Presenter - Daniel Appelquist – Vodafone
Reps Vodaphone at W3C and focuses on web standards
28.6% of US users using mobile browsers
Developers embracing HTML5
If you want to reach the broadest user base you should be focused on HTML 5
Touch web is growing like crazy at the moment
Things are great for the web on mobile but there are limits since you are in a sandbox. You cannot easily access device info, you need to be consistently connected, currently tricky as users need to find your app and access it. Still hard to monitize online web apps. All challenges are being worked on though.
Canvas and SVG are big parts of HTML 5 that will make web apps very interactive.
Android and iPhone are heavily supporting these right now and will continue to evolve (thanks to Webkit base). These are the reason you don't necessarily need Flash and can create rich interactive experiences.
W3C Widgets - allow you to package up web apps. These handle an install event and can essentially make your web apps work like native apps.
Widgets can be updated
Look at Apache Wookie Project
incubator.apache.orgNokia and Opera currently supporting widgets.
For now, use PhoneGap in order to widgetize webapps for iPhone. This is a legacy approach that should evolve over time.
PhoneGap allows you to build web applications and get them into the App store
APIs are sexy
GeoAPI - huge work has gone into this and is taking off. Google, Mozilla, Opera, MS all involved. Currently embedded in iPhone and Firefox and newest Android (2.0)
Allows you to get the users location from the browser context. Currently used by Google Maps, Gowalla, Flickr, etc.
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Location is the KEY to mobile at the moment.
Helps refine search and makes everything easier for the user
Lots more APIs in the works. Contact book, Calendar, File system, Audio/video, system info, tasks, app launcher, etc. All of these should extend functionality
Cannot overlook mobile device access and privacy
Users must remain in control. Consent to usage. Give notice when private data is being collected. Users also need to understand how long you will hold the info and what you will do with it. Can be extremely intrusive.
Lots of discussion going into this privacy stuff right now. Lots of info on betavine.net/location
Mobile developers should keep up on the W3C mobile app best practices. Lots of good info there.
AndreG
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