The (paraphrased) ‘one-url-for-one-document’ mantra is great when the web is one of essentially immutable documents.

But isn’t it time to bust through this assumption? – as we (and even consumers) start to think of the web as being more one of apps? One which should flex and adapt to give the user the best experience (by which I include content, functionality as well as user interface and pixels) possible, given everything we can divine about the human using it?

If an application is to provide the service that its user needs, the more clues about what that human is doing the better. If they are using a mobile device, there’s already a big clue about what that user’s state might be. I’m intrigued by things like Nokia’s Situations project too, as it permits more insight into what the user is doing, where they are, and what state of mind they’re in. Imagine how you might be able to optimize a web experience – to the human – given such clues!

So as you can tell, I’m excited about this. A far more fluid web that is truly responsive like this. Responsive to human context (in all its possible forms) and not just the temporary challenge of smaller numbers of pixels. It’s not that I’m not a fan of RWD – just that it’s far too superficial to help move the web to this higher plane.

However, I also still believe in ‘thematic consistency’, by which the W3C means that the same URL should get you to the same content. BUT that is not the same as saying that the same users actually want to use the same content or that web providers want to give it to them.

In practical terms, this might mean promoting or demoting certain types of content that the designer thinks are more or less useful for users known to be in the mobile context. (I’ve talked about promoting ‘contact us’ from the conventional end-of-secondary-menu to front-and-foremost on mobile sites, for example.)

But why not create entirely separate services? I certainly don’t find it condescending when a user-interface designer has thought about what I actually want to do in a given context. More likely I’ll be thrilled.

And by the way, with this point of view, separate URLs or domains are entirely consistent: “we don’t mind which device you actually use, but you should be aware that the content on our mobile URL is better suited to humans on the move”.

Finally I should add that this is really nothing more controversial than using country-code top level domains. The reason there is an amazon.co.uk is because users in the ‘UK context’ want (or need to be given) different content and functionality. No-one ever complains about detecting IP ranges to encourage users from different countries to go to the best service for their likely location.

I’m a proud citizen of Mobile Web country

We just launched v1.1, compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Download it, read the changelog, read about the features in full, or even join the team.

The plugin includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit the site or write new posts when out and about.

Features include:

• Mobile switcher to detect mobile visitors and provide an appropriate experience
• Base mobile theme for quick-and-easy XHTML-MP compliance
• Extended mobile themes so you can unleash your mobile creativity
• Transcoding and device adaptation to optimise the mobile experience
• DeviceAtlas integration for world-class adaptation
• Mobile admin panel for when posts can’t wait
• Mobile ad widget to make you some money
• Barcode widget to help users bookmark your blog

I have a lot of fun writing this plugin and there’s a bunch of cool ideas we have for the future. Check out the Assembla project to see the work as it happens – and maybe toss us some new ideas too.

It’s always a work in progress, but thousands of users seem happy enough so far. See what you think…

After much deliberation, we figured that it wouldn’t really be possible to continue my current role of CTO. As well as the traditional CTO-like activities (evangelism, slideshows, strategy, whiteboard death-match), I’ve also been leading the, now quite large, development team at dotMobi. Doing that properly needs someone nearby, and not offset by five-and-a-half hours. So the CTO (aka VP Technology) role is now in the hands of a very able replacement – there’s certainly a world-class team to continue the good work in Dublin.

But the good news is that I’ll still be involved with dotMobi, despite my geographic and temporal displacement. I’ll be consulting for the company as VP Emerging Technologies – which makes me a sort of a one-man research team. I’ll be slightly decoupled from the engineering activities of course – but, because there are still lots of innovative things that the company needs to do, I can make the most of my slightly remote perspective by pushing those inventions forward.

There are a couple of things I’ve got in mind. Firstly, I’d like to to help understand how dotMobi’s existing tools can be better used. I’ve got a DeviceAtlas WordPress plugin up my sleeve, for example – and I think there’s lots more we can do to make that platform easier to use in familiar runtime environments. We’d like to push DeviceAtlas further in the area of AJAX and CSS support. I expect I’ll rattle off a few posts for mobiForge. And I expect I’ll also be chipping in some ideas for Instant Mobilizer.

Although it will be a change not to be in the office every day, bouncing thoughts off everyone else, I think I’ll be very able to see these projects through without too much day-to-day distraction. Of course we’re a heavily connected team, so (Indian broadband permitting) I’ll still be able to stay in touch via Skype, email, Twitter and so on.

Co-incidentally, I’m pleased with the word ‘emerging’ in my role as I think will be wholly appropriate for my locale. We’ll be in a place called Nashik, a few hundred miles north-east of Mumbai. It’s small enough not to appear on most maps, but it’s got a population of 1.5 million or so. India of course, is emerging as both an economic and mobile phenomenon, both in the cities and rurally, and I think I’ll be well placed to watch these developments unfold.

What do I mean by by mobile phenomenon? Well I don’t know what that means on the ground yet – but I do know the country’s been gaining something like 10 million new subscribers a month. (That’s the population of Dublin every, um, working day). As well as the staggering numbers involved, I fully expect to discover that these millions of newly-connected mobile users are using the medium in exciting new ways. And surely many of them won’t already own a PC: so mobile web usage is undoubtedly going to feature heavily.

But I don’t really want to say too much about what I think I will see and experience – I know it’s going to be a huge adventure, but I also know that most of my assumptions (whether about the local mobile market or India in general) will be wrong. I’ve been a few times on holiday, but this is an altogether different kettle of fish, so I’m going with an entirely open mind. My Twitter account and blog are a blank canvas upon which I will try to describe what I see, smell and observe once I get there. (I’ll endeavor to keep a regular ‘mobile letter from India’ going).

Anyway, all in all, it’s daunting, but the situation looks like it will work out well. I’ll be spending more and more time researching some of the technical challenges that face the company – and the mobile industry as a whole – and hopefully coming up with some innovative solutions and neat technology. I’ll be able to see, first hand, a completely different side to the evolution of mobile communication, and I’m looking forward to blowing some of my Western preconceptions out of the water. Finally, of course, I’m hoping this will be a great experience for my children – who, after all, will consider India to be one of the major world economies when they are my age.

So, as of next week, good bye Europe (for a little while) and stay tuned!

I’m making a big deal of this because, as of Thursday, I won’t be CTO at dotMobi. My wife Jayne, has landed a marketing job at a vineyard near Mumbai in India, and both of us, together with our two young children, are emigrating to live there.

Everything changes. So humour me. Rather than endless industry predictions you’ve been reading everywhere else this week, I’m going to indulge myself in a retrospective.

In my next post I’ll talk about what’s happening next. (Clue though: I’m not leaving the company!)

dotMobi was a fairly different place when I joined two years ago. The .mobi domain name had recently gone on sale, the company was focussed on being a domain registry, and most of the company’s technical capabilities were outsourced. But not entirely. Ronan and Ruadhan, who were both incumbent technologists when I arrived, had already started developing early versions of the developer community and the ready.mobi test tool. And through the work of Jo Rabin, the company was keenly supporting the mobile work of the W3C too. The seeds had been sown for the organisation to be able to play an important role in the mobile world – as well as for the domain community – and that’s why I took the job. During my two years, I’d like to think we stayed true to those ambitions.

Looking back, I spent relatively little time on the domain registry business per se – when I did it was mostly evangelism, blogging, and a bit of data mining. Of course we like to articulate why a mobile URL or domain is important if you want to let your users choose their experience via their address bar, and how you can use such a trustworthy mobile domain in conjunction with your existing web properties.

But dotMobi has other missions. For example, we want to help designers, web developers, marketeers, and businesses appreciate the potential of the mobile web as a whole. I’m passionate about the role that mobile will play in our on-line lives of the future, but I also recognise that someone’s got to actually build it. Given my recent career, it was natural that that agenda would shine through – and that’s been a large part of my work. With its highly reputable investors (not to mention a decent cashflow from the domain name business), the company’s uniquely placed to offer assistance to mobile developers and other companies throughout the ecosystem. It’s able to solve some nasty problems that would be unrewarding for, say, a more financially-backed company to undertake.

The hassle of mobile handset diversity, for example, is a huge pothole in the mobile web superhighway. We felt dotMobi had an obligation to help fill it in for the good of all the travellers on such a road. And so was born DeviceAtlas: designed to become the world’s leading database of mobile device information. I was lucky enough to be able to recruit WURFL founder Andrea Trasatti to the team in the summer of 2007, and convince him that dotMobi was the place to build such a thing. We launched just over 6 months later, and, although it’s a work in progress of course, we’re thrilled by what the team have created so far. (I still suspect it might end up being what we are all remembered for in years to come).

ready.mobi has also changed hugely in the last two years. It’s gone from being a fun little mobile rating tool to becoming an important part of many mobile developers’ toolkits. We’re supporting thousands of testers every day from around the world who are committed to producing quality mobile sites. With full site testing now available, and the recent release of a machine API, it’s never stood still. It remains the tool that many people know dotMobi for most.

The jewel in dotMobi’s crown is undoubtedly its developer community mobiForge (nee dev.mobi). Well over 20,000 developers regularly turn to the site for a stream of high quality material about the state of the mobile development world. Editor Ruadhan, together with all the team members and authors who contribute, deserve the credit for this. (I merely pull a few levers and press a few buttons behind the scenes; plus the occasional article). Sister site mobiThinking is also starting to make real strides.

In 2007, one of our major, if left-field, projects was find.mobi. At that time, we thought that mobile search was really an unsolved problem and that a lot of traditional search companies didn’t really understand mobile – and what mobile users want. (Hint: it’s not mangled PC web sites). Since we had to crawl an awful lot of .mobi sites for compliance reasons anyway, we started crawling other top-level domain sites as well, looking for made-for-mobile sites to flesh out a contextually-targetted directory and search service.

The technology is clever and at the time the UI was pretty unique: as an experiment it was very worthwhile. Not surprisingly, we weren’t able to give it the love and care it needed for a consumer launch. Also, incumbent services have improved since then. But… well, I still think mobile search is unfinished business: there are still some exciting possibilities being explored for the find.mobi technology.

Another technical excitement this year was the purchase of Mowser from Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl. They’ve moved on to other things now, but the Dublin engineering team have been pouring effort into its reincarnation, dubbed ‘Instant Mobilizer’. Yes, it’s a transcoder that takes non-mobile content and adjusts the syntax to better suit a mobile device, but it comes with a few twists.

Firstly, it’s an opt-in service: small businesses for example can subscribe to the service instead of having a new site built for themselves. Secondly, we don’t just perform markup gymnastics to hack a site to pieces: we also enhance pages with additional services that might be useful for mobile users. Thirdly, we don’t think that transcoding non-mobile sites is a particularly satisfactory end-game for the industry anyway. This, if you like, is a taster service that can open businesses’ eyes to the possibilities of mobile – but one which, if it does its job well, will help to promote the advantages of building mobile services properly subsequently.

Anyway, Ronan’s been leading that project, and it’s due for a launch in the New Year, so I’m not particularly due any credit! But it’s very neat, and keep an eye open for it in months to come.

I’ve had a fantastic couple of years living in Dublin. The city’s been warm and welcoming to both me and my family. Professionally, the city has been a great base for the company. Although it’s been hard hiring world class people, we’ve always made that a non-compromisable priority – and I’m really happy with the large, talented team of mobile-centric engineers that we’ve cultured. Outside of the technical team too, there’s a great team of people at dotMobi overall. It’s always been a pleasure to work with smart, international colleagues from across all the disciplines: Neil, Trey, Paul, Amy, Norbert, Vance – and many, many others.

The last two years have seen dotMobi play a more mature, supportive role within the mobile industry, and it has broadened its brief from domain names to many other, perhaps more altruistic, activities. I won’t ever be able to say that the mobile web has taken off because of us, or because of the small part I personally played – but I certainly know that when it comes to mobile, I’ve been in the most exciting place at the most exciting time.

In the next post, a bit more about the next chapter of our lives.

But just an update on some things going on here. Firstly my movements, recently and soon:

• Mobile World Congress, Barcelona (it was OK)
• SXSW, Austin (not much mobile zeitgeist, and I felt old)
• A family skiing holiday (amazing snow for late March)
• CTIA in Las Vegas (my favourite city, ahem… but Mobile Jam will be cool)
• WWW2008 in Beijing (4 years since I was there last – will I recognise it?)
• MoMo Summit in Malaysia (2 years, but ditto)

There’s certainly no shortage of mobile-related shows on at at the moment. Plenty of gigs containing the words “mobile”, “web”, “2.0″ again this year. I think there are another two Spring events in London that I’ve missed from my list – and after all that I know I’m still, sadly, missing another sponsoree, Over The Air.

Secondly, things going on at dotMobi and elsewhere:

• DeviceAtlas (launched last month, roaring success, 1,000 users already, yes I wrote some of the code)
• Find.mobi (none of my code! but try flight codes and currency questions…)
• Dev.mobi (going from strength to strength…. 10,000 users)
• http://447867554666.mobi/ (and similar… interesting idea, no?)
• MetaJam (already paying some of the household bills; thanks AdMob!)
• HotTwit (a bit of malformed fun; probably could do more with it)
• IvyRoot (not even ready for prime-time on my own brain yet)
• Erlang (a solution looking for me to find a problem for)

So, I guess this blog post is sort of an almanac of what’s going on in my life, circa Q1 2008.

If you’re at any of the upcoming events above, I’ll see you soon. If you have any comments on these various projects, let me know

And on the European side, Andrea is doing Barcelona, where the subject is mobile travel. Also set to be a great evening.

If you’re going to either, one of us will see you there  

Yes, yours truly has the dubious honour of having made Pseud’s Corner.

For those of you not familiar with the aforementioned organ, Private Eye is a satirical UK magazine that has a regular spot where outrageous quotes from the pretentious and precocious are paraded. Authors, actors, art critics and such like.

This week, a mobile CTO!Seems the editors look a shine to my Mobile Monday Barcelona introduction.

OK, so maybe it was a little heavy on the rhetoric, but still… I get to share this (perhaps dubious) honour with Fay Weldon, Ozwald Boateng and A.A. Gill – so it can’t be entirely bad.

Featuring…

• A variety of development tools (Eclipse, Visual Studio, MySQL, Wireshark, FTP, SCP, JMeter scripts, a JSON parser)
• The Android SDK
• Portions of a mobile web book I am writing
• Slideware for various products  & projects
• Domain analysis results
• An Ubuntu ISO image and an Apache install
• An OPML file of mobile blogs
• My registration form for MWC
• A JPG helpfully named “graph”
• A bunch of browsers
• The hiring plan for my team
• MetaWeb Query Language documentation
• Mobile Monday Dublin’s Peer Awards application forms
• Two mysterious text files called “yes” and “no” (?!)
• Some social network clients
• Something to listen to
• Armadillo Run
• …and a folder named “temp” – where all this rubbish is shortly headed.

Yes, that pretty much sums up the last 3 months of my life. What’s on your desktop – and why?

There’s a lot going on at the the Mobile World Congress, and of course there are lots of sub-markets and sub-industries being represented. But the thrust of the show is pure telecoms. Device and infrastructure vendors trying to wow network operators.

Everything else (in particular, hall 7, complete with porn and prayer room) is really just a side show. However important you think content provision are, you can guarantee the telecoms world doesn’t.

So, on that basis, the show was rather disappointing.

If the handsets launched were supposed to be some sort of comeback, then Cupertino will sleep easily. That side of the show was dominated by one company – who didn’t even turn up – and I thought everything else was utterly underwhelming. (At most I might see myself with an X1)

And on the network side, I’ve rather lost track. The acronyms are getting farcical. Too long for me to remember which ones are which, and which ones are actually synonyms for something else. So forgive my naive conclusion that there was little news there either.

In previous years, the implicit message from GSM was “We are the Masters of the Universe”. This year, there’s nervousness. This is an industry that knows it is about to be disrupted, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it.

On a personal note, the show was most notable for the number of virtual folks I finally got to meet: James Whatley gets special thanks for finding me a personal mobby. After days of being locked in with analysts and journalists, it was nice to come out blinking into the sun and meet people who speak my language

I hope it´s not to precocious to post the conent of a three minute speech! As it happened I deviated a fair deal, but the spirit was about right.

——–

Hello Barcelona. And welcome to you all.

We have an amazing afternoon ahead of ourselves. An amazing venue. An amazing city. An amazing organisation team, and of course amazing people. You know, this is not Mobile Monday Barcelona. This is Mobile Monday The World.

I feel honoured to have the chance to welcome you all today. To see such a talented collection of individuals in one room together – all under the banner of mobility – is truly exciting to me. Somehow I feel we are coming of age.

It is so easy to forget what the mobile industry is all about. Yes, its economics are very enticing. Yes, its trade shows are awe-inspiring. And of course the technology is always mind-blowing!

But it’s not really about any of those things. Our industry is about something else. About communication. And communication is about people, human beings. You might call them “users”, “subscribers”, “audiences”, or “eyeballs”. But they are human beings.

In fact you could say that the mobile world is the ultimate social network. One day it will be the size of the entire species. A vast and intelligent network of human beings. Our fellow human beings, wherever in the world they are.

And I have no doubt that that mobile environment must be used for good.

It is the human beings in this room that are making that happen. You, your friends and your colleagues around the world, are
the creative, disruptive, and pioneering force that must lie behind the grand mobile ambition.

All I am going to say about dotMobi is that we are here for no other reason that to help you realise that ambition.

What I see in front of me today is not a safe and lazy industry. You are not faceless brands, multi-national monopolies, or sanitised and defensive incumbents of some dull grey ecosystem.

No. You are the mobile mammals. You are the individuals, the entrepreneurs, the artists, the merchants, the craftsmen and women, the smart, ambitious, bright young things of all our mobile tomorrows.

So. The next time you are rewriting your business plan again or pitching your startup to yet another jaded investor, the next time you are up at three in the morning writing software to launch the following day, the next time you are in a sales meeting, telling sceptical potential customers that you have what it takes – I’ll be there with you. We’ll all be there with you. We’re a community. The Mobile Monday community.

And we have got what it takes.

And you do know that we are doing something quite special, don’t you? Nothing less than the formation and refinement of an entirely new medium. The reinvention of communication for the whole human species. Somebody in this room might be doing something that can change the human race, and that can change the world to make it somehow a better place.

That is a huge privilege and a huge responsibility. I trust we all take it very seriously.

Nevertheless, that is why this afternoon’s competitions are going to be very exciting. Good luck to you all and thank you!