If you are interested in these two technologies you should join the FREE online seminar that will happen on 13 March 2007.
Giorgio Natili will be the speaker. If you would like to know more you should visit mobile.actionscript.it, FlashLite vs J2ME on-line seminar.
There are rumors that people don’t go to the 3GSM for business reasons, but for the parties. Obviously it is not the case with me, but I have to say that I had a chance to join a couple of nice ones.
Here are a couple of pictures I took during Swedish Beers. Special thanks to Helen A.K.A. Technokitten for arranging the evening.
More pictures from the Swedish Beers party are available on Flickr, in the Swedish Beers group.
PS: Rumors are that I missed the Playboy party!!! I can’t think of any other chance in my life to join it. 😦
So the 3GSM World Congress is over. Our 1 time meeting for 2007 is gone. Last time I visited was many years ago and it was still in Cannes. At that time I thought it was a huge Expo and that it was very crowded. I had heard that they moved from Cannes to Barcelona because it’s bigger, well now I understand.
I heard 60.000 people attended. Day 1 was already crowded, but days 2 and 3 were really unbelievable. Hall 8, the one with all the big manufacturers was inaccessible and even if you could get in, it was almost impossible to reach the devices available for testing or talking to anyone at the booth. You HAD to have an appointment and in most cases they only lasted 10-15 minutes. All the big manufacturers had separate rooms or upper floors for meetings, but anyway it was really full of people going back and forth, chatting, talking, exchanging business cards.
The atmosphere was amazing. Everyone was clearly there to make business. I have visited other Expositions, of course, both as a normal visitor or to make business, but this one, it was clear to everyone that they were there to make business. Everyone was open to talk, ready to explain what they do and listen to what you do and see if there’s any chance to buy or sell something. It’s been really amazing. I’m not a sales guy, of course, but really anyone, even me, could have made business during this show.
There are already a lot of articles about the Congress, so I’ll go straight to the main points.
What did not surprise:
What surprised me:
What I liked:
What I did not like:
I feel in one of those movies from the seventies or even better in a cartoon where you see someone entering in a room, someone else is running after him, enters the same room and at the same time you see the first person to exit from another room and so on.
Where is Mike Rowehl?
Where is Dan Appelquist?
Not that I need the 3GSM to talk to Dan, but I joined the PartyStrands to say hi to Dan and meet Mike in person and I missed them! I arrived around 9pm and they were gone, already (or at least I haven’t seen them!). 😦
I got to meet a lot of interesting people. Make a lot of networking. Met people from Italy. We are really everywhere! They say Spanish is the most commonly spoken language and English is probably going to pass it soon, but Italians are everywhere!
The mood is good. Lots of technologists, mobile people and big companies.
Tomorrow is 3GSM first day!
Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone have launched the LiMo Foundation, to stimulate the development of Linux for mobile devices and most of all unite forces to make a common effort.
It looks like Vodafone lately is part of any possible alliance, .mobi, LiMo, the operators teaming to make mobile search engines…
Anyway, I had already posted about linux on mobile devices (Mobile Linux, ever taking off?) and they still have to convince me that the manufacturers really want linux on the mobiles.
Apple, in my opinion, is demonstrating once again that if they want to take an open-source OS and make a solid product, they can do it. They did it when originally launched OS X bringing a GUI that *nix systems had never seen and they are doing it again bringing their BSD/OS X to the iPhone.
OEM’s like Motorola have been producing linux-based devices for years, but never brought it to the mainstream devices.
Is the LiMo going to change this?
Can a foundation like this change anything? Where is Savaje Technologies? Wasn’t it a company built with a similar spirit? Name 5 mobile devices that run their operating system.
Sorry, I’m skeptical.
A bit more than 2 months have passed since the last public release of WURFL (Nov, 16 2006: WURFL 2.0.3 is ready).
I originally hoped to be able to make a new release every month or so, but Christmas and new Year were in the middle. Also, we always have so many great contributions that it’s hard to say “STOP, we make a release and then we can restart collecting data”.
So WURFL keeps growing, our community of users and contributors keeps growing and keep getting better and better. We have almost reached 2000 unique devices (1984) and passed 9600 unique user-agents. I can tell you from now that I already have a queue of updates and that our run for the coverage of all the mobile devices won’t stop.
If you are serious about web browsers too, you should not forget to check out the web patch. There are some updates in CVS, see here: WURFL web browser patch (please use the CVS client as the web interface is very good to check logs, but not as good to download big text files).
So go ahead and download WURFL 2.0.4 (zipped is easier).
If you read technical news and blogs (read for example HTML Standards Process Returning from the Grave from Surfin’ Safari) around the net you should by now know that the HTML Working group has been re-chartered until 2010!
You will certainly know that it has been a highly debated topic between supporters of the evolution of HTML and the supporters of XHTML as the next version of HTML, that is to say that HTML is dead.
On the other side Daniel Glazman has raised a very interested topic which is the HTML in e-mail. It did not get into the charter, but at least we had a new public mailing list to discuss and hopefully get our voice heard in the group. Read from Daniel’s pen, “HTML in email” W3C mailing-list.
I have never been a fan of HTML in e-mail, but I agree with him that it can be a very important tool for promotional purposes and not only. There is not only spam, there are also valid e-mails, newsletters and mailing lists in which HTML is appropriate and provides an extra tool for formatting and layout.
XHTML and CSS could be the markup and styling too, of course, but if the web browsers are far from being strict, e-mail clients were not born for HTML and XHTML and their support for the standards is often poor.
This mailing list is NOT to complain about spam or unwanted HTML, but it is to suggest a viable, satisfying solution for a secure and quality implementation of markup and style in e-mail.
It would be dumb to create a new markup specific for e-mail when we already have 4 major versions of HTML, 2 major versions of XHTML, 3 major versions of CSS and a number of minor versions. Let’s just agree on something that can work for everyone!
This said, I invite everyone that thinks to have constructive proposals on this topic to check out the online archive of public-html-mail, join and let your voice heard (even to say that XHTML should be used).
This article was actually published before the job posting that I mentioned earlier, but I thought I should write about it anyway.
.mobi is looking for case studies, companies or projects that have developed a mobile site, faced particular problems and solved them.
If you are looking for a little of extra visibility for your project it’s probably a good chance. Check out the .mobi blog posting, Wanna be a .mobi case study?
I have been chatting quite often in the last few weeks with Roberto Galoppini. He also published a short interview we had.
I like his view to the open-source world and the comparisons he always makes with the “normal” way of doing business and how the open-source can be part of “making money”.
After barcamp in Rome he wrote this very good post that I’m happy to rely: Barcamp: “Free as in Business: lucrative coopetition”
I wanted to recap a few valuable resources that developers can find on the web to help them start or improve their skills to produce sites for mobile devices.
My favourite, of course, is The Wireless FAQ, simply because of the time it took to bring it to a Wiki. I think it has done a big step ahead since that day and thanks to the wiki approach we have been able to add a number of resources about very important topics such as DRM, Video downloads, multimedia content delivery and more.
On the same track you might also want to check out the Techniques for the Best Practices, originally developed and maintained by the W3C. It’s another Wiki site and it’s about the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 that the group has produced. The Wiki was chosen because the group is looking for user contributions. If you are interested you should go, read, ask questions and add content, if you feel like willing to share with the W3C community.
A more specialized site, maintained by Barbara Ballard of little spring design inc, is Mobile User Interface Design Patterns. The title says it all, Barbara is a super-expert of User Interfaces for the mobile. She has already created a lot of valuable content and while it’s less technical from a certain point of view as compared to the other two sites, it actually provides great guidance about the general UI and presentation that you should use in your mobile site. Barbara’s Wiki is certainly something to read and put in practice in your mobile sites, maybe using some techniques suggested in the other 2 sites previously named.
The last site I wanted to remind to the community is mTLD‘s developers site. The site does not have a Wiki, but rather a forum, blogs and a few selected articles, all about the mobile. The site is relatively new and the administrators are working hard to provide more and more resources every day. It is obviously a different approach, the site aims to provide all the guidance and help to develop mobile sites, also linking to external resources, of course. It’s another great place to start from and to ask questions if there’s something you can’t do or is not clear. You can reach it at dev.mobi. The site can be visited both from your desktop computer or on the move.
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