I came across a press release today stating that IBM will be spending $100 million on mobile research over the next five years.

IBM is concentrating on…

"millions of people who have bypassed using the personal computer as their primary method of accessing the Internet"

Here are the areas that IBM think could benefit from more research…

• Analytics
• Security
• Privacy
• User interface
• Navigation

IBM, by it’s very nature, will be concentrating mainly, but not exclusively, on the Enterprise. The Enterprise is an area that I consider is under-served at the moment and an area of great opportunity.

Related Articles:

• Strategic Mobile Technologies Through 2010
• Mobile Business Applications
• Enterprise Email
• Orange Mobile Data Forum

If you follow my blog you will know I was disappointed with S60 5th Touch. Nokia has always stated that S60 5th was never intended to compete with the iPhone. I can see why because touch bolted onto S60 was never going to be elegant.

Nevertheless, the price point for the 5800 has been very attractive, particularly here in the UK, although the Comes with Music variant has been spectacularly unsuccessful.

I met Scott Weiss the new User Interface Technology Manager for Symbian Foundation at a mobile event earlier this month. He said S60 5th is considered an interim touch solution.

Symbian plans state that the Symbian^4 release will include a Qt extension called Orbit that will replace the existing Avkon UI library of the Symbian…

"A new “Orbit” extension library for Qt, which contains more than 50 widgets tailored for mobile user experience, and which will provide a replacement for the existing “Avkon” widget set; A new “Direct UI” interaction and navigation logic, combined with finger-optimised layouts offering excellent touch and hybrid-device user experience"

Meanwhile, Scott is championing the idea of an additional new non-touch UI and a XML-based alternative to Nokia’s Orbit and DirectUI.

I am curious how deep Nokia will go with Qt. It seems that Nokia will be heavily relying on Qt to simplify development and provide for improved mobile user experience. Will Qt really give developers enough (API) control to allow them to forego the Symbian API for the majority of applications?

If the existing Avkon UI library is removed, this will imply a binary break for existing Symbian applications. Conversely, if the Avkon UI library isn’t removed, the Symbian OS will have multiple UI personalities and become confusing for the end-user. It’s a tough call.

Krzysztof Choma, who I worked with while I was contracting at Symbian, provides a great summary of Orbit and DirectUI vs Avkon on on his blog.

Novarra have a ‘Mobile Internet Experience Update’ (PDF) available today.

Here are some key points…

• Mobile internet, first marketed a decade ago, is truly becoming mainstream.
• Young adults with disposable income and multitasking parents make up 66% of the mobile browing population.
• A user doesn’t need to have a smartphone to be a high volume mobile internet user.
• There’s a long tail of sites. Novarra usage data shows that the top site typically accounts for about five percent of total page views.
• Mobile web is often used even when there is a PC available
• 40 percent of mobile internet sessions are under five minutes, 40 percent are over 15 minutes.
  
  

Today, Google announced their beta Adsense for Mobile Applications. This allows developers to embed advertisements within Android and iPhone applications. In order to be accepted for the beta you will need to be able to provide a minimum of 100K daily page views, have a free application, able to implement now with a view to going live in 4 weeks and be able to participate for at least 3 months.

Incidentally, a Reuters interview with Microsoft published today states that Microsoft expect "Mobile phone advertising will account for 5-10 percent of global media ad spending within five years".

So what kind of advertising might this be? First Partner happened to also release their mobile advertising forecast today. They expect mobile advertising to be worth in excess of €950 million in Western Europe by 2013. First Partner expect that the most dominant revenue stream will continue to be mobile internet search with applications making up less than 10% of the mobile advertising total revenue by 2013.

There’s an interesting post by the author of BlackBerry PodTrapper. While it relates the author’s experiences developing an application for Blackberry, most of the issues and learnings are equally as applicable to other mobile platforms. For example…

• On older platforms, deciding on an SDK version is often a compromise and balance between features and device compatibility
• The need to be constantly concious of memory use
• The problems of devising a workable copy protection
• The importance of marketing
• The power of the new application stores
• Talking to your end customers is valuable

The newly released Ericsson Labs offers mobile developers some useful resources. At the moment they provide mapping, Java Comms and Mobile Java push APIs for mobile developers.

Ericsson Labs specifically contacted me about their Java Mobile Push because this relates to my previous post on mobile push. It’s a combination of SMS and HTTP to allow latest information or files to be sent to phones without the need to poll for updates. The main advantage of this implementation is its ease of use.

I assume Ericsson’s implementation uses the Java ME push registry. Ericsson abstracts away the complexities of this and provides a web interface to administer the pushing of content.

If you are interested in developing femtocell-based mobile applications there’s a free evening event organised by the Femto Forum on June 23rd at the Radisson Edwardian Heathrow…

"The event will feature a series of live demonstrations of new mobile applications that take advantage of femtocell technology. Examples include; when a consumer enters the home their phone could automatically trigger an application which displays personalised reminders from family members, uploads their photos to their PC or downloads their favourite catch-up TV/podcasts."

The informal demo session between 6pm-8pm is open to mobile application developers (free of charge) as well as operators. They are keen to get developers along so that they can get feedback on what’s needed in order to start building applications that use the features of femtocells (APIs etc).

The event costs nothing and they will be putting on some drinks. More details, including registration, can be found on the event web site.