Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I really liked the post that Paddy put up recently at OpenGardens, particularly this bit:

In our open garden, the service provider is the garden designer and horticulturist, who will be creative in order to captivate his audience. He doesn’t just hand over his wares at the gate. These open gardens will be enabled not just by openness in platform technology, but openness of ecosystem for service providers.

“openness of ecosystem for service providers” really sums up a whole set of issues quite succinctly. It also got me thinking about open standards and mobile development. Paddy is definitely correct about the advantages of applications in mobile that don’t follow the traditional breakdown of the role of the client and the role of the server in online interaction. The GMail java app certainly doesn’t feel like other applications that talk IMAP or POP back to the server, and Opera Mini also has a very different feel than most web browsers, even on a smartphone.

Of course this is just the reason that operators have always used for not cleaving to open standards for stuff like messaging and until recently web access. I’m wondering if the way to tip the scales is to develop some open infrastructure to begin with, outside the carrier domain but structured in a way that it should be easy for the operators to adopt when the time comes. Essentially additional instances of efforts like Funambol, a company building open tools around the public SyncML standard. The kinds of things that work without a carrier cooperating, but work better when woven into the ecosystem.

What other areas would fit well into something like that? XMPP for messaging obviously, VOIP services, direct support for SIP. Perhaps identity and profile info, LID, OpenID, something of the sort. Just thinking out loud here, I think it would be interesting to put together a vision of what a future mobile network operator could look like. It’s something that we’ve spoken about a lot, but never really laid out in full as far as I know. Anyone know of a pre-existing instance I can take a look at?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 9:58 pm and is filed under ThisIsMobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.