The latest research from Telephia shows that around 4 % of U.K. mobile users have uploaded content created on their mobile phones to social networking sites, video and picture sharing sites, blogs and personal web pages.

Still, uploading content from mobile phones is not yet mainstream, probably because of the still expensive data plans for using the mobile web. But Telephia says it is already ranking close to watching mobile video in popularity. An interesting fact is also that users are finding ways to send their content even to sites that do not yet offer a facility to upload direct from mobile phones. That shows the strong demand mobile and should be integrated into social networking services.

In recent years online social networks have experienced huge growth. Typically sites like Facebook.com or MySpace.com have been a place for the younger demographic in society to express personal interests and information. The report ”Social Networking: Finding Friends Online” from InStat describes these networks as “virtual social structures consisting of individuals that are connected through various social familiarities, geographies, business connections, or common interests”. In short: social networking sites are a great place for self promotion.

But with tragedies like the tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 it began to show that online social networking sites have become more important than just promoting yourself. They became a public place to mourn the loss.

On April 16, 2007 Nokia announced their S60 platform would support widgets in subsequent releases. This means, using their WebKit based browser under the hood, newer phones (S60 3rd ed. with Feature Pack 2) will have support for those small applications, mostly serving not more than a single purpose (e.g. show the weather or an RSS feed) that are well known on the desktop since a couple of years now.
In preparation to my talk at this year’s XTech conference I want to point out some important things related to this announcement. I think widgets on (mobile) devices are a major step in the right direction and I feel the mobile web can finally get the boost it so desperately was waiting for since a couple of years now. “The Ubiquitous Web” is this year’s XTech topic - I feel the mobile web will become ubiquitous pretty soon…This article can be seen as a primer to my talk at XTech: Ajax on mobile devices - making mobile web apps ubiquitous.

There are some interesting news from the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany (15.- 21. March 2007). The CeBIT is a leading business event for the digital world, and the mobile industry is an important part of the CeBIT. Especially this year is a lot of going on mobile + internet. Here are some facts:
T-Mobile:
T-Mobile has dramatically dropped their prices for mobile surfing. Here are the prices for their time- and volume-based rates.
time-based rates:
The time-based rate is called ”web’n’walk”. You only pay 0.09 EUR/minute for the “web’n’walk Starter” rate. There is neither a basic fee nor a volume limit. In August 2007 T-Mobile plans to offer the “web’n’walk Surfer” rate with 120 minutes for 5.00 EUR, which means 0.04 EUR/minute.
volume-based rates:
T-Mobile has also dropped the prices for their volume-based rates:
”web’n’walk BASIC”: 200 MByte for 20.00 EUR/month
”web’n’walk MEDIUM”: 400 MByte for 35.00 EUR/month
”web’n’walk LARGE”: 5 GByte for 50.00 EUR/month

I am speaking at this year’s Xtech conference, on the 17th of May in Paris, France.

The Xtech, Europe’s premier web technology conference, will take place 15 - 18 May 2007. The speakers include some famous people and I am looking forward to meeting some people and friends I met during other conferences before, especially Håkon, Mike and Jeremy.

My presentation will be about ”AJAX on mobile devices - making mobile web apps ubiquitous”.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

I was asked a couple of times to post the slides from my presentations (1, 2) about Mobile AJAX, so here they are.

Since I think it can be quite difficult to get valuable information out of these slides without further explanation, I want to use this chance to write a little more about the whole topic from my perspective. I see the topic being discussed in the internet everyday - obviously always from a little different angle, I also see that in some cases the term “Mobile AJAX” is used quite inflationary.

So I created a page about Mobile AJAX, on one hand because I feel the topic is too big for one post in the blog, on the other hand because it is “sticky” on the page and I can keep on editing it there.
Here’s my own opinion on the topic and the current status of my insights into Mobile AJAX. Since I am the developer here at PavingWays and since I have a strong web development background, I will accordingly focus more on the technical side than on business-related areas. I also feel that there is way too few information about the technical side of the whole topic around, so maybe my two cents will even help someone understanding what this mysterious ”Mobile AJAX” is all about.

Check out the page here.

A week after our visit to Mobile Monday we attended the Webmontag in Munich. Webmontag is a great platform to meet interesting people from the web business. Organized by Martin Szugat and taking place at the amiando office the event was quite the opposite from the Mobile Monday because of its very relaxed atmosphere and start-up minded people attending.

As of February 1st there have been massive price drops amongst some of Germany’s pay-as-you-go / prepaid offers such as blau.de, Symio and Aldi talk. Aldi talk even offers UMTS / 3G SIM cards, so users can profit from the new cheap rates while using fast connections. All these discount MVNOs are using the network and infrastructure of E-Plus. Apparently E-Plus has dramatically lowered the reseller tariffs for data traffic.

We have been at this week’s MobileMonday in Munich, Germany. Being the first “real” MobileMonday for us, except the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco last November, and being the first MobileMonday in Munich at all it has been a premiere in many ways. The overall topic of the evening was “Next Generation Mobile Internet” and it sounded like the perfect topic for PavingWays.

Here’s a quick review of the event from our perspective.

Today Steve Jobs unveiled the long-anticipated iPhone to the public. We gotta say this thing is amazing! Featuring a new input method called “Multi-touch”, which allows you to use several fingers at once to input “gestures”, the phone also features Wi-Fi (and EDGE) along with a version of Apple’s web browser Safari - this is possible, because the phone’s operating system is MAC OS X!