Mobilising our efforts

Submitted by Simon on Sun, 02/20/2011 - 09:48

I used to play a game - walking down Oxford Street - where I would count the number of people using smartphones (I included people listening to iPods too).  I would count up if I saw someone using one and down if I didn't - all the way down to our offices in Centre Point.  Month after month it always netted at a negative number - less people doing it than not. 

And then that negative number started to shrink. 

Maybe around August of last year, you could validate claims that the smartphone market was exploding by walking down the road.  I had a BlackBerry around then - just waiting to switch to a real smartphone. (Sorry Blackberry users - you're carrying a dead parrot, not a smartphone).  When the moment came, my choice was the Samsung Galaxy S.  Very quickly, I'd rooted the handset, installed a custom ROM and added a 32Gb microSD card.  The BlackBerry's idle competence at email and (oddly) photography, was replaced by a blizzard of mobile brilliance.

When you point a good smartphone around, you see the world in a slightly different light.  You're never lost, thanks to maps.  You're never out of touch, in any channel: email, SMS, chat, facebook, Twitter and old-fashioned talk.  The 'cloud' and everything in it follows you around - calendar, documents, YouTube, Flickr.  You can point and shoot any moment as video or still. And you can access the web.

The last point is a funny one.  Although Apple were the first out of the gate with a truly usable mobile browser, they'd love to kill the web off.  That's where their 'apps' delivering web services came in.  That's where their revenue came in.  You buy the app through iTunes and Apple take a 30% cut.  That's great for Apple, whereas web browsing isn't.  Because they can't get the cut.

The whole 'app' thing threw everyone for a while, especially with the Apple PR machine behind it.  But the truth is, most 'apps' don't need to be 'apps'.  They could be slick mobile websites.  And that has two very big advantages.  One, it makes it free again.  Two, it works on all smartphones - not just on an iPhone.

So, to celebrate the moment, we've launched a mobile version of our own site.  Point your mobile at www.newdigitalpartnership.com and you'll see what we've done.  Along the way, we discovered this:

   1. Creating mobile skins for sites built using Drupal is easy.  (Drupal is the open-source technology that we, and many others, use for building websites.)

   2. While the mobile skin is easy, the site architecture usually needs a rethink.  Overall, this means that creating a mobile version adds about 25% to the budget.

Right now, we're only scratching the surface of the cool things we can do with mobile.  The location, orientation and touch sensors of a smartphone add a wild number of possibilities.  And, don't be fooled by the small screen - the creative opportunities are enormous too.  And the great news - all of this can be done with the same skills we already have - HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Drupal.

It was always fun to be doing web.  But right now, it's a breakout moment.  Go Android!  Go iPhone!  We're with you.