I was attending the Mobile Ajax Workshop at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. The whole workshop was very interesting and I met many interesting people from Japan, Korea, USA, UK, India and companies such as NTT DoCoMo, NHN, Vodfone, Aplix, Motorola, SitePen, NEC and many more.

The event, being a workshop not a conference, was structured a bit different from what I experienced until now. There were different moderated discussions around topics related to Mobile Ajax. These discussions were conducted in the form of panel discussions, where up to 4 panelists came up on “stage” and held a 5-minute introduction about their position papers that were handed in before the event. I was up in a panel about “one web” with Alan from AOL, Dave from Google and Goro from DoCoMo. Honestly, it felt a bit strange being in a panel with people from these major players, but it was cool and my presentation went ok too.

Some lessons learnt:

• AOL is using Mobile Ajax in their mobile search (works in IE) on http://wap.aol.com/search
• Aplix is working on a Java based tool that can provide access to device hard- and software to web aplications in the browser through a browser plugin, e.g. web app<->browser<->plugin<->Java<->GPS on phone
• Japan is cHTML (iMode) all the way, but there are full web browsers too, many phones with 2 browsers
• in Korea it’s all XHTML (WAP2.0), many carriers develop their own Flash-like VMs to make content developers use their tools
• Motorola will soon have a widget engine and Ajax support in their browser too
• Content adaptors use many different ways to detect the user-agent, also, but not mainly WURFL, more on DDGW
• Solutions for “offline” detection/browsing/management/handling are crucial, needed and Google Gears looks promising

The minutes of the workshop can be found through the W3C website. Here’s the slides on the Frost Ajax Library from my lightning presentation.

All in all it was a great day and I want to thank Microsoft for hosting the event and lunch, the W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance for putting this event together and especially Daniel Appelquist, Michael(tm) Smith and Jon Ferraiolo for their great work moderating and running the event. Looking forward to the next one.

Last week 3jam and Virgin Mobile announced their partnership. That’s really amazing news! Virgin Mobile is promoting that deal heavily, e.g. on their homepage and via messages to subscribers.
What is 3jam?
In 2005 Andy Jagoe and Enlai Chu started developing a new way of text messaging communication. Let’s name it SMS 2.0. It improves the basic text messaging by allowing friends and family to stay connected with group communication. The 3jam service is free, only SMS charges may apply. But the cool thing is that each text message you send or receive through 3jam is counted as 1 standard text message, even when your message may be received by multiple recipients in the 3jam conversation.
How does the 3jam service via Virgin Mobile works?
The Virgin Mobile customers have first to sign up on the menu of Virgin Mobile’s WAP deck or at www.3jam.com/virgin.Then they can start sending SMS to any number of friends simultaneously. The receipients of the SMS can reply to all at once.
How big is the market for SMS?
For this year Informa analysts suggest the value of global SMS traffic at 60 Billion USD; Gartner forcasts 1.8 Trillion USD by 2010.

In the US we already talked to some carriers and most of them are pretty interested in partnerships with service developers, since they can help them to attract more customers and also increase their ARPU.

Currently, 3jam is building a global service for transiting, billing and clearing multi-party SMS messages. They are also working on some new features. Rocco already met the 3jam Andy and Enlai. Way to go 3jam!
Sources: us.blognation.com 3jam.com virginmobile.com

111 Minna St. in San Francisco is a Gallery during the day and a club/bar at night. It’s also evolved into the preferred spot for the very popular SFBeta events that take place once in a while. We went to SFBeta November last year and it was a great experience, so we had to go to this one too.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of SFBeta. The event started around 6:00 pm and it got crowded pretty soon. We met some familar faces like Daniel from Bitpusher, Vivek from RapLeaf and Philippe from CScout Germany, but we also got in touch with some new people from all over the world doing pretty exiciting businesses, such as Anton from eBlizz.com or a mobile webhosting company from the Czech Republic amongst them. The party ended around 10:00 pm. Afterwards Alex suggested we go grab a drink and we went to a nice place on Divisadero called Nopa, one of the places open late even during the week. Great food and wine there.

The SFBeta is a typical event for why the Silicon Valley is such a special and interesting place for doing web business. It is a very casual and social after-work event where you can meet a lot of people, sometimes well-known, from the industry and can have some really nice talks - not only about coding ;) It is not just an “exchanging business cards event”, but more of getting in touch with like minded people who struggle(d) with the same problems you do. And quite often you end up staying in touch with those people after the event. We definitely will.

So, if you are in the Bay Area, you should definitely go to an SFBeta event. It is really worth it. Christian Perry, the organizer, did a great job - again! Thanks!

Hot, hot, hot up on the roof of the FamilyOven HQ on Jackson St. just on the border to Chinatown: a sunburn is what you can get if you stand up on a roof of a building (with a great view over the bay) with great weather during lunch time. You also can get in touch with many interesting people. I got both at Lunch 2.0 yesterday.

Lunch 2.0 is a get-together of mostly web people in the Bay Area and it is usually hosted by a company that provides food and drinks for free. FamilyOven and their sponsors did a great job at this, they had incredible food and plenty of beer.

I met Christen from thumbble, Terry Chay (Lunch 2.0 organizer and PHP hero), …

Some people from wired were there too and seemed to like it as well they instantly blogged about the event here and included this image…I’m on it too.


By the way I have been told by two people during the event that the Risotto was actually the best they ever had.

Last week I received an invitation for the ”AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007” in Santa Clara, organized by SYS-CON Media. I got an expo pass an could attend the keynotes and get on the expo floor for free. That’s because I am apparently registered as a contributor back from earlier this year when we published the Mobile Ajax FAQ. So I went to AjaxWorld on Monday.

I ended up at a talk by Michael Carter about Comet and a product called Orbited. Interesting stuff and in fact I was not aware that such a big chunk in Comet is related to the server, not the client. The expo floor was rather big with many big companies presenting amongst smaller ones. I had anice introduction to Silverlight, and enjoyed the cozy sitting-bags provided by Oracle. Even WiFi worked after lunch, which was by the way also very good.

At lunch I met Alex Russell of Sitepen Inc., a.k.a. creator of the dojo Ajax toolkit. He seemed interested when I told him about Frost and he’ll probably also attend the Mobile Ajax workshop on Friday. I ended up sitting at the table of the dojo bunch. It appears that dojo is the framework of choice for big companies. At the booth of IBM I learned that they chose dojo, because of it’s extensibility and overall great performance. Sun is also using it in an upcoming product.

Back in the expo room I also met Max Carlson, founder and original creator of OpenLazlo. We talked quite a while and I hope we will stay in touch. OpenLazlo was also Diamond sponsor of AjaxWorld and they provided for a lot of the free food and drinks - thank you for that. I unfortunately missed the party in the evening.

I also realized that our Mobile Ajax FAQ was printed in the AjaxWorld magazine that was availbale for free at the conference - nice. Overall it was a fun day and a good conference, Ajax is big business now and has definitely arrived at the enterprise level.

I met Cameron after his first conference talk in Europe at the @media conference in London in June 2006. He was talking about the same thing there - Mobile Web Design - and I really liked his presentation. Since then we both kept on doing research in the mobile area and Cameron just released his first book and it’s a great one!

Early chapters entitled “Mobile Web Fundamentals” give a great amount of background information on the mobile web market and usage, the concept of being “mobile” (it’s not the device, but the user that’s mobile) and on the fundamental limitations in this area (screen size, input methods, carriers etc.).

I especially liked the focus on what I really feel is important about the mobile web, even though it is in contrast to the newest developments in the browser and handset market: it’s not about bringing the desktop web to mobile devices, people, it’s about creating mobile web applications that serve people’s needs while they’re on the go!

Browser differences are also thoroughly covered in Cameron’s book and even Microformats are mentioned as a possible way to solve context-related problems in browsers, i.e. adding contextual info to things like contacts and phone numbers in the markup, so the device knows what do do with this type of content (add it to the address book/call the number).

The main section is divided into four approaches how to implement mobile web sites and applications: do nothing, reduce images and styling, use handheld stylesheet, create mobile-optimized content. It also covers topics like testing and validation as well as advanced techniques, such as SVG and Ajax (I’m mentioned in a book, yeehaa!). The final chapters contain things like promoting your mobile content, dotmobi and semacodes.

Overall the book is an excellent summary of the current status in mobile web design and a great resource for anybody who thinks of creating a mobile version of his existing website or better yet, a new, web based, mobile service (that should actually be almost everybody in the web design/development community).

The book is a must-buy and it is available as a PDF at the book’s homepage: http://www.mobilewebbook.com.

I want to recommend a book by Jeremy Keith, called ”Bulletproof Ajax”. I recommend it for several reasons. First of all, the book is an excellent introduction to Ajax programming in general and everybody starting to write JavaScript code to do Ajax should read it before touching any of the libraries out there.
Secondly the book is especially suited to anybody who is interested in writing Ajax powered apps on mobile devices and constrained browsers. After all the book is all about making JavaScript code bulletproof and that’s exactly what you need to do if you are facing browser constraints, flaky implementations of JavaScript engines and a hugely fragment environment overall.

Jeremy’s book is suited for the beginner, but also for the seasoned developer, since it makes it clear what it all comes down to: writing clean code that gracefully degrades (Jeremy calls his method to do this Hijax) if the application runs in a less-than-ideal environment. There are many best practices and useful code snippets contained and topics such as JSON, web services and accessibility.

The book is not entirely new but nevertheless a must-buy, it was published New Riders Press in February 2007 and I urge everybody interested in Ajax to grab a copy, e.g. at Amazon.

If you can’t hear words like “Facebook”, “social”, “networking”, “friends” or “community” anymore, then maybe you should have a look at the antisocial networking site Bugroff.


This “website” has launched by Gray Dring - the person behind the Clever Little Pod comedy podcast. No wonder why Bugroff is nothing more than a spoof service :)

Source: http://uk.blognation.com

Last Monday it was time for another Mobile Monday in the Silicon Valley. This time the Mobile Monday took place at Nokia’s Research center in Palo Alto. I am not sure why, but this time there were much more people than last time. I even heard they had to turn away some people because there was not enough space. A compliment to Nokia: there was enough food and drinks for the rest of us who came in :) One thing that was annoying was the registration procedure that required two signatures and showing of your ID in order to get in, all supervised by 4 Nokia security guards.

The Mobile Monday started at 7:00 pm with ab. 30 minutes of networking before presentations started. This time Nokia (Mosh), Bebo and Loopt presented about their services. Too bad that the guys from Rabble didn’t make it.

Unfortunately, there was nothing really new in any of the presentations, they were more or less product pitches with little technological background or helpful insights. But since there were so much attendees, it was a great opportunity for networking.

All in all it was a good event and I did not want to miss it.

By the way we are planning to do a barcamp-style mobile event at the end of October in Germany, probably somewhere in Munich. If you are interested in setting this up or would like to participate, please let us know!

Last Thursday there was another Mobile Internet SIG event organized by SD Forum. This month’s topic was Social Networking & Mobile Phone Services.

The first presentation was held by Steve Granek from NeuStar, Inc. Not only is Steve a great speaker, but he’s also very knowledgeable in what he was talking about: problems with multi-service providing for carriers and network operators. It comes down to the fact that mobile phones (and networks) have originally been created to provide voice service, not data services such as SMS, MMS or web access. The biggest issues with this is address routing and interoperability. We heard in-depth facts about how routing a regular phone call is different from getting the route to someone who is supposed to receive a text message (that’s the address part). Interoperability is a big issue, because carriers tend to approach widespread problems with their own focus only, so e.g. IMS was mentioned as a great thing with the exact same problem.