Article discusses importance and challenges of mobile web.
An article in the September 6-12th edition of The Economist discusses the mobile web (The meek shall inherit the web, Technology Quarterly supplement, page 3). Rather than analyze the article and face the wrath of people saying I’m biased, I’ve include some quotes from it for you to draw your own conclusions. [FYI, I’m not ignoring .mobi. the article did not mention .mobi.]
The article uses a new interest group within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a backdrop.
“the number of mobile phones that can access the internet is growing at a phenomenal rate, especially in the developing world. In China, for example, over 73m people, or 29% of all internet users in the country, use mobile phones to get online….China also has some 600m mobile-phone subscribers.”
“Last year Lee Kai-fu, Google’s president in China, announced that Google was redesigning its products for a market where “most Chinese users who touch the mobile internet will have no PC at all.â€
“If mobile banking is possible using a simple system of text messages, imagine what might be possible with full web access. But it will require standards to ensure that services and devices are compatible.”
“The right approach, Mr Boyera argues, is not to create “walled gardens†of specially adapted protocols for mobile devices, but to make sure that as much as possible of the information on the web can be accessed easily on mobile phones. That is a worthy goal.”
“Ken Banks, the other co-chair of the W3C’s new interest group and the founder of kiwanja.net, which helps non-profit organisations exploit mobile technologies in the developing world, points out that simple services based on text messages are likely to predominate for some time to come”
“With up to eight students in each dorm room [in China], phones are often the only practical way for students to access the web for their studies.”
“The developing world missed out on much of the excitement of the initial web revolution, the dotcom boom and Web 2.0, largely because it did not have an internet infrastructure. But developing countries may now be poised to leapfrog the industrialised world in the era of the mobile web.”
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