola for OHA, joined by an operator (Eplus) and a long time open sourcer David Axmark (Founder of MySQL) we should be able to cover the entire spectrum of governance…
Why care you might ask? Governance is boring, administrative stuff and in the end they ‘re all the same… Or almost… (vote here for the best open source license for example)
My answer to this would be rather simple… governance will impact everything you can or can’t do in and around a platform… from annihilating your business model to blocking your product’s route to market (thinking a bit negative here)… ever tried to become a member of OHA or submit a code fix to Android to set-up an Android distro? Still waiting for the outcome of a JCP for APIs you need to launch your app across multiple phones? Still battling to get your apps through the Appstore or through an operator? Looking forward to put your hands on the Limo or Symbian code? All points that we can take with our panel of experts…
24% of mobile developers have started to write apps for netbooks according to EDC and will definitely check this with our participants. Thanks to Intel we will have a truckload (or so) of netbooks in demonstration at the device bar… and a great discussion group on the subject of netbooks and new devices… what could we make of them? What do they change to development patterns?
And if these 24% are correct, what I’m even more excited to find out are the motivations behind this move? Are these Windows Mobile developers scaling up to larger screens and hopefully larger volumes or Linux mobile developers doing … well roughly the same thing, or whether there’s just no logic at all…
Developing for smartphone is like entering the Babel tower writes Paul Krill for Computer World stating that the large number of native runtime is a limitation to developers and stating that html 5 could hopefully be our saviour soon!
Fragmentation has been a statement of fact in the mobile development world for as long as one can remember, and the situation has only become worst with the rise of iPhone and Android. The resulting dilemma was all fairly well summed up by Mobile Sorcery in Total Telecom or as I heard at a recent mobile marketing seminar , “All big brand want an iPhone app as the key to their mobile marketing strategy until we tell them this is only 2% of the market, then starts the real discussion”. Which makes Caroline’s platform choice panel part of OSIM and discussion group on platform choices particularly timely, or if you’d rather talk to the protagonist of the article directly anyone from Eclipse, Motorola, Limo will be present.
Seeing html5 as the new saviour of mobile fragmentation though is pretty new. Anyone looking at the vast numbers of browsers, widget frameworks, web API initiatives could certainly ask whether we’re not heading towards yet more fragmentation. The usual explanation by those involved telling me html5 is a standard and we need to wait for it to be ratified to see unity. I’ll be waiting then… but only until we hear what our unpanel has to say on the subject with W3C, Bondi, Vodafone, Siruna giving us their thoughts on the all-web future of mobile development.
If this has tickled your curiosity, you can now register or start posting questions you would like to debate! The comments on this page are made for this!
See you in Amsterdam! and remember it’s free to attend for developers!
Thibaut
@campbieil
Tweet This Post
Following our Europe Open Source in mobile WIPjam tour, here’s the second blog in a short series summarizing the tour.
So if we do not want openness in mobile to equal opensourness soon can we really limit it to opensourceness and exclude other aspects of openness such as open development, open governance…
The first answer to the question came from a very unexpected angle and (un?) surprisingly from a non mobilist Tomcat from Mozilla. [For background information Mozilla Christian Sejersen was presenting on Fennec (Firefox for mobile) at the show and one of our discussion leaders at the WIPJam.]
The conversation had started very badly though on the slippery subject of certification and signing. The subject is fairly commonly referred to as the rock and the hard place of debates between mobile application developers. And it usually takes strong moderational talents to navigate around them… On that day I failed… But when the subject is usually the beginning of an endless (if partially justified) rant against operators and device manufacturers, despite their efforts to facilitate the lives of mobile developers* this time it actually revealed a gem… A comparison with the extension certification process as operated by Mozilla for the most famous Firefox extensions (before you click on the link believing that this is pointing towards a hugely interesting extension for Firefox this is actually a link to the process…)
Let’s imagine the world of mobile applications adopting the Firefox extension approach tomorrow:
Simple! Happy developers! Happy customers! Open!
Obviously various mobile certification programs have started implementing some of this approach (do not hesitate to post spot the difference type comments), but still no one can claim to be this transparent and open today.
A pipedream in mobile? Completely unrealistic in the wireless world? How do me make money if nothing protects apps? Maybe, and all good subject of a lively debate here or at our next WIPJam session… One thing is sure though… something like this could come to a Fennec near you in the coming months…
* Background reading on certification :see the new Java verified process , the Symbian Signed 2009 roadmap, the Android Market, the well documented Apple process and each operator specific variety).
Tweet This Post
As many of you know, June was a heavier than usual business travel schedule for me as it included 10 airflights, 4 train rides, 6 countries, 3 continents (Asia, Europe and North America), 1 boat ride, 3 speaking engagements, 2 WIP receptions and 2 mini WIPJAM sessions. Whew!
I want to share with you the activities and observations I had along the way - warning this is a long blog.
I started traveling at an early age, so am well aware of how countries and cultures can be different that you expect; and that you certainly can’t paint countries or even cities in a region with the same brush stroke of ‘this is the way they are’. This trip once again confirmed that, and in particular the the developer/mobile industry nuances in different places. And as always, I’m ruled by my belly, so I also shared some ‘personal’ impressions too!
NORTH AMERICA
San Francisco – June 1-4 – Java One
June started off at JavaOne in San Francisco (15,ooo attendees) for our WIPJAM Session with the Java Verified team at JavaOne. We reported on this is on last newsletter so I won’t repeat. The talk at the show and what continues after are questions of what Oracle will make of SUN and in particular JAVA ME.
ASIA – Shanghai, Singapore
Shanghai - June 8-13
I’ve been lucky enough to participate in Canada’s Investment Champion program, where I am invited to speak about the strength of Canada’s wireless industry at various international events. So that is what brought me to Shanghai. I hadn’t been to China is almost 9 years so was eagerly anticipated the trip (I used to market industrial park space in Fujian province). I spoke at a Canadian Chamber event and had meetings with many of China’s leading companies including China Telecom, Huawei, LeadCore (DaTang), Hanyin (China UnionPay), and others.
Business Impressions: China is promoting 3G in a huge way, now that the licenses have been set, TD-SCDMA the home grown network is ready to go, and the handsets ready; and with the anticipated September launch of China Mobile’s new developer program and Mobile Market app store based on what’s called OMS (Open Mobile System that is built on Android). It’s a prepaid market, with higher fees than normal, so no surprise that there is a bit of complaining going on from consumers; but I think no different from the Western markets when the smarthphones with high device and plan fees were introduced. China mobile already claims 1 million 3G subs, adding 100 k every week (400 million total).
So that of course leads to apps, which are in hot demand now to meet the needs of this new network. There is a steady growth of local developers, many with a lot of expertise and arrogance to work this market (reminds me of the US somewhat - ‘it’s so big we don’t need to pay attention to what is happening anywhere else’.) And of course always room in markets for the big brands. Is there room for other smaller developers (language/localization issues aside)? We think so, and are working on a beta project to determine some helpful gateways – stay tuned. If you have some knowledge – please share with the rest of us!
Personal Impressions: The pollution is really sad, as a constant haze is over the city, so the great cityscape is just not as impressive as it used to be, and there are more buildings that my last visit! But China is great for clothes (I had a nice jacket made to measure, see in photo in Cologne below), and of course the food is always so diverse and fantastic (I twittered about an especially interesting meal while there).
Singapore – June 13- 18 – Communicasia and WIP Reception
Marc Nadall (NAVTEQ) and Device winners courtesy of NAVTEQ at the WIP JAM reception in Singapore during Communicasia with Caroline
The Singapore leg centered on Communicasia, a place and event I also haven’t been to in over 9 years. I spoke at the Canada Partnering Day, had many meetings, and hosted a WIP reception for mobile developers that was sponsored by NAVTEQ (thanks!). We had over 100 people out, made some great contacts and had a great time. We are gearing up for a full WIP JAM session next year!
Business Impressions: Communicasia was always the event I measured the other big events against; the size; international nature and really cool cool products and especially devices. I was disappointed, in part because CTIA and MWC have really made great strides the last few years; but also the event was trying to be a few too many things to too many people – lots of infrastructure, broadcast as well and a little bit in between. I didn’t feel wowed this time. That being said, it is still an event that stands at the confluence of Asian activities, so a great place to get a flavor for the region and meet lots of great people. I will attend again.
I was pleased to see a new organization announced – the Mobile Alliance of Singapore. As my readers know, I’m a big fan of regional organizations having founded and supported several. They are valuable in that they take both a big picture perspective on their regions (ecosystem and economic development) as well as provide the promotion and events/networking that the local companies need. We look forward to working with them and including them as a WIP partner.
Not just in Singapore, but in the Asian region as a whole, a noticed a much stronger entrepreneurial footing that I recall from 9 years ago. There are more SMEs with real products (lots of eagerness but mostly brochureware previously), and a good understanding of how to build a business – I guess time and experience were needed.
Markets to watch in this area from my impressions and several other ‘expert’ opinions I spoke to are: China and India of course; then Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Sri Lanka also had good very good reviews, especially in light of the government stabilization.
My prediction: The West has better watch out for the next 18-24 months is going to see a influx of strong competition in the mobile development space coming out of Asia.
ON TO EUROPE …..
We are hosting a WIP JAM Day for Developers (September 16) at the upcoming OSiM event in Amsterdam (15/16). We will make this the biggest open source event for mobile developers – oh yeah! So we undertook a European tour to find the best developers, look for great topic ideas and really good speakers. And by we I mean myself and Thibaut Rouffineau (formerly Symbian), who is taking the lead on this event.
Business Impressions: In general we initially found it hard to nail down where the developer crowds were in these parts of Europe. Then we found some great connectors that led us to many great people and companies. I would encourage these regions to look into the regional clusters/associations to provide some cohesion to these groups.
Amsterdam – June 19-23
We held a pub night and met some great folks . We were really impressed with the creativity and innovation of the crowd here, especially on the media/content side. I anticipate great success for many of these companies. And thanks to Sandra Brandenburg who helped us connect to many others!
Personal Impressions: Nice to be back to cool fresh air after being in Asia. I made a mistake of booking into a lovely apartment right beside a canal AND a fantastic fromagerie (my ultimate weakness). I also enjoyed a lovely concert in a dom in Utrecht with my brother’s inlaws. Amsterdam has got to be one of the easiest cities to get around. Looking forward to being back there in September (yes same apartment booked).
Cologne/Bonn – June 23/24
Caroline Tweeting at the Medien Forum - photo by Andrew Grill
I took a quick train ride to Bonn for a meeting with T Mobile International. The main focus of this leg of the trip was speaking at the Medien Forum, that Mark Wächter so graciously request I speak on APP Stores. It was a lively event, but only 2 hands popped up in the crowd of almost 200 when I asked who was a mobile developer. I think my presentation may have been a bit greek to the crowd. It also nice to finally meet so many fellow Twitters including @jmacdonald @andrewgrill @sarik @ossiu @paulbmma @cellity and @MobileZeitgeist
Here is a copy of my slides from Medien Forum presentation in Cologne on “It’s Raining App Stores – Hallelujah?”
Berlin – June 25-27 – LinuxTag
LinuxTag is without question the geekiest event I have ever attended (JavaOne a far second!). We held a mini WIPJAM there with folks from Open Moko, Mozilla, Enough (J2ME Polish) and others participating. Thanks so much to the Symbian Foundation for sponsoring our participation there. You can read more on this event from Thibaut impressions here.
Personal Impressions: The best Italian food I’ve ever had, both times, has been in Berlin.
Marseille 27-30
Now that was fun! The PACA Mobile Center held their annual Nuit du Mobile, which has grown into the Day and Night of Mobile; with developer events during the day and a reception in the evening. We held a WIP JAM session with about 100 developers in the afternoon on the topics NFC led by Stephane Lebas from SFR, App developments on SIM cards led by Frederic Martinent from Gemalto, revenue generation by Steve Haney of Mobile Distillery and Thibaut and I leading platform choices and App Stores respectively. Check out the WIPwiki forum for all the notes. We also instigated a new Jam format we called the WIPJAM Buzz – a series of 15 minute rapid topics on recent events. Here we raced through JavaOne and asked topics like is Oracle the end of J2ME; the Apple event (iphone 3.0 and Iphone 3GS?) and Google I/O (HTML 5 or Native SDK? And Donuts anyone?)
Business Impressions: A tres vibrant mobile development community in Southern France, and a great cluster of support from the government, centers like PACA, and big companies like Gemalto. Still getting their entrepreneurial feet wet though and still some language barriers – thank goodness there were enough translators for me!
Personal Impressions: Vincent Berge and his team at Mobile Distillery, along with the Provence government are the best hosts. We were treated so well – thanks so much. Of course, the highlight was the boat ride out to Porquerolles for some swimming and sunning, with Captain Berge.
Dinner at Lunch at the Calanque
Salut to a successful Nuit de Mobile and great friends. R-L Tim Baker, Caroline, Steve Haney, Eric Chan, Vincent Berge, Thibaut Rouffineau
Eric Chan (Mobile Slate) and Caroline, Tweeting on the Med.
It was then off to Paris for a quick dinner with a friend from Alcatel Lucent and a flight back home to Vancouver (still the best place on earth!). I know I’ve missed alot - but if thank you for sticking it out this far!
WHO WANTS TO COME WITH ME NEXT TIME AND WHERE SHOULD WE GO?
Let me know! I definitely think I should do one of these a year. With the right pace, they actually aren’t as tiring as a week at CTIA or MWC; but the emails sure pile up.
So now its summer! You think it’s time to slow down? Nuh uh – not when we are still having so much fun!
Our BIG announcement is the mini WIPJAM session at the Verizon Developer Community Conference, taking place July 28 in San Jose. Watch this space for more updates, and if you haven’t yet – register now, as it’s filling up fast.
Tweet This Post
Following our Europe Open Source in mobile WIPjam tour, here’s the first blog in a short series summarizing the tour.
Obviously one can wonder these days about the usefulness of blogging about an event when twitter offers you a better, more multilaterally objective opinion @ TwitterSearch ?
If you do not speak German? You could probably get all posts googletranslated and start wondering about what really happened and what the discussions were all about. And frankly looking at tweets like this one you would be led to believe that there were serious and interesting chats going on when it comes to openness in mobile: @taknil “Back from LinuxTag. This is where Apple is not an open wireless devices found. Did the Android phone is not won.” (*)
Unfortunately this is entirely misleading and the debates around openness and mobile were rather scarce… or rather the open-sourceness spirit and mobile did struggle a bit to meet at the show (as a reminder LinuxTag is the largest open source show in Europe with 10,000 visitors this year).[once again you might need to googletranslate].
And I was going there full of hopes that finally openness would please the crowds… It was but not in the way I had expected… As we discovered during the WIPJam on openness in mobile organized with the support of Symbian Foundation.
Open-sourceness is obviously a given… And anyone not in this camp should be vilified… Except maybe if they’re Apple. Looking at source code experts can comment extensively on the beauty of the Dalvik for Java developers, or the greatness of the Android security model (googletranslate again). And frankly open-sourceness seems to have gathered around Android… a large community of individuals willing to spend time, effort and their own money to bank on the future opportunity as we saw at the Android Stammtisch.
However open development is just not a crowd pleaser… The numerous tales of bug fixes on Android left unanswered (interesting to see though that most people I met tried) , and the lack of activities on the forums… None of these seem to be issues for developers… Except that is if you are genuinely trying to do a device and looking for a project where you can truly contribute.
So if we do not want openness to equal opensourness soon can we really limit it to opensourceness and exclude open development ?
We’ll discuss this in our next post.
*) The translation from the post by a human being would rather sound like: “Back from LinuxTag. No open WLAN available on my iPhone. And I didn’t win an Android device at the prize draw” … (sounds like a bad day to me)
Tweet This Post
Subscribe to Updates
Twitter links powered by Tweet This v1.6.1, a WordPress plugin for Twitter.