Archive for the ‘mobile web’ Category

I’m back.

It has been well on nine months since I last posted, and I am nothing short of disgusted with myself – a guy who promotes blogging regularly, even if it is just a short post. In a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do,” I got so lost in a major project – unexpectedly so, may I add – that time for blogging disappeared faster than newly released iPads do from store shelves.

The project took me back to my online product development roots, and allowed me to build an incredible analytics system for mobile devices. I figured I knew how to build algorithms and real-time search engines, so it might be good for me to know how to build the analytics system that measures the results and feed them back into the behavior of the engine.

I am now officially hooked on mobile as part of the repertoire. Mobile today reminds me of the web in 1996 – 1998 – it is the wild west of technology markets. The rise of smartphones and tablets has changed the entire dynamic of how people interact with information. Everyone is experimenting, and their are thousands of small firms making bets on various approaches to mobile. Evolution is fast and furious, with winners and losers coming and going almost overnight as market changes and technology enhancements literally create disruptive change in the ecosystem.

One ongoing technology argument is HTML5 versus native apps and whether HTML5′s advantages of cross-platform compatibility, channel freedom (not being dependent on the app stores), enhanced discoverability due to better search engines, large base of developers, better analytics tools, and substantially lower cost of development will cause it to overtake native app development as the platform of choice for next-generation mobile apps.

I was at the AppNation conference last week and Trip Hawkins – someone who knows about as much about mobile gaming as anyone – weighed in.

“The browser will beat the app store,” he argued. “It’s more convenient, it’s driven by search and it’s more viral for consumers. It doesn’t matter what device your friend has… All technologies start as silos, but get 100 times bigger when they become inter-operable; think about roads or text messaging.”

I agree with him completely – ubiquity trumps functionality every time, and ultimately the ubiquitous platform surpasses the proprietary platform because more people invest in evolving it to do what they need it to do. Think open source and the “community of the commons” which helped evolve platforms like Java, Linux, Twitter, and Facebook. Or even more fundamentally and applicable to the HTML5 discussion, think the original Apple versus Microsoft Windows. Windows ultimately dominated – and still dominates – Apple as a platform because Microsoft early on allowed its OS to be licensed to any hw manufacturer, extending the franchise and opening the market to an overwhelming level of app development investment that to this day dwarfs what Apple can offer.

This is the economic law that Brian Arthur has described and quantified in his evolving work on Complexity Economics and something we all understand intuitively nowadays. That is, the value of the network (think technology network) increases as it becomes more ubiquitous, thus drawing more investment into it which only further increases its value. It is a virtuous cycle, and one reason becoming the market share leader in a new technology is so critical.

Apple has learned a few things over the years, and with the iPhone and iPad they have quickly moved to gain dominant share and the largest developer community. They are evolving their tools for developers and their OS faster in order to keep their developer community growing and provide more opportunities for developers to make money on the platform. It gives Apple a tremendous lead and advantage at this point against any open platform alternative.

But developing native apps is, relative to HTML5, time consuming and expensive. Unless you are in an industry like gaming where the quality of immersive graphics and performance is critical, HTML5 offers a cost and time to market advantage that provides a lower barrier to entry into the mobile market.

Then there is also an arrogance to Apple that is driving developers to consider ways to bypass the platform. Consider:

• The iTunes store is a bottleneck. It is a single place to sell, and it gives Apple tremendous power over who succeeds and who does not. And Apple has been more than willing to display its dominance to developers and the community at large.
• There is a relatively and unpredictably long approval process to get an app live, and often apps are rejected for issues that were not apparent in advance.
• Apple changes the rules continuously and in many people’s minds, arbitrarily. Take the recent paid download spat with Tapjoy and others. In a single dictum, Apple basically removed a major monetization mechanism for developers.
• You cannot tell when a push notification actually goes out through Apple. So you pay someone like Urban Airship to send the token to Apple, but then about 1/3 of the time the pushes never arrive. Apple is a “black box” on this and won’t tell you why (although they say they are working to fix this). Now if that isn’t arrogance, I don’t know what is.
• Apple keeps track of everything developers’ users do on their platform, but do not make the data easily accessible to allow developers to improve their products and optimize their revenues.

All of this give Google and Windows 7 a potential opening to exploit HTML5′s advantages, and they will. Google is already doing so, although they are to a certain extent hedging their bets right now. And Facebook pushing HTML5 apps gives the platform momentum. Eric Schmidt was at Sun with me when Java came to market, and knows first-hand how to leverage an open platform to disrupt an entrenched proprietary competitor. Voila Android. And very soon, Android devices will have a larger installed base than iOS, if it doesn’t already.

The weakness Android has in the app market is fragmentation. In my limited experience looking at the data, there have got to be at least 30 variations of Android out there. When you look at the ROI for developing on Android, it only pays to develop for one or two versions – and this sentiment has been documented extensively in magazines like Fortune .

But that argues strongly for using HTML5 as a development platform. It allows developers to undercut Apple’s power position in the industry and develop for all Android phones.

HTML5 thus provides the opportunity to develop faster, cheaper, with a wider audience to sell to. And Apple is more than providing the motivation, just like Microsoft did for Java. As a rule, developers are a libertarian bunch who hate being dictated to by anyone, and they are getting increasingly upset with Apple.

The only question is how fast this transition will occur, and that remains to be seen. I think ABI Research is right when they say that native app development will peak in 2013 – that just feels right to me given my experience with numerous technology adoption cycles. But any prediction like that is fraught with peril. On the one hand, some killer mobile app built on HTML5 can come along tomorrow and change user behavior to the point where the browser becomes a natural first point of entry into a mobile device. On the other, Apple could change its modus operandi and salve the wounds of upset developers.

So while it is a matter of time, developers for now will have to make a bet on when HTML5′s time will come.

Like many I have an iPhone. Admittedly I still have a 2G because I’ve become more thrifty in my old age (funding a national-level gymnastics career and private school tuition will have that effect) even at the risk of having my Silicon Valley friends call me a technology troglodyte. But I am an avid user of all the main apps (I can bump with the best of them), use it for location-based searches (e.g. AroundMe, Google maps), send images to Facebook, Tweet in real-time at events, Ping when I can, check my blog traffic with Google apps for the iPhone, and know how to plan/execute advertising campaigns specifically on mobile phones. No one who knows me would say I am in any way behind on my use of mobile technology.

But until now, I’ve never felt like mobile has really changed the basic way I have experienced the world. I go to trade shows and listen to all the ideas for the latest mobile services or how mobile concepts should change my daily life, but I have never felt that I had crossed a Rubicon with the real-time nature of mobile in the same way I did when I got my first laptop or sent my first Tweet.

That changed yesterday. I had the pleasure to take my family to a performance of The Smuin Ballet at the Sunset Center in Carmel. I am an admitted ballet snob, and Smuin is a wonderful company with talented, disciplined dancers and creative choreography. So whenever they are in Carmel we go to see them. The second act was a performance of Smuin’s Medea, which was first performed in 1997. It is a dramatic ballet that retells the story of Medea, the wife of Jason, the intrepid explorer of Jason and the Argonauts.

The myth of Jason and Medea is a dark and haunting tale of revenge and self-destruction. But in the dark as the curtain rose on Act 2, despite being a student of mythology, I couldn’t for the life of me remember even the outlines of the tale to tell my wife and eight year old daughter, neither of whom knew the first thing about this particular myth.

So what did I do? I pulled out my handy iPhone and while shielding it so as not to disturb others, I did a web search on Medea and pulled up the Wikipedia entry.

Despite the dark and small print, I was able to glean from Wikipedia the details of the story. Jason met the sorceress Medea, daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis. Medea falls in love with Jason, and he convinces her to help him to acquire the Golden Fleece in return for a pledge of marriage.  After acquiring the Fleece, Jason and Medea flee to Corinth and have children. In Corinth, King Creon offers his daughter Glauce to Jason in marriage, and Jason feels he cannot pass up the opportunity to marry a royal princess. Despite explanations and promises of support from Jason, Medea feels betrayed. She gives Glauce a wedding gown covered in poison that kills the bride. Then to ensure that nothing of Jason’s will outlive him, she kills their two sons.

I quickly related the story to my wife and daughter (who was especially engaged by the dark and intense drama onstage).  I then sat back and enjoyed the performance, knowing that they now could now understand what they were seeing and, as a result, enjoy it with more insight.

Not a big deal, you might say. I say otherwise. Prior to this, I had used my mobile capabilities to get directions or find a resource nearby. I was using the mobile device as a tool for location-based information. It was a parallel use to a GPS, which while practical, was not a fundamental change in my experience over a map. It was easier than a map and had better information, but the experience was just a replacement of one form of information (paper) for another (digital).

In this case, for the first time I used my iPhone to plug into the wisdom of the commons, into the global village, to enhance and extend the quality or content of an experience.   In other words, the phone and the information it provided in real-time became an integral part of the experience, although it was unintentional (from the perspective of the choreographer or the dancers) and because it was unintentional, it was distracting. But this little thing, this one act, was a fundamental change in how I interacted with the world. This was not a substitution of paper-based data with a digital version. Instead it delivered the true promise of the mobile web. It allowed me to access a completely new set of information that was then added to a real-time, real world event to enhance the experience. The equation is real-time event + Internet information = a real-time multimedia experience.

Admittedly, the experience was not perfect because it wasn’t intentionally developed by the show’s producers. But what if Smuin developed a mobile video app that during the Intermission allowed audience members with iPhones to see the full story of Medea in an entertaining way that also tied the story to how the ballet attempted to recreate that story in dance. That would be a more intentional, and less invasive, way to provide the same integrated (but completely new) experience.

So yesterday for the first time, I experienced the true power of the mobile web.  I can now say “Eich Bin Ein Mobile Netizen.”