Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

Check this annoucement: Texas Instruments Application Suite Ecosystem Boosts Development of Affordable Multimedia Feature Phones: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance… Just to let you know that things are moving !

[...]The process of porting, validating and integrating software takes significant monetary and time investment. TI is committed to helping customers maximize those investments by offering them a choice of pre- integrated application suites[...] TI customers can select an application suite such as Motorola Ajar, OpenPlug’s ELIPS, Sasken’s ARIA and SKY MobileMedia’s SKY-MAP(TM)[...]

Texas Instruments Application Suite Ecosystem Boosts Development of Affordable Multimedia Feature Phones: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

Thanks a lot Mag this is now my bible, and it should be on every project manager desk!

A fun post from GigaOM : GigaOM » The Virtual Taxman Cometh? describing how virtual world are generating real money … and how to tax it!
So this is coming, virtual money is going real. Not so surprising when you see how people are enticed to Word of Warcraft, that some guys are earning money …selling game characters, virtual money, etc on eBay.

And it may become bigger: time is money and has million of people are spending their time in those virtual place, it is normal that an economy will emerge.

Do you see the backers of those virtual worlds  opening some kind of stock exchange? Could be fun to see the created wealth…Matrix anyone?

All this Ajax/Web 2.0/New Application Framework/Google are all about a big change in the CPU power repartition: Today PC is king, so CPU power is, defacto, at the network periphery…. But … as it was the case years ago, before the PC era, this power is coming back near the “center”, and this exellent article from Wired Magazine, found via Open-Gardens, depicts it pretty well:

The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..

Wired 14.10: The Information Factories

A verbose wired article as per link above speaks of the ‘Internet cloud’. It can be summarised as

The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age.

The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..

And what to say about those Sun and Google “overnight datacenters” like mini-CPU power plants, autonomous, you put like vampire s(hum I disgress, I disgress) on the net backbone to bring computing/memory power anywhere:

Google’s Global Super-structure

Cringely breaks the silence on the rumors of a major Google innovation – worldwide datacenters in a box (actually a shipping container).

Got Ads?: Google’s Global Super-structure – Google AdWords and Overture PPC

At the end all of this may have a HUGE impact on mobile computing, quoting the last Mobile Opportunity entry about Smartphones and PC overlapp:

No, the realistic scenario is that PCs and smartphones (and other mobile devices to come) will prosper in parallel for years, each doing its own thing increasingly well. There will be some overlap at the edges, but the core usage of each product will remain very distinct. Meanwhile, the web apps platform will continue to gradually eat away at both operating systems, transforming them into commoditized plumbing that few people care about.

Mobile Opportunity: Will the smartphone kill the PC?

Yes I fully agree on this, and I share also the following point of view with Michael Mace:

The development tools for creating web apps, and the features of the web platform itself, are not currently as sophisticated and powerful as the traditional programming environments like Windows and Mac OS. So you can’t create a fully functional clone of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop with the current state of the art in web tools. This is shielding the big software companies from immediate competition in their core businesses, and often produces a false sense of security.

However, the web platform is evolving much faster than the old-style operating systems. At some point it is inevitable that the web platform will become mature enough that web apps can challenge the established software standards. At that point, the swarming little web 2.0 application companies will fall all over themselves to take bites out of those lucrative franchises.

Rubicon Consulting, Inc. – Our Thinking – Newsletter – Understanding the full impact of the web

And this is precisely where I really see things evolving, see my post about those new “modern” frameworks. Some key elements are still missing, like micro formats, data standardization, behaviour abstraction for easy application deployment and mashup, but once reached the Holly Grail of complete uncorrelation between representation, control and data (hey MVC again), it could be possible to have applications written “in pieces”: I’m not an advocate of the “write once run everywhere”, in the Mobile space applications have to be so much taylored, adapted to the hardware, customizable and so on, that being able to have a common part, “written once, run on a server” and a customized one for each kind of device/Operator may be of high value…and those new frameworks may be the key (hum the beginning of the key to be exact ).
So next generation Mobile frameworks may have a very clean MVC abstraction, based on a standard that still doesn’t exist:

• The representation (View) should be optimized for the hardware, cause representation has to run locally. Javascript is not a good candidate, perhpas xml or even binary description are better suited
• The Control part is also really tied to the available user input/output and a part has to run locally
• The other part and the Data model should be of course on the server, with the big algorithms and processing

Of course everything will work smoothly if the network lag/answer time reduces greatly, but for sure it will come with next gen wireless networks.
A good example of such a modern application, appart from the today basic web 2.0 widgets, would be a Mapping/GPS appliction where the card and route computation are on the server and the data display and GPS infromation are on the device …hum Orange is already providing something like that with Webraska….let’s move on with other example! Do you have some? Any Comments?

Update: Thanks to AC/OS for the Sun data center link. Check those Sun prototypes…wow.

Update2: I’ve managed to found the article talking about google plan, looking like the Sun one.

In this blog we talk a lot about developpement frameworks in the mobile space, which are close to “traditional” framework (like GNOME, Qt, Windows, MacOS, even Java in less extent), but newcomers are popping … from the web space.
I’ve played recently with a great CMS (hum : a blog engine on steroid) Drupal to developp as quickly as possible an in-house test cases/release quality report system for our test teams, a weekly tracking tool for my team and some other stuffs: I’m NOT a php/javascript/XML/HTML junky, I’m a C/C++/algorithmics dev, and … doing that was EASY and FAST, and I must say efficient.
The biggest positive points that have popped out:

• Documentation of PHP/Drupal : amazing, clear, dense, …neat
• Data formalization (RSS feeds and XML)
• Powerfull presentation framework that let me concentrate on the job

If we compare those point to exisitng frameworks, some are really missing : Documentation of course is not only many time missing, but when it is present, it has been written by code monkeys, certainly good at coding and architecture, but not for teaching and giving fun (I’ll quote here one of my Kathy Sierra favorite post never underestimate the power of fun). Data formalization: it is a joke today in the C/C++ world, where is easy serialization? Database?. Presentation framework : ok you have some exisitng but you still have to fight with widget mechanics…boring and bug prone.

It is where new web frameworks may bring something new, I’ve spotted 2 at this time:

• Ruby on Rails
• OpenLaszlo (found again via TomSoft)

Ruby on Rails is really pushing the MVC (Model View Controller see my post here and here) paradigm to its limits, with a clean high level language….I’ll try to use it as soon as possible.

OpenLaszlo claims to bring the desktop power to web applications … and the approach seems greats (look at the examples) : the UI is described in clean XML, then everything is compiled in Flash or DHTML, AJAX stuff/javascript are hidden.

So it will be time to bring this kind of technologies to mobile developement … and constraints… Flash today is perhaps too RAM and CPU consuming (but I’m sure it will change). Making things too easy has also its drawbacks, especially in an area where customization is a key differenciator, see also this Kathy’s post about ease of use.

At Open-Plug we already have a clean, all recoded GTK that is running on Ultra Low Cost phones with no issues, for me the next step would be to add some more formal and high level UI descriptions, and some better data modeling to come close…We have begun, and it is exciting!

I’m happy to see that in France we are not anymore a third world country in respect to broadband access, and I really think it is thanks to the ADSL operator Free who is always pushing the envelop for new technologies (triple and even quadruple play, Freebox HD…) followed by the others, forced to play the technology game (orange, neuf, alice and club internet above all).
It is why it is really great seeing new Wifi/GSM telephony offers: Neuf/Cegetel Twin, Orange Unik, and Free offer (some photos of the Free phones).
It is why reading this new from the exellent MobileCrunch was not a surprise:
MobileCrunch » T-Mobile Announces Launch of UMA, Dual Mode Handsets … this seems to be a big trend with wifi expanding quickly at home. The Kineto Wireless white paper is really worth a read to understand the involved technologies. Only the Orange offer seems to be really UMA compliant with a clean handover from Wifi to GSM (but not the other way round…)
The Free approach to give everyone 2 MIMO boxes is really wize: in big citie the Free Wifi coverage will be amazing …
Update: MobileCrunch has post a new article about UMA.

As usual a great read from Mobile Opportunity: Mobile Opportunity: Facing reality in the mobile industry. It describes how difficult is it to build a new application/services for the Mobile Phone market, taking a great example : SKYPE. It’s a mix of hardware issues, and software compatibilities.
Tarek talks about the old CDMA/GSM battle and the Ultra Low Cost Market:
It’s A GSM Kinda Developing World. Imagine, we have not even set and agreed on the radio technology, the processor is converging to ARM (7 for some, 9 or event 11 for others), so don’t talks about the software/services plateform!…but is it a bad thing after all? Ok interoperability is a big great thing … but to have no limits in the creativity is perhaps even more important at the end, to choose the right Hardware/software combination to reach target prices.

Vision Mobile has a good post on Diversity :
User interfaces and soft walled gardens of tomorrow Brands have a real strength, this is not a dull windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome world. Nokia means something, Sony Ericsson also…. they have great UI specifications, and strong brand awareness.

MEX – the strategy forum for mobile user experience – Zi makes progress with Qix

I’ve missed this one … even if we are working with Zi as an IP provider for predicitve text input, I’ve never heard about Qix (see the Zi Qix Web Sit).
It really looks like the Palm Treo Initiate launcher : use any bit of information to quickly access the data … errrr everything is about data those days (see my 3 to 4 previous posts). In the case of Qix it is only text, but for initiate it is also voice,… google search on the phone anyone? coupled with applications to display and use the found data…: THIS is interesting, and a good alternate way to the menustrees.
I am a convinced defensor to the all-flat-search-by-content organization oposed to the classical folder trees (perhaps because I’m NOT organized , see my post about desktop search engines ). It should be pushed a little more to also launch actions, etc. Definitively something to keep in mind for user interactions!

they also bought Decuma it seems, a very powerfull text recognition engine for stylus input (found an the defunct Sony Clié PalmOS devices).

found here : bLaugh » Archive » Cell Phone Overkill

Really this is happening…our customer (phone manufacturers) are asking for features that even us, as geeky as we are, don’t know how to use! (found again via the Kathy Sierra: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/ )

This shows also that voice is and continue to be the “killer app”…of a phone (how bizarre how bizarre). The industry is truggling to find a new one (camera is a good idea, I like the concept of “personal data gatherer”).

My guess is that a “one fit all user device” (as in the PC land) is really simply irrelevant : see the latest SonyEricsson offering, see how many segments you have for cell phones, opposed to the PC market:

  Read the rest of this entry »

Look at that video amazing! how could they do that??? look at the movements, coordination,etc … stunning.

Here is another video of the same robot…but be sure to check the first one also.