We have created a state of the art, high tech exhibit at Pan IIT 2010. Please visit us at Booth 62 to see it in action. For complimentary invitation to Pan IIT, please drop an email to vikas@letsgomo.com.

I am very excited to attend this conference. It is going to be a great event with a huge array of impressive speakers, and a gathering of 3000+ brilliant minds from all over the world.Hope to see you there..

When it comes to mobile websites, we have seen little hesitation on creating HTML5 Mobile Websites. We get lot of questions on what is the future for HTML5, what benefits over the WAP, and most important being which mobile phones are supported by HTML5?

Lets try to answer the last one, which mobile phones or smart phones support HTML5?

Notes:

1. A Lot of HTML5 features depend on the underlying specifications of mobile phone like camera, codecs support, Processor, Screen Resolution, and more.
2. If you want to check how much support your current mobile phone browser has, simply go to www.html5test.com from your mobile browser.

So, How many mobile phones exist right now which can display HTML5 mobile websites?

According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, worldwide HTML5 phone sales will surge from 336 million units in 2011 to 1 billion units in 2013. HTML5 has quickly become a high-growth technology that will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge through cloud services. Moreover

• 34% of top 100 sites using HTML5 – binvisions.com
• 75% of Developers Using or Plan to Use HTML5: Survey – Evans Data
• 2.1 billion HTML5 Browsers on Mobile Devices by 2016 – ABI Research
• HTML5 in the Top 10 tech trends for 2012 – CNN Tech
• HTML5 is the #1 job trend – .netmagazine, indeed.com
• The Web is going through a once-in-a-decade technology transition to HTML5 and CSS3 – Gartner

At its 2012 Developer Summit, AT&T cited the estimate of an installed base of 2.1 billion mobile devices (including phones) in 2016. AT&T also predicted HTML5 on all its smartphones , with support for an increasing number of HTML5 functions.

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, on Dec 7, 2011 in a press conference at Boston said, “HTML5 has quickly become a high-growth technology that will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge in the future. HTML5 will be a pivotal technology in the growth of a multi-screen, 4G LTE cloud that is emerging for mobile operators, device makers, car manufacturers, component vendors and Web app developers. With its potential to transcend some of the barriers faced by native apps, such as cross-platform usability, HTML5 is a market that no mobile stakeholder can afford to ignore”

Now, you need to decide if you still want to create a WAP site or leverage HTML5 to create a highly interactive and engaging mobile website for your users. In either of the cases, do Contact Us, and we would be happy to help.

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I recently attended MoMo Delhi (Mobile Monday meetup) on 17th July. Great event. During the introduction, one of the attendees talked about how his 16 month old daughter asks for paddy (iPad) when she gets up in morning, and she knows how to get to the Home screen, and so on. This reminded me of my nephews Ranek and Trish who simply love to play games and download newer ones on their father’s iPhone and Nokia N97. They are 6 years and 4 years old respectively. Older one has been doing it for the last 2 years, and already can go to App Store, understands when the iPhone is on the Wi-Fi and when its on Cellular (Speed issues..) and knows the difference between paid and free apps.

So, can a 16 month old or a  year old or 6 year old use your mobile website or mobile application without much training or help? Is that a test you should go for before launching your flashy new mobile website or app? I am slowly agreeing with Yes, but let’s find out the user interface and usability design principles you can follow while creating mobile applications.

1. Simple. Less is More.
When it comes to mobile websites, simplicity is key. Because of the lack of space on the screen and Internet connections that are often slower, it’s important for visitors to have access to what is most crucial, and as little else as possible. Prioritize Content. Heavy Content makes your app/site sluggish where 3G networks aren’t available.

2. Analyze Customer Flows. Especially the negative ones.
Mobile App / website user is not like a typical desktop user and would browse your app/site while waiting in the car, driving (risky but it happens) and will be frustrated by poor navigation schemes or unnecessary click paths. That’s why you rock-solid mobile information architecture after properly analyzing customer flows.

3. Design for different Screens.
Fragmentation in mobile devices is reality. iPhone is 320 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, Nokia N-Series is 240 pixels wide by 320 pixels high, Blackberry screen resolutions range anywhere from 160 x 160 pixels all the way up to 324 x 352 pixels and many more. Use a database such as dotMobi’s DeviceAtlas or the open source WURFL to help your site detect visitors’ devices and then optimize for the most frequented mobile devices.

4. Location.
Both Google and Yahoo successfully use user locations to tailor their local search results. Using mobile context both makes the user’s life easier and your application smarter. Leverage that.

5. Validate with Guidelines.
Check your site complies to industry standards with dotMobi’s mobiReady or the World Wide Web Consortium’s mobileOK. For a mobile app, always validate with the app platform, which may be Apple, Android, Blackberry or any other.

6. Test, Test, Test.
You may use emulators and desktop browsers to test your mobile website or app but there are many elements of mobile device usage that can’t be replicated accurately in this way. Devote a good amount of time to testing and fine tuning on different devices. You can also leverage mobile testing clouds for the same.

Interested in knowing more about how can we help you in creating your next user friendly mobile application, smartphone app, or mobile website. Get in touch with us.

Till then, use some of the above guidelines or more, and do test out your app / website with few kids. One, it would be fun, and Second, you would get some insights from user behavior.

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Analyst	Statistics	Detailed Report
Pew Internet (Mar, 2012)	Nearly half of American adults are smartphone owners Nearly half of American adults are smartphone owners	Pew Internet
TechCrunch (Mar, 2012)	Smartphone Owners Now Outnumber Other Mobile Users In The U.S.	TechCrunch
Strategy Analytics (Dec, 2011)	Global HTML5 handset sales will surge 365% between 2011 and 2016.	Strategy Analytics
Comscore (May,2010)	Out of 234 Million Americans using mobile devices, 31.9% used mobile for browsing and 30% downloaded apps and used them.	Comscore Mobile Report
Quantcast (Jan,2010)	Mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S., and 148 percent worldwide in 2009. Interestingly, the mobile Web still only makes up 1.26 percent of total U.S Web consumption, and a mere .99 percent worldwide.	Quantcast Mobile Report
Admob (Jun,2010)	Mobile Traffic from each region has increased at least 4x in the last two years, with increases of more than 6x from North America, Asia, Western Europe, Latin America and Oceania.	Admob Metrics Report
Bango (Feb,2010)	Bango’s annual mobile usage study, records 6 times the number of visits to mobile websites, comparing December 2009 with the same month a year earlier. The average time on site is measured as 3 minutes, 21 seconds, compared with just over one and half minutes the previous year. Average number of pages viewed per visit at 5 pages, up from just over 2 pages per visit twelve months before.	Bango’s Annual Mobile Usage Study
Morgan Stanley (Jun,2010)	Number of smartphone users who have accessed mobile web through their phones stands at 38 Million for Apr-2010 as compared to 18 Million for Apr-2009. Based on the current rate of change and adoption, the mobile web will be bigger than desktop Internet use by 2015.	Morgan Stanley Research Report
Nielsen Company (Aug,2009)	Web visitors using a mobile device increased 34 percent year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile Web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009 according to The Nielsen Company.	Neilsen Company Mobile Research
China Internet Network Information Center (Mar,2010)	China’s Online Population reaches 420 million, out of which 277 million get online with their phones, and access popular services that support web and video products.	China Internet Network Information Center Survey Report
PercentMobile (Jul,2010)	Mobile traffic to sites designed for the desktop Web have increased over the last 6 months from 8.3% to 11%, a 32% increase.	PercentMobile Survey

Sounds very impressive. Now let me detail out, some of the other changes happening in the world around us, which are making the mobile web growth explode.

• Smart Phones shipments on rise. The growth in worldwide smart-phone shipments last quarter was 55%, fueled in part by demand for Apple’s new iPhone, according to research firm IDC. In the last quarter of 2011 the industry churned out 158 million units – a bigger number than the population of Canada and Mexico combined. Worldwide, 1 out of 3 cell phones shipped is now a smart phone, which lets users run apps and surf the Web.
• 3G Adoption on Rise. According to Synergy Research Group, the number of 3G subscribers in Asia reached 381 million in mid-2011, having spiked 51 percent over the previous 12 months.
• Wifi Growth. Mobile Web access happens not only through EDGE/GPRS/3G/4G networks but also through wireless networks. 90% of new smartphones being shipped have Wi-Fi capabilities, enabling existing desktop Internet users to easily migrate to mobile Internet.
• Social Web and Location Based Services (LBS). No technology can grow without a killer application. We believe Social Web and LBS are such two applications. Facebook ended 2011 with 432 million mobile users and 55 percent of all active twitter users are active on mobile. .

LetsGoMo is all in, and is focussed on helping you going on mobile. In case you share our enthusiasm about mobile web, and want to explore the possibilities of how mobile web can help you scale up your business, do Get in Touch with us.

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If you are here, my guess is either you are planning to create your own mobile website or you already have your mobile website up and running. And you are using one of the industry standard tools to measure and analyze the behavior on your website coming in from desktop browser, and may be thinking about doing the same for your mobile phone visitors.

How can you do that?
Easy way is that your existing web analytics tools like Omniture, WebTrends, and Google Anaytics which have added support for measuring mobile traffic. Most of them will capture and report data for javascript enabled smart phones (like the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android and some Nokia phones). But is this the best choice?

Need for a separate Mobile Web Analytics tool
In our experience of working with clients, building mobile websites, desktop web analytics tools fall short, because they haven’t been built from ground up for measuring mobile web traffic. While measuring mobile traffic, apart from a desktop web analytics data like page views, visits, visitors, countries, you also need to measure mobile specific information related to mobile device (model, manufacturer, screen resolution, possible ad-hoc grouping based on device capabilities such as “smartphone”, etc.), mobile network operator (carrier), access via cellular mobile network or WiFi network etc.

In addition to that, web analytics tools would not measure the traffic coming in from non-javascript phones which do not have an advanced browser like smartphones. These tools have an extensive Devices database, which gives you a complete picture of which device came from which telecom operator , when and by which location.

Take a look at a sample mobile traffic report from Google Analytics (Desktop Web Analytics solution) and PercentMobile (Mobile Web Analytics solution). You can very well understand and appreciate the difference.

Sample Google Analytics Report

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version]

Sample PercentMobile Analytics Report

[Please click on the above image for a higher resolution version]

Which Mobile Analytics Tool to go for?
A. PercentMobile – Easy to Use, and Setup. Great User Interface, which allows you to drill down, and view reports in different formats, and by applying filters. Take a look at the report sample above. Free to use.

B. Admob Analytics – Simple to setup, allows you to set goals and track them. Free to use. Worthy competitor to PercentMobile.

C. Bango Analytics – Most extensive tool. Provides support for mobile applications, mobile websites, and mobile marketing campaigns. Free for 30 days, and then $49 / month.

In the end, its more important to start measuring the mobile traffic. Take a moment, and setup the mobile web analytics tool for your existing website or mobile website today. You can be up and running in less than an hour. Need some help, we are just a quick call away. Contact Us any time.

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Let’s understand some basics first.

WAP 2.0  uses xHTML-MP as a markup language and WAP-CSS for styling. Although it offers less in terms of capabilities but again it is supported on millions of devices. Likes of Moto-Razr, Nokia, Samsung, LG, and other low cost devices which have browser do support WAP 2.0.

HTML5 is the newest kid on the block, supported by the mobile ecosystem leaders like Google, Apple, Opera and more. It provides a range of key capabilities like Offline support, for storing stuff locally on the device; Canvas and Video to simplify adding graphics and video to a page; advanced forms, which can handle tasks like field validation on the mobile browser; and the GeoLocation API. It can only run on those mobile devices which have the Webkit Engine.

Take a look below on how the mobile version of youtube.com looks like when done using WAP 2.0 and HTML5.

Clearly, in terms of usability, features and user design HTML5 stands out way ahead of WAP 2.0. So, now the question comes on what your choice would be? Let’s evaluate both of them on some basic parameters

Verdict: Measure your current mobile traffic , Identify your target market, your users, what kind of phones they have, are you getting more traffic from HTML5 enabled devices or from WAP Devices, look at your overall marketing and business strategy, and then decide. You may just need a WAP mobile website right now or you may go for HTML5 mobile website or you may end up creating both, like your clients.

LetsGoMo can create your mobile website in HTML5 or WAP, and also help in your decision making process. Please talk to our expert by contacting us.

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