Mobile Monday London: widgets

15 May 2007 by Rod McLaren

The major themes at MoMo London, 14 May 07, were:

• super-easy for users (find, install, use)
• inspired by web content, and/or: best way to mobilise existing web content. (The implicit assumption is that all innovation necessarily comes from the web and then gets versioned for other platforms, which seems an exaggeration.)
• building on or making accessible to the much larger web development community. Therefore: directly using web technology, and in some cases open source/standards.
• need for standardisation/interoperability
• entirely too much quoting of “long tail”, “web2.0” and “mashups”

OK, here are the raw notes, with my comments in [square brackets]:

David Pollington, Vodafone:

• users want at a glance info, quick access, fill their dead time without having to launch a browser or do a search
• “bubble gum presentation format”
• widget chrome stored locally
• leverage web dev technology and the dev community.
• discovery: can a user simply enter a url to find the widgets that belong to it?
• user creation via templates
• aggregated presentation, like a carousel
• future: contextualising/mashups, “widget lego” [a lovely metaphor but drag and drop programming always seems to falls short of the promise, even Yahoo Pipes]

Anwar Ahmed, uiOne (Qualcomm):

• OTA-updatable
• SDK with simulator “for authenticated BREW developers” [sounds like RIM’s controlled approach with BlackBerry]
• trigs: app, triglet: content, actors: api between UI layer and OEM layer, depot: backend [obscure terminology]
• operator could sell a music phone with a music UI
• [Presumably the USP is the very deep integration to core phone features plus ease of porting, though it lives in BREW-world only.]

Cees Van Dok, Frog Design:

• Demoing Celltop [after a long sales pitch of an IDEOesque methodology: discovery -> many ideas -> 3 concepts -> develop 1 concept]
• Celltop’s aims: monetisable (increase data usage), deployable, innovative, delightful
  • launched Jan 07, Q1 subs +8%, Q1 data rev +64%
• built on uiOne/BREW
• softkey launched, horizontal carousel, side-by-side “cells”, no vertical scrolling, has buy/install hooks [it looks like a device UI on top of a device UI. Perhaps this is what Virtual BlackBerry on Winmobile will fell like…]
• Frog is part of Avicent (big dev house/services co)
• “convergent user experiences” [= ovens with lcd screens seemingly, but he was going at pace so that’s probably unfair]
• [Can you write your own cells? Was it co-funded by Qualcomm as a uiOne showcase?]

Ganesh Sivaraman, Nokia S60:

• 100mm devices shipped on S60, 50% market share
• S60/3rd edition browser: full html, webkit based etc [he’s pushing the open source story hard]
• bring full desktop-like experience, web2.0, “widgetising web 2.0”
• Web Runtime, widgets run on it, also could use to extend native C apps
• for [web] developers: familiar, rapid, simple. 5 day dev time if you already have a desktop widget.
• “fully standards compliant, nothing proprietary here … tie the power of the web to the power of the platform”
• N95 an awesome phone [he loves this stuff. Passionate evangelist.]
• Christian Lindholm from the floor: “Does it run on the idle screen?” “No [presumably because operators won’t let us]” “Why not?!”

Charles McCathieNevile, standards pirate at Opera [three capitals in your surname, and without hyphens: my two are utterly trumped]:

• Opera: 40mm desktops, 40mm phone browsers, 10mm Opera Mini phone browsers
• “putting the web everywhere”
• not all mobile devices are phones (Wii, DS, etc) – diversity is increasing [ie phones aren’t actually swallowing everything that’s mobile]
• 1k widgets, 100k widgetised pages; mobile for S60, WinMob
• sent draft widget packaging spec to W3C [he’s understandably pretty hardcore about standards and interop]
• Issues: signing and trusting widgets, messaging between mutually trusted widgets, documentation, security, true interoperability
• varying widget engines: Opera S60, Yahoo/Konfabulator, Apple/Dashboard, AOL etc
  • portability: Opera -> AOL in 10min, -> Dashboard is harder, -> Y/Konfab = forget it.
• Opera built time-tracking widget [desktop only?]
• [entertaining guy]

[To this point, it was if each presentation was raising the stakes on the last. uiOne < S60 < Opera/open, etc. As I tired, the quality of notes had completely hit the wall at this point.]

Florent Pitoun, Webwag:

• vision: 50% of net users will have personalised start pages [hmm, seems unlikely unless Google personalising your search page for you counts]
• shows website widgetiser [works very well], and widget-to-widget communication on handset [Webwag looks like a Netvibes/Pageflakes-style home page, with widgetising pixie dust sprinkled on]
• [how open/standardsy is this?]

Ray Anderson, Bango:

• [Bango are a big mobile on-ramp/intermediary for content providers]
• 18mm users
• interesting numbers on calls-to-action: send both sms and wap-push message: 35% of recipients access the url; send one of sms or wap-push only: 18% success; url only? 3% success
• [not entirely following this but Ray seems to be thinking about mobile widgets as an addressable medium, which has the echo of the Bango numbers they originally back in 1999ish]

Kaj HeGe Haggman, Widsets (Nokia):

• Widsets launched Oct06. 1mm registered users [widget on mobile = widset]
• downloadable widget engine
• 1,350 widgets, most made via templates by users
• runs on other devices, eg BlackBerry

1. Thanks for this extensive article. I’ll post a link on my blog at http://pitsharing.com.
   As to the fundamental question about openness, the answer is WIDELY OPEN! It’s true I haven’t mentioned it yesterday but any developer will be able to create and publish widgets for Webwag mobile as it’s the case for the web part.

   
   — florent pitoun    15 May 2007, 22:11    #

2. Thanks for commenting Florent.

   If it’s open to developers, I guess the next question is Charles McCathieNevile’s one on widget interoperability: will Webwag widgets talk to non-Webwag widgets? Will Webwag sign up to any widget standards that get W3Ced? (I ask as someone who’s remains new to widgets.)

   
   — Rod McLaren    16 May 2007, 11:44    #

3. @Rod, I hope so. Now that I am back online (after a week in Paris working without connection – what else do you expect at a tech conference ;) ) I will be following up the discussion with Florent about how best to collaborate (simple answer – via W3C)...

   Nice article by the way. And I sympathise with the problem of getting tired and feeling it get increasingly hard to take notes – especially in a series of short sharp talks.

   One of the things that I thought was interesting was that it was easy enough to build on earlier talks. I actually re-wrote a couple of slides during the Nokia talk that came before mine, so I could look ahead instead of repeating things that had been said. (I love HTML slides for that…)

   
   — Chaals    21 May 2007, 13:11    #

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