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:

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.

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.

April 8, 2014. That’s the date that Microsoft has set to end all support of Windows XP. Yes, XP will almost be old enough to be Bar-Mitzvah’d at that point.  Oy vey.

That date is important to mobile developers because XP is the boat anchor that is holding back full-throated supported for HTML5-based apps.

Managing support of older browser platforms – especially when you have to balance desktop and mobile browsers – is a pain for everyone and the costs and resource requirements of doing so are significant. Last month Google declared that it is ending support for Firefox 3.5, IE7 and Safari 3 as of August 1.

While it’s hard to find reliable statistics on OS market share, XP sadly still plays a prominent role in many enterprises. And the limitations of XP are what’s holding many developers hostage to this day. A Forrester report from as recent as Q3 2010 indicated that a whopping 75% of PCs are still running Windows XP[1].

In Windows chief Steven Sinfosky’s appearance at All Things Digital’s D9 conference last month, Microsoft demo’d Windows 8 [prior coverage] the most important announcement in my view was that HTML5 & JavaScript would be the primary development environment for building apps. That Microsoft has made such a strong statement of support for the open HTML5 standard over a proprietary one (essentially demoting Silverlight to whatever is past the scrap heap) is a major coup for the HTML5 movement.

That is in addition to Microsoft’s move to add support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9 and 10.  But alas, neither of those browsers are available for Windows XP users.  Factoring in the limitations of XP and the resulting significant share of non-HTML5 compliant browsers IE 6, 7 and 8, application developers can’t fully commit to HTML5.

Here are some graphics I found on HTML5 browser compliance that I thought were worth sharing. They paint a pretty clear picture (Source: : http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus).

Therefore they stuck with the challenge of having to develop multiple presentation layers, rather than being able to consolidate under the HTML5/CSS3/JS umbrella. This naturally multiplies development, testing and support costs which can rob the ability of development organizations to invest those resources in other activities that move the product/service forward. Not good, right?

Yet this is exactly what Adobe should be thanking Microsoft for.  Many of the older desktop and web applications were built using Flash and Flex. So developers are handcuffed to these platforms and it makes investing in new versions and support for mobile devices (remember that iOS doesn’t support Flash) more challenging.  And there are 3 more years until XP goes away and therefore 3 more years that Flash hovers over the industry like a spectre.

Now my colleague Avinash Kaza writes that even if Flash goes away it’s not a big deal as Flash drives a relatively small portion of Adobe’s revenues and that tools are where the money is.  That is true to an extent. But Flash has had a halo effect on Adobe’s business far greater than the revenues indicate. By making Flash player free, it transformed Adobe into a web publishing platform, that drove the sales of its tools. Even though Adobe probably makes the very best design tools for HTML5, if Flash were to go away Adobe would lose that halo and be positioned as a great tools company.

I was just talking with a client who is trying to figure out how to bring their Flash-based app to mobile, with the iPad as a key target platform. Unfortunately there are no easy paths forward.  In the same boat as many other companies, they don’t have a lot of budget and many of their customers are accessing the app via IE 6, 7 & 8. They did ask me for projections of when XP will fade in the enterprise so that we could build a product roadmap to migrate the product towards HTML5. I thought I’d share some of the information I found so far:

• XP still has a significant role in the enterprise. Forrester’s data shows a 75% share for XP, but forecasted that Windows 7 would exchange share with XP.  This clearly hasn’t happened to the extent forecasted, but the chart that follows shows a much smaller number, but still significant progress. I believe that the Pingdom number includes consumer PCs too because of the relatively high share for Vista which most enterprises avoided like the plague (with good reason). We might have been in a very different place if Vista wasn’t such a disaster of a product. In my opinion, Vista cast a pall over Windows 7 that stunted enterprise adoption.

• Windows 8 is not due until (early) 2012. The demo and D9 looked great. I have not been able to find any info on projected enterprise adoption. While I love the Metro UI and tile interface, I wonder if the stark differences in UI will delay enterprise adoption because of anticipated higher training costs and impacts on user productivity during the initial transition.
• Here are current browser share that seem to show that gains by IE9 are correlated with Windows 7 adoption. Also to be noted is that Firefox users (based on the Gecko rendering engine) are pretty quick to update to the latest version (Firefox 3.6 has pretty good HTML5 support and Firefox 4.0 is even better)  – Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.

Did you find this information useful? Are you struggling with the same issues?

If you have chosen a particular technical direction, please share with the group and make us all smarter for it!

That was the title of my latest post in Tnooz.  

For all the buzz around NFC and Google Wallet, I don’t think that it’s a real game changer in the near-term.  Why you may ask?

1. Google Wallet isn’t the only game in town. PayPal, Apple, Square (backed by Visa) and others are in the game and are well ahead at this juncture.
2. The wrong use case? The NFC-based technology fits better for Point-of-Sale retail situations than it does for how  much of travel is purchased. There may be other uses for NFC in travel, but I’m not sure how well payment fits.
3. It’s the Infrastructure, stupid. Getting NFC chips in phones is the easy part. Getting NFC-capable readers at the point of sale is another story entirely.
4. Devices need to reach critical mass. Google launched a Wallet system that today works on only 1 phone on 1 network in 1 country.  And it’s the smallest network of the Big 3-1/2.  Ironically Google might only succeed only if Apple, Microsoft and others are successful too.
5. The Court System. It seems as if it can’t be a travel related story if the courts aren’t involved in some way anymore. Rest assured they are as PayPal sued Google only hours after the Wallet announcement dropped.

But maybe my perspective is skewed as I’m not a huge believer in NFC (a 10 year old technology) as a game changer. Please read the full article and please add your thoughts in the comments?

Last week I appeared on a panel at DMO Mojo conference down in New Orleans, where I was surprised and delighted to find out was taking place during Mardi Gras.  That certainly made for some fun eveing activities J

I was privileged to be speaking alongside Morgan Johnston, who runs the social media programs over at JetBlue (he’s the main protagonist behind @JetBlue), and Stuart Colovin, chief creative officer at MMG Worldwide, the hosts of the event.

During my portion of the panel session I laid out an approach to develop a successful mobile strategy and discussed the various elements that need to be considered (see the embedded Slideshare presentation below).

Morgan really knocked it out of the park, giving a great presentation on the challenge and opportunity of harnessing social channels to promote and reinforce a brand, highlighting the significant contributions he and his “Black Ops” team has made at JetBlue.  Stuart made an excellent presentation on brand positioning and how to differentiate one’s message from other similar destinations (it was hysterical to see the amazing similarity in messaging and images between many island/beach destinations).  Really well done.  Even better was the lively Q&A session that followed.

But for me, it was a great opportunity to learn about a segment of the travel industry that many pay short shrift to, Destination Marketing Organizations. Boy do these guys have a tough job:

• Competing to be the starting point for trip inspiration and planning at the beginning of the travel lifecycle
• Trying to be the go-to source of information of what to do and when while people are at the destination – yet fighting an uphill battle against better known, location-independent information sources like Zagat or Yelp or plain old Google search.
• Having to balance the holistic needs of the city/region with the individual desires of participating member organizations.  One DMO was very concerned about providing unbiased and honest recommendations of restaurants/hotels/activities (which promotes the trust necessary to maintain value to the consumer), but may not be as well received by some of the organizations who support the DMO.
• Fighting for budget dollars when state and local budgets are under extreme pressure and changing monetization strategies as they shift from traditional advertising supported printed guides and other materials to digital platforms.

Really tough job.

In the afternoon Pecha Kucha session there were some very interesting presentations from some of the DMOs/CVBs on their efforts to leverage social and mobile. In particular, two stood out to me:

1. Visit PA’s use of Foursquare: Location is one of the unique intersections of mobile and social that it tied to exploring the different areas and attractions that a region or state has to offer. Richard Bonds, Director of Social Media for Visit PA described how they put together a very progressive custom badge program using Foursquare to spur visitors to explore the state and not simply stop at the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Tagging all the previously claimed check-in locations seemed to be a fairly labor intensive process, but was critical to the program’s success.
2. Visit Florida’s response to misconceptions about the impact that the Deep Water Horizons disaster had on local beaches:  This was a really interesting use of technology, mobile and social, presented by Will Seccombe, CMO of Visit Florida. To allay prospective traveler’s fears of oil and tar-filled beaches (there was even concerns about the east coast of Florida), Visit Florida rolled out the “Great Visit Florida Beach Walk” campaign and mobilized their own citizenry to take pictures of local beach conditions and then overlay the geo-coded photos on a map so that visitors can see what’s real for themselves.  Very clever, very cool.

NB: MMG Worldwide paid for my travel and attendance at the conference.

Well even though there was Labor Day and Rosh Hashannah (at least for me), it turns out it was a busy week after all. Here are the things that caught my eye. Let’s lead off with perhaps the one piece of news that may have the farthest reaching effect…at least in the travel world:

1. There can be only One: The OpenTravel Alliance and OPEN Axis have agreed in principle to work together to harmonize the two competing XML schema for airlines. While there’s plenty of work yet to be done, it removes the threat of competing standards causing confusion and slowing adoption and innovation in the industry.
2. If you thought Mark Hurd’s departure from HP was entertaining, wait till you see how his arrival at Oracle is being handled.
3. WiFi in the sky wars continue to escalate. Row44, who provides WiFi for Southwest Airlines’ planes, raises $37M. That may sound like a lot, but pales in comparison to the $176M that Aircell (the company behind GoGo Inflight Internet) raised earlier this year.
4. Excellent analysis by Daring Fireball of how Apple Ping might expand music sales, but also the potential impact for books, apps and more.
5. Google anticipates your search results with Google Instant. That’s the concept at least. Some of it is real (Google can look at historical data to try to anticipate what you’re searching for as you type), but the rest relies pretty much on tried and true UI schemes like AJAX to dynamically present refreshed results while you type. It makes a strong visceral impact, but it doesn’t seem as if they’ve really done much to shrink the pure search times. What is true is that this has a major impact on SEO strategies. Edelman Digital’s Steve Rubel has a take on this aspect.
6. Professor Sabena digs deeper into the latest round of travel market statistics.
7. Reconciliation of a sort between Apple and Adobe in the Flash saga? Let’s not get crazy, but Mashable provides a good review of what developers should take from the change in Apple’s stance.
8. I love a good rant as much as the next guy, so here’s one by Valyn Perini on the suckiness of most vacation rental sites.
9. Not that this should come as a shock to anyone, but most mobile travel bookings are from people who are already in transit. Some good stats from Priceline bear that out.
10. Loyalty is not simply repeat purchase. A great post by Seth Godin.  If you like this post, I’d also suggest reading “Start with Why” by Steven Sinek.  Here’s link to Sinek’s TED Talk.

Sorry for the late Monday post. So without further adieu:

1. Google introduced App Inventor, a simple GUI based app builder for Android OS. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid takes it for a spin. Mike Loukides from O’Reilly Radar discusses the different philosophies behind Apple and Google as evidenced by App Inventor. I for one don’t think that we’ll be better off having more bad apps at our disposal, but to each his own. And I guess that’s Google’s point.
2. Tnooz reports ITA had been working on hotel search. Add this to Google’s display of hotel listings and pricing on Google Maps and you’ve got some serious juju going.
3. Big cloud announcements at Microsoft WDC10. Perhaps Azure-in-a-box is the most intriguing. Ben Kepes has an interesting take.  And eBay is the first high-profile client to take the plunge.
4. Facebook v. Google: the upcoming travel wars. Interestingly the author ponders Microsoft’s potential role, but doesn’t consider Apple.  Curious.
5. Apple had its press conference on Friday, but the real-world experiences of Engadget’s own writers shows that perhaps the iPhone4 antenna issue isn’t as big of an issue that the media is making it out to be. And I would say that Microsoft COO Kevin Turner’s lame attempt at a joke equating the iPhone antenna issue with the outright suckiness of Vista was imprudent at best. First ship a mobile OS that doesn’t suck and then you’ve earned the right to say something.
6. In related news, it looks like Microsoft Phone7 OS isn’t going to be the game changer they hoped it would be.
7. Can Google make a good travel product? TravelPost’s Simon Breakwell has some definite opinions. A must read.
8. Google Click-to-Call. Is this the new face of mobile advertising?
9. Bing Travel introduces Flight Summary with savings if you’re flexible with your travel plans. Pretty cool. Would be even cooler if they could integrate dynamic packing of hotel and car to give the best overall travel value.
10. Homeaway hires their new COO from PayPal. This signifies a move to better integrate alternative payments (including mobile) into the booking process, but perhaps shows an appreciation of the benefits of having a more professional software engineering organization in order to keep up with the needs of the business.

I’m introducing a new segment called “Insightful Conversations” which are interviews with industry executives in the technology or travel industries talking about industry news and trends.  Last week the big news came out of Google’s I/O conference with major implications for the mobile web.  To talk about the implications of the announcements by Google and Adobe and how they might impact companies’ mobile plans is Crisp Wireless CTO, Xavier Facon.

In the interview we discuss Flash v. HMTL5, app-centricity v. mobile web-centricity and whether brands and developers should alter their mobile plans based on the evolution of the Android platform, HMTL5 and Google’s open sourcing of the WebM VB8 video CODEC.  Some of the key insights from Xavier were:

• Adobe is an authoring tool vendor. It’s only natural that they support other platforms like HTML5, but it won’t reduce their support of Flash. But he’s bullish on the future of HTML5.
• Xavier breaks down the differences between Flash, H.264 and Google’s WebM CODEC
• Regardless of whether HMTL5 or Flash wins, Adobe wins. Developers will always need the best tools and Adobe will likely deliver them.
• HMTL5-based apps may make Apple’s section 3.3.1 meaningless. Apple won’t be able to tell what tool was used to create HTML5-based apps. The final code will all look the same.
• The most important thing of Google’s new Web Apps store is that it shows that they finally get that winners and losers is based on distribution, not technology.  There will be a convergence between the app-centric world of Apple and Google’s mobile-web centric approach.

Enjoy the interview.

Insightful Conversations – Xavier Facon – iTunes format

Insightful Conversations – Xavier Facon – MP3

About Crisp Wireless

Crisp Wireless is a mobile advertising company that offers a rich media mobile ad platform and a full catalog of beyond-the-banner ad units to enable premium brands to interact with consumers on mobile devices. The company makes it easier for advertising agencies to buy, create, and manage mobile rich media campaigns. Crisp also empowers publishers to take control of their valuable mobile inventory and maximize their mobile ad revenue. Leading brands including Lexus, Infiniti, Paramount Pictures, Estee Lauder, Skittles, and others have utilized Crisp Rich Media ads.  Crisp Publisher Partners include Hearst Magazines, Discovery Communications, A&E Television Networks, Fast Company, Inc., and others.

Last week Dennis Schaal wrote an article pondering the question of what travel companies should do with their mobile and web strategies in light of the Apple/Adobe feud over Flash.  Dennis got input on whether to continue leveraging the Flash platform or wait for HTML5 to mature from several prominent individuals involved in the travel industry including RockCheetah’s Robert Cole.  And Robert got it exactly right…only backwards.

But I don’t want to bury the lead.  Let me state up-front: You should not stand on the sidelines and wait for the Adobe-Apple kerfuffle (nod to @jangles) to sort itself out.  This will take years.  Instead, be thoughtful in establishing your web and mobile strategy and get moving today.

Now let me outline where I have disagreement with Robert’s views.

Different platforms require different modes of presentation based on different usability strategies

Robert worries that uncertainty around the winner of the Flash debate will result in the “dumbing-down” (Dennis’ words, not Robert’s) of sites or the need to invest in multiple sites to support different technology platforms.

In fact, trying to provide the same experience over different devices or platforms is the epitome of dumbing-down.  “Write-once, run anywhere” is a siren’s call that can cause many apps to crash on the shores of poor usability and blandness.  Different devices have different use cases and capabilities.  If you don’t take that into consideration you’re making a fatal mistake.  Let me elaborate.

• Think of the use case: In software development, just like in web design, nothing is more important than the use case. For example, prospective travelers are more likely to conduct their primary research during the trip planning phase on their desktop/laptops, but are more likely to use their mobile devices post-booking and while in-situ (e.g. itinerary changes, alerts, making a dinner reservation).  So the kind of information that you present and how you present it should differ in each case. While the information you provide the “travel researcher” can have a lot of text, high-res images, and video, the information and options you give the mobile traveler need to be much more streamlined and transactional in nature.
• Consider the device capabilities: First of all you must remember that the desktop paradigm is based around the traditional WIMP (windows-icon-menu-pointer) construct while most smartphone and mobile devices are touch-based.  This changes almost everything about the way you need to present your information.  In a touch-based paradigm mouse-overs don’t work because you can’t physically do it.  The precision of ‘pointing’ is constrained.  Finally, and most obviously, not every device has the same screen size or can automatically switch from portrait to landscape mode. To not adapt for the different devices is to leave a lot of potential improvement to the user experience on the table. More importantly, why bother creating an app for a device if you aren’t going to take advantage of specific device capabilities like accelerometers, locators, calendars, or phonebooks?

Finalization of the HTML5 spec will take years, but won’t hinder adoption

It is true that the finalization of the HTML5 spec is not anticipated until 2012.  But that’s a very different point than saying that no one will be adopting it until the spec is finalized. If nothing else the web is fluid and reacts quickly.  Every desktop browser of note either supports HTML5 currently (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) or has pledged its support (Microsoft for the upcoming IE9).

And the same goes for mobile browsers, which are increasingly based on the WebKit standard.  Check out this chart from a post in the O’Reilly Radar:

Overwhelmingly mobile browsers already support HMTL5 (with Microsoft pledging support in the future) and TODAY, none of these mobile browsers (nor really any mobile device I’ve heard of) supports Adobe Flash.

Add on top of this the fact that by all accounts over two-thirds of videos on the web – and perhaps as high as 90% – are available in the H.264 standard used by HTML5-powered sites, I’d say that video content isn’t a deal-breaker anymore.

Let’s get real about “Open Source”

Lastly there is the debate as to who is more open.  Is it Adobe or Apple? I think that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (no relation) says it well.

“Open” is one of those terms that means a lot of different things to different people. Most should be able to agree, though, that open-vs.-closed is a continuum — shades of gray, not just black and white. A light enough shade of gray is “open”, dark enough is “closed”. The arguments are over where those thresholds lie.

I, for example, would argue that HTML5 is open, and that Flash is not. HTML5 is open, to my eyes, because no one vendor defines or controls either its specification or its numerous implementations. The specification is being written and decided upon by consensus by two standards groups, WHATWG and the W3C.

You can argue whether or not Apple’s policy regarding AppStore approvals make any sense and you probably have a good argument.  But I don’t think it’s fair at all to say that Apple is closed from a technology perspective.  Apple’s web vision is based on HTML5, CSS, Javascript and H.264 video — all industry standards that they do not control.  Adobe on the other hand freely licenses the Flash player, but not the platform. Adobe can make whatever changes to Flash of their own choosing and on their own timetable.  They may claim to take the desires of the development community into consideration in developing their product roadmap, but they are not required to. In the four years since Apple’s iPhone ushered in the age of the web and media driven smartphone there has been no mobile version of Flash available for any device and consequently no mobile device has supported Flash in all that time and we have lived to tell about it.

In my view, Adobe’s entire argument is merely a matter of timing. Only now when Adobe is finally planning to release Flash Mobile 10.1 (anticipated to be launched next month on the Android 2.2 OS…backwards availability or compatibility not assured…and H/Pre’s WebOS) after years of delay are they protesting.  How much longer should they have expected the rest of the industry to wait before they moved on to a standards-based approach? It’s important to remember that months prior to the release of the iPad and the announcement of iPhone OS4, it was Google who was the most vocal proponent of an HTML5-centric view of the future of the web.  Only recently has Google begun to embrace Flash on mobile devices driven by their “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” strategy against Apple.

Yes, Adobe’s products have long been a favorite of designers (let’s not forget that it was Apple who helped them achieve that position), but they’re certainly not the most “open” company and there are plenty of alternatives for web and mobile app development to Adobe’s Creative Suite.

OK, one last thing. While Tnooz highlighted the largely sarcastic and self-serving ads by Adobe to show how much they love (i.e. loathe) Apple at this moment, I feel compelled to share a faux-ad that I found on TechCrunch created by an Apple fan that I found truly amusing