Blog by Paul Golding

Pipe = something that value flows through.

In the UK, it is difficult to miss the latest marketing venture by Walkers Crisps, especially if you're a crisp lover, as I am. Walkers held a fantastic competition to get crisp eaters to suggest new flavours. The winner gets his or her flavour on the shelves and a slice of the potato, as in the profits. User generated crisps!

If there's ONE book that you need to read to provoke ideas about how an operator might rethink its business, then it's "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis.

Recently I've been consulting for a mobile ads start-up, including requirements and wire-framing for their entire site. As always, I looked for techniques that enabled me to 'go digital early,' This means:

In the old telco model, the switch was everything - the heart of the system. In the current MNO model, it's still the heart of the network, but then there's also the SMSC, although these are gradually being replaced by SMS 'edge' routers for most P2P traffic. That said, the MNO probably places most emphasis on the billing system! It's possibly the real heart of the operation.

However, these are switching models, not connecting models. They are ignorant of the content and any emotional and human value associated with the content and the need to switch in the first place - i.e. to connect. And they are not open systems. They are not platforms.

The future is open distributed platforms - using the network as a means to connect and make transactions, the value being in those connections, not the pipes underneath.

What's your open platform strategy? Should it be something like Alpha One release of ExperiaSphere from CIMI Corp? At the heart of their open system is the Social Framework - SocioPATH. Not a switch, but a socially-aware connection framework in the services layer.

These guys seem to get it.

There's been lots of news coverage about MWC, so I won't repeat what's been widely reported. I'll focus on my favourite moments and picks in terms of people and products.

I wish I could say that there was a certain buzz in the wings, among the crowds, but there wasn't. Nothing shone as the talk of the show, on track or off track. The crowds seemed light to me. Apparently, attendance was down from last year. The recession is taking its toll. Nonetheless, stands and fold were cheery and bright. Optimism was the dominant mood.

Of course, lots of touch screens and smart phones flooded the floors. No Apple of course, but then they turn up by proxy - their influence was felt everywhere. Lots of imitation devices, lots of talk about app stores and barely a presentation that didn't mention iPhone, despite the complaint of one irate member of the audience - "it's only 1% of the world's phones." And I'm sure that Google was once only 1% of the world's search traffic.

And, talking of Google and 1%, there was only one new Android phone, But that doesn't mean a thing - it's just timing. We all know that there are plenty of Android projects in the design rooms. Anyone who doubts the influence Android is having and will have on the market is deluded.

So, what were my moments?

For interesting platform moment - that came from Yahoo...

I had a great chat with my old mobilist friend Alex Linde from Yahoo about Blueprint, which he thoroughly plugged in the Developer Garage track, which was an otherwise moribund affair - but I'll get to that. Blueprint is now out of the Yahoo box, meaning that any developer can use the platform to deliver their own mobile apps across a wide range of devices outside of the Yahoo properties. Blueprint was developed in-house. One Search is written in Blueprint, which is YAML (Yet Another Mark-up Language) built on XForms. Version 2.0 was due for announcement at the show and promises a lot of new features, including iPhone (via static libraries) and Blackberry support.

Yes - we know that we all want open standards, like W3C widgets, BONDI, and so on, but as Alex said on the stage, some of us need a solution that works today on today's handsets. Anyhow, he promised me that I'd get access to the closed 2.0 beta. I hope to report on its features in due course.

I have blogged about the middleware idea as far back as 2001 when I suggested that operators should host middleware for developers, I think at the time I suggested Volantis. This is what Yahoo is now doing and it's worthy of attention because it follows the distributed platform model [e.g. Read Jarvis] that operators need to understand and embrace. And this is coming from Yahoo, considered by many to be an 'old-school' media company in this new-media age.

For interesting mobile-ads moment, that came from Gigafone...

Mobile ad solutions were in abundance at the show. Not much new here - there are only so many ways that ads can be delivered via mobiles, and I've probably written about most of them over the years. In fact, I invented some of them! I did apply for location based ads patent as far back as 1992, dismissed by my then employer Motorola as 'not core to our business.'

The real issue is about the business model and the ongoing debate and uncertainty about the basic unit of advertising monetization. As we know, what matters is conversion and it is here that Gigafone shines, not only because of their solution design but because of their intrepid spokesperson, Andrew Grill, a force in the mobile ads debate. He also talked Trutap into giving away 3 cuddly bears for my kids, so I love him anyway :)

For interesting mobile browser moment, that came from Raj Singh of Skyfire...

Raj Singh is an engine of enthusiasm for mobile, especially browsing. Like myself, he's lived through the entire mobile browsing experience since the days of HDML. As crap as those early browsers were, there's no denying the excitement we felt back then when our mobiles (or more like the UP SDK) could suddenly interact with web servers. How far we've come, including the polished Skyfire browser. With Raj, I love drilling into the analytics that Skyfire has, courtesy of the way Skyfire proxy (Firefox) sits in the cloud. They even track where he user zooms on a page. How cool is that. But the think I love about Skyfire is the business model. Skyfire are attempting to monetize via search, following an Internet model and NOT the more traditional OEM model.

I shall be at MWC from Saturday, leaving Wednesday AM. Looking forward to meeting some of you. For open networking, I shall be popping by the following 'fringe' events:

PhoneFinger from Wonderwarp is a useful utility tool for iPhone developers, allowing them to simulate the finger operation, but on the desktop during development.

As my forthcoming e-book says: "GO DIGITAL EARLY" - this is my motto. It means get as much of your thinking, work and project data into a digital, shareable and collaborative form as early as possible. It actually saves you time and makes you money, especially as an indie worker like myself.

Here are five suggestions for collaborative tools to go digital early in your web projects:

1 - Gliffy - diagramming software 'for the rest of us' - think of this as a low cost (free version available) and easier to use version of Visio - a versatile alround drawing tool. For web projects, it has UI tools for drawing wireframes and all the usual UML constructs for those who want to get deep and dirty with requirements modelling. Thanks Bryan Rieger for the intro to this tool.

2 - Jump Chart - 'nice and tidy website planning' is the promise. This is getting more sophisticated and even more agile than just drawing wireframes (as in Gliffy). It allows a real mock-up to be built allowing clients to actually click-through and navigate the site before you've programmed a lick, or should that be click? It also enables all the content to be uploaded and organised, such as images. Get all the approvals you need and then export the project to clean CSS/XHTML.

3 - Proto Share - This goes one step further than Jumpchart because not only does it provide clickable wireframes, but it supports team collaboration (creative review) within the same environment - discussions, comments and annotations, all supported with email alerts.

4 - Proto Notes - You've done your first real prototype. Now you need to get feedback. Anyone who's reviewed any kind of creative work knows the problem - how to describe what changes are required - and where! "Home page - top left - leading paragraph...." It isn't easy. The obvious solution is to add notes directly to the work. With just a tiny squirt of Javascript goodness, Protonotes provides a comments overlay on any website. Great idea!

5 - Dim Dim - You're still going back and forth with the client, talking about architecture, project ideas, web pages and so on. You want to do this online quickly and easily. Of course, you need web conferencing that works - and this is the promised of Dimdim. Go check it out. Thanks to Celso Pinto for pointing me to this cool tool.

HAVE FUN! Let me know which ones work for you or if you have any similar recommendations.

On a recent course I held - and in my book - I describe the principles of 2D games programming for mobiles using sprite-based graphics, layers, textures and so on. It is a feature of the Games API on MIDP 2.0 and also of OpenGL ES for iPhone.