Putting the vision into practice

Representing .mobi, who are here to answer the question: "why bother"?

Who we are:
- want to improve the consumer experience of using the internet on mobile devices
- not so much about tech challenges as about trust challenges
- a sponsored top level domain
- mid-2006 launch

Guiding principles
- solve real consumer problems
- guarantee a minimum predictable experience
- Have Rules - some of which are enforceable and auditable
- supported by a developer community: specs, tools, techniques, use cases, etc.

Approach:
- style guide for web browsing
- others (e.g. email on mobile) later

.mobi is a brand designed to imbue consumers with confidence

Panel discussion

Rhys: standards for devices are hampered by need for differentiation. Lowest-common-denominator is not an acceptable approach
Rotan: most authors of content online provide content but not metadata (purpose of page: info/navigation? relative importance of content). The accessibility world has standards for much of this metadata. Have we learned anything from the accessibility world?
Rhys: a lot of the work in content adaptation is reverse-engineering the semantics of the original data. Other techniques include semantic enrichment (labelling bits of content), or abstractions.
Franklin: people are lazy. Most web pages are "tag soup" with nothing to do with standards. I don't see this situation improving overnight.

Dan: call for coherent approach to avoid fragmentation.

Colin O'Donohue: how can content providers check their content to see if it'll work?
Dan: MobileOK trust mark will be given to sites which validate using a validation tool which will be produced. Tutorials for content providers are in development.
Charles: Opera have guidelines which have formed input for best practices.
Jo: It's early days, but there will be a test suite which follows W3C best practices
Paul: majority of testing will be human interaction-based. It can't all be automated.

Some Journalist: will this lead to a situation where 5% of devices do 95% of the browsing?
Charles: This is the situation Opera Mini is designed for: to allow all devices to access all content. The goal of best practices work is to ensure that content designed reaches 95/99% of devices. Most of the fat tail looks crap; how it looks isn't relevant: people want the information. Compare usability of SMS. "It's about the content, stupid": if people want the stuff, they'll work out how to get it.
Chris: there's a thin/fat fail thing about users as well as content: distribution of usage follows the same curve.
Dan: within Mobile Best Practices they're trying to address not just top-end devices, but a majority: web and WAP 2.0 space, which is where the majority of consumer devices are. Less capable devices don't go away - they tend to spread into less developed markets, which are pending a growth in the mobile web.
Jo: the job becomes easier as standards get better implemented. Demographics will be associated with content types, which means a premium experience can be targeted at specific classes of handsets. BPWG job is to ensure that a minimal level of experience is possible on every phone.
Paul: we don't expect content authors to work with incredibly old devices (e.g. B/W).

Question: has there been any market research done into this?
Dan: companies have been doing research (which is how W3C operates).
Jo: most companies have engaged in (usually proprietary) mobile research, which is frustrating. .mobi are doing research which will be put into the public domain.

Question: date for next draft?
Dan: 2nd/3rd week December. There should be a new draft every 2/3 months, they're working faster than most W3C committees.

Question: Is there to be any standardisation of LBS?
Dan: identity, billing, location all lie outside the scope of the MWI. Getting browsing right will provide the spark which lets companies like Vodafone kick these other things off.

Question (Julian, 3GMobile journo): Operators charging 30cents - 3 euros/mb for data. Won't think work be in vain unless operators sort out business models?
Dan: out of scope for him :)
Paul: guidelines have an idea of max page size which should help here.
Charles: providers understand that there's a correlation between volume, profit, turnover, etc. The web was built on high access costs which then came down. Adaptive content can help manage costs.

Mobile Web Potential and Challenges, Rhys Lewis of Volantis

Pre-processing of web (as opposed to browser-style post-processing)

Potential:
- more users
- more geographies
- mobile use of existing applications
- innovative new applications

Not everyone is using the great networks that we have here.

Discovery:
- finding sites that work
- finding sites that are interesting

Trust:
- secure access
- secure applications
- trusted for payment

Technical challenges:
- accelerating diversity
- the way people think about the web embodies some assumptions which mobile challenges
- even the 1:1 relationship between what an author writes and a user sees

Making the web Truly Mobile, Jonas Wilhelmsson of Drutt

There are no killer applications; instead you need a large number of services
cf Amazon and books. Long tail again (he calls it "the fat tail")

Currently:
- Mobile operators drive the business
- Walled gardens business model: 10-30% of subscribers use operator portals, high margins
- Mission-critical functions: adaptation, integration and charging of content
- Everything else is negotiable

The long tail will encourage the 75% of folks not currently using mobile data to do so

How to exploit potential:
- Make the web truly mobile
- Focus on where mobility adds value: do segmentation and transactions will follow