Virtual RoundtableThe Mobile Touch WebApril 2010

In January 2010 we released a report uncovering the state of the Mobile Touch Web which seemed to strike a chord with people in the industry…

While the mobile content industry is living its moment of glory and enjoying the phenomenal popularity of “apps” and applications stores, a small, innovative, company like Taptu shows that these stores are only part of the story. "The State of the Mobile Touch Web" report Taptu released in January 2010 reveals an astonishing growth in the number of touchscreen websites compared to mobile applications.

Creativity and innovation take different avenues in the mobile content industry and Taptu sheds new light on activity and creativity underway in the mobile Web space. Other players focused on the mobile Internet should join Taptu and work to improve the experience and spearhead the Renaissance of the mobile Web.

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Saverio RomeoFrost & Sullivanfrost.com

I like Taptu’s thinking. The company did not just buy into the ‘Apps, Apps, Apps!’ applications store hype repeated by everyone obsessed with touchscreen smartphones nowadays. True to the ideas I present in my own best-selling book on mobile Taptu thought it through. It understood that mobile, the 7th mass media, is different from PC, and touchscreen is different from everything! Taptu also understands that a touchscreen-enabled mobile Web experience will be distinct and different from the 'typing and mouse' metaphors common to the PC, as well as the classic T9 or QWERTY-based mobile Internet experience of old. Very clever! Taptu also recognizes that the Web services opportunity on the Mobile Touch Web is much greater than the apps opportunity.

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”Tomi AhonenCommunities Dominate Brands@tomiahonen

Thanks guys

Mobile. Touch. WebIn the past 15 years technology has changed in ways that no one could have foreseen. Now, with the convergence of the mobile Web and touch screen technology we’re embarking on another journey into the unpredictable. However …

A Collaborative VisionIf we’re all heading in the same direction why not make use of the hive mind to prepare ourselves? We asked some leading industry thinkers what they thought. To make it easier to digest, we’ve grouped these thoughts in to common themes

Take a look at what other people are thinking, and tell us what you think too

what the mobile touch

web means

Made for mobile: We will have to develop a new design mindset about what it takes to deliver a superior user experience for touch devices.

“”Jo Rabin

The Handheld Company@jorabin

Expect a continued revolution in human-computer interaction fueled by the iPad - what some have called the first "new computer" released in the last 20 years - and driven by an exciting new touch-centric mindset in UI and UX design. On both the desktop and on mobile, this experience will only continue to improve.

“”Alfred De Rose

Tego Interactive@AlfredDeRose

Touchscreen devices harness gestures and commands using our finger tips to offer new functionality. Manufacturers combine this with the device accelerometer - through taps, shakes and gentle pressure, for example -- to create new behavior and even standards specific to their device. The danger: this could confuse the user and result in silo loyalty to one device over another. It then becomes a case of the user thinking ‘I don’t understand how an Android device works, so I'll stick with iPhone, thanks.

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”Mark CurtisFlirtomatic@flirtomark

Designing and producing content for the mobile Web has always had its boundaries, with shortcut keys providing the only real dynamic form of navigation. The Mobile Touch Web removes all previous notions we have about a user’s mobile Web experience and allows content providers to focus their energy and creativity on more than how the user can interact with the content. It allows them to focus on providing a new richness to the experience because the touchscreens are better, bigger and allow more interactivity.

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”Carl MartinRedWeb@carlmartin

Pressure-sensitive touch interactions pave the way for new ways to connect with information and people. How hard you press on the screen or how lightly you move your fingers across the screen can signal faster or smoother interactions.

“”Andreas

ConstantinouVision Mobile@andreascon

The advance of the Mobile Touch Web accelerates us toward a time where ANY machine and a screen, can be used for ANY process that currently runs on disparate machines and screens with keys.

“”Jonathan

MacDonaldThis Fluid World@jmacdonald

The Touch Web will become popular on a wide range of devices and screen sizes, including PCs, notebooks, tablets and Microsoft’s Surface tabletop, to name a few.“ ”

Hugh GriffithsPhonepay Plus@hugh_griffiths

As screen size and resolution grow and mobile browsers gain Flash and robust JavaScript support, the lines between the Touch Web and the desktop Web will blur and eventually disappear. Going forward, web designers, developers and publishers will recognize that a rapidly growing percentage of their users are visiting their ‘desktop’ sites with phone browsers, and so sites and services will be designed to work seamlessly across desktop and mobile browsers. Ultimately, the Touch Web will become The Web.

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”Dennis BourniqueWapReview@yeswap

Touch-based search emerges to enhance keyboard-based mobile search. Touch can speed up navigation and contextualization of search results. In practice, the user could effectively and swiftly search through results in 2-D in much the same way we search through a stack of drawers or a pile of Lego bricks.

“”Andreas

ConstantinouVision Mobile@andreascon

Concentric search evolves. Search results are drawn from many places and inputs - the Web, the user’s desktop, the user’s social networks including their Facebook friends, even their ‘news feeds’ -- and presented in a 3-D window environment where a touch interface is simply the best interface to organize, navigate and prioritize the results.

“”Neil MacDonald

Nuance Communication@neilcmacdonald

Services will dynamically combine content and features from multiple sources. Services will evolve based on ‘Puddles’ or ‘Hubs’ of information, dynamically manipulating and pulling feed-like content and features from different sources based on the user preferences and context. Nested service discovery will become key.

“”Martin Wilson

Indigo 102@indigo102

Despite industry hopes and promises, mobile gaming – which was launched in EMEA around 2003 -- has failed to achieve more than single- digit penetration of users in many markets. The advance of touchscreen devices – with bigger screens and more interactivity --has already given the industry a boost and will continue to spur mobile gaming.

“”Hugh Griffiths

Phonepay Plus@hugh_griffiths

Content swapping explodes. Exchanging mobile entertainment ideas is big on mobile, boosted by social networks. This will be even bigger thanks to the Touch Web. We’ll also see the mass consumption of video products on mobile, an experience enhanced by the new wave of smartphones and faster connection speeds.

“”Dave Moreau

Fonestarz@DaveMoreau

Ease of purchase is a ‘no brainer’ for the consumer and will boost commerce. This can be helped a great deal by the introduction of transaction suggestion engines.“

”Dr Mike ShortTelefonica Europeblog.themda.org

Brands and agencies will embrace the Touch Web as the premiere channel to engage preferred demographic targets including young, educated professionals. This will drive Touch Web CPMs to very respectable levels, fueling more Touch Web app development, innovation and expansion.  This combined with streamlined data entry and integrated payment methods, will drive growth in mobile commerce, online banking, stock trading and shopping.

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”Dennis BourniqueWapReview@yeswap

Context matters. There’s a new realization that it’s not just about the devices; it’s about the context, and this includes factoring location, mood, time of day and purpose into mobile services and applications.

“”Jo Rabin

The Handheld Company@jorabin

The user’s location has already been made available inside the browser with the W3C Geolocation specification produced last year (and incorporated into iPhone, Android and Firefox browsers). This capability will come into wide use in 2010, resulting in more mobile and PC websites providing location-aware services. Meantime, more device capabilities, such as camera and sensors, will become available to Web application developers this year, creating new opportunities to incorporate context into Web applications on the mobile platform.

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”Dan AppelquistMoMoLondon@torgo

Consumers will define what content they want and how they want it. Mobile services will be increasingly lifestyle and socially orientated – linked to events, local activities, news or information, for example – and consumers will be able to filter content based on their preferences, interests and context. Touchscreen will make this process easier and more intuitive.

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Martin WilsonIndigo 102@indigo102

Advertising will become integral to services and woven in as content. People will pay for this ‘service’ with their attention and respond by interacting with the content on their touchscreens.

“”Martin Wilson

Indigo 102@indigo102

Advertising makes its mark. Advertising, which will benefit from the advance of location-based services, will boom. People will get over their paranoia about services linked or related to their physical location.

“”Dave Moreau

Fonestarz@DaveMoreau

With touch, users are able to consume and absorb more real estate on a mobile device in a shorter space of time, therefore allowing brands to offer more relevant content with a higher chance of completing a sale. And the feedback channel is also streamlined. Consumers reading content on a page are able to respond to advertising at the point of inspiration without the need for multiple clicks. Just swipe and click!

“”Carl Uminski

Somo@uminski

For the first time the Web is an experience that goes well beyond stylesheets and mobile one-column design. We are also seeing the segmentation of the Web experience. The first new segment is the Touch Web for mobile use. This Touch Web complements mobile apps and will be used for content that requires lots of back-end inventory, lots of browsing and -- most importantly-- lots of conceptual iteration.

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”Christian LindholmFjord@CLindholm

HTML5 is the new Web 2.0. The HTML5 suite of technologies will gain ground in 2010 and HTML5 as a platform will usher in a new era of rich Web applications, including off-line capabilities, Web video without plug-ins, and rich fonts. Like the Geolocation API, these advanced will often come to mobile before they appear on the desktop Web, upending the traditional Web innovation cycle.

“”Dan Appellquist

MoMoLondon@torgo

Simon AndrewsAddictive!@simonbigpicture

The role of the app will increasingly be a posh bookmark that effectively gives you (as a developer or content company) a presence on the mobile device home screen, which is the the most valuable real estate there is! When the user clicks on the app icon they don't care whether they launch an app or a browser, they just want to be delighted with the content or service at their finger tips. As the OS develops expect to see apps and browser-based content working together in one user experience.

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The best thing about a mobile device is that it’s connected to the Net, where you can interact with any person or service in the whole world. The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor .... from that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

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”Tim BrayGoogle@timbray

The reality is that, if mobile is going to live up to its promise, we need a future without gatekeepers. It isn’t hard to conceive of a future where more people have smartphones than have PCs. In some countries, people get more news from their mobile phones than they do from their desktop computers. We need to ensure that we have the freedom to publish what we want without restrictions

“”Jason Grigsby

Cloud Four@grigs

Touch potentially improves navigation, search and information access. Get this right and it will open up new and exciting markets for mobile and mobility including education, transport and health.

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Dr Mike ShortTelefonica Europeblog.themda.org

PC manufacturers will likely tweak the UI for the laptop, paving the way for the track pad to become a second touch screen.“ ”

Mark CurtisFlirtomatic@flirtomark

”Christian LindholmFjord@CLindholm

Within 2-3 years we will have 3 Webs. The 13" Mouse web, designed for computers, desktop and laptops; the 4" pocket Touch Web for mobile touchscreen devices and the like; and the 10" casual Touch Web for devices such as the iPad. Thus, we will have three segments: Phone, Pad and Computer. The Phone and Pad are Web sub-segments, and will require their own discovery, structure and monetization solutions

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What we’ve learnt

The advance of touch screen devices, app stores and new advertising approaches/formats are all coming together in a new kind of interactive mobile Internet, a brave new place where new content, new experiences and even new mobile search services will set the bar….Taptu understands this seismic shift and the impact of smartphones on the very fabric of the Mobile Web. The challenge: the Mobile Touch Web, though growing vigorously as Taptu shows, is not the only game in town. Thus, the pressure is on companies everywhere in the ecosystem to re-think their strategies and … create a balance of touch-friendly content for touchscreen devices and the emerging Mobile Touch Web, while not losing sight of the opportunities offered by the other Internets. We face tough choices, but hoping for the Internet to become a unified place where everything is accessible and connected (again) is not an option.

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Peggy Anne SalzMsearchgroove@peggyanne

Special thanks to Peggy Anne Salz for helping put together this ‘virtual roundtable’

And again thanks to everybody that contributed

signup for Mobile Touch Web reportswww.taptu.com/metrics

more info, tell us what you thinkwww.blog.taptu.com/

get in touch@taptu

Since early 2009 Taptu has evolved and pioneered the index and crawling of media specifically designed for touch screen mobile devices. Consumers can now, for the first time, search and browse millions of mobile touch web sites, apps, images and the real-time web from their touch screen mobile device. Taptu is also making this unique index available to third parties via an API.

Taptu is available from your mobile browser at taptu.com orin the App Store or Android Market.

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