Tom Hume

Bryan has put another one of his cracking presentations online: "Going Mobile - A Pragmatic Look At Mobile Design" is available from SlideShare here.

Panel discussion

Mr Mozilla
Paul Golding, Consultant
Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

DB: I don't think Google Android will important. Symbian will remain valuable. Fragmentation is here to stay.

MM: On next-generation handsets the browser will be the overshadowing application.

DB: More people use the alarm clock than the browser.

MM: The alarm clock could be a widget :)

PG: Discovery is still a big problem on mobile devices.

DB: 28% of Apples cost of manufacturing the iPhone goes into the screen. So "bumping into content" becomes easier, when there's more screen real estate. One of the themes that came out of our earlier discussion: for services which are critical or valuable, a dedicated client is worthwhile - as with Youtube on the iPhone.

Bena: What about Mozilla on mobile?

MM: We started late last year, we're finalising and releasing later this month. We think there are things that can be improved on the UI, even over iPhone.

Q: What platforms?

MM: We can't do it on the iphone thanks to the license terms - you can't write any application which runs code. So we're targeting Windows mobile, Symbian S60. We already have offline capabilities. We have another project called Prism which does offline web-based applications.

DB: There'll be opportunities and problems in giving applications access to device capabilities.

Q: What about distribution? How can we develop for something which doesn't exist in the field? Will it be preinstalled onto phones in the future?

MM: Our first releases come out in partnership with (didn't hear). We're working with operators.

PG: Firefox on the desktop always asks to download new versions of itself...

MM: Yes, the mobile one will too. (This is a really good thing IMHO - faster software updates for mobile would be a very good thing indeed).

Q: Will you support all access points the phone offers? How do you intend to explain to users why they can't be recognised or authenticated when using certain access points.

MM: We don't do anything about this, all of this is platform-specific. We don't know whether they're using Bluetooth, wi-fi or GPRS.

Quadratura are doing an event in London in June. Go see their showreel, it looks amazing. Mr BigFug does lovely things with light :)

(and guitars)

Mobile Web 2.0: Two Tribes or One World?

Panel discussion on "sharing content between web 2.0 and the Mobile Web 2.0 experience" with

Professor Ed Candy, Chief Technology Officer, 3 Group

Kai-Joachim Boyd, Senior Manager Strategy and Development, Telefonica O2 Europe

Anil Malhotra, SVP Marketing & Alliances, Bango

Josep Aliagas, CEO, Arena Mobile
Mathieu Saccharin, Head of Web 2.0 & UGC services, Bouygues Telecom

Bena (moderator) talks about Taptu encouraging sharing of web sites between friends.

EC: the opportunity is to go beyond Web 2.0 and improve on what we get on the fixed web. Scrap the type of UI we have today and go analogue. The digital watch face failed and now we use analogue watches: it'll be the same for mobile UI. Mouse-and-cursor is a very analogue experience. Scrap open source: everyone claims to be open, but they're all different and the term is becoming meaningless. OMTP is doing some good stuff to work towards "sameness" - OSs don't need to be identical, they just need to agree on common points.

MS: You can't even share content between mobile and mobile today, never mind mobile and PC.

KB: We need to offer converged services. We're preparing our customers for a seamless experience.

AM: Sharing has always been a driver for internet usage; look at early content-free web pages which were sets of links. Mobile will define how web content is produced eventually (as in Korea/Japan).

Bena: How would you promote social sharing? O2 have partner tariffs, Wii have online play.

Bena: Is sharing going to be the key for social networking?

AM: Some similar things to fixed internet. We've let individuals create personal WAP pages on wap.com, to let users open up their own content to each other.

Audience: Is content important? Isn't 2.0 more about communication?

AM: The 2.0 services which work well on mobile have content at their core (do they?).

EC: When we started 3, we built a service-independent network to let us distribute content. Initially we created menus of content for customers - and no-one came. When we started to do X-Series products, which encouraged users to do what they wanted to do, we saw an explosion in traffic. The ones which worked best were the ones which established a level of communication first, then encouraged content sharing: these are my friends, my family, and now I'd like to share my photos with them.

So, Google has 'fessed up how they've been building their database of cell IDs. Apple use such a database of cells to location-enable the iPhone v1 mapping applications; whilst the spangly new iPhone has onboard GPS to improve accuracy in this respect, I've found cell ID to be extremely useful when combined with a decent map.

And for the rest of us, there are stirling efforts like OpenCellID to help build an open database of cell ID to lat/long mappings... with a nice downloadable client to let those of us with GPS-enabled phones to contribute.

Talking of FP... we've been rubbish at talking about what we're doing. So excuse me if I go a little salesy, but I thought I'd use this platform to mention some of the stuff we've been doing this year:

• We're working for half of Nokia's design teams in the UK, implementing handset themes onto a range of devices which have come to market so far in 2008, and will be continuing to arrive throughout the year;
• Top-secret design work for a large international agency. Can't say any more;
• Piles of design and product development for trutap - there's some really great stuff going on here which I'll share more about in the next few montsh;
• Some concept work for the LastMinute.com Labs team (when I'm not trying to cleave them in half, virtually), and Channel 4 - both of whom have contributed to our healthy collection of NDAs, so no details here I'm afraid;
• Mobile web development for the Royal Observatory Greenwich (see the presentation Bryan and I gave at Over The Air here), and for a font distributor - coming soon!
• More game development for LocoMatrix;
• Nifty bits of Bluetooth work for Wieden & Kennedy, to support an ad campaign for Save The Children, and for CuteCircuit - who sell a really T-shirt that beams hugs over mobile phones. Honest.

Phew. Oh and there's all the stuff that's so secret I can't even breathe about it, of course... ;)

We're looking for a Senior Designer to join our in-house design team. Here's the job spec in pure job-speak:

"Based from our offices in central Brighton, you'll work closely with our customers, our development team and third party suppliers to define and build delightful mobile software products. Commercial experience of mobile design and an absolute passion for the medium will be essential, as will strong interaction design skills and a solid understanding of the technical constraints of the medium. Externally you'll be representing us to the design community; internally you'll be responsible for honing and refining our approach and techniques.

Future Platforms is an 8-year old UK software business employing 14 members of staff. We live by the seaside and build delightful mobile products for a diverse range of clients. In the last year we've worked on customising handset themes for Nokia, mobile social software for Trutap, concept development for Channel 4, won a place on the BBC Innovation Labs scheme, and helped Discovery US viewers hunt ghosts across America.

Email a CV and covering letter to recruitment@futureplatforms.com if you're interested.

Truly, madly, deeply, no agencies please. Really, please don't"

That last bit about agencies is so important. Every time I post a job ad I get inundated by calls from agencies, write down their names, and resolve never to use them.

So, I had a weeks holiday last week; just over a week if you count the previous Friday when I tramped off to Wales with a group of chums for a few days camping and clambering. But - somewhat typically - I'd arranged to spend the week working for a client of ours, Locomatrix, for whom I moonlight as CTO.

If you've not come across Loco before, it's really neat - and weird enough to fit snugly into the Future Platforms portfolio: a platform to enable location-based gaming: you can see a lovely video outlining the concept here. There's lots of action in this area at the moment, what with the commoditisation of GPS and the increased physicality and casuality of gaming that Miyamoto and chums are working hard on, and there are oodles of location-based games out there. But Loco's status as a platform makes it a bit different: sure, we've written a couple of games ourselves to demonstrate its versatility, but the aspiration is to hand this over to the public and let them do much cleverer and more imaginative stuff than we can dream of.

With FP being a mature 8 years old, I no longer get to kid myself that I'm working for a startup, so it was quite exciting to get back to that world again - even if briefly. Four days isn't a long time to achieve much, and I spent the first couple of them doing basic housekeeping: tidying up projects, slimming down applications, packaging things up properly, tidying up build scripts, automating installations... all those things you really mean to get around to doing, which save you oodles of time and hassle in the long run but you never quite get to. By the end of Tuesday Loco was in a clean, maintainable state and I was much more comfortable and familiar with it, ready for a Real Day Off.

Thursday was incredibly frustrating, as I worked on trying to improve one of our game formats, Treasure Hunt. One of those days where you crack on well, and achieve nothing. But my glass was half full: Loco being an outdoor gaming platform, most of my testing effort involved running down to the beach or a local park. Loco HQ is on Brighton seafront, not an unpleasant environment to be doing your testing in at this time of year :)

Friday morning: final tidying up, and a meeting with a potential Loco customer. We're actively targeting agencies and game developers with the platform right now - it feels far too early for LBS gaming to go mass market, we don't have spare cash to burn promoting the concept to the public, but for brands or game authors the platform is a cheap opportunity to do something really unusual today, without the infrastructure costs most LBS game developers usually end up paying.

And the afternoon? Running through the game developer APIs, which I wasn't personally too familiar with, and was pleased to see strike a balance between feature and simplicity. I reckon if I can explain them to someone fresh in less than an hour and they get it, there's something good there. And then working on a backlog of desired features for Loco with a view to sorting out some longer-term planning for the product. Having gone through the pain of introducing decent processes to a software company 5+ years in, I'm keen to start getting Loco into good habits early on :)

So... not exactly a holiday, but definitely a change of scene, a more relaxed atmosphere than the sometimes frenetic pace at FP, and a sense of leaving something better than I found it. I look forward to repeating the experience (perhaps after a real holiday)!