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I remember the days when thinking mobile was a real exercise where you needed to totally rethink your product so it can still being value to your users while surviving the limitations of the mobile itself:

* ridiculously small screen
* hectic Internet access
* buttons and T9 text input
* j2me or WML as sole way to display contents

Building something reasonably useful on those platforms was a real challenge while flash and HTML were already rocking the place on the desktop world.

But let’s face it, phones those days have nothing but the name in common with those dinosaurs from 10 years ago – and a few days before the MWC starts it’s time to look back and reflect on the next evolutions of the online ecosystem.

I’ll start by sharing a few bets that I’m strongly believing in:

Mobile and desktop are not 2 different platforms anymore

* while desktop has become pretty distant to native apps as it has been embracing the cloud and SAAS over the past 5 years – and while during that time the mobile has been going the exact opposing way embracing apps – I believe HTML5 is on the verge of maturity delivering a real convergent experience on any platform disregarding its aspect-ratio, available input methods or size and portability. HTML5 apps with local storage shared on the cloud between devices (as it is being added to the new versions of Chrome) will be transforming SAAS apps into rich applications running on your local virtual machine (WebKit) and leveraging on the cloud to be executed. Google is heading this way, Adobe is heading this way (after Nitobi’s acquisition ) … That was even Apple’s Jobs bet before he realized the technology wasn’t ready yet.

* Apps features will depend on the screen size / aspect ratio: not the platform. Responsive design is leapfrogging every day. While today’s implementations are mostly heavy hacks, new approaches at layout definitions are redefining the way we design the apps UX based on mandatory and optional content to show depending on the case. Mobile and desktops both face the same fragmentation challenge, and anyway the frontier between platforms is becoming more fuzzy every day.

* Mobile ads are actually wrongly labelled : they should be called in-app ads as they enable you to display rotating ads within a dynamic application which is not dependent of the reloading of pages to update its contents. And likewise geo-tagetting which seems to be only bound to mobile nowadays is also being very relevant on the desktop (although maybe a bit less precise as not relying on a GPS).

All those elements lead me to think that if you’re lucky enough to start building a service today, this is your chance to make it right from the very start. Think multi-screens, think offline and asynchronous, think MVC on the client side, think API on the backend, and build one app to serve all platforms but include the support of various rendering modes to support the various screens you’re targeting.

I’ve been an iPhone users since day 1 (literally). I’ve owned all google flagship devices since the very first one (I still miss the G1′s keyboard).

And yet – I never told anyone to buy Android. Android is brilliant, it’s Linux, it’s open, it’s easy to hack, to toy with, it has everything a geek may want, including a compiler to build your java apps straight on the device, gazillion of hooks letting apps replace stock functionalities and hence a potential far beyond iOS.

But apps on Android sucked. App developers were focused on iOS, making amazing experiences, and Android was getting the “good enough” treatment. Multiple screen sizes, a rough google play store with a complicated check out process and a poor country coverage where too much for the companies to invest on this platform as much as deserved.

Zendesk iOS

Zendesk Android

But it seems like 2012 was the year when everything turned around for Android. Incredible devices along with a more mature Android native experience got incredible powerhouses in the hand of more and more people. With a retail price less than half of the iPhones’ Android phones sure have a lot to offer (and Apple sure makes a nice margin by overpricing their phones). And after cooking and stabilizing their iOS apps, companies turned to Android and massively improved their existing apps. I recently moved back to Android, and all the apps I used to love on iOS not only are available on Android but actually do look better and are more feature-full through deeper OS integration.

Dropbox

Chessbase

Banking

So yes, if you want a new smartphone, it’s time to move to Android, it’s cheaper and better. (get a nexus 4 !)

As for the tablet, Apple built with the Newsstand something that has no Android equivalent. I love reading all the scuba magazines that get released anywhere in the world straight from it – and I’m only waiting that Google provides something equivalent to move to a Nexus 10 or nexus 7 tablet

I’ve been spending some time in the mobile ad space lately. I’m not an “ad” guy – and indeed I never see the ads on the web and just find them ugly. The only one that work on me are the retargeting ads showing me over and over again that gadget i’m trying not to buy.

Anyway back to basics… Why are brands advertising?

• Brand equity: Let’s be fair, this kind of non-ROI-based advertisement has mostly disappeared from the web. This is the kind of advertisement that was typically used at the infancy of the ad-financed Internet, when brands where paying millions to get banners all over the place, but that would not lead to any actual money earned…. only brand equity
• ROI-based ads: Getting a qualified email, making someone buy a product… all those actions are creating tangible value for the brands, hence giving them the ability to actually earn money from spending money on advertisement. Since the crisis kinda cut out any negative-ROI budgets, those ads are what brands are going for.

On the web, it’s pretty easy to earn money from an ad-recruited user

• e-commerce => direct tangible money
• sign-up & email acquisition => acquisition cost vs long-term customer value
• Fan/follower acquisition : like the previous point but … well.. even harder to properly transform into an actual user/ customer

Now back to mobile. Life is way tougher here:

• m-commerce: in 2011 it was accountable for 0.7% of total sales in 2011 (6.7B vs 188.1B)
• acquisition: way harder than on the web, sign-up processes are hell, typing is hell, screen size is smaller and acquiring a customer is tougher. Even fan/follower acquisition with is an integrated experience is harder. Facebook’s latest iteration enhanced that greatly though.
• Connexion: although everyone brags about their N-G network, white areas are still legion and even in dense city it may be hard to get a decent connexion

The main ways to sell something on the mobile at the moment are through the various stores (app sales, content sales…). I personally never click on ads as navigation being not as fluid as on the web I’m always pissed when I’m being moved away from the page / app I’m currently using.

The mobile puzzles adds a few pieces though to the web one

• Location – less on iOS now – but fully on Android & co – being able to channel a mobile user to a physical point of sales as YOOSE is doing makes a lot of sense.
• m-payment – wether you believe this makes any sense at all, m-payment is coming with a pile of solutions, from credit-card picture snapping, to square and paypal mobile or m-banking, you actually have plenty options to use your smartphone to pay.

Now just like Facebook has explained a gazillion times in their IPO documents, Media consumption is shifting massively from the web to mobile.

But this shift is way ahead of proper solutions to monetize the media as the mobile ad puzzle will remain incomplete as long as there’s no easy way to acquire a customer or perform a quick sale.

Bottom line, this market is amazing:

• Huge potential for progression
• New technical challenges (proper location-based campaign management at the web-scale has real technical challenges)

And although fortunes have already been done on the mobile ad market (such as the admob sale to google for 750M$ back in 2009) turns out they only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

iPad was revolutionnary … 2 years ago. We all marvelled about that piece of technology letting us consume digital media in a whole new different way.

2 generations later, I’m still in love with my iPad, love to read RSS on it or play chess… but I believe the iPad will never go beyond the media consumption paradigm. iOS which was one of its strength thanks to its ease-of-use is proving way too limiting to enable any actual work to be done on that device – which is a shame since this device is – at least in its latest revision – a computing monster.

In the meantime, Windows 8 is bridging the gap between tablets and computers at fast pace.

As you may know I can’t work with windows as it lacks a decent shell and I still don’t see why you need to use a mouse to do actions that require the precision of a command-line.

And yet – Windows 8 and the new generation of tablets it’s helping build are truly a leap forward from the standard set by Apple. One example is the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, rocking a i7 processor and 13″ 1600×900 IPS display, it’s both an ultrabook and a (big) tablet.

lenovo ideapad yoga

Featuring both a touch interface, with an elegant design (I kinda like the Metro UI/UX as I grew kinda tired of Apple’s skeuomorph thing) as well as en environment where productivity apps can work decently – I love being able to use Visual Studio 11 on a “tablet”, coming with or without a keyboard, it opens up this platform to the full class of usages that people may imagine for them – lifting away the media consumption-only limitation. 

windows 8 on samsung slate review 13

Moreover, it comes with an unusual openness (coming from Microsoft) to web standards as HTML5 apps are natively supported by the platform on an equal level as native c++/c# apps.

To me this evolution means only one thing : the time of Apple is coming to an end unless they manage to give a decent openness to their system and stop putting walls everywhere (Moutain Lion is a major step backward from that prospective).

I’ve been an iPad user since day one, and I believe tablets are way superior to laptops when it comes to consuming media. Watching a movie, reading a magazine (and accessing all the foreign magazines in a few seconds thanks to the newsstand…), reading newsfeed (I’m a lover of the reeder app), browsing the web…

Yet every time I tried using it as a creation tool it failed painfully. Creating keynote presentations, pages documents, writing code… all the usual stuff are still no good on that platform.  Every time I try using keynote the simplest operation which would be granted on a regular computer becomes a massive pain. The only thing that get actually easier is the “drawing” or “sketching” on apps such as Adobe ideas.

Apple launched yesterday its new iPad, featuring a retina display – and yet although I’m an Apple fanboy I’m left wondering why I should upgrade from my iPad. Will I be able to do more stuff ? Probably not. A few tech bumps (retina display, A5x) do sound appealing to a tech geek, and yet if those 10 last years have thought us something it’s that processin power or screen resolution do not create any new usage or experience.

I liked discovering yesterday the Android AIDE toolkit which enables to develop and compile android apps straight from an android device:

From my prospective that kind of tools are symptomatic of a healthy ecosystem where both creation and consumption can happen. Of course the experience is still very rough but that kind of trials will undoubtedly lead to some significant UX breakthrough in computing that will evolve touch-based devices from mere interactive screens to fully-functional computing platforms..

I got the opportunity to play with a WP7.5 phone a few days ago, and was pretty amazed by its progress.

‘ve been a believer since day one, and against all odds. I really think Microsoft is a real and serious player in the mobile OS war (as opposed to Palm, which despite the fact that they made a nice OS did not have the money to support it).

After playing with the latest 7.5 release, and notably with the Spotify app, I think it’s safe to say that WP7.5 is finally ready for prime time. Backgrounding works, the UI is smooth and responsive… Although the slide UI is a bit of a pain from a developer point of view (you have to rebuild/rethink your apps to match that experience) and the app store is still a bit empty because of that, I’m sure frameworks such as jquery mobile will soon support those kind of transitions.
Moreover I was surprised to see that finally the mobile IE is up to the task displaying html5/css3/js websites properly as their webkit couterparts already do.

I guess I’m going to give a close look at the Nokia Lumia tonight a the launch party!

Adobe has just posted on their official blog about their backing out of flash plugin on mobile. Here’s basically what they’re saying:

This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming andpremium video.

Adobe has been trying really hard with Flash for mobile since almost 10 years… unsuccessfully. Since the first version on Symbian to the latest plugin on Android phones it’s become clear that the market fragmentation, the cost to port and maintain the plugin on all those platforms and the fact that the adaptation of content is not really as good as it should lead to a really small market share… definitely not wort the investment apparently ! (Especially since the iPhone will remove out of reach for Adobe).

Recently they acquired  Nitobi the editors of Phonegap. Phonegap is in my opinion the absolute best solution for creating cross-platform mobile applications nowadays – and that’s what we are using for Diveboard. It provides deep device integration while relying on the power of html5/css (and the render engine of the built-in web browsers) to ensure and easy development and port of the applications. This is definitely good enough for many applications, although it will never be as good as native, the TCO of a Phonegap mobile app is way lower than that of a native cocoa app – plus it relies on skill that web developers already have.

Kudos to Adobe for their clear-sight analysis of the situation – must have been an complicated decision internally!

From the official Google Blog:Today in our New York City office, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, we gave a demo ofGoogle Wallet, an app that will make your phone your wallet. Youâ??ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC). Weâ??re field testing Google Wallet now and plan to release it soon.


Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.

Yesterday, Google announced the “Android Open Accessory Toolkit” and this announce got me really excited.

Source : Nielsen