About Mobility

From a New Report from Aite Group titled Contactless Payments and NFC in the United States: Beyond Science Fiction:

In the absence of increased incentives by card networks, Aite Group estimates that merchant penetration of contactless payment will only increase from 0.5% today to 2.5% by 2014.

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[Via Glenbrook Partners]

Last week I spent a day at the first Java Mobile and Embedded Developer days conference. It was a great event, very technical in nature, organized by developers for developers. Sun’s Grand Auditorium is a beautiful building, a perfect setup. The organizers, Roger Brinkley and Terrence Barr did a great job.

Great set of sessions, poster presentations, and lightning talks. The event was recorded and you can find it at http://ustream.tv/sun. BTW, UStream.tv is a great service.

I presented on physical world connections with focus on NFC. I also moderated a panel on the topic of “Developing and Deploying Content in the Real World”, with focus on fragmentation and other developer issues, and the state of Java ME and the industry. It was an interesting discussion, which was followed the next day, then Friday with the discussion on the formation of a Mobile Development Alliance to help voice and represent the developer community. Terrence Barr and Sean Sheedy (with me helping as I can) are heading this effort. If you are a mobile Java developer, be sure to follow this effort, and get involved.

Due to business pressures (eZee) I wasn’t able to stay for the whole event, and I even missed the BarCampME (due to a tremendous headache that I had).

During the event I was recognized as a Java Community Champion/Star, and I appreciate that, thanks.

Related to this see:

• Mobile app developer alliance pondered (InfoWorld)
• Mobile developer alliance discussion to continue (InfoWorld)
• Do we need a Mobile Developer Alliance? (Terrence’s blog)
• Open Discussion of Developer Issues (Sean’s blog)

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Sean Sheedy sent me an email about an important meeting that is going to be taking place today in Santa Clara. If you are there, you should attend, and express your opinion, feedback, concerns…

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The meeting is introductory. There have been years of blogs and articles and JavaOne hallway conversations about the issues facing individual mobile developers, but actual progress has been glacial.

It is time to move from talk into action. But what action? and solving what problems?

The format of this meeting will be very similar to that of a meeting in Paris in January 2006, where about a dozen JCP member representatives who happened to be in town for an MSA meeting, met to discuss fragmentation. The format allowed everyone to gain a much better understanding from different industry perspectives without getting caught up in the details.

The goal of the meeting is to gain a more complete understanding of the problem from our different industry perspectives. By no means are we trying to walk out with a vision or mission or actions – though it is intended to drive thinking that way. It is simply meant to bring together our different perspectives and get us on the same page.

Agenda:

1) Introductions
    - Name & place in the industry
    - Why you're here

2) Perspectives
    - Each participant presents their perspective
    - What you see the problems are
    - What you think can be done about it
    - Anything else related

3) Goals
    - Brainstorm on goals we'd like to accomplish

4) Actions
    - Brainstorm on actions we can take in the next quarter
    - Low-hanging fruit?
    - Things people can easily do by themselves?
    - Avoid boiling the ocean?

5) Wrap-up
    - Action items
    - Write up and distribution of meeting minutes
    - Exchange of business cards
    - Next gathering - JavaOne?

Location:

The Mansion at Sun’s HQ in Santa Clara (4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, CA). The Mansion is across the street from the auditorium. It is one of the old buildings in front of the main campus.

Time:

9 – 1 PM, Friday January 25th

Access:

No badge is needed, but the door requires badge access; just bang on the door or call me (703) 898-0201 if you have trouble getting in.

Sean Sheedy

The day after I gave my presentation on NFC and Information Ubiquity, I found a good summary of NFC today around the world (ZD Net), that covers NFC deployments in Australia, Asia, and Europe.

Most often that sort of data transfer takes the form of payment — but applications are already going beyond that to contactless ticketing and information exchange.

See the article: Around the world in … NFC and contactless payments.

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The Presentation slides are complete, the bags are packed, and I am ready to go to MEDD.

Also see Come join us at BarCampME, January 23rd, Santa Clara, CA.

The slides look very good (not that I’m biased) and cover:

• Information Ubiquity
• Application Triggers and Use-cases
• Background on NFC
• NFC Code Example, and Pointers

The slides will be made available for download from the Session’s page at the MEED website.

Also, if you can’t attend, the event will be broadcast remotely.

I am planning on writing a very good article or chapter on this same topic (probably break it into two topics: Information Ubiquity, and NFC) that will be made available online, somewhere… Stay tuned.

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Microsoft cancels its annual conference for mobile and embedded developers…

…and Sun will have its first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Conference.

And don’t forget about the BarCampME.

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Come join us! It should be fun…

BarCampME is scheduled for 8:30 PM Wednesday January 23rd until 8:30 AM Wednesday January 24th, during the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days (MEDD) conference! BarCampME bridges the two days of the conference.

You don’t have to be a MEDD attendee to participate at BarCampME.

For more information see the BarCampME wiki.

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This has become a yearly tradition, see The Frustrations of Java ME…

Russell wrote:

According to a Greg Ballard of mobile games maker, Glu, in a recent interview in Mobile Entertainment, their Transformers game needed no less than 25,000 SKUs (or variants). 25,000! This has reached the point of absurdity.

I bet there is misinformation here…

Barbara responded:

For that, the number was 20,000 and included “Transformers content SKUs” including ring tones, wallpapers, games, and so forth for 150 operators in 65 countries. I couldn’t deduce how much of that was a result of Java ME fragmentation issues.

Mobility is complex, yes, all of it: messaging, context, user interfaces, latency, fragmentation, proximity, graphics, multimedia, and whatnot regardless of local, texting, voice or web… No apologies needed, it is the way it is. Embrace it! Find solutions, deliver applications, make it happen, today! Use whatever method makes sense for your product or is requested by your customer. But deliver something…

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Below are a couple of citations from the article The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry (Wired Magazine); a very good article indeed:

“For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers’ proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power. Carriers are learning that the right phone — even a pricey one — can win customers and bring in revenue.”

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“Jobs, a notorious control freak himself, wasn’t about to let a group of suits — whom he would later call “orifices” — tell him how to design his phone.”

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“Application developers are poised to gain more opportunities as the wireless carriers begin to show signs of abandoning their walled-garden approach to snaring consumers. T-Mobile and Sprint have signed on as partners with Google’s Android, an operating system that makes it easy for independent developers to create mobile apps. Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network. In time, it will give the wireless world some of the flexibility and functionality of the Internet.”

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A small but interesting survey of 300 mobile phone users in Japan (via What Japan Thinks) has shown the results below, but could this be representative of the expected behavior on other parts of the world?

Via A Third Of Japanese Will Type In A URL On Mobile: Report (MocoNews)

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