Subject: Mobile Web Applications - A Growing Market
Author: WebSpider
Posted on: 10/14/2008 01:38:09 PM
Amidst the economic doom and gloom, bright spots can be found. The Mobile web applications arena one of them. No matter how slow the economy gets, and how much people changes their behavior, they won't stop communicating while on the go. Our mobile phones have evolved into powerful communications devices with high speed Internet access. This transformation has opened up a huge market for mobile web applications.
The mobile web applications concept isn't new. As reported in an article in Business Week's October 13, 2008 issue titled "Nokia's Bid to Rule the Mobile Web" the author, Jack Ewing, notes that Nokia's R&D group developed a mobile web application in 1996 called the 'dangerometer' which used satellite technology to match your location to an on-line database of crime statistics. If you happened to find yourself in a high crime area, the mobile application would alert you and prompt you to buy life insurance. Funny people, these Fins.
Mobile applications use has come a long way since then. In the article, Ewing cites research that found that the number of mobile phone users that access the Internet though their device has increased 36% in the past year, to over 40 million users. Ewing further states that Nokia, the giant in world wide mobile phone sales is expected to sell almost one half of one billion handsets in 2008! Nearly all of these new handsets have some level of Internet support. Nokia's most recent high end mobile phones are designed to compete with Apple's iPhone and other devices of this class. Any way you cut it, mobile Internet use has arrived and will increase regardless of the state of the economy for the foreseeable future.
Maybe it is time to go mobile with your web presence? Most hosting service providers are supporting Java, PHP, Python, C++, and Ruby on Rails, all of which offer tools to build mobile applications. The following links will get you started:
Sun's Mobile home page for Java - http://java.sun.com/javame/index.jsp
NetBeans IDE mobile support for Java - http://www.netbeans.org/features/javame/index.html
Nokia's Developer Discussion forum (Java, C++, Python, PHP) - http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/
Article on Alliances for Mobile Turf War - http://www.redherring.com/Home/24920
Ruby on Rails for iPhone - http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/35532
W3C's Best Practices for Mobile Applications - http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-mobile-bp-20080729/
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