If there’s one person/company that understands the value of providing access to the Web to everyone, it’s you and Opera. It makes good commercial sense, but it’s also the right thing to do. India has a few potential surfers who’d like to access the Web and I’m damn sure they don’t give a toss about weather forecast.

Regarding DoCoMo, I remember speaking to them over dinner in Rome. Their W3C rep actually said it was all about the name of mobileOK, not the label or the Trustmark itself. He said it was all down to ‘protecting customers from illegal content’ – in other words, content that the rest of the world is permitted to see, adult content.

However, we’re not disagreeing because I was very diplomatic with my original post. I agree with you. DoCoMo’s position on the Web is revenue driven to help ensure they don’t lose it by opening the gates. Perhaps we should go over and show a few users what the rest of the world can see  Instead of the mobile industry here thinking it should be taking a leaf out of DoCoMo’s book!

BTW, your opinion is more equal than others
I wish it was possible to write short comments about this stuff.

(When are we going to catch up? I am sure one of us owes the other a beer or two. Right now I am in India working with various people on the idea that they could do with less, rather than more fragmentation…)

Interesting read. I am, as you know, with you on the idea that there is one web (and yes, that is also the opinion of my company ) and that fragmenting it is not a helpful way to get anything except a mess.

I reckon you’ve got DoCoMo a bit wrong. I don’t think they misunderstand the value of a label like mobileOK or even mobileOK Basic, but it threatens their business model in various ways. The major one is that their own technology, i-mode, works a bit differently and to see mobileOK in Japan might wake up their core market to the fact taht the rest of the web is not marching to the DoCoMo drum. They are in the position of going from a near-monopoly to an open market, and I suspect they aren’t that happy about it. But they do have an open web, it’s just that you don’t get onto their portal without giving them some love - and because searching a portal is generaly easier on a phone that has a huge impact on visibility and therefore visits.

Given that a large number of phone browsers actually handle tag-soup rubbish as well as nice XHTML Basic, many i-mode sites are generally viewable on other sets as well (except where they use wierd proprietary extensions).

..just my equal opinion

Actually I had a huge debate with DoCoMo’s W3C rep regarding this. I attempted (and failed) to help him understand that the W3C mobileOK Trustmark represented content that could be deemed technically appropriate for a mobile device. That is not the same as saying the ‘content is ok’.

I agree totally that there’s a use case for both XHTML-MP (or better) and WAP/iMode experiences. In fact, I thought O2 Active was perfectly good. There will always be a use case for an iMode, WAP or application interface to content that you can easily access and purchase. When I talk about mobile web some people think I’m taking the extreme view of getting rid of WAP – I’m not.

I was on a panel debating the whole iMode thing so I’ll write a post about it soon - I hope you can contribute your wealth of experience in this area and tell me if you think I’m mad Everyone seems to have an opinion about the Mobile Web, but some opinions are more equal than others

O2 hat off: I don’t think it would be difficult - because I forgot to mention that the button Kimmo was referring to didn’t appear to be a hard button, but just one of the softkey ones. So, any CP (i-mode or not) offering content, could for example have “search” on the right hand soft key (or some other soft key) which searched for the thing relevant to what you were viewing on the page at that time. e.g. perhaps you were viewing Arsenal football score and you hit the search key, you might get news about Arsenal, buy shirts, fixture info etc. The idea being that you don’t ask the user to type something in.

I do agree though re device requirements that it’s hard to get operator specific requirements involving deep-change in the device vendor roadmaps.

Re choosing the content provider line-up - it’s not such a bad idea really. One of the speakers on the night talked about “stupid” customers. Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, if you give your average joe a phone and they hit the “Internet” button - which one are they going to respond to most warmly: a empty search page or a page full of links to recognisable brands? Personally, I think there has to be both. But someone needs to choose the brands. In DoCoMo’s case, they choose the lineup - but they do so in order to ensure a “mobile OK” experience, not because they have favourites. (In fact they vary the order of the lineup depending upon customer popularity don’t they?) The net result is thousands of CPs offering mobile OK experiences - which customer’s *actually use*. Sorry I don’t mean to abuse the term mobile OK - but I think you get what i mean.

I didn’t realise you blogged live from the bus - brilliant!

Thanks for the update on Kimmo’s presentation. Sounds extremely interesting. Don’t you think however (not sure if you can remove your O2 hat for a minute) that it might be a little more difficult to get that simplicity in Europe given that DoCoMo have specific devices that they churn when they see fit. Whereas in Europe it’s very difficult for Operators to give specific requirements to Vendors.

Furthermore, DoCoMo choose which Content Providers to use. So, you’re not talking about the ‘Web’ but another WAP-like solution. Ouch! I feel another post coming 

Re Kimmo’s demo, I know Kimmo and have had him demo that kind of thing to me in the past, but what he was doing at MoMo was demoing MCN’s work with DoCoMo in Japan. DoCoMo has several content providers on i-mode offering a visual radio type of service and there’s a “search” button on the screen of the radio which the user get more info about the artist currently playing. This invokes the MCN search, which returns the results relevant to the artist, e.g. ringtones, wallpaper, CD etc - all with onward “actionable” links to purchase pages etc. So, basically, DoCoMo CPs pass the artist keyword to MCN - who do the search and serve up the results. The thing that Kimmo wanted to point out was the sheer simplicity - no entering a search item - just press the button.

Hope that helps!

Looking at your comments regarding Jo Rabin’s work - I’m extremely surprised that he didn’t mention me given that I was the one who first redefined the ‘One Web’ for the MWI. Jo then wrote his view, Phil Archer then merged the two views for the group to start a debate. Oh, how we forget little things…

Look forward to your comment re Kimmo’s demo - thanks for getting in touch.

> I’m afraid I couldn’t make Kimmo’s demo out. I had no
> idea what he was saying and would greatly appreciate some
> feedback from anyone who attended.

I’m just about to put up a blog post where I discuss some of this. I’ll let you know when it’s there. In the meantime, see here:

http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com/archives/2006/11/mobile20_great.html

and look for “MCN” where the approach is described a bit.

Paddy