Personally Mobile widgets are an area I have always struggled to understand. Previous attempts in this area such as Nokia Widsets have been so unusable it was hard to see what the fuss was about.
However, after Mobile Monday London this week I am beginning to see the light...
Here are my notes:
Nick Allot - OMTP BONDI
I've seen Nick speak before at MoMo and he does a great job of making a standards body sound exciting - bringing a lot of enthusiasm to his role in trying to create a standard for mobile widgets.
- BONDI initiative started because realised there were 20 different companies working on mobile widgets with no standard approach
- Bondi is a set of runtimes/ standards to create a glue between web and phone
- examples of widgets might be qutie simple stuff like contact or calendar sync or picture uploading - not necessarily complex things...
- Just launched developer area at http://bondi.omtp.org - where you can download specs, give feedback, addd to the Wiki and so on
- there's also a widget gallery at http://bondi.omtp.org/widget
Samuel Sweet - Ikivo
Very slick presentation from Samuel and some interesting stuff about an actual widget platform deployment - really brought the whole area to life.
- mobile widget platform deployed for SK Telekom on the Samsung T Omnio device
- enabled better UI (e.g. task switcher) - "abstracting" Windows Mobile to improve its interface
- another example a clock on the screensaver linked to live time and weather feeds
- one of SK Telekom's most successful devices with 300% sales uplfit
- providing "an Apple iphone experience on non-apple products"
- announced reference implementation of the W3C widget spec
- also going to support BONDI standards
Christian Sejersen - Mozilla
Mobile Monday really attracts great speakers and to get the inside track on Firefox mobile from Christian was brilliant.
- mobile browser codenamed Fennec now launched in alpha
- targeting Linux, Windows Mobile and Symbian NOT iphone (licensing restrictions), android (would have to be a java app), Blackberry (java-based OS) or Palm (because they are Palm!)
- Firefox and Fennec have same code base, full API compatiblity across web and mobile
- Add-ons will be supported - already have 6 add-ons developed after 2 days, now after a month 20-30 available!
Panel Discussion
- developers are key to all mobile widget initiatives
- strongest driver of standardisation is content, economic pressures - if users demand compelling apps across platforms this will happen
- mobile widgets are "putting the web in new places" e.g. in operating systems, out of browser
- key benefit will be to drive mobile internet usage and take-up
That's it. The big take-away for me was that "mobile widgets" could be a major content/ service category for mobile over the next few years - similar to the scale of something like ringtones or wallpapers - exciting times and lots of opportunities in mobile...
More coverage here
http://www.puddingrelations.com/mobile-monday-tuesday/
http://duncan-cragg.org/blog/post/mobile-widgets-arent-mobile-web/
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=2b8de49a-29d5-4382-abfb-58baab72b717)
We do both have a common thing.Guess?what?like you i always face problem to know widgets.Anyway it's agr8 sharing.Thanks.
Posted by: Pietig | 02/14/2009 at 06:52 AM