Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

If my last post was not clear enough this video really explain what twitter is all about (…ok I’m still not sure if it is useful or a new waste time machine). Anyway be sure to check http://www.youtube.com/leelefever for great educational videos!

(found via Presentation Zen)

Twhirl, the adobe AIR twitter client has been acquired by seesmic .

The web is all about Twitter (and in a lesser  Jaiku, acquired by Google) and what is now called microblogging.

What is interesting for us is that it is traditionally done …with a mobile phone! (Java or native client…or SMS, even the iPhone has a client).

Twitter allows you to post basically "what you are doing now" and engage conversations with friends on it using short messages ( less than 140 characters). Everything is aggregated with RSS feeds…and this is getting serious, with 1 million users now.

Graph found here, in this great article. It speaks for itself and show the shift from traditional blogging to "social blogging".

Here is a little Google trends about those platforms

Jaiku         twitter     tumblr    seesmic

An Alexa graph gives the same information of page views:

Read one this post around the evolution of web publishing , summarized by this graph:

What this shift is meaning for the mobile space? Microblogging is highly social, personal and "impulsive", the preferred way to microblog is … on the go! Where you have to capture the instant, because this is it: it is about being instantaneous, quick reaction, without the heavy formalism of more traditional methods. Twitter is already used a lot through mobile phone, Jaiku is even more "phone oriented".

Seesmic is bringing the next step: video micro blogging, allowing reply, comments, around videos. I’m really not sure about seesmic’s success…but I was wrong about twitter (and to be honest I’m not sure to really get it…)…and microblogging with video is already coming to phones thanks to Qik, on S60 phones.

…something to follow, and certainly some acquisitions will pop up around this field.

[update] interesting schema from Fred Cavazza to sum up the main actors:

Found via the TAT blog

Wow, this is intuitive!

Seeing the popularity of video services (youtube being the flagship, but seesmic may become a big one), I can’t wait for new manipulation methods.

This one is a great step for video reuse and study.

I can’t wait for a nice user experience that will allow me to easily annotate webcasts, video presentations and trainings easily and reuse my notes associated with the video pieces I found interesting and inspiring when  watching …without viewing the full video again. It just happened to me when watching the google android video trainings…how to keep the interesting pieces associated with my text? I think this is something really missing…or perhaps I don’t know the magic service that allows that?

Big news in our world! Check the press release.

Price (the offer values the company to 100 Millions Euros) is not so high compared to Trolltech technical and community assets (but high …looking at the actual company revenues of 7 Millions Euros). This is not a dot com acquisition. Period.

The next game would be to understand why.

Trolltech is providing a native development environment called Qt, which is a set of “OS services” (memory management, Thread, etc…) and is famous widget library. This environment has been ported on Desktop Linux, Windows, MacOS and embedded Linux: “Qt/embedded”, now called Qtopia Core , on top of which a nearly complete phone application stack has been built, Qtopia.

The framework allows C++ development but recently a java version surfaced: Qt Jambi

Trolltech provides also (and sell) some development tools: a RAD, QtDesigner, qMake a command line tool chain, a plugin for Visual Studio and some internationalization utilities.

While huge adoption in the mobile phone market remains to be seen, Qt is at the earth of one of the biggest OpenSource piece of sotfware: the KDE Linux Desktop (…father project of the now famous webkit browser engine).

So crossing with Nokia current strategy and ths interesting quote from the Nokia PR:

“Trolltech’s deep understanding of open source software and its strong technology assets will enable both Nokia and others to innovate on our device platforms while reducing time-to-market. This acquisition will also further increase the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40.”

Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia

Here are the different bets:

• It is widely known that the proprietary S40 is difficult to maintain and extend/modernize, porting Qt as a companion framework may allow Nokia to open it’s most widely used platform (S60 is negligeable compared to S40 market share) to third party developpers … and open source developpers.
• Nokia wants to have cross platform technologies to merge S60/S40 and desktop environment, so take advantage of the HUGE Qt developper pool.
• Nokia desperately needs a credible platform and a set of APIs to counter Android in the web services area…and the Java Qt makes sense here.
• Does Nokia has some ambitions for KDE to use it as its base OS for its forthcoming “Personal Computer”, touted as the next big thing and next strategy of Nokia?

Be prepared for a S40, a S60 Qt port …. and perhaps an opening of the S40 platform, at least for selected third parties.

Anyway I quite don’t get this …

• In Hildon regards, the Maemo Tablet OS running on the nokia Internet Tablet (n770, N800 and N810). This one is based on GTK, the Qt archrival on the Linux Desktop, uses a Mozilla based browser, so is in the opposite technical direction: will it be cancelled as it is to run a Qt based Tablet OS?
• For KDE Desktop: Dealing with a little company like Trolltech is something, having Nokia as the main backer of its framework is something else. How the OpenSource community will react?

What do you think Nokia has in mind?

Thomas

Ok I admit, I have an iPhone. I love it,  blablabla you know the song already. It has its flaws, but as an old time mobile software engineer I’m really stroked by one BIG fact: The applications I use the most on it are fully web based!: My IM messenger (JiveTalk), my english/french dictionnary (Ultralingua), my mail and rss reader (special version of gmail and google reader) … even my all time favorite mobile game Bejeweled is web based!

What a shock I wasn’t prepared for that: when Steeve Jobs told us that the only way to add application will be (at first) through the web browser I was the first to laugh, only raw C++ is meaningful for applications, a web browser is a mere toy compared to a real application framework.

How wrong I was. And here is why. (and no it won’t be only about the iPhone)

• Unlimited and affordable data plan, and efficient bandwidth and coverage: I’m in Europe (France) and here network coverage and edge (2.5G) are very efficient.
• Webkit and Mozilla : Webkit engine tends to begin the defacto mobile web browser (check what pleyo is doing) embedded in S60, MacOS, Android…the only other credible contender is the Nokia Mozilla version (my Nokia N800 is simply unbeatable for web browsing).
• Raise of ad-hoc web services framework: the famous and numerous web widget frameworks (webwag being one to be noticed), and Yahoo GO for example.
• And the biggest one which is vastly under looked: modern websites, sorry webservices, are fully Model/View/Controller (ruby on rails, but above all struts2, etc.) what does it means in human readable language? : it is VERY easy to adapt the content/services of  a web site to different browsers / way of presenting data. Look at the plethora of “iPhone” optimized sites (ebay, dailymotion, facebook, etc)  that have popped up everywhere in few months.

Those approaches have something in common

• Need of a reliable wireless data link
• Well architectured network backend to provide optimized business data and adapted rendering data (the last one is not mandatory, check RSS for example were the business data has no notion of representation in it).
• An “On Client” web service framework: a browser with standard and added proprietary APIs like the iPhone Safari, a limited and fully proprietary engine like YahooGO, or a full OS with the complete stack like Android and … the iPhone OS (OK, don’t forget the “old” high level OSes like S60 and WinMobile).

Everything seems to be in place, and from what we saw above a good web service client platform would have to:

1. Be fun to use and compelling, tailored for each user
2. Be VERY efficient for the phone common tasks (phone call, address book)
3. Offer a nice and easy way to deploy data representation and flow control from existing web services backends…with good performance and relatively wide access to the underlying platform and datas

For me the first two doesn’t have to be understated (just try a WinMobile phone for a few months to understand what I mean ), as the device remains a phone, a communication machine and voice is still the undefeated champion for communication. This is where the iPhone is groundbreaking at a first sight…and also where I’m not sure of what Google Android will deliver (call me skeptical if you want…).

The third point may bring a lot of optimism … as it implies that we doesn’t need a single platform anymore, but a bunch of deployment possibilities, tailored for each devices/client or even each services . Android and  the iPhone may be seen as such a platform with at least two of those deployment possibilities: the browser and application native development, here Android is much more friendly to Java/Web programmer that the iPhone. But we could perfectly imagine devices with more deployment options or other completely different but close enough to web development standards to allow fast adaptation of web backends….why not an iPhone with an Android sandbox?

At the end the famous “cloud” (the network) is really shaping the “on device” clients, allowing more and more diversity and at there won’t be a “one fit all” solution…

Thanks Steve Jobs for being the first to have put in place all the elements of the chain, dealing with carriers, content provider, services providers…and coming with a great consumer electronic design.

Google wants to go further? not sure for now, but the US 700 MHz auction have to be followed very carefully cause if this spectrum becomes “free” of the carriers, we don’t know how fast it could go!

Flash 10: Hydra and AIF (Adobe Image Foundation) and Hardware Rendering [ draw.logic ]

Very interesting stuffs those days around UI. Adobe is PUSHING (is it big enough?) , and really trys to begin a direct MS WPF/SilverLight/.NET direct competitor… they even have a server part (for Flex).In this annoucement what I find particularly interesting is the following: From Adobe here is what AIF is:

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit (…) includes a high-performance graphics programming language (…), codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. (…). It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes.

Hydra is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms in a hardware-independent manner. Some benefits of Hydra include:

• Familiar syntax that is based on GLSL, which is C-based
• Allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems in a future update
• Abstracts out the complexity of executing on heterogeneous hardware
• Supports 3rd party creation and sharing of filters and effects
• Delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products

At last usage of hardware! and with the recent annoucement of AMD licensing some ATI hardware IP to Freescale and Qualcomm…. this is coming to mobile phone and perhaps faster than we think.

The only issue for me is … that I don’t see a real use beside video encoding/decoding for now , but it will come.

Thomas

Nokia to acquire Navteq for $8.1 Billion

WOW after TeleAtlas bought by TomTom … there is room for a new mapping actor!

Ok Nokia, you are serious about your “I want to be a service company” but 8 billions for a mapping company?? This industry is crasy

Thomas

I’m really avid of Flash Lite informations…and it seems that this post at the always exellent VisionMobile fit my bill perfectly:

VisionMobile Forum :: Flash Lite: Facts and Figures

Especially interesting (at least for me ) is the following:

Flash Lite Technology:
1.5MB: size of Flash player for PCs
400K: size of Flash Lite 2 for mobile devices
300K: the target size for Flash Home product, built on Flash Lite (based on the technology acquired from ActImagine)
ARM 9 with 32/32MB ROM/RAM running at 150MHz: lowest-spec phone embedding Flash Lite, according to Adobe.
BREW extensions: the technology Verizon uses to automatically download and install the Flash Lite player on 12 supporting handsets.

VisionMobile Forum :: Flash Lite: Facts and Figures

So it seems that we are still not in the “low to middle” cost phone range of the spectrum…still a little bit high-end, but it is shrinking and it will continue to do so, thanks to the Actimagine acquisition (cococrico!) .

Another good read about Adobe Open-Sourcing startegy:

How Adobe can overcome the issues around open sourcing the Flash Player Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:32 am…

…..But the rise of Flash also means that Adobe has less incentive to open the Flash Player, and at this stage, I can’t fault them for keeping it proprietary. I’d love to see them open it, and after talking with Ted, I think they can do it and still keep business as usual, but I wouldn’t expect it any time soon. The path is open though, so we can wait and see.

How Adobe can overcome the issues around open sourcing the Flash Player | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com

Palm pays $44m for Palm OS source code licence | Reg Hardware

I’ve forgotten to comment on this one …. but we can draw 2 big conclusions here:

1. Palm is not interested by ALP (Access Linux Platform)
2. They pay 44 millions for an OS license …so palm iw willing to make MILLIONS OF TREO WITH PALM OS inside…surprising, so it may also means that they want to do some OS coding of their own.

Ok…difficult to say more for now but the market of mobile OS/framework is a tough one!

I’ve been coined by Thomas (TomSoft) Web 2.0 bullet to tell “fifth things you don’t know about me”…else I would be doomed till the 7th generation.

So here is my contribution

• I have no sense of orientation, I get lost all the time and anywhere…it is a legend around there…I’ve bought a gps but I keep forgetting it when I need it…of course.

• I have no more room to store by huge bd (comics) collection (check it here).

• I’m a roller hockey junky (and was a judo one).

• During my studies I’ve developped and sold to Iambic an ebook application for palmOS: I’m a big palm fan, but will be forced to switch to the dark side (windows smartphone) or grey side (symbian) or perhaps keep my honor intact and wait for the Apple iPhone

• I’m a ravioli nicois pasta and gnocchi world champion (cooking and eating) .

Ok so now the idea of the game is to spread the word!…up to you, else beware of the malediction:

• Eugeniu Clim (Mobiface), please tell me your secret for your designs, icons…
• Raddedas (Techype) would be really happy to read more about you…be as cynical as possible
• Andreas Constantinou (VisionMobile) ok let me read more of your studies!
• C. Enrique Ortiz (blog) what a man with CEO as initial can hide…
• Nghia (w3sh, in french) old boy, its your turn….

Voila…