Audacity in communications

In March 2007 I told Senator Obama how much he was improving America’s image abroad – he replied that greater changes would come with his election -. Indeed most of the world applauded the president-elect and there was fascination on advanced communications that supported his campaign.

This post collects some information on innovative e-politics, infrastructure and policies for communications from this election campaign.

Innovations in e-politics
Internet adoption by Americans to get political information jumped to 40% of (compared to 31% in the 2004 campaign) as reported by a Pew research on a sample of 2,251 adults. Politicians and supporters could gained easy assistance to move on-line from groups like e-politics or the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Obama has been called "tech president," as democrats demonstrated better use of technology than republicans or previous presidential candidates as summarized by Sarah Lai Stirland in Wired
The Webwas the dominant media. Chris Hughes blogs about the future of My.BarackObama site. The site has 1.5 million accounts and this community created 35,000 local groups, hosted over 200,000 events.

Online video in particular stormed the stage: 35% of Americans have watched in absolute time (views * video length)around 15 million hours (Obama 14.5 McCain 0.5) including campaign commercials, debates, interviews, and speeches. David Burch of TubeMogul analyzed the value of this channel.

Social networks and blogs were used by up to 49% of online users: on Facebook and MySpace supporters had 3.6 million pages (Obama 3 McCain 0.6)

Mobile communications included SMS and downloaded applications. SMS alerts from short code 62262 (OBAMA) delivered messages such as this one

Less than a week until Election Day on Nov. 4th! Barack needs your help. REPLY to this msg with your 5 digit ZIP CODE for local Obama news and voting info

Barack Obama sent 3 million SMS to supporters to announce Senator Joe Biden choice for vice president (Mobile marketer). Similarly Rock the Vote, encouraged young people (18-29, 18% of electorate) to vote, using text-messaging campaigns to over 100,000 subscribers and called 13’000 on election day. The Obama campaign also set mobile web site at http://obamamobile.mobi or http://m.barackobama.com . The Mobile future coalition has recorded a panel discussing mobile impact of elections.

Online fundraising and advertising
This campaign broke records in both raising and spending money on media. Nearly 10% of internet users donated money online to candidates in 2008, compared to 3% in 2006, according to Pew Research. In 1999, MoveOn has been the pioneer in internet fundraising (MoveOn had 1 million making 370,000 donations totaling $88 million for Obama'08). In total Democrats raised a record-breaking $780 million in contributions from more than 3 million people, many of whom donated through the web. Republicans raised $340 million. [Federal Election Commission, September]

Obama's campaign spent $293 million on TV ads, according to TNS Media Intelligence. In addition $8 million was spent on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, news Web sites, ad networks, and in-game ad firm Massive. McCain spent $132 million on TV ads during the same period. (campaign spending in media was close to $500 million and 50% of the contributions).

Hopes for a better communication infrastructure

Despite the great shift to online campaign, some issues remain. Pew research noted that 60% of online Americans feel that the internet is a megaphone for extreme viewpoints and a source of misinformation. Responding to this rise of media on the Web, along with the decline of public trust, Newstrust recruited an online community of 8’000 news consumers, journalists, educators and students. They launched an election news hunt initiative in July to recommend the best coverage on the presidential elections, using community review tool.

How can the momentum be sustained beyond the campaign, for 40% of the electorate who went on-line? The technology engaged people to participate in volunteer groups and to organize off-line events that could support better government. But will this all stop when the funding and marketing efforts disappear ? The Obama web site promises to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens….Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (will it be Google’s CEO ?) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century.

About the competitive infrastructure, the programs focuses on net neutrality and spectrum expansion. Net neutrality through federal legislation will allow all applications, services and devices to operate on all access networks. It announces a review of competition in the wireless space and "smarter, more efficient and more imaginative use of spectrum” meaning the 700MHz auctions. Telecom employees had mixed feelings and contributed $3.5 million to Obama versus $4.1 million to McCain.

There are other good intentions to support innovation in communications. Obama's program promises to expand funding of broadband infrastructure to compare with Japan, South Korea and Finland. And Silicon Valley is likely to benefit from an increase of H-1B non-immigrant visas to recruit engineers and scientists. Tech employees seemed pleased and backed Obama in a 5:1 ratio donating $21 million ($1.5 million at the 20 largest Silicon Valley companies).

Many other blogs have been written on this topic. NewsFeedResearcher offers a consolidation of them.

Are magic phones getting closer ?

Advanced technology is like magic said Arthur Clarke, author of the novel 2001 Space Odyssey . This was echoed in Google’s video of young end-user needs. With so many technology innovations in 2008, mobile applications environments may look like magic. Among others : Apple iPhone and Appstore have been the talk of the town, Adobe’s Open screen project should enable more visual experiences (such as Flash in Brew), Google launch of Open Handset Alliance's Android and G1 phone introduces new players in the game, Nokia acquisition of Symbian and its release into the Symbian Foundation consolidates its importance, LiMo compliant devices have been released, lots of developments have occurred in the mobile browser area such as OMTP launched the BONDi project. How can we summarize this for developers of magic communication services ?

In this post I look at 3 levels of mobile software :
1. Mobile operating systems
2. Application execution environments and ODPs
3. Mobile browsers and widgets

To measure progress toward magic in the last 3 years, I also checked Tom Godber 2007 summary and Andreas Constantinou's 2006 report

Commoditization of operating systems
The fragmentation of platforms is the biggest problem for application developers. Ricardo Varella of Yahoo! summarized bluntly his frustration during September’s Mobile Monday London. This seems to consolidate slowly into 4 smartphone OS choices : Symbian, Windows, Linux, Mac OS. And the trend of royalty-free, open source licensing will help unleash more innovation (except on Microsoft platforms). Gartner estimates the following smartphone market share

Symbian 57%
Windows 12%
Linux 8%
Mac OS 3%
Other 20%

Symbian
The Symbian Foundation platform should soon become available under a royalty-free (Eclipse EPL) license. This will leverage the leading market share(200 million handsets, 235 models 5 OEMs, 4 million developers,9000 applications). Different user interfaces variants exist today, and a choice will have to be made in favor of S60 (Nokia, 60 million) but discarding UIQ (Motorola / Sony Ericsson, 6+ models) and MOAP-S (NTT DoCoMo/Fujitsu/Sharp/Mitsubishi). Nokia will also contribute the Qt UI framework from Qt Software (acquired from Trolltech in June. Ari Jaaksi's Blog provides a good discussion of the merit of the Symbian Foundation.

Windows Mobile
Licensable OS without consortium-contribution model, Windows CE kernel source code under shared source licenses. Windows Mobile 6 was released at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 and currently includes : .NET compact framework, ASP.NET mobile (renders markup on different mobile screens), Silverlight for mobile (leverages code for browser-based applications).

Linux
Android has attracted much of the publicity around mobile Linux, putting some of the more experienced suppliers under its shadow. Rich Miner presented Google’s Android and G1 at EmTech08 future of mobile panel in September, one day after the G1 launch : "platforms should be driven by human factors, created by creative software developers, using contemporary tools". Linux aplication platforms include :

Open Handset Alliance (Google's Android)
LiMo foundation has attracted more than 50 members and 23 commercially available phones.
Other linux mobile contributors include
Access
Azingo
Purple Labs leverages 1 billion browsers installed base (acquired from Openwave)
Wind River Systems (acquired MIZI Research)
MontaVista (Mobilinux, platform)
NTT DoCoMo (MOAP-L platform)
Nokia Maemo an open source product since 2005.

Fragmentation of application execution environments

At the AEE level with virtual machines and visual programming differences across devices, operators and other variants. Several suppliers announced this year their own ideas on how cross-devices should be implemented.

J2ME
Java ME is the market leading platform with over 2 billion handsets today and there is innovation announced for 2009 with a mobile edition of JavaFX allowing rich internet applications (RIAs). But device fragmentation remains and J2ME provides multiple configurations of Java virtual machines or profiles, such as the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 (MSA), the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.0 and 1.1, and the Connected Device Configuration (CDC). Applications need to target a specific profile, as profiles are assembled for a specific configuration and there are multiple implementation of JSR software libraries including :
Mobile User Interface Customization API for Java ME (JSR 258)
CDC 1.1 (JSR 218)
Foundation Profile 1.1 (JSR 219)
Personal Basis Profile 1.1 (JSR 217) JSR.
Some example of platforms include

Esmertec (Jbed JVM technology is implemented on more than 200 million units including Android platforms)
Aplix (JBlend is embedded on over 650 phone models)
XCE (mostly deployed in Asia)
Google Android JVM, called Dalvik, does not support JAD/J2ME directly but the J2ME MIDP RUNNER for SDK 1.0 allow running J2ME applications without code change.

Adobe Flash
Flash is a a clear favourite for designers and developers and is available on more than 500 million handsets (this is Gartner estimates, Adobe forecasts growth to 1 billion by 2009) and is. Adobe made news in May with by announcing the Open Screen Project. Together with 20 companies (excluding Apple, Google, and Microsoft) it will enable Flash and AIR runtime technology to be updated over the air on phones and mobile Internet devices. Adobe also skips licensing fees for devices and opens up the SWF, QVM, FLV/F4V specs (it does not make them open source) with FlashCast protocol and AIR players to follow. This includes the licences for video codec such as ON2, Sorenson, H.264, ACC and Nellymoser. The main benefit for developers is that Adobe supports a community-driven porting of the full platform. Apple iPhone remains an exception, apparently due to processor speed limitation as disclosed by Steve Jobs in March – though Adobe has a version available for iPhone emulators.

Microsoft Silverlight
Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash, and comes with great developer tools, even if it does not have the design community. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering RIA .NET based media experiences. Microsoft announced Silverlight for mobile will be available initially on Windows Mobile and Nokia S60. Recently at PDC 2008 Microsoft (Amit Chopra and Giorgio Sardo) demonstrated services that play media, handle gestures, animations and web services and leveraging Visual Studio SDK. Earlier in the year, Microsoft (Amit Chopra) announced the mobile plans at MIX 2008.

Qualcomm BREW
BREW (Binary runtime environment for wireless) runs on BREW RTOS with an installed base of 150 million CDMA handsets from 45 manufacturers. This year it added Flash support to the existing UiOne user interface and APIs for C/C++ and Java. It implements a transaction-based shared revenue business models, claiming 1 billion $ earnings by 2500 developers in 2007.

ODPs to hide fragmentation
On-device portals (ODPs) have progressed in recent years, leveraging mobile clients on AEEs or RIA technology, customized for accessing and interacting with content and information. ODPs typically improve visual user interfaces and response time with caching. But they still implement proprietary frameworks and require OTA download to multiple handsets as we wait for more ubiquitous AEEs or the emergence of mobile web technologies. Some examples include :

BlueStreak Technology MachBlue platform with APIs and SDK, for designing mobile multimedia content delivery.
Streamezzo delivers Universal Software Platform for delivering rich media mobile services on clients compatible with Windows Mobile, Symbian, Brew, Java, Linux, Android, and Apple’s proprietary iPhone O/S. It references 50 customers among mobile operators, handset manufacturers.
SurfKitchen is a full ODP suite for content download, Widget configuration, streaming media, event management
Action Engine ODP platform offers usability, strong OTA update and management, and advertising. Clients run on Java, BREW handsets.
Cibenix On-Device Portal (ODP), launched an idle screen-based dashboard for ONE in Austria
Tech Unified mPortal provides ODP clients for J2ME, Symbian

Innovative browsers environment ?
In 2008, the innovation trend converged towards browsers as mobile execution environment. Over 100 million mobile Ajax browsers have been shipped on smartphones like the iPhone and N95. Mobile browser-based applications leverage all fixed web developments such as client-side scripting and presentation : HTML, XHTML (WAP profiles), CSS, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest (AJAX), JavaScript extensions for handset APIs. This promises to bring the community of 25 million web developers to mobile.

Two early limitations of mobile browsers are starting to be addressed :
- Access to phone features : there are minimal and incompatible implementations of APIs available. OMTP Bondi initiative issued in August draft specifications for standard APIs that will gives a widget or website control of application invocation, camera, call log, location, storage, messaging, PIM, device status, user interaction this is complemented by a framework for stronger policy and security. OMTP expects compatible handsets to be available in 2009.
- Network limitations : REST/XHTML are heavy protocols not optimized for low bandwidth and error-prone radio network. Proxy based browsers (such as Opera Mini, UCWEB, TeaShark) attempt to optimize network traffic using a network-based proxy server to compresses pages and interactions received by a thin client browser.
Browser platform examples include :

S60Webkit a webkit opensource browser ported to Symbian OS release 3 (S60) by Nokia
Opera Mobile 9.5 has been installed on 100 million phones complemented by Opera Mini (proxy based) and Opera and an SDK.
Teleca offers Obigo for Symbian, Windows, Linux complemented by messaging applications
Access offers NetFront mobile browser (300 million installed in embedded devices)
Mozilla mobile Firefox is available for Windows mobile and Linux platforms.
Safari a webkit opensource browser ported to Mac OS X by Apple
UCWEB Technology UCWEB, Version 6 is popular in China with 11 million downloads
TeaShark a free browser

Mobile widgets
Widgets (window gadgets) offer the most innovative application environments for handsets. Defined in W3C widget 1.0 , Widgets are client-side web application for displaying and updating local or remote data, packaged in a way to allow a download and installation on a client machine or device. Widgets typically run as stand alone applications outside of a web browser (on the idle screen or as other applications). Typical examples are accessories (calendar, address book), information services (weather), they are displayed on menus or icons or the idle screen. Widgets are developed using web technology including HTTP 1.1, SVG, XMLHttpRequest, HTML4, ECMAScript, CSS21. John Puterbaugh provides more comments on mobile widgets on his post Some of the popular environments and libraries include :

WidSets mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME, SDK (XML, CSS, Helium), by Nokia in 2006
Bluepulse mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME
Yahoo! http://mobile.yahoo.com/gallery mobile runtime for Yahoo! Go 3.0, iPhone, Windows Mobile device, Nokia S60, Blueprint SDK (XML, server-side PHP, JavaSscript).
Opera Widgets
Bling Software http://www.blingsoftware.com, AJAX mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME and BREW.
Webwag mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME, SDK (XML, CSS, Helium), APIs
Zumobi widgets with zoom-space user interface for Windows Mobile and RIM, spun out of Microsoft
Joemoby WidX mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME, compliant with the W3C draft specifications
Bicon over 7000 widgets for RSS feeds, Web searches, microbloging, advertising
Mywidz (beta version) mobile widget editor and community services for end-users
Celltop mobile client framework based on widgets, includes personalized content, messaging, unique design of two rotating cells.