Jupiter Research just released a new study which says the Mobile Web is growing. As reported by Online Media Daily, “SOME 40% OF WEB SITE operators have launched mobile sites and another 22% plan to do so in the next year.”
Will 2008 be the year of the Mobile Web?
I have been playing with the social wine site Cork’d since right around day one. Anything that brings wine together with Web 2.0 is great in my book but I have to say the site doesn’t fit or integrate well into my life.
I started off really strong using Cork’d. I was reviewing wines, adding wines to my “shopping list”, and friending people. But… alas alack… pretty quickly my level of activity went down dramatically.
I’d drink a glass of wine but by the time I got back to my computer to type in my review I would have forgotten all of my thoughts and review. I started writing down my thoughts about wine in a little notebook but the thoughts never made there way from the notebook to Cork’d.
Only if I had some type of mobile computing device which allowed me to input data in a simple manner that also had Web access…. just happens that I along with a few others on the planet carry a mobile phone… and mine has Web access.
I think it’d be a completely different story for Cork’d if there were some type of mobile Web site I could access to type in quick thoughts about a wine I just tried.
I find myself taking photos of wine labels with my camera phone all the time. What if you could take a photo of a wine label, type some thoughts, put it in a MMS message and send it to a service where it’d be store for later? It seems like that’d be such a simple way of capturing my thoughts about a wine in a way that’d integrate well with my life.
Cork’d can tell me what wines my friends are drinking and even allows me to create a shopping list. But in order to take the shopping list with you to the wine or grocery store, i’d have to print it off or write it down… that’s so 1995. What if you could access the wine shopping list from your mobile phone? Even better… what if your phone knew what wines were being sold or in stock at the store that you were going to and would adjust your shopping list accordingly.
Cork’d has SOOO much potential. Wine is such a social object. Someone’s review of the wine is another social object…. I just think that for a service like this the capture of explicit feedback needs to better integrate with my life.
People talk about the impending social media revolution. I’m here to tell you that you’re already amidst another revolution that’s more fundamental and just as big if not bigger…
Figures released by industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media reveal that worldwide mobile penetration will hit 50 per cent – or around 3.3 billion subscriptions – today, just over 26 years since the first cellular network was launched.
It’s the mobile revolution. Around the world, people are using the mobile phone as the preferred method of accessing information.
You need to pay attention to this. The mobile phone and the mobile Web is such an exciting medium. The thing is… it’s also very different.
Mobile Monday DC is a group within the Washington DC tech community who doesn’t get talked about as much but has been putting on some great talk about what’s happening in the mobile industry.
This month Mobile Monday DC is giving a WiMax 101 talk, which I’m sure will prove to be informative. The meeting is December 10th at 6pm at the Teqcorner in McLean, VA.
Being a carless Washingtonian, I’m not sure whether i’ll be able to make it out there. If you live out in that area, you should go. I know you’ll have fun and you’ll probably learn something.
While the mobile Web in the USA has a long way to come, there are some shining examples of what it can be. Car sharing and hourly rental service Zipcar has one of the best mobile Web site’s I’ve seen.
My whole family was in town last weekend. We were out and about and thought it might be fun to get a Zipcar to do some more shopping. The thing is… I wasn’t near my computer or my apartment for that matter. All I had was my mobile phone.
I typed “zipcar.com” into Pocket Internet Explorer on my Samsung Blackjack. It auto-detected that I was surfing from my mobile phone and gave me the mobile Web site. I was quickly able to see if there was or wasn’t any cars available. It was so handy. It was quick and easy.
Not only is it useful but it makes me more happy with Zipcar as a company. It makes me think they understand me as a customer. They understand that we live mobile lives. We don’t just need a car when we’re at home and in front of our computers.
If you plug Zipcar’s mobile Web site into dotMobi’s evaluation tool ready.mobi , you can see that Zipcar has followed industry standards. It scored a 5 out of 5.
This is the kind of site that is going to people in the USA excited about the mobile Web.
Wanna help the advancement of the mobile Web? Test the Web standards compliance of your mobile phone.
All you have to do is run your mobile phone browser through a bunch of test cases. It’s super easy.
Point your mobile phone here – http://www.w3.org/2007/03/mth/harness
So it seems like everyone and their brother is talking about the Amazon Kindle E-Book reader. Well, I’m not a fan yet.
I think the future of e-books is the Apple iPhone. It’s something more people already have. It’s the most popular device with the biggest screen. It has a good battery.
The Apple iPhone is also launching it’s SDK in February. Who’s going to write the e-book reader app come February?
Washington DC programming rockstar Zvi Band has just launched a cool new Web app called Metro Times. It allows you to send a text message (SMS) with the name of a metro station to an address and it will send back to you the times of the upcoming trains. It’s awesome.
What’d make this app even better is if it were a mobile web app and not just for SMS.
This site provides essentially the same content as the iPhone Web app Meenster. Metro Times is great for those who are iPhone-less.
The mobile phone is hands down one of the most ubiqutous devices ever made. If you have a message that you’re trying to communicate over the Web, it’s a medium that you can’t ignore. The problem is that the medium is new enough (at least within the United States) that most of us don’t know enough about it.
Well this week Web industry luminary Cameron Moll released his book “Mobile Web Design.” The book is a great high level introduction to the Mobile Web and how to develop for it. It’s available only in PDF and costs $19.
Pick it up right now!
Have you read the book? What do you think of it?
Today, the crew at Carson Systems has announced a new conference, the Future of Mobile in London on November 14th.
It has quite the prestigious lineup of mobile industry dignitaries such as Brian Fling, Daniel Appelquist, Andrea Trasatti, Tom Hume, Luca Passani, and others.
This just continues to validate what I’ve been saying about how the Web is moving in a mobile direction (and in some cases or parts of the world it’s already there.) People want to take the Web with them wherever they go.
We need an event here in Washington DC about the Mobile Web. MobileWebDevCamp? What do you think?
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 