About Mobility

This is my last weblog entry for 2006, where I'll share with you some thoughts about Mobility in the year 2007…

It has been almost a decade since I first realized the potential of mobile & wireless, and the impact it would have on our society. Back then I fell in love with mobile, wireless and embedded to the point that I decided to make it my career. The idea of "mobile gadgets" that people would carry with them everywhere, always connected, and use to communicate with others, and that can be programmed with applications and data while on the field, was just an awesome concept; as you can see, same concepts today but almost 10 years later. Back then were the days of CDPD, Mobitex, and HDML, RIM pagers, Palm OS and WinCE. Symbian OS, WAP and short-messaging were still kind of new here in the U.S.  Smartcards were a big deal and some of us spent a lot of time on them. The year 1999 came and the KVM and J2ME were introduced,
having a huge impact on the future of mobile/wireless. We did a lot of firsts on mobility with our partners, Sun and others invested millions on us, and we almost got acquired by BEA – but that is a whole different story. Back then I believed 2005 would be the year for mobile & wireless. I was close, but it wasn't the year; things have evolved slower than I had anticipated. Today I see 2007 as having the right ingredients for the birth of the next generation of mobility. Below are some of these ingredients:

• Advanced feature-and-media-rich handsets and APIs, including the next generation of Java on handsets: MIDP3 and MSA
• Fast and robust wireless networks everywhere
• Personal or near field networks
• Services, services: Services on the web, location-based services, open methods for service publish and consumption, collaboration
• Open tools, platforms, protocols and APIs, services, Internet, Web and Mobile Web, including W3C standards for Widgets and W3C WICD Mobile
• Messaging, and next generation messaging
• The mobility community continues to grow: from developers to investors
• People are getting it! User participation, user-generated content, collaboration, mass messaging/texting, high penetration of mobile handsets, the mobile lifestyle is happening!
• Investors are getting it,  even outside Silicon Valley

2007 should witness the true birth of the next generation of mobility, as hinted by the Mobile 2.0 movement in 2006.

Instead of predictions for 2007, I'm going to share with you the top five mobility areas for 2007
as I see it:

1. "advanced (multimedia) messaging”
2. "mobile advertising and promotions"
3. "mobile payments"
4. "mobile directories and searching"
5. "mobility + social  (user-generated content, collaboration)"

We will see a big push in these areas, but understand that the tipping points themselves are years away, some farther than others.  Note that I didn't say "mobile web" or "Java" or "native" or "widgets" — all of those are “channels” to deliver the above. Note that some of the above hot areas have challenges with respect to business models. For other areas to watch and be part of see Hot Areas in Mobility (to follow and be part of).
Note that the above are "verticals" in some respects, but what really will set or define the next generation mobility is the evolution of the mobile context itself and its effect on the mobile experience; the set of characteristics that span across verticals and defines the essence of mobility.

2007 is going to be (or should be) a good year for mobility, for those who decide
to seize the opportunity.

I want to wish you and your family a great and happy, productive, successful and healthy 2007!

ceo

Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2006.

One of the hot mobility areas in to keep watch in 2007+ is the intersection of mobility and social software: mobile social software, virtual communities, messaging and user-generated content.

Earlier this month M:Metrics published a report on user-generated content and social networking application usage as of October 2006, where they confirm that “…teens are expanding their social networks to the mobile realm”, and found that “…with 70 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds engaging in social networking or otherwise creating content, Italian teens best their peers in Western Europe and the United States.” More from the report:

Survey results and images are from Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright © 2006. Survey of mobile subscribers. Data based on
three-month moving average for period ending 31 October, 2006, n= 101,893 mobile subscribers. *Includes IM, chat, dating, photo messaging, video messaging, created own ringtone, watched video sent by friend.

ceo

Bill has added a new Java ME and realated discussion forums to his site, go check it out.

He also has renamed the old “J2ME Archive” to be the “Java ME Archive” to reflect the rebranding of “J2ME” as “Java ME”.

ceo

I read Barbara's (Little Spring Design) piece titled the un-browsers where she describes mFoundry's mojax mobile application framework. I know about mFoundry from before, but wasn't aware of mojax. mojax is their a Mobile “AJAX” application platform, so I went ahead and checked it out.

mojax is very cool, but mojax is not Mobile AJAX; it does have mobile AJAX characteristics. I write this because when terms get overloaded, confusion and noise is introduced… and if you read my blog, you know how picky I'm about that.

mojax is based on their mWorks technology, and uses an XML dialect called MIL to describe the application, that when combined with Java produces code that runs on a runtime at the client/handsets; these clients they call Moblets. They also use CSS and their own flavor of ECMA-262 (ECMA/JavaScript) which is called MILScript. So mojax is an client-side application runtime that uses “their own flavor of XML to describe UI” + “their own XML to describe other application metadata” + “their own flavor of ECMAScript. Calling mojax a Mobile AJAX platform, per the already accepted definition, is a stretch. In the mojax blog, Rodney Aiglstorfer writes Why does mojax qualify as a mobile AJAX application framework, but I have to disagree. Rodney also mentions that mojax is not a browser per-se, which I agree with, but it does have XML rendering (browser)-characteristics, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The technique of using XML combined with Java (into MIDlets) to describe the UI and related controllers we introduced/used at AGEA in the early 2001, giving us the flexibility of dynamic screens definition while leveraging native/local functionality. But
I quickly convinced myself that using the proprietary XML to describe the UI (i.e. re-inventing the wheel) was not the right approach and instead (X)HTML + scripting should be used. Nevertheless the approach worked fine, and allowed us to quickly create fully functional mobile applications. This is when I realized of the potential of the convergence of native + thin clients.

Note that the concept of converging native (such as Java ME) with client-side XHTML rendering (local or web-site) is very powerful; I call these type of mobile clients lightweight clients, which is about the intersection of “native” and local/thin client approaches – very powerful indeed. Imagine being able to run locally on the handset,
occasionally-connected, use (embedded or remote) XHTML and CSS and JavaScript for the user interface, together with Java/MIDP code to access to the native functionality such access to messaging (WMA), multimedia (MMAPI), localstore (RMS, file), the network (HTTP, socket, datagram), cryptographic functions, location, camera, and other APIs. Note that this is the goal of the JSR 290: Java Language & XML User Interface Markup Integration, to integrate Java with W3C's Web Integration Compound Document (WICD) to run on handsets… I can't wait.

So what should mojax do next? mojax should use the standards of the Mobile Web, such as XHTML Basic 1.1, ECMAScript 3rd Edition Compact Profile, CSS 2.1 Mobile Profile, SVG Tiny 1.2 and other – see
W3C WICD Mobile 1.0. And perhaps evolve into small and efficient JSR 290 runtime, and donate the source code, under the Apache license, to the Java ME community

ceo