Google talks up mobile sociological shifts, new mobile tools

TORONTO—Google Canada officials predicted the trends that will shape the future of the mobile Web at a “Mobile Monday” presentation at the Mars Centre in Toronto on Monday. About 400 people turned up for the event Easter Monday, eager to hear about the search giant’s direction. Some major sociological shifts are occurring, said Punit Soni, Waterloo-based product manager for Google Canada’s mobile applications initiatives. People now relate differently to their smart phones, especially “Generation Y” types who grow anxious when they’re not within range of “the hive”—their community of friends. “In our market research sessions, one guy said if he doesn’t get SMS text messages for a few hours, he doesn’t feel loved,” Soni said. He compared smart phones to small supercomputers, pointing out that the Google Nexus One phone offers 512 Mb of memory, while original "supercomputers" offered just 32 Mb. Google is increasingly talking about smart phones as extensions of the senses. They’re equipped with cameras, microphones, GPS and other features—all connected to the cloud that is the Internet. “The phone in many ways is an extension of our own senses,” Jacob Glick, Google's Canadian policy counsel, told The Wire Report in a recent interview. “It has eyes with the camera, it has ears with the microphone and it also exists in a place. To that extent, the phone can augment all of our senses in terms of helping us navigate the world, get better information, make better choices, and have more fun.” Soni noted that smart phone tools “allow you to constantly broadcast information about yourself—but you need controls.” Soni said Google is placing its bets on the mobile Web by focusing on emerging platforms, standards and development tools—such as the Android “open handset” software platform. “Consumers want to customize their devices, as they do with Apple’s iPhone,” he said. Browsers are the best way to deliver the features consumers want, instead of building them “natively” on phones, said Alex Nicolaou, an engineering manager at Google Canada involved in the development of Google’s Chrome operating system. “We want to change the face of what’s possible in a browser,” he said, adding that HTML5—a new Web application standard being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium—“provides revolutionary capabilities for achieving this, as it makes Web applications modular and adaptable to different devices.” The new HTML language represents a major upgrade from HTML4, which was introduced in 1999 when the Web was a static medium still in its infancy. HTML5 offers more dynamic capabilities. It allows Web pages and applications to conduct more than one operation at a time and enable browsers to communicate more effectively with Web servers. It also offers new language elements to create richer page content. Another emerging tool that Google says will play a big role is WebKit, a new open source layout engine that allows Web browsers to render and display Web content consistently in windows on devices of various makes and sizes. WebKit is being developed by a consortium including Apple, Nokia, Bitstream and other major players. “Users are finding that attending to the garden of icons on their smart phones is a big chore,” Nicolaou said. “But if you can get your applications from the Web, there’s no maintenance. There’s nothing to install or update when you get them from the browser.” Nicolaou and Soni also presented demos showing the capabilities of new Google tools for mobile users on airplanes, subways or other low-connection environments. Gmail, for example, can compensate for low connectivity by detecting it and then storing messages in a database that makes them available at the same speed as fully connected environments. Similarly, users can access the Gmail calendar on an iPhone when they’re offline. Soni also demoed Google Buzz, which allows users to “Share their thoughts”—the application’s buzzword—with anyone in the vicinity. Buzz uses geo-location capabilities to search out users who are also “buzzing” within a geographic area, allowing them to connect with one another. Users can check the location of another user’s public Buzz entry by identifying nearby buildings or landmarks. In a demonstration, Soni displayed a list of Buzz comments coming from the Manulife Centre and other buildings near the Mars Centre in Toronto. “You can find out what people around you are talking about,” Soni said. Users can also expand to larger map views. Soni displayed a map of New York, with a scattering of location-based Buzz entries. “I’m afraid to click on some of these to find out what they’re talking about,” he joked. “You never know what kind of commentary you’ll get in New York.” Sure enough, he clicked an entry that drew a few laughs. A user—Cyberman in Brooklyn—said: “It went on all night. All niiiiight...” “The point of all this is that all these features are in the browser. It’s a key delivery mechanism that’s sustainable and scaleable,” Soni said. Michael Sachter is vice-president at CellWand Communications, a Toronto-based mobile applications developer that is partnering with carriers to deliver #TAXI—a service to help callers find available taxis based on their locations. He told The Wire Report by email that “it was interesting to hear how Google is taking the browser wars to a new level in mobile.” Google’s open standards and operating systems will position the company as “a very potent competitor” to Apple, he said. “They also seem to be starting to address the bandwidth issues faced by wireless carriers by using more of the computing power on mobile phones to carry some of the load," Sachter said. --with files from Jonathan Migneault news@thewirereport.ca

Google talks up mobile sociological shifts, new mobile tools

Broadcast | April 6, 2010

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