As we ended 2011 many people were asking me what I thought was next in the world of mobile and whether I had any predictions. My response was that companies should focus on getting the basics right first (develop a coherent mobile strategy, create mobile optimized versions of their websites) before even worrying about “what’s next”.

I’m a big advocate for creating native or hybrid apps, depending on the type of engagement you desire with your customer (a topic for a whole other post), but creating a mobile optimized website is pretty much a must these days, considering how much search and browsing is done on mobile devices.

It seems a recent report from L2ThinkTank bears out my view. The report, focuses primarily on luxury brands, what they refer to as the Prestige100 (though I’m quite sure how Macy’s makes the list; but I digress).  Though the report is limited to luxury brands, it’s my impression that the results are at least directionally applicable to the overall state of mobile maturity across various sectors. Their research shows that many of these brands are not yet mastering the basics, as indicated by this chart recreated by eMarketer:

Takeaways for the Travel Sector

As I am ensconced in the travel sector these days I wanted to highlight the results from hospitality brands.  In many ways the results don’t differ much from what I had noted 10 months ago in a post I wrote over at Tnooz.

The only companies that fit into the Prestige100 were luxury hotels (one might hav thought that airlines like Singapore or Emirates or luxury cruises like SilverSea might have made the cut, but alas, no).While Intercontinental made the “Gifted” class and as a whole, the “Hospitality” segment averaged a score of 86, which falls in the “Challenged” category.

The good news is that it puts Hospitality as the second highest rated industry, behind retail, but also shows there’s still a long way to go. And I would further speculate that the scores for the non-luxury hotels would come up even a bit lower still.

You can find the whole report from L2 available at SlideShare below:

Amazingly investors keep throwing money at companies that are engaging in potentially illegal enterprises (re: local lodging regulations). Couchsurfing is in the same vein as Airbnb and Wimdu although they claim to be more benign (“building communities” rather than focusing on transactions).
The best part of the article: “Evidently, the San Francisco-based company plans to make money at some point, but how remains unclear: Fenton said they’re going to experiment with a number of revenue models in the future to try and find one that doesn’t interfere with the user experience whatsoever.”

Translation: “We have no idea what the fuck we’re doing, but thanks for the money.”

I think it’s now clear that I should make up a fake company idea, say that it’s going to be just like XXXCo (pick any overvalued, stupid idea), take the money and then move to an exotic locale with no extradition rights. You’ll all be invited to visit. Pina coladas for everyone…on the house.

Another stupid idea that devalues the concept of social recommendations. If any of my friends sign up for this I am un-friending and un-following you.

Now, I’m not saying that Meg Whitman reads my blog or calls me for advice, but I’m glad to see they followed my suggestion last month to make WebOS an open source project.

Open sourcing WebOS and HP’s statements of continued financial support to the project, really gives WebOS one last chance to fulfill its promise.  Although it’s hard to really know what the plan is from Whitman’s and Andreesen’s recent comments.

When HP originally bought Palm, I thought it would give WebOS a chance to be embraced by the developer community.  I figured the combination of HP’s resources to both take the product to the next level and make it a mainstream alternative in the enterprise (both via HP’s market position in desktop and mobile devices) plus the strong developer relationships it had accumulated via its other software products would push WebOS into a viable competitor to Apple and Google, or at least to the top of the second tier among RIM and Microsoft.

If I were a handset manufacturer, WebOS could give me cover in case the litigation between Oracle and Google or Apple and the Android OEMs goes the wrong way. Or as a way to differentiate its devices from the other OEMs instead of developing it’s own OS as Samsung has done with Bada. I’m not sure however, as some have suggested, that WebOS would provide any leverage for an OEM in discussions with Google or Microsoft.

Personally I hope the open source community throws its efforts behind WebOS. I think it is at worst the 4th best platform alternative out there (iOS, Android, WP7, WebOS, then QNX). But one of my favorite quotes is “Hope is not a plan” (h/t @michaelombardi), so I hope that Meg and Marc have a plan.

What’s your POV?

In a move that was a long time coming and not terribly surprising, Adobe announced today that they will drop all future development of Flash player on mobile devices. Instead Adobe will put most of its energy behind HTML5.

During the past year, Adobe has steadily moved towards embracing HTML5 and refocusing its efforts on continuing to create the world’s best design tools and less on propping up a legacy, proprietary technology.  Putting HTML5 first is a continutation of the path they committed themselves to last month at their MAX 2011 conference when they announced the acquistions of Nitobi (maker of the PhoneGap cross-platform mobile development framework) and TypeKit.

It’s also not surprising given the fact that for all their protestations, and pronouncements about hardware acceleration, Flash was a dog on mobile devices. Performance was poor and battery life suffered even more.

Adobe is saying that to ease the transition of Flash developers that they will still be able to leverage their skills for mobile development using the AIR framework which is approved on iOS, Android and Research in Motion platforms (BlackBerry OS and BBX née QNX).  Adobe will also continue to support Flash on the desktop into the future with a focus on “advanced gaming and premium video”.

However, the move could spell the end of Flex as a framework as noted by this tweet from Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri:

That would suggest that anyone who’s made an investment in the Flash/Flex world better start to think about how to transition to solutions that leverage the open web standard trinity of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3.  I’m sure that Adobe’s tools will support HTML5 output making the transition easier without retraining.

So now that that’s settled, what will the Android phone makers use as a differentiator from Apple’s devices now that they can’t trot out “support for Flash Player 10.2” anymore?

What’s your POV? Does this announcement affect your approach to mobile development or had you already moved off of Flash-based development?  Please let me know in the comments below.

Recently new HP CEO Meg Whitman announced that the company will keep Personal Systems Group as a part of HP’s core, undoing the decision that caused great consternation about the technology giant’s future and essentially led to former-CEO Leo Apotheker’s ouster and Whitman getting the job in the first place.

What’s a little disappointing is that it looks like WebOS may not survive, even if the computer and peripherals business does. And that’s too bad.

I used to have a Palm Pre and thought very highly of WebOS, even if the hardware disappointed. When HP decided to buy Palm last year, I immediately thought it was a great decision and that HP had the ability to make WebOS a force in the mobile community — something that Palm couldn’t accomplish on it’s own — because if HP’s place in the enterprise.

I still think that WebOS has a lot going for it. If HP does abandon it, I hope that they might donate the code, to an organization like the Apache Foundation, and see whether developers would build off a strong core and create a TRUE open source mobile operating system.   It’s clear by speed at which WebOS tablets sold at $99 that it’s not a matter of the quality of the OS, just the opportunity it was provided.

What do you think?

For all of those who demonize Apple as closed, remember this and WebKit. The code is available under an Apache license.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder.  Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files.  A description of a ‘magic cookie’ for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.

In a somewhat surprising announcement one the first day of their MAX 2011, Adobe Systems announced that it was acquiring Nitobi Systems, the creator of PhoneGap.

At Ness we’re big supporters of PhoneGap and have used it for clients in some cases, so we’re happy to see this deal happen (not at happy as the Nitobi guys are ) as we think it will lead to more enhancements to an already strong platform.

I think this is an important development that mobile devs needs to pay attention to.  There are three things that I think mobile developers should take away from the announcement:

1. Adobe is Looking Forward

With the purchase of Nitobi and Typekit, Adobe signals that it is unequivocally moving to reorient their development tools and “Write Once, Deploy Anywhere” strategy around Open Web standards of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS and moving on from the legacy of Flash. This is great news for all developers for two reasons: first from a skills development perspective it simplifies things. Secondly all of Adobe’s energies will be to ensure that their industry-leading tools will stay there. Certainly this is part of a plan to re-engage and re-energize the developer community who on average prefers an open, rather than proprietary approach.

2. It’s a Great Fit

This was a surprising deal to me only because I didn’t think Adobe was shopping for one of the mobile cross-platform framework companies. But it makes a ton of sense. Now developers can create the apps in HTML5 using Adobe CS5 and then deploy that code into native binaries via the PhoneGap framework with the click of a button. Dead easy (oversimplification, but you get the idea). I expect that the integration between CS5 and PhoneGap will improve over time to make it a seamless experience.

And I expect that this is the end of Adobe’s Packager for iPhone to translate CS5/Flash files into iOS compatible code. Good. I hope they put the extra development dollars from that project right into PhoneGap.

Further Adobe also released the third public preview of Adobe Edge a HTML5 motion and interaction design tool that enables Flash-like animation to websites and mobile apps via the Open Web Holy Trinity (HTML5/JS/CSS3, not to be confused with onion/celery/carrot for you cooking fans).

This has a chance to really get devs excited about Adobe again…not that Adobe hasn’t had great products all along  – they have – but with all the posturing over Flash in their spat with Apple, they haven’t generated the excitement with the developer community that they had in years past. That should change now.

3. Adobe Continues PhoneGap’s Open Source Culture

Initially I wondered whether Adobe would continue to keep PhoneGap open source and include the developer community in enhancing the platform or if it might simply make the code available as Google does with Android. But Adobe was pretty emphatic in its support of the Open Source community as the code was donated to the Apache Software Foundation.

The Open Source nature of PhoneGap is part of what made it so popular with developers.

Now if I was cynical or suspicious I’d think that the donation to ASF was the final effort of the Nitobi management to ensure its legacy is maintained. Perhaps the Nitobi founders made it a condition of the deal?  You only have to modestly parse the statements in the press release to say that Adobe endorsed the decision post the transaction, not encouraged it.  Who knows and who cares. What’s important is that it’s done.

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Are you using PhoneGap already? Does this announcement make you more or less interested in it as an option for mobile development?  Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and one more thing. Do you think Samsung, Motorola and RIM will stop advertising Flash compatibility as a reason not to buy an iPad now? God, I hope so.

That’s the opening statement from an Amtrak commercial that I saw last night (at least it was new to me). As a consumer of travel it’s a sentiment that resonated with me very strongly. Pretty well executed ad overall, although the point about the ‘shoes’ is probably too veiled a reference to TSA security for the average viewer to catch. But moving right along.

As a participant in the travel industry I understand the movement towards unbundling of products and the opportunity for ancillary revenues to drive profitability that the ad directly references. If I was cynical (oh, wait I am) I might say that it’s easy for Amtrak to make these claims and offer ‘free’ services because they are receiving government funds to stay afloat.

However JetBlue and Southwest also follow the Amtrak philosophy and are among the most profitable and highest rated US airlines. So the correlation between ancillary revenues and success isn’t necessarily as high as some would like us to believe. Sometimes I think that the airlines have lost sight of the customer as they focus on expanding revenue streams.

As I wrote earlier this year in Tnooz, the best path to creating higher margins is to deliver an experience that the customer enjoys and you can earn real loyalty that isn’t driven by providing the lowest cost or through constant promotions. Whether that experience is created by software, services or amenities isn’t the point.

In case you were at the beach, shaken up by an earthquake or lost power during a hurricane this summer (I did all three in the past month) and somehow missed our webinar on mobile strategy, fear not. We captured the whole thing for you watch on YouTube.

In the webinar, Jean-Noel Lau Keng of Amadeus and I cover

• The state of the mobile industry (for those of you looking for stats)
• Common challenges in approaching mobile development initiatives
• Why mobile has become a critical channel in the travel sector, and how Amadeus are integrating mobile into their products and services
• How Transaction v. Engagement objectives may impact the approach you take to mobile
• The approach Amadeus has taken to address the mobile imperative, unexpected challenges, and the results of the company’s mobile initiative
• What are the 5 key steps your organization should take to implement a successful mobile strategy

If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments.