5 Most Viewed Articles on the Delvinia Link Pool: April 19 – April 25

History Channel Launches Foursquare Campaign and a New Badge | New York Times

Log in or sign up? | Leah Culver’s Blog

Future Of Retail: The Impact Of The iPad | PSFK

Foursquare Becomes More Business-Friendly | TechCrunch

Why Didn’t Facebook Launch Location Features? | GigaOm

Click here to see what links we’re sharing this week.

Muddy Mobile Waters – Part 2

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Apple is moving away from using a shared standard for distributing and running RIA content on their mobile devices. So how will we be able to efficiently create rich online experiences and have them work on the desktop and on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad? Let’s look at some possible solutions:

Target Only Apple’s Devices
I’m sure that there will be still be situations where it’s cost effective to develop an RIA that only targets Apple’s devices, at least for the near future. But the obvious problem with this approach is that you will limit your audience. While the iPhone is currently a very large slice of the mobile pie, Android based devices are rapidly gaining ground, Microsoft will soon release their new mobile OS, Windows Phone 7, and other mobile OSs are maintaining their market share.

HTML5
Creating RIA that works within the web browser, using the new HTML5 tags to handle video, audio and animation is certainly going to be a useful way to deliver cross-platform content.

However it relies on if a platform’s browser fully supports the HTML5 specification’s APIs. Currently most mobile device and desktop web browsers do not or only partly support HTML5 and all have individual quirks in how they handle older HTML and CSS. HTML5 also does not provide as fully featured an API as various plug-ins have (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), so it will mostly be useful for embedding simple video, audio and animated content into the user’s browser. For more complex RIA interfaces in the web browser we will likely continue to use Web 2.0 solutions such as server-side scripting, AJAX, jQuery, plug-ins, etc. Even for embedding video and audio there will be issues, as it will be up to the browser to render video and audio and they are not in agreement about which codecs to use.

Flash
The Flash plug-in is already widely accepted by Internet users on their desktop computers, so I don’t think it will be a big stretch for them to use it on their mobile devices, especially if it comes pre-installed. Clients are comfortable with having their RIAs built using it and Device Central integrates several the Creative Suite apps, including Flash, to make it easier to create mobile content. Flash also supports exporting animations to the HTML5 Canvas tag, which may be useful for creating alternate content for non-Flash users.

But the problem with Flash is that currently there are not enough mobile devices that have the Flash plug-in installed to guarantee a large mobile audience and Apple is not likely to support the plug-in any time soon, if ever.

Conclusion
I anticipate that the Open Screen Project making Flash as mainstream on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. But it is the mobile user who will decide what really works for them, and truly RIA capable mobile devices which support the Flash plug-in have not yet gone on sale.

I suggest that unless you need to develop a mobile RIA right now, you’re best off waiting until the Fall. By then we should be able to see how the sales of non-Apple mobile devices are faring and have a clearer indication of how people’s mobile habits are evolving.

Mobile GPS, oh where art thou? Managing the Hype: The Reality of Mobile in Canada

GPS awareness and usage on smartphones is still relatively low among Canadians, particularly among Boomers and the 65+ crowd. Even some 38% of NGen don’t know or aren’t sure whether their smartphones are GPS-equipped. Given these stats, it isn’t surprising that few Canadians use their mobile GPS on a weekly basis.

Why this lack of awareness and relatively low usage rates of GPS across all generations?

One reason could be a lack of association of GPS with a mobile device. Most customers were first introduced to GPS in their cars with the wide-spread inclusion of in-car GPS systems in the 1990’s. When consumers think GPS, they automatically think of in-car systems – not their mobile devices.

Also, in-car systems are more user-friendly and are generally safer to handle while in transit. They offer real-time voice navigation with onscreen turn-by- turn directions. Mobile GPS in comparison, is only beginning to offer these features now in Beta or to business subscribers.

Canadian consumers also think that setting up GPS on their mobile phones is complex and time-consuming, stating “it’s too small and I haven’t had time to investigate how to set it up” or “I don’t know how it works.” As with any other feature, customers want ease of use. They don’t want to have to learn how to set it up or how to use it – they just want something intuitive.

Another implied factor which could affect the relatively low usage is consumer habits. Respondents indicated that they didn’t need mobile GPS as they determined a route for their destinations in advance. In the case of an impromptu need for directions, many Canadians fell back onto existing behaviours such as calling their destination directly, looking it up online before leaving home, or even using paper-based maps.

Some habits and perceptions just take time to break. However, marketers and product developers take note, this will create opportunities for you to better educate and engage with consumers of GPS mobile.

To gain more insights into how, download the complete Delvinia Dig quarterly report on mobile at www.delvinia.com/digreport/.

Do you know if your smartphone is GPS enabled? If so, do you even use it? Tell us.

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