All posts tagged Jeff Yee

Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 6

by Jeff Yee on October 17, 2011 in Mobile Web with 2 Comments

This six-part blog series retraces the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode. Part 4 discusses the growth of the mobile Internet in the early 2000s . And Part 5 brought us the phenomenon of Apple and its influence on the industry.

THE STATE OF THE MOBILE INTERNET TODAY

Determining the state of the mobile Internet as it exists today is a difficult task. The challenge is – which day? In a dynamically changing industry, technological advances are a common occurrence every day. The answer to the question is different depending on the day. This is the challenge with developing for the mobile Internet. With change being constant, where should developers focus their time and attention? Which technologies are worth the investment – the ones that will have a future?

In this six-part blog series, we reviewed the early stages of the mobile Internet and noted the introduction of the iPhone as the inflection point, based on wireless carrier data traffic. A look at the Evolution of Mobile Web-Related Markup Languages, found on Wikipedia, describes in visual format the challenge that developers have faced. The chart, found below, describes the many languages that were created to solve the mobile Web problem, sometimes branching off from a predecessor with improvements.  Some of these languages are still in use today; others have been dropped by the vendors that once promoted them.

The chart on Wikipedia has been updated through 2007, coincidentally the year the iPhone was introduced. Unfortunately, it’s out of date and missing the latest HTML5 movement. So let’s take a stab at completing this chart for Wikipedia. Will it look like the following, where the world finds its harmony and lives happily ever after?

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 5

by Jeff Yee on October 10, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode. Part 4 discusses the growth of the mobile Internet in the early 2000s .

APPLE SPARKS THE LONG-AWAITED MOBILE INTERNET

In June 2007, everything changed. Overnight, the world woke up to a new phone that was radically different than its predecessors. It was the Apple iPhone, which will be remembered as the device that finally lived up to the mobile-Internet hype. But it could have been very different. In 2006, AT&T was working on a secret project with Apple, dubbed “Project Fruit.” The project, done in typical Apple secrecy where few people were aware of the project within both companies, was for Apple to become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MNVO. In the middle of the decade, MVNOs were the rage. Although Virgin looked like a successful MVNO, many other notable brands, such as Disney and ESPN, were having a difficult time with their MVNO offerings.  ESPN was shut down that year.  Apple took notice of the MVNO failures and changed its plans. It would not become a virtual operator, piggybacking on someone else’s network, but instead, it would focus on selling devices. Can you imagine how different it would be if Apple was an MVNO? By 2007, Apple stuck to its core business and put its focus on the launch of the iPhone in the U.S., with an exclusive deal with its first carrier, AT&T.

Until the launch of the iPhone, critics stated that the mobile Internet needed faster networks and cheaper data plans to succeed. They claimed that the mobile Internet wouldn’t go mainstream until this happened. Apple’s iPhone proved them wrong. The first iPhone launched using AT&T’s EDGE network (a 2.5G technology), despite the fact that AT&T had already deployed a 3G network. And the phone required a $30 per month unlimited data plan, when other phones on AT&T were only $20 per month for unlimited data (the price of the plan actually increased, not decreased). Therefore, it wasn’t the speed of the network or the price points that had been the problem for slower-than-hoped-for mobile Internet growth before the iPhone, it was that the market lacked a device that had the experience that users expected when they surfed the mobile Internet.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 4

by Jeff Yee on October 3, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode.

WAP’S INITIAL HYPE AND GROWTH IN THE EARLY 2000s

While data services were exploding in Japan in the early 2000s, the Western world seemed to declare each year, at various conferences, that, “This will be the year for the mobile Internet.” But despite some success, these prophecies were largely wrong until the latter part of the decade. The decade started with a dot-com bust that took down many of the Internet companies that were declaring wireless to be the new frontier for the Web. And when the dust settled after the bust, the remaining companies that stayed loyal to their beliefs in the mobile version of the World Wide Web, had to wait patiently, for years, until the adoption rate finally lived up to expectation. Mobile Internet adoption did grow during the first part of the decade, but it seemed to always be short of expectations in North America and Europe. 

The successful mobile start-ups during this time were not getting rich on the mobile Internet. They, instead, focused their time and energy on the money-makers at that time: SMS services and digital downloads such as ringtones.

Why did the mobile Internet fail to live up to expectations in the Western world in the early part of the decade? And why was i-mode so successful during this same period?  Around the same time that AT&T launched PocketNet in 1997, the WAP Forum (now Open Mobile Alliance) was formed.  WAP, or the Wireless Application Protocol, was started in June 1997 by founding members Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Openwave, formerly Unwired Planet which is the browser AT&T was using for its first PocketNet phone. The WAP Forum was busy creating specifications for the protocol and markup language that would bridge the differences between a mobile network (GSM, TDMA at the time) and the Internet. As a result, carriers utilizing products from these vendors began a shift to WAP and WML (Wireless Markup Language) by the early 2000s. Even early-leader AT&T shifted from the HDML markup language used for PocketNet to WML by 2002. Meanwhile, i-mode was benefiting from a different choice in technologies; a technology that more closely resembled HTML development for the PC.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 3

by Jeff Yee on September 26, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touched on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone.

I-MODE – THE EARLY LEADER IN MOBILE DATA SERVICES

After the launch of AT&T’s initial PocketNet service, NTT DOCOMO sent a team to the United States to learn more about the offering as it attempted to build its own data phone. NTT DOCOMO,the largest wireless carrier in Japan, built a strong relationship with AT&T at that time, and would eventually become an investor in AT&T Wireless with a 16 percent stake in the company.

In February 1999, NTT DOCOMO launched i-mode, Japan’s first mobile Internet service. Unlike AT&T’s initial offering, i-mode was an overnight success. It reached 10 million users by 2000, and 40 million users by 2003. It became the envy of wireless carriers around the world and the talk of the content community. But why was i-mode successful when PocketNet failed? What was the difference between the two?

The American answer was to point to differences in the Japanese culture – the Japanese are early adopters of electronics, or dense cities in Japan meant more commuting via public transportation and thus more susceptible to data services (it’s impolite to talk on the train), or average landline costs in Japan for Internet connections, such as DSL, were much higher than the U.S., thus the mobile phone was the first connection to the World Wide Web for many Japanese. While many of these reasons have some validity, there was a better explanation that was being ignored by the rest of the world at the time.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 2

by Jeff Yee on September 19, 2011 in Mobile Web with 1 Comment

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touched on the history of the PC Internet.

AT&T POCKETNET– THE FIRST MOBILE INTERNET PHONE

By 1997, the Internet was booming. It was also the year that AT&T Wireless unveiled the world’s first mobile Internet phone. Developed by Pacific Communications Sciences Inc., the phone was branded PocketNet, and it looked like a standard mobile phone at the time, but with one major difference – it included a 19.2 Kbps modem running on AT&T’s new Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network. Two additional phones using the PocketNet service followed: the Mitsubishi Mobile Access (MA120) and the Samsung Duett.

Despite being the first to market with Internet-capable phones, AT&T’s initial phones were not a tremendous success. (Reports suggest that slightly more than 20,000 analog PocketNet phones were sold.) There were many factors that contributed to the relatively slow adoption of the first Internet phone. The PocketNet phone had a three-line, 60-character LCD screen that limited readable text without significant scrolling. This limited its use and appeal, as it was not compatible with most Web sites that were being developed in 1997.

But more importantly, the first PocketNet phone used the analog AMPS network for voice calling at a time when users were demanding digital voice features. The phone had made an interesting leap in technology to support a data connection, but it missed the popular transition at the time to move to the digital voice network (AT&T’s digital TDMA network). Moreover, users selected a channel and network, which meant that a voice call could not be received while a user was in data mode.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 1

by Jeff Yee on September 12, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

The power of the mobile device is quite simply amazing. Today’s miniature computer, which is what we now hold in our hands, is not fixed to a geographical location. It travels with you wherever you are – it is mobile. And with today’s technology, it is more than a communication device. Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. Radical changes in the past decade have brought us to this point. We need to stop calling our utility tool a phone, but instead, we need to call it a device.

This six-part blog series will explore the last decade of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. By understanding its history, we’ll be able to answer why consumers and developers are faced with an overwhelming number of technology choices. But to understand mobile, we’ll need to start with the history of the Internet itself, or what I’ll dub the “PC Internet.”

British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1994. (Courtesy of CERN)

HISTORY OF THE PC INTERNET

Although the mobile Internet may sound like a separate network, it is in fact the same Internet that blossomed with PC computers in the 1990s. Although there isn’t a differentiation in actual network, the Internet viewed through the desktop computer is sometimes referred to in the wireless industry as the PC Internet, to separate it from applications and services that have been optimized for mobile devices, or the mobile Internet. Since the mobile Internet shares the same network as the PC Internet, and now the same protocols and languages (although this was not always the case), it is helpful to start with the history of the PC Internet when considering how the Web grew to support mobile devices.

The World Wide Web was first developed in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee built the protocols for communication between a client and server at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.  At that time, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, which is an important point to make. The network itself, the Internet, was already in place. In fact, the Internet has roots back to the U.S. government’s ARPANET, the first packet switching network. But in 1989, this network, for the most part, connected government and educational facilities, and each node often had differing systems that made it difficult to share information.

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Mobile Web: Survey Illustrates That Mobile Performance Matters

by Jeff Yee on July 29, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

Equation Research recently came out with a report analyzing user expectations for the mobile Web.  Their graphic is a well-illustrated visual of the issues that a mobile Web site owner faces when developing a site. In short, poor performance results in users dropping and less likely to return or recommend a site.

Courtesy of Equation Research and Compuware Corp.

While the conclusion may not be surprising, it’s the survey numbers that are worth noting. Interestingly, nearly three-quarters of mobile phone users expect Web sites to load as quickly on their phones as they have on their desktops. When it doesn’t meet expectations – they drop.  And 74 percent will only wait five seconds for the page to load.

How does the problem get resolved? It’s true that network congestion and factors outside a developer’s control can be an issue, but there’s a lot within control to be a major influence on the user experience. It’s time to stop putting the blame on wireless carriers for having poor coverage or an old network. It’s pointless as the carrier in turn puts blame on their governments for not releasing enough spectrum or to YouTube for hogging an amazing 22 percent of the pipe.

From the Equation Research numbers themselves, we know that 77 percent of the top companies’ mobile sites take more than five seconds to load. With everything else being equal (network coverage, etc.), this means that 23 percent of the sites are able to beat the mark and performance. So what are these sites doing right? Optimization and compression. Too many sites rely on the mobile browser to do the work. It’s the lazy approach. Pages are not optimized for the size of the device, often defaulting to the desktop version of the site and relying on the browser to use best fit or zoom technology to provide a decent user experience. Another common issue is the lack of media compression, or even worse, CSS or JavaScript that is not used in the markup. In a wireless environment, bandwidth is critical and needs to be considered carefully when crafting the mobile site. These problems can be solved individually by developers – although it’s a painful process – or with platforms that address device optimization and compression for wireless networks.

Performance is often neglected during development and design, with most of the attention going to UI and feature capabilities in the mobile device. Yet these numbers from Equation Research tell a different story – build a poorly performing site and you may not have many users, regardless of your features. The good news is that it’s not necessarily a trade-off between speed and function. With the right architectural approach, a high-performing, feature-rich mobile site is certainly possible. Even on an older wireless network;even in poor coverage areas. It’s time to stop blaming the network. Seventy-seven percent of the top companies with 5+ second response times need to start redesigning their mobile sites!

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Mobile Web: What Does Last Call for HTML5 Really Mean?

by Jeff Yee on June 21, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

When I hear “last call,” I typically rush to the bar and place a few drink orders before the bartender shuts down the flow of alcohol to its belligerent patrons. But in the case of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announcing last call on HTML5 – what does it mean? We’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid spiked with HTML5 for quite some time, and are drunk with hallucinations that it will solve all of the world’s problems. So if we’re already intoxicated, what’s the point of last call?

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and all of its flavors, is a victim of its own success. It made a relatively easy process out of creating and sharing information across the Internet. Millions of people now use it to develop Web sites. With that many developers, everyone wants to have a say in its future direction. The W3C is not only the governing body, but its director, Tim Berners-Lee, is the author of the first version of HTML. The 61 members of the W3C team have the arduous responsibility of making decisions that impact not only millions of developers that utilize the language, but also billions of users that see the results produced by HTML.

HTML 4.0 went to recommendation status on December 18, 1997. That was nearly a year before Google was formed in September 1998. The Web was a very different place at that time, and the mobile Web wasn’t even a consideration when HTML 4.0 went to recommendation. What took so long to get to HTML5? Part of the reason is that the W3C was taking a different path in the last decade – something the mobile Web got trapped in with variations of the language such as XHTML. But the sheer size of the affected parties and the revenue impacts that it has on the companies that support the Web created a political environment that makes it challenging to certify a standard the way that it was in the beginning.

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