What is WebGL?

At its most basic level, WebGL represents a set of extensions to JavaScript that allows developers to write code that can use the processing power of a user’s computer to create 3D graphics that update in real time. The standard is supported by Apple, Google and the Mozilla foundation but Microsoft has not yet lent its support to the nascent standard (I suspect it’s only a question of time as most of the browser world has announced support for the format). Today, you need a fairly recent computer and the latest version of either the Chrome, Mozilla, or Opera web browser.

The applications can now run and modify fairly complex 3D web-based applications. This is going to be a huge boon for online games, as can be witnessed from early examples like the recent implementations of web-based versions of Quake and X-wing, and also have substantial other uses. For example, the Google body browser allows users to get a better sense of how the human body works and someone put together a very convincing webgl photo editor that can handle a substantial amount of the basic image editing needs most people have. In science, a lot of representation can now be fred so scientist can experiment with different views of the data on an experiment.

In the future, one could see a lot of data set being presented in 3D using this technology, with the ability to access and manipulate data in real-time and see rich representations of that data immediately.

The bigger picture

For a long time, web applications have been limited to running within the context of a browser and thus sandboxed away from the rest of the operating system. With WebGL, we’re seeing that barrier broken down for the first time and is creating a precedent for the future growth of web applications.

In a way, this is an interesting return to ideas that existed almost 15 years ago. Back then, Microsoft was interested in merging their browser with the operating system. Early alpha versions of IE 7.0 actually had a deeper level of integration with Windows but fears around anti-trust regulations led the company to pull those extensions out.

To open up the web to deeper level of integrations with lower level processes could mean a variety of new possibilities. While web applications have long been limited by the browser sandbox, webGL now opens the door for a substantially improved experience as it gives the web access to a lot of the power that has been resident on users’ desktops. For a couple of decades, the web has been sipping that power through a straw but with WebGL, it’s as if the straw had been replaced by a firehose when it comes to graphic processing power.

For almost two decades now, many people have tried to make 3D on the web a reality (a little known fact, for example, is that Mike McCue, the man behind TellMe and now Flipboard, got his web start with a plugin that allowed the Netscape browser to display complex 3-D models) but many of those effort failed. A large reason for those early failure was that the different solutions presented were often limited to what the web browser could handle and until recently, it was considered a big no-no for the browser to access any low level processes.

But a few entrepreneurs had a more long term vision. In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen quipped that his browser would reduce the Windows operating system to “a set of poorly debugged device drivers”. While many have laughed this off as bravura on the part of a young man (he was in his 20s then), the concept of the web browser as central to computing experience is no laughing matter and it appears that the browser is now getting to that point where it could truly reduce operating systems to what he had envisioned in the 90s.

While 3D processing is but one frontier being broken by WebGL, it is an important one because, for the first time, web browsers are given access to low level processing without requiring plug-ins or authorization from the end-user. This will, of course, represent a set of new security challenges as code that is interpreted by 3D rendering engine gets pretty close to the heart of the machine (and traditionally, the code that has been allowed this privilege has been tightly controlled at the distribution channel level, with 3D gaming being mostly manufactured and distributed by a few people. By contrast, the whole web is mostly open to everyone with few or no limitations, opening it up as a potential attack vector).

Now that this frontier has been broken (and one could say that the door was initially opened when HTML5 was allowed to do geolocation), imagine what some of the next offerings that will build on this precedent could bring: in the future, we could see web applications being allowed to access cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and other parts of electronic devices across all web browsers. This could mean that applications that now run on your desktop could truly break free from that format and run exclusively from the web.

In the past few years, the idea of breaking down applications into smaller and smaller components to be distributed through an app store has taken hold of the computing industry, potentially challenging the idea of applications running from the web itself. With the rise of WebGL, the graphic rendering portion of those applications is something that now has accomplished feature parity. Sound will be next and access to device components will probably follow.

Web applications’ future has been challenged by apps and the web has answered the challenge, allowing for a set of offerings that will be richer and will present themselves in a way that will make it hard to differentiate between a native and a web application, Eventually, we will see WebGL being implemented on mobile devices browsers (the processing power is there and I suspect it’s something we will see appearing within a couple of years), radically reshaping the web app vs. store app debate.

With WebGL, we’re seeing a future that renders the web exciting again. It’s a technology worth keeping and eye on. Now may not be the time to develop on it (unless you’re developing web-based games for computers) but within the next 12–24 months, it is a skill that will be required of most Javascript developers.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title WebGL and the future of the web. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Looking at the history

In order to look forward, it always pays to look back. The dominant standards for the web today are undeniably HTML (or its variances like XHTML) and HTTP. More recently, XML has emerged and, increasingly, RSS is becoming the dominant type of XML for sharing a variety of data.

How did each of those standards become a standard. It is obvious now (hindsight is always 20/20) that standards bodies have relatively little bearing when it comes to influencing the succes of a format. Take, for example, SGML, which was the dominant standardized format for document formatting. It was quickly superceded by HTML which, at the time, was not considered a standard.

The same is true of RSS and other standards for syndication. Formats like ICE, CDF, and NewsML were touted as the future when they were first introduced. However, they’ve recently been superceded by RSS.

And even within the RSS world, formats like RSS 1.0, which was supposed to be more semantically sound, and ATOM, which was supposed to be more forward thinking that RSS 2.0, have been losing the war to RSS 2.0.

Bootstrapping is a social phenomenon

What Dave Winer understood, when he sheperded RSS 2.0 into becoming the dominant mean of delivering syndicated content is that the life and death of a new format is predicated on its widespread adoption. And, in order to increase adoption, one has to make something generic, easy to understand, and simple.

Many of the people in the early days of the syndication space failed to see it as Dave did. We believed that a semantically sound format was better and we were wrong. Purity, it turns out is not always a good thing, especially if it gets in the way of people implementing something.

The same is true of HTML. I’d venture that, from a development standpoint, the biggest boost to HTML was a single menu feature that appeared in early browsers and remains there to this day: view source. In the early days of the web, countless developers learned how to do cool things with HTML by reading the source of pages designed by other people.

In a recent issue of ambidextrous magazine, Jeffrey Schox talks about the three stages of technological development: appropriation, early innovation, and sustainable innovation. Here’s how he describes the appropriation stage:

an issued pattent allows innovators to construct roadblocks behind them as they travel down a particular technological path… During the appropriation stage, patent roadblocks waste time and money… The countries, needing to catch up with the designs and technologies of other countries, should focus on collecting revenue and knowledge streams to fuel later stages of technology development.

While he focuses on hardware and electronics in a globalized marketplace, the same truth can be applied to standards. With few barriers in adopting a new standard and by fostering a culture of appropriation, one can easily establish a base of people who understand a new format. As more people understand it, they start implementing it and, after eventually getting smarter about it, start building on the efforts of previous creators. Eventually, those masses of tinkerers get to a critical point, pushing the new format into areas that were unexpected. Some companies eventually get smart to it and see growth in that area, which triggers them into experimenting with that new format.

Eventually, due to a general agreement among all developers, the format becomes a de facto standard. It does not have to have the imprimatur of a standard body (except for some very late adopters or pockets where such imprint is considered important) and moves forward.

What is interesting is the next stage, the one where standard bodies see the area as hot and decide that they need to play in that field. A good example of that is the ATOM format, which has been enshrined into an IETF approved format, and to date has failed to stop the RSS 2.0 juggernaut.

So what happened?

The amazing thing is how simple the issue is. The reason RSS 2.0 has been winning is that it has developed a following. With every new developer learning RSS 2.0, the format goes stronger and the same is true of every company implementing it. Because it is simple, it’s easy to pick up, which means that new developers can do interesting things with it relatively quickly, giving them a chance to become active members of the community and therefore become hooked on it.

The other issue is in keeping things relatively open, while still maintaining some level of control over the general direction. A successful future standard has to allow people a chance to contribute but, in the end, it also needs some gatekeepers who decide what goes in and what doesn’t. The same truth can be applied to any sofware development cycle: for example, Linux may be a widespread open source phenomenon but the number of people who decide what goes into the core kernel or doesn’t is still relatively limited. The same is true of any successful open source project: some level of centralized decision making and distribution of the work: anyone can contribute but not every contribution makes it into the final product.

I’m now seeing some of the same history repeat itself in the OPML space. It’s a format that is very simple and Dave is working very hard on getting people left and right to support it. It’s the same scenario he’s used to bootstrap the RSS format and to bootstrap concepts like blogging and podcasting into the mainstream. It’s a formula that works: keep it simple to implement, maintain some level of centralized control over the roadmap and then evangelize it left and right until it can no longer be stopped.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Standards as social contracts. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

How we got there?

Microsoft is not really a new player in the syndication space. With the release of Internet Explorer 4.0, in 1997, the Redmond giant introduced CDF, a format to push content and software to the operating system. With the craze around push deflating, CDF was pushed in the background.

While such efforts were not that successful, RSS moved stealthily towards the mainstream. As a plucky little standard, it is starting to dominate how a lot of notification is being done. So Microsoft decided, wisely, to join the RSS bandwagon.

However, old habits die hard and just embracing a standard is not enough. So Microsoft decided to extend the standard with some “enhancements” they created (known as Simple List Extensions). The fact that they are extending the standard is not something I have a problem with, even though it sounds like the old “embrace and extend” approach they took to HTML. However, what I have a problem with is what they decided to tackle.

Lists and RSS

The new proposed specification allows the ability to create lists. Yes, lists are a good idea if you want to use RSS for something other than distributing content. However, it’s a problem that’s already been solved, and one that has pained much of the RSS community. Let me explain.

In early 2000, when RSS was still in its infancy (version 0.92), a debate erupted on several mailing lists as to how RSS should evolve. The two sides to the debate were as follows:

• On one side were the hard core geeks, who believed that RSS should be reformulated as an RDF specification, tying it into the Semantic Web. Realize that, at the time, the concepts behind this were faily revolutionary: machine intelligence, etc…
• On the other side were the hard core hackers, who believed that the beauty of RSS would lie in its simplicity, and that its adoption would go along the same course as HTML if it were kept simple.

This ended up with two different formats: RSS 1.0 (which met the requirement of RDF integration) and RSS 2.0 (which met the requirement of simplicity).

Well, the irony is that it turned out both sides were correct: On the one hand, plugging RSS into a more formal structure, using things like namespaces and an orderly model could allow it to do more; on the other hand, keeping it simple allowed it to thrive.

Fast forward to today. RSS 2.0 is widely adopted, thanks to its simplicity. And Microsoft is announcing the use of extensions to create lists. RSS 1.0 also enjoys wide support (though nowhere near as wide as RSS 2.0) and supports lists natively. See the humor here: by endorsing RSS 2.0 and creating extra extensions, Microsoft has essentially added a feature that existed in RSS 1.0.

But wait! It gets better. The proponent for the RSS 2.0 specification was Dave Winer, who wrote the RSS 2.0 specifications and maintained it for a fair amount of time after that. However, Dave is pushing a new list and outline format called OPML and is pushing it as the next format he wants people to try out.

So we now have three different ways to create lists. And that’s not even considering the fact that you could use the Microformat concept and had a rel="list" to an HTML element and end up with another format.So Microsoft gets an A for embracing RSS, another A for using namespaces (instead of creating a new version of RSS) and releasing their extension under a Creative Commons license, but gets an F for poor research in terms of introducing a new format. There were a number of other useful things they could have introduced as part of this effort but just generating lists is attempting to reinvent the wheel without really providing any added value.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Microsoft Loves RSS. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

First of all, I would ensure that all the links have proper titles, something that a lot of people tend to forget when designing pages but which can be useful for disabled users. Second, I would replace the validation logos with a much friendlier CSS only alternative, similar to what some have done with the XML button.

Second, I would put the A-to-Z elements in a list, as they should properly be. This would also take care of clearly differentiating them instead of using a CSS trick to hide special characters.

The descriptive text about the consortium is needed on the page and could go above the news section in that design in order to match the existing information available on the page and the proper RDF tags would need to be reinserted in the page to ensure its continued progression with the semantic web.

Last but not least would be a change of color in the masthead to align with the existing color set presented by the original W3C logo (basically changing the site’s primary color from orange to blue).

A very good effort and I hope that the people at the W3C will consider moving to that new design. However, the redesign also points to a big issue with the existing site: not only is its wrong page boring, in comparison to what can be done using the latest standards, but there is also a certain inconsistency in the way sub-pages and sub-section of the site are presented. While the existing front page provides a lot of information, there does not seem to be any overarching design thought in the way each subset is organized, with some pages looking as if they came from the web in 1993, 1995, and late 90s-earlyish 2000s. Maybe the consortium should consider developing a style guide for its overall site. After all, shouldn’t the site be an example of how standards can be implemented and still look professional? On that end, the W3C still falls short and it would be nice to see them doing some work in that direction.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A matter of Style. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

According to the wired article, some of the reasons have to do with complexities related to going online. In order to resolve those issues, the industry needs to play closer attention to user experience and start figuring out how to make things easier. Return on investments in technology will increase if more people use a system. More people will use a system if it’s easier to use. However, few companies pay close attention to those kinds of details. Next time someone asks you why usability research is needed, point out the relationship between usability and bottom dollars: the business people will immediately see the value.

A question remains, however, on how to get people back. As standard marketing theory often points out, it is easier to convert a customer that has never used a product than to get one that has unsuccessfully used a product to come back. This is a challenge that marketers everywhere need to crack in order to increase overall market shares.

Also of interest in the story is the fact that most disabled people do not go online. This seems to represents a huge market for anyone as the Internet could actually act as a great enabler for disabled people. Site developers should pay close attention to things like the World Wide Web Consortium WAI project which could help lure more disabled people online.

Last but not least is the question of economics and Internet access. Obviously, there is a need for education here as most libraries now offer Internet access for free. However, recent efforts in monitoring what is done online in libraries probably keeps some people from getting online and the remainder is probably either not aware that Internet access is available at their local library, not interested in going to the library (for educational reasons or other), or doesn’t see any value in the Internet. A way to solve this would be through better educational programs related to the fact that the service is available, addressing quick wins by showing people how they can do certain things faster online (for example, showing how people could get a better job or reduce the amount of time and money it takes to do something by going online).

However, all of these points have a pre-requisite. Before addressing the problem, we must first understand who those people are. A demographic make-up of Internet drop-outs could help (are those people mostly from a certain age group, for example) in understanding whether this might become a longer term trend that needs to be addressed or whether most of the problem is going to go away over time (as kids nowadays seem to get online at a faster rate than older people).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Mind the Gap. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

While XHTML 2 is indeed a departure from the existing standards instead of being an evolution, it is important to realize that some of the things the workgroup is trying to do is fix old issues and help improve the overall development of the web. While I agree with Zeldman’s assertion that IMG should be deprecated in this version instead of being completely tossed out, I believe that the tag should never have been in HTML in the first place. The argument for an OBJECT tag date back to the early days of the web (circa 1993) when things broke down into two camps: one that wanted a quick and dirty way to show images on the web (the IMG crowd) and the other that looked forward and wanted any type of media to be embedded in a page (the OBJECT crowd). We are now paying for the decisions that were made back then and, much like tables are still in use for layout on most sites instead of being replaced by CSS, we will continue to see IMG tags in code for a very long time.

The next assumption by the anti-XHTML 2 crowd is that XHTML 2 won’t be supported by browsers for a long time to come. However, because browsers have now evolved to the point where properly formatted text can be presented, most modern browsers can already display XHTML 2 without any problems (for an example, just check Sjoerd Visscher’s weblog), as long as a proper DTD is pointed to. This means that once XHTML 2 makes it to recommendation level, then all modern browsers will be able to exploit it. However, I suspect there will be a slow uptake (as there has already been a slow one on the existing XHTML implementation) largely because a lot of developers do not want to have to deal with the rigorousness of XHTML (making sure all tags are closed, making sure not improper characters are inputted, etc…)

The first step in making sure that XHTML 2 will move forward is in ensuring that the browser vendors fix their implementations to conform to the standard. Microsoft’s implementation of the OBJECT is broken and needs to be fixed. It does not meet the standard so it is their responsibility to fix it. The same is true of other browsers that do not render it properly. In the long run, the success or failure of XHTML 2.0 will be based more on whether those things are fixed than on what people feel is right and, much like the fights over improper CSS nowadays, this kind of thing will only happen once the development community pressures browser vendors into fixing their code.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Much Ado About XHTML 2. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

All these developments are happening among browsers which have a combined market share equivalent to one fourth to one fifth of the one engine enjoyed by IE, the leader (in browser market share) offered by Microsoft. However, they point to an interesting scenario about how new features go from being enjoyed by a small but vocal minority to a wider audience. Tabbed browsing was one of the big innovations that Opera introduced in the marketplace but it wasn’t until Mozilla’s implementation that it started getting noticed. Once developers got used to it, they realized that it was difficult to use browsers that did not offer it and “demanded” that the feature be available in any new browser.

This is an area where an open source project like Mozilla can be considered to have contributed to the mainstream. While Mozilla’s market share remains tiny in comparison to that of Internet Explorer, its impact on web browser development is growing. On one side, it is helping improve the way web pages are developed (due to its strong support for web standards), and on the other, the joint effort of thousands of people are helping develop features that match or improve on what is offered by other browsers.

Since the popularity spurt of tabbed browsing, there hasn’t been any major development coming from the Microsoft end (most of the focus has been in fixing a number of annoying security bugs in their browser) but I would expect the feature to show up in future versions, as IE is now the only browser not to sport the feature.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title How new features appear. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On a related matter, the blog world is now abuzz with a description of the Internet as an agreement. While the document provides an interesting set of concepts that are sound from a purely technical standpoint (yes, the underlying standards of the Internet are based on an agreement), it does not cover the variety of choices of what is on the Internet. If the goal is to say “hey, the Internet is just an agreement to tie networks together” then World of Ends succeeds. But the contention that this makes a difference does not really matter much in today’s world. What world of ends does NOT address is what is ”

on

the Internet” and therein lies the usefulness of a conversation.

So the problem arises from the fact that we keep coming up with new definitions of the Internet that end up referring or reiterating the initial one. However, we seem to do little to figure out the next step. Companies, government, and individuals co-exist on the Internet. Each of those can be considered an entity. Each of those entities makes statements. Each of those statements is either provable or not. And if it is not provable, each of those statements can be assessed as trusted or not (my basic assumption being that a provable statement can only be trusted if it is true). The question remains as to how we can parse those statements quickly (can machines do a better job than we do individually? can smart mobs do a better job than the individual?) and judge their trust-worthiness.

Chris is right: marketers are not necessarily bad. The question is how do we make the difference between the ones we can trust and the ones we can’t?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Blog, Internet, and Marketing. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

In the discussions surrounding my suggestion of how we can level the playing field, I’ve learned a couple of things:

First, whatever solution we come up with must be easy to implement. It is easy for those of us who are more technical to come up with XML rules and complex structure to represent the world. However, most people neither have interest nor experience in experimenting with such thing. Hence the first rule of any answer is that whatever solution is implemented, it needs to be simple.

Second, trust is a very large issue and some portions of it are being addressed. For example, FOAF allows you to establish trust between friends. But what about concepts (can I trust this person’s opinion on a movie review? can I trust their opinion on an Internet standard?), things (do they own the product? did they buy it or was it given to them for free? If it was given to them for free, who gave it?), people (I think that’s somewhat covered by FOAF but there’s more that needs to be built into it). This is a wide space and needs to be properly categorized for a model to work.

The next question is one of granularity. Should a trust statement apply to a whole site or to a particular entry on that site. As Scott points out “implementing this on a per post level would definitely increase the amount of work to blog content which isn’t good at all.” So what’s the option here? Is there a way to modify editing tools so they have a caveat emptor option?

Another question is how that information is displayed. Should there be a browser plug-in? an RSS reader plug-in? Should it be embedded in a feed or a page? How would the user know when the level of trust on an entry or a site is lower than expected? And, more importantly, how would one be able to check that a “trust statement” can in itself be trusted.

Lots of questions to which I do not have an answer yet but I think that they are worth pondering and I will post further on this soon. (but can you really trust that last statement? )

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Trust, truth and networks. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strong Growth

France had been a leader in terms of establishing an information society but was starting to get trapped by its legacy Minitel tool. The Minitel was introduced in France in the late 70s as essentially a precursor to the web. The service allowed users to read online versions of magazines and newspapers, shop in online catalogs, chat, play games, and have access to every government office. In the early 80s, Minitel penetration became so high that the government-owned phone company decided to drop printing of phone books and move that service to the Minitel.

Fast forward to the late 90s. France is still on the Minitel and the Internet has gotten wide acceptance in the United States. At that point, Internet penetration in France is sluggish as few people see any value in it. As a result, the French government issued an ambitious plan to move France onto the Internet. As is the case for every major government project, little happened for several years.

However, the combination of government support for a new Internet initiative and the rise of global services finally started a revolution in French online services. According to several people I talked to in Paris and in the south of France, the effects of the Internet were not really felt until about a year ago, when a sudden usage explosion started. From 1999 to 2001, the number of Internet users in France tripled and it is expected to double this year to about 30 million. As more and more services are now moving away from the Minitel and onto the Internet (as I was told by an American living in France, the Minitel is now fairly useless as most everything has moved onto the Internet.)

Combined with growth in other European countries, this represents a market of almost 150 million users in Europe.

Broadband

While most Internet users in Europe still use narrowband, a few people are starting to make the move to broadband. However, prohibitive costs for DSL mean that most broadband users in France are accessing the net via cable. A DSL line can cost over 100 euros whereas a cable modem connection can be had for as little as 15 euros, with averages of 30–45 euros per months for a 500Kbps connection. The big advantage of such connections in Europe is that local phone is metered whereas broadband is not. As a result, heavy Internet users are finding that it is less expensive to get a broadband cable connection than it is to use a modem and phone line.

The Euro

For the first time in history, 12 countries have simultaneously gotten rid of their currencies and moved to create a single monetary block: the Euro is here and it has wide implications on global E-commerce.

No more Austrian schillings, Belgian, Luxembourg or French francs, Finnish markka, German Marks, Greek drachma, Irish punts, Italian lira, Dutch guilders, Portuguese escudos, or Spanish pesetas. No more complexity in trying to convert those from one to the other when doing electronic transactions. Now, the Euro is the currency for this whole zone (dubbed the Eurozone) and it represents a very large market, larger, in fact, than the American market in terms of customers.

One the biggest challenges in dealing with the European market was the lack of standardization when it comes to laws, shipping, currency, and language. With the Euro, a large portion of that problem can be taken care of as members of the Eurozone start moving towards developing a similar set of economic policies.

Essentially, the Euro takes away the barrier of multiple currency transactions that held back some users from shopping online and some vendors from launching e-commerce sites.

A couple of years ago, I alerted our readers to the fact that Europe was quietly rising as a new giant in the global E-commerce arena. With the rise of the Euro, this message is becoming more important. Now that a market of almost 150 million people has been created, the US is no longer the only place where E-commerce can work and as such, it is important for people in the US to start looking at technological developments in Europe. In the long run, a number of European companies will probably become some of the larger players in the online space.

Wireless connectivity

While everyone in the U.S. is starting to pay attention to WiFi, the wireless computing revolution has not yet taken hold in Europe. On the one hand, cell phones keep getting smaller and offering more features (Multimedia messaging is started to take hold among European digerati), there seems to be some lag in the adoption of wireless computing offering. A few underground efforts are getting organized, in a fashion similar to that seen in the USA a couple of years ago.

Conclusion

The Internet space in France seems to now follow a curve similar to the one experienced in the United States in the late 1990s. However, the lack of venture capital and the fact that, much like the United States, France is suffering from an economic slowdown, have tampered the explosion. While acceptance for everything Internet is growing, the adoption of networked technology is following a course that is different from that of the US and UK. While there will be strong growth in the Internet field in France over the next year, expect that revolution to be relatively quiet, compared to what was experienced in other countries.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet in France 2002: An overview. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Hybrid World Lives!

Many of you may remember the February 10th issue about Hybrid Computing. While talking with Birger Steen, CEO of Scandinavia Online, I discovered that the concept is not that far off the market. It is his contention that WAP-enabled phones are largely a pain in the back when it comes to interface. Having to key in every letter on the small phone keyboard is far from the easiest thing in the world. As a result, Scandinavia Online has developed a set of services that allows users of their portal jump on their site and configure their WAP view on the web. From his point of view, this is the best service he can offer now to wireless users.

The point was reiterated by a few people around the conference that told me that going to the web to configure a cell phone was the best way to deal with the small screen interface problem encountered by most WAP phones. Anne Rasmussen, of WAPportal.net demonstrated how their company plans to offer a similar service in a hosted fashion for corporate sites and others. The word around Scandinavia is that if you want to find the best way to configure a WAP phone, you have to go to the web via a computer to do so.

M-Commerce Huge … but not for Etailers

Another significant trend is the rise of M-commerce. In Finland, and to a lesser extent Denmark, Norway and Sweden, people can already use their WAP phones to buy from vending machines. The vending machine has a telephone number on it. You dial that number and a credit is added to the machine, to be billed on your phone bill. With the introduction of security in the new WAP standards, a few people were talking about how in the future the question “will it be cash, check, credit card, or phone?” may not sound silly.

What they envision is that WAP phones could become the new credit card.

A recent survey found that in Scandinavian countries, 82% of the people would go back to get their cell phone if they forgot it before leaving home, while only 64% would do the same thing if they forgot their wallet. The basic concept is one that may be foreign to those of us who live in the United States and revolves largely around the fact that GSM phones are equipped with a small identification chip called a SIM card. You can take the chip out of one phone and put it in another and you don’t have to worry about changing phone number or contact info.

Because of the emergence of such a way to do billing, some of the speakers at the conference predicted that the long run path for mobile phone operators would be to merge with financial institutions as their services will increasingly resemble those of credit card companies.

However, few people were optimistic about the prospects of etailers when it comes to mobile phones. “When I’m in a store buying something, I’m not going to go up on the web to check if it’s available at a web store,” told me one attendant. “I want to get it now and not wait a few days for it to show up in the mail.”

As a result, the promise of m-commerce is good for software vendors (who will sell packages that allow operators to set themselves up as currency clearinghouse) and mobile phone operators (who could become the next big financial force) but unfortunately, current etailers will not fare as well.

Content is King… in a Wireless Republic

The promise of advertising supported content on wireless phone has been hailed by some as a new way to support content sites. Unfortunately, few content providers will survive in the wireless space as demand for those services does not seem to meet expectations. Talking with people from the Scandinavian arm of large American companies who have tried to go the wireless route as a distribution channel, I discovered that there was not much demand for those services. “Sure, people do check the price of their stock on the phones but they still call our voice line to place their order,” said one executive from an online trading company.

As a general rule, the demand for content seems to be limited to a few areas: entertainment (bars, clubs, and restaurants locators), financial (stock prices) and sport-related (latest scores). However, many of the people involved in those areas told me that they were still looking for a proper business model. The locators are looking at a coupon-like scheme, whereas bars can offer a special coupon and people can go to a bar and show the phone coupon to get a rebate on drinks (“It appears that beer is the hot wireless app” quipped one panelist). Financial services and sports services are currently looking at possible subscription based models or at deals with operators whereas they would share a portion of the revenue they are generating for the operators.

CN U RD THS

On the other hand, communication in the hot wireless app. SMS has clearly become the hot app when it comes to wireless service across Scandinavia and across Europe. Because operators are charging lower rates for data services than they are for voice traffic, short messaging has become the quickest way for people to get in touch. A new lingo is starting to pop up around SMS as people are trying to economize the number of keystroke they type (SMS messages are limited to 160 characters). As a result, the headline for this section would translate from CN U RD THS to Can you read this?

Convergence in the Making

I also talked to a bartender who told me that the previous night a woman was in the bar looking for some of her friends and asked him if he could change the TV channel to a particular teletext page (in a lot of European countries, TV channel use the extra bandwidth to carry data. As a result, while watching the BBCyou could switch to the BBC teletext channel and read the latest news, etc… on there). The channel this woman was using allowed her to converse with several of her friends in a TV-based chat room by using her phone and an SMS gateway. True convergence in my book but the problem here is where revenues for an online operator are. Unfortunately, the only operators who will make money on this will be the phone operators who are racking up extra data minutes of usages.

Smaller, Faster, Cheaper

The good news, from a user’s point of view, though, is that those services are coming in a smaller package. A lot of the phones I saw over there would put our American phones to shame. On average, European phones are now weighing about 2.78 ounces (79 g.), a form factor of 3.9 X 1.75 X .6 inches (101.5 X 44.5 X 17 mm.), and a battery life that allows for either 150 hours of standby time or 4 hours of talk time. Of course, they come equipped with voice recognition (so you can have the number dial based on a name you give to it), predictive text input (a new set of tools for SMS which allows the phone to predict what word you’re going to type based on your input), and are WAP ready. The most interesting thing is that they usually are priced under $200 which makes me feel that we’re overpaying in the US.

The future is now?

The new thing around that space, though, is not a smaller phone or a better way to do e-commerce but a new set of services around higher speeds of access. The first step in that direction is GPRS, which offers about 20kb per second and has been rolled out around Europe. This is seen as a way to distribute such services as music and better news on the phones. However, the real discussion is centering on UMTS which promises wireless throughputs of 2Mb per second or more. Portions of the UMTS spectrum have already been allocated in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Finland, with the rest of Europe moving quickly on allocating this space. UMTS proponents envision the use of wireless video conferencing and a better Internet experience to result from this new development.

Euro Fighting

One of the big challenge in terms of doing business in Europe is location. Because most of the European countries are too small to create an actual market for digital services, European operators usually have to provides sites in multiple languages, and support multiple currencies. As a result, European etailers tend to be in favor of the Euro, which would make their lives a little easier. However, as the currency is slowly deflating in the currency market, opposition to the Euro is growing across Europe. On September 26, Denmark is holding a vote on whether to join the Eurozone or not and this election is seen across Europe as a big test for the Euro’s power.

The reason it the Danish election is so important in Europe is that if the Danish vote fails, England’s upcoming vote will probably do so too. As a result, there is a lot of concern across Europe about this election. Many etailers I met in Copenhagen told me that they were trying to organize themselves to push for adoption and work across borders when it comes to those election. Danes I talked to told me that British conservative politicians (who are opposed to joining the Eurozone) had been lobbying in Denmark. This is a race that etailers both in Europe and the United States should pay attention to as it will most probably dictate the viability of the Euro as a currency and, if the Euro succeeds, could mean less headaches to all of us.

Going beyond Economic matters, support or lack thereof could mean either an acceleration or a slowdown for eEurope, a new initiative by the European Union to become a force in the information age by normalizing rules related to e-commerce across the difference members of the EU and offering incentives to companies that want to bring net services to the EU marketplace. Among the initiative supported under eEurope are net access in public schools and public centers, lower access costs for businesses and individuals, agreement on common specifications for a smart card infrastructure, financial support for emerging tech companies and a number of social support and government services becoming available to all via the Internet.

All and all, what eEurope would mean is that countries would work in the EU government to set up rules about the Internet. I do not need to tell anyone reading this that it would be better for those of us in the industry as we would not have to lobby several governments in order to get the proper support for our industry.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Scandinavia With Love. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What I came to realize is that what works for a computer does not necessarily work in a wireless environment. The main issue is input and output. A wireless Palm is great to get information but somewhat difficult to use to send out email (typing in graffiti being the biggest challenge so far) and WAP works well to get little bits and pieces of information but is limited to a set number of characters (depending on which version of WAP you’re using, you will get an allocation of between 1500 and 2000 characters). As a result, sending out something like this newsletter over WAP does not seem to make sense.

However, a new breed of services is now popping up and it could be the next big thing: connecting to the Internet by just dialing into a phone number. In order to test this out, I checked out several services: Tellme Networks, which launched last month to a barrage of publicity, and Quack, which has been quieter but is also launched. Other contender for the space (and all of those are launching “soon”) are Internet Speech, BeVocal, and 888TelSurf.

Tellme Networks

Mike McCue is no stranger to bleeding edge technology. I met Mike back in 1995, when he was running a company called Paper Software. Paper did VRML browser, at a time when VRML was not only cool but also seen as the potential future of the net. Netscape acquired his company and Mike ended up as VP of technology there. While there, he looked at the future of the Internet.

However, as many other Netscapees, Mike ended up leaving Netscape and founded a new company: Tellme Networks.

Their goal: to make the web as easily accessible as using a phone. Pulling talent from both sides of the browser war (Netscape and Microsoft), Tellme was a very secretive operations until a couple of months ago, when it announced its offering: a phone service that gives you access to news, weather, sports, stocks, movies and restaurant info.

An interesting concept but how well did it hold up? Would I be stuck in one of those horrible menus (press 1 to access news, press 2 to access stocks…) or would it be better, I wondered as I registered for the service. To my surprise, it worked very well.

There are a number of interesting features in this service. First of all is the text to speech engine, which is one of the best ones I’ve heard so far. It takes bits of information and relays them in a clear and understandable way, which I found quite amazing. The voice recognition algorithm also held up very well, clearly understanding what I was saying (for those of you who’ve heard me speak, you know I have a fairly strong French accent, which makes this all the more amazing).

But what about the selection? Well it is, in one word, adequate. Not great but not bad either. I was able to get stock quotes (an interesting feature allows you to use the touchpad to spell out a stock symbol if the service does not recognize the name of the company you gave it), grab the latest news from CNN (the only general news provider tellme offers), pick up the weather in New York, check out a movie schedule, get some restaurant info and be connected to the restaurant for reservations. Also interesting was the phonebooth, a feature that allows you to make 2 minutes phone calls anywhere in the US for free (brought to you by AT&T). All and all, I was impressed enough to save the number into my cell phone memory.

Quack

Quack offers basically the same things as tellme (with the exception of the phone booth) but requires you to set up personalization largely through the web. As a result, the service may seem a little kludgier. On the plus side, however, the voice recognition algorithm gets some points. For example, I requested stock price on Internet.com on both services. Tellme was unable to find Internet.com and asked me to enter in the stock symbol using the keypad. Quack immediately recognized the stock, gave me its symbol and, while playing ads, went on to retrieve the information. What was disappointing, however, was that their text to speech engine is not as advanced as tellme’s. The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakingly a computer when it came to particular bits of information (weather reports, stock quotes) compared to the syntax used by tellme.

Another plus for Quack is their caller-ID system: The service also recognized that my call was coming from New York and immediately gave me the weather report for that city (I had to request New York on tellme’s service).

All and all, I found very little difference between the two services, with the possible exception of Quack carrying traffic reports (which tellme did not offer when I tried it). However, since I am one of those New Yorkers without a car, traffic reports held little value for me. If I were outside of New York, I am sure that this service could be a godsend.

Looking at the future: the other contenders

Internetspeech and bevocal seem to be aimed at the same market. They both plan to offer similar services. InternetSpeech seems to go a step farther by trying to capture an audience that will be able to say a URL and get what’s on that page read to them. This could be interesting but can get kludgey as the example on their site shows. Going to Yahoo means that their service will read the links but also shows that it doesn’t know how to stop on a particular link.

However, a somewhat more promising concept is that of 888Telsurf, which plans to not only offer information but also access to an online calendar and address book as well as over the phone reading of emails. Advertising revenues will finance their service, like the others. Unfortunately, none of those services are available now nor do they have announced launch dates.

Where is it all going?

Obviously, those services do not plan to stand still. Each of them is trying to establish a beachfront as the new “portal” to the Internet. I personally believe that a lot of those will end up either being acquired or striking significant relationships with the current group of already existing portals. Ultimately, all of them will have to follow the lead of 888telsurf by offering email, address book and calendars as part of their standard package.

While they are all squarely aimed at the consumer market, I think that at least one of them will break away and start offering the technology as a software offering, allowing corporations to set up private intranets with dial in interfaces. For example, one could be able to call into the main office to get part numbers on something they are selling, or check the latest sales statistics for a particular region.

Another potential use for the technology developed here is in the Ecommerce arena. Why not use that technology to offer a call-in service for ordering. Wanna get that new book from Amazon.com? Why not call 1–800-AMAZON (or whatever their number will be) and order it via phone. This could go over the scare hurdle that some people still have about online commerce.Or at least, it will give it a new dimension.

The other thing that could help those offerings become more popular would be the integration of comparative shopping features. I can see myself in a store, looking at prices on a particular item I want to buy, then pulling out my phone to check if someone will offer the same item for less.

Either way they play it, I think that this group of companies will present the first serious challenge to WAP, unless more content providers start offering WAP-enabled content (at current time, the selection is fairly weak).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Challenging WAP?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

AOL started moving further on its AOL Anywhere Strategy by announcing partnerships to deliver its Instant Messenger services on the Bell South and Sprint PCS network and to equip Neopoint, Nokia, and Motorola devices with the necessary software to do this too.

Microsoft announced partnerships with Nextel and Airtouch to deliver MSN to their networks. This follows recent announcements by Microsoft that its technology would be integrated in Sony and Quallcom wireless devices.

Meanwhile, Palm Computing announced a deal with Sun Microsystems to make Sun’s iPlanet service available to Palm VII users.

But with all the hype, one has to wonder whether wireless is truly here and what hurdles it has to overcome. From this issue on, I will take a quick look at some of the issues facing wireless web implementors these days, adding wireless as a new category of coverage. We will start with the formats.

WAP, WML, HDML, PQA???

It seems the wireless space in adept at developing a new set of standards. While this world is just burgeoning, a number of implementations have already surfaced.

WAP

: As defined by the WAP Forum, WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol. Think of it essentially as HTTP for the wireless crowd. Backed by the W3C, the IETF, and the ECMA, as well as most large wireless industry players, WAP has become the de facto standard for wireless delivery. However, some companies (NTT comes to mind) have tried presenting alternatives to WAP and have so far been relatively unsuccessful. However, I doubt that WAP will go very far as it limits the number of characters that can be sent to about 1600. For stock quotes or weather reports, it’s a great think but beyond that, I doubt that anyone will use it for Ecommerce or content.

WML

: WML stands for Wireless Markup Language and is an XML based subset of HTML. However, a war as broken out in that space, with phone.com (one of the early pioneers in the wireless space) striking out on its own and developing a competing standard called HDML.

HDML

: HDML, or Handheld Markup Device Language, phone.com proposal for a new markup language. At the current time, the W3C has worked with phone.com and other markup language partners in an attempt to resolve the incompatibilities between the two offerings. With the cachet of WML increasing over the past year, phone.com has started supporting both format but offers HDML has a language with new tags that allow it to extend WML applications. Because it was an early player in the field, phone.com has taken a lead and could be the Microsoft or Netscape of that space. As a result, the extensions they are providing can’t be ignored.

HTML 4.0 mobile

: Last year, with the introduction of HTML 4.0, the W3C made some recommendations in terms of supporting HTML for wireless devices. Throwing further confusing in the wireless space, the W3C decided that HTML 4.0 and its successors might be the way to go, throwing more oil on the wireless fire. While no recommendation has been made yet on an actual standard and in spite of the W3C’s claim that it is working to resolve disputes with the W3C, expect some serious in-fighting between the different groups as they try to position themselves in the next hot web application space.

PQA (Palm Web Clippings)

: A couple of years ago, I pointed out that the Palm OS could be a potential Java competitor in the non-PC devices space. As could be expected, Palm went out and introduced the Palm VII, a wireless device with connections to the web. What was surprising, however, is that instead of going out and supporting either WML, HDML, or even HTML, they decided to introduce their own format to distribute web content: PQA or the Palm Query Application language. PQA is a paired-down HTML version that allows you to distribute content on the wireless Palm platform. Since services like OmniSky plan to offer wireless access to Palm devices other than the Palm VII, and since Palm already has an established footprint in the PDA space, expect PQA applications to pop up left and right.

A lot of format but what do I implement for?

At the current time, it seems there are no clear winners in the space however it seems clear that WAP has a strong lead in the delivery space for small bits of data. But WAP will not be the way to do Ecommerce or content as a clear character limitation makes it fairly useless for this. On the markup front, I’d strongly recommend looking at WML as it has received support from some of the larger players (Microsoft and Sun, among others) and seems to be the basic level of functionality. However, you should also look very seriously at the PQA format because of Palm’s extremely large footprint in the PDA space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Wireless: A confusing Landscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.