Google led the creation of Open Handset Alliance, a consortium involving a number of telco and manufacturers . As its first act the Alliance released Android, an open source operating system for mobiles complete of SDK and API. The SDK includes a working emulator and half a dozen example applications. The idea to establish an open platform for mobile developers is very good but not particularly new: project Openmoko has been working to a similar concept for several months and went as far as to release a developer version of the handset.

Currently there are several competing platforms with a significant presence on the market: Symbian OS, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone, Motorola MotoMAGX, Qualcomm BREW and RIM Blackberry to name a few. Trying to build a business on top of mobile applications is very difficult because you have to make several different versions of your application and the market is very fluid. Now, with the huge money and pressure that Google can inject into the field there’s a chance they can impose a common platform.

They chose to build on top of several open source technologies: Linux, OpenGL, SQLite and Webkit. The latter is particularly interesting because it’s a rendering engine derived from the KDE project (and going to be merged back into konqueror) and already powers the iPhone, s60 and Safari. This could become the rendering engine widely used both on the web and on mobile handsets.

To bootstrap the project and quickly build a critical mass of third party developers, Google issued a contest with a 10 million dollar prize for the best applications that will be developed in the next few months. There are a few countries not allowed to participate to the contest. As usual there are countries forbidden by US laws (Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar) and on top of that there are countries excluded because of local restrictions: Quebec and… Italy!

So Telecom Italia is one of the members of Open Handset Alliance, but Italians can’t participate to the challenge. Great. How is this possible? Simple: in Italy contests are regulated by a very strict law requiring that issuers create accurate documentation, put the prize in a protected guarantee fund and seek permission of the Ministry of Economy. Google probably found that going through all of this was not worthwhile. Italian bureaucracy and over-legislation at work. Do you remember my last post on this topic?

Apple started to sell iPhone in Europe. In Germany the price is €399 for the handset, that is $586! Either they don’t get currency exchange or they think ripping off Europeans is OK. Moreover, on top of that you need a mandatory 24-month subscription plan at €49 a month (100 min/month voice calls). In total it’s €1575 ($2316!).

By comparison, at the same price I can buy a Blackberry Curve 8310 (more feature rich with GPS receiver, SD memory, MMS) and a subscription plan with flat data and 400 min/month voice included. And there’s no 24-month term: I can stop this contract after one month if I don’t like it, and pay just for that.

No wonder few people cared when Apple stores opened in Germany last night…

I’ve just read this article appeared on the last IEEE Spectrum issue. They talk about a breach in Vodafone Greece’s core network, a list of phone numbers intercepted and the apparent suicide of a technician in charge of Network Planning Management after he discovered the problem and alerted his supervisors about it.

Relevant facts:

1. in 2004, before Athen’s Olympic Games. malicious software was planted on four MSCs, with no reboot, thanks to sophisticated hot-patching capabilities provided by Ericsson software
2. fake phone number entries were created on these MSCs
3. a list of 102 phone numbers were configured for automatic interception, during the Olympic Games, a copy of their conversations routed to the fake phone numbers
4. those numbers belonged to Ministers, authorities, leaders of important institutions and leaders of activist groups
5. a technician discovered the problem in January 2005 and apparently hanged himself soon after
6. Vodafone CEO requested the MSCs to be rebooted immediately to clean the rogue software that was planted, but doing so they accidentally destroyed important traces including log files
7. Phisicaly access to the MSCs (apparently required to plant the patch) was monitored and everybody entering the site had to sign a register, that unfortunately gets destroyed after 6 months

Actually this is no news, BBC had reported this back in December, but I didn’t know. Now, kudos to IEEE for bringing this scandal back to light, but they must be kidding when they say this is the work of “hackers”. Only secret services, CIA and the like, can do this sort of things. Hackers don’t have a list of VIPs to wiretap and they wouldn’t “convince” somebody to hang himself in order to cover up traces.

GPRS was yet to come, we had just CSD at 9600bps and we had to pay by air time, just like a normal phone call. It basically felt like going back to BBS age and use a modem over analogic PSTN, but with a textual browser that you could carry with you anywhere.

Phones didn’t come pre-configured and setting up one was tricky. For each carrier you had to enter a different dial-up number, user and password, gateway IP address and port, plus strange settings like connectionless. Of course people would never remember those parameters by heart and would look them up on the Internet.

Surfing the normal web with this technology was basically impossible. If you wanted to make a small page accessible from the phone you had to write in a special markup called WML which was not compatible with HTML and in fact represented a very different paradigm. Instead of pages you had decks and cards. For people used to the web, WML was real hard, first because it was XML based (which had been just released and mostly unknown – very few people could tell what well-formed and valid meant), second because it was a different set of tags, third because mobile browsing was a very different user experience. With no mouse, no qwerty and a very small display you had to design your decks very carefully, with usability in mind.

All of this was the brainchild of a company called Unwired Planet (nowadays known as Openwave) that was able to create a consortium together with the leading handset manufacturers. They called it WAP Forum (nowadays known as Open Mobile Alliance) and issued a complete suite of spec documents featuring a transmission protocol stack (WDP, WTP, WSP), a markup language (WML), an image format (WBMP), a binary compressed representation for XML (WBXML) and a middle-ware component architecture (the WAP gateway). A huge undertaking that also happened to be the topic for my master thesis, so I intimately knew every single bit of those documents.

Coding for WAP was very exciting, but experimenting with a real phone was expensive, slow and cumbersome. When something was wrong, the phone didn’t yield any meaningful error message, just a plain dumb 500 internal error. In order to easy development, a few emulators were developed by manufacturers, mostly as win32 native applications. None of them was satisfying to me, so I ended up developing my own.Usability was a big deal. Not only each phone had different display size, form factor and soft keys. On top of that, each manufacturer rendered some tags in a very different way. For example selection lists could be displayed similar to drop down lists or radio buttons.

There were a few wap sites available, some of them linked from the carrier’s WAP portal. There was no usable search engine, so you had to rely on word of mouth or list of links, just like the early days on the web. In the end none of those services became successful, mainly because the price you had to pay for a WAP session was so high.

I remember there were a good number of start-ups flourishing around WAP. In UK they were concentrated in London and used to gather in a periodic event they called the WAP Wednesday while in Italy they were spread over at least 4 different cities and had no pulse to gather together. Unfortunately I had just graduated and had no money to flight to London just to attend a meeting.

I remember many people abandoned WAP after the first navigation attempt, either because they were scared by navigation costs, or they found very bad services (bad for usability or for lack of interesting content). The industry was technologically ready, but the market was not and WAP became known as a big flop. One year later GPRS arrived and it was marketed as the next technology after WAP, when in fact it was just a substitute for CSD. Companies needed a way to make investors quickly forget the flop, who cared if WAP as a technology remained central for everything that came later?

It looks like we are again at a turning point in the Value Added Services space. Apparently this market undergoes at least one paradigm shift every three years.

The first happened in 2002, when premium SMS was introduced. Back then the market was based in bulk traffic sustained by Internet advertising. Massive traffic was generated by web sites, but when carriers opened the opportunity to attach a premium tariff to a text message a number of new services began to flourish, mainly connected to TV commercials and printed ads. Recurring subscription services became the most successful, with ringtones of the week being the undisputed king, at least in Europe. Meanwhile handsets grew MMS capabilities, colour displays, mp3-quality audio.

Then, in 2005 the Internet-mobile convergence became real, with interactive services that were paid on the phone but mostly used on the web. The best acquisition channel became Internet advertising, with Google Adwords and affiliation networks taking the lion’s share. This allowed the biggest companies in the market (which were Italian and German) to begin playing internationally (Internet is international by default, whereas TV commercials and printed ads are much more difficult to replicate abroad) and go conquering the rest of the world. Meanwhile 3G networks became common in many countries and with the advent of WAP2 handsets (who said WAP was dead?) started to offer a much better browsing experience and a camera.

Now it looks like we’re again at a new turning point, for a combination of different phenomena.

1. Many services grew a nice WAP interface and carriers are opening their on net space and allowing flat tariffs for data traffic. The ability to charge directly from a WAP link, with no SMS involved, is popping up in new countries every month. They call it WAP billing. After all, using SMS as an identification and payment method is weird when you’re trying to build a really interactive WEB/WAP service. And mobile advertising is becoming a business in itself, opening the door for WAP to become an important acquisition channel.
2. Internet providers want to emulate mobile carriers and provide subscription and billing connected to the DSL account. Imagine you are browsing on a web site and at some point they ask you if you want to but a service. You just enter your DSL password (or you just click on a button!) and they charge you on your balance. As simple as that. It works because they can track your identity on their RADIUS server, using your IP address.
3. I hate to say it, but the iPhone is the third breaking factor. They’re trying to redefine what phone browsing is. No WAP, just straight Internet and AJAX. No apps. No downloads. The iPhone experience is much similar to browsing from an Internet Café. You can access web sites, but you can’t get anything on your local disk. Except, maybe, if it comes from iTunes…

Anyway, we’ll see. It looks like an interesting 2008 is to come.