LiMo Foundation Blog

The first installment of this multipart article explained the concept of the smartgrid, Web 2.0 and its relation to data, the Cloud and the opportunities for telecom service providers within an M2M environment. Part 2 will address the two principle issues that arise when the boundaries start to blur, namely:

(1) Interoperability

(2) Privacy

Interoperability

The world of Telecoms and sensor networks/M2M converge through the Cloud. Sensor networks interconnect devices through the Cloud and the Cloud could be the ‘glue’ that enables the Internet of things to take off because network layer connectivity is hard to achieve. In principle, technologies like RFID, NFC, EPC etc should all talk to each other for Internet of things to be really ubiquitous [1] . In practise, this does not currently happen and history has shown that network layer connectivity is hard. However, it is possible to achieve 'best case' i.e. good enough interconnectivity between the various 'intelligent objects' at the Cloud level. (And not at the network level)

How to get all these systems to work together at a software level?

One option is: we could create a global standard to make all these systems work together. The goal of standardization is for systems to talk to each other. The problem with the standardization process is: It is slow, it does not allow for differentiation and it needs a lot of upfront work before its use can be availed. So, if we are talking of global interconnectivity and interoperability - this becomes a complex problem and one which is not easy to solve.

Mobile ISVs have never had it so good… and at the same time, so bad….

Some even feel it’s still early days!

With the advent of open mobile ecosystems, there are many more opportunities for Mobile ISVs to deploy applications. It may not seem obvious that there may have been a issue, but there is a core problem - deployment in proportion to the market opportunity is seen only by the very few - only 26 products have shipped on more than 100 Million handsets in a market with volumes of an excess of a billion handsets annually.

Open mobile ecosystems have enabled easier distribution channels for ISVs, making a bad situation better, if not yet, good enough. Traditionally, the only viable model for wide distribution has been pre-loaded ISV software on OEM devices. This has changed. With open mobile ecosystems, ISVs can directly engage with the customer.

This good news comes with its own set of challenges – the perennial ISV Application development issue of having to address many fragmented platforms, low prices and margins, the difficulty in selling technology components below the application layer, and having to sell yet-another-application in a crowded market place.

LiMo is a Member-driven organisation. What this means is that it is our Member companies who provide the engineering effort to build and improve the operating system, not the Foundation Office itself. Commercial grade software is contributed by these Members and integrated into the existing code base; it is a truly collaborative effort. Those involved in reviewing and approving each contribution are not employed directly by the Foundation Office either but are representatives of Member companies with a particular domain expertise who join technically-focused LiMo Domain Working Groups or else are voted onto LiMo’s Architecture Steering Committee (ASC).

Without software contributions LiMo will not advance or meet the needs of our Members so we strive to make it as simple as possible to submit code and really value every new contribution. Of course, there are a variety of business reasons for which Member companies contribute code to LiMo; these differ depending on where in the industry’s value chain the company is situated.

So how does a Member company actually go about contributing a new software component or framework to LiMo? The following steps set out in simple terms what needs to be done and why. It’s important to bear in mind that this process concerns the inclusion of an entirely new software module to a collaboratively-owned OS; so, there are more steps than would be needed when for e.g, a patch is being applied to existing code. These steps ensure that new modules are actively supported by LiMo Members due to an open review by domain experts, and that consistency of architecture and coding style is maintained across the OS.

Now onto the actual steps...

The paradox of the open Web platform is that the authoring tools for Web applications or widgets have been lacking despite the rapid developments of widget technologies, device features and mobile environments.

The LiMo Foundation BONDI Web SDK Development Project is a "meta" open source initiative sponsored by the LiMo Foundation to build an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that can support new Web technologies such as W3C widgets and device APIs.

The Eclipse development environment has been chosen to support our goals via plug-ins. After installing the plug-in, the Web developer will find templates to get started, tools to write a widget configuration document and Javascript auto-completion for BONDI device interfaces as well as a mobile emulator.

OMTP BONDI is a pioneer in device API definitions using W3C WebIDL and hence, the BONDI Web SDK will support application authoring using these exciting new APIs.

By contributing to the BONDI SDK project and by providing Web developers with tools to do so, we hope to build a compelling and competitive Web SDK based on open standards.

The “desktop” has been getting all the attention for the past score of years or so, and it was a big improvement from the “command line”, which is what we had to deal with prior to that. The desktop metaphor opened up all kinds of possibilities for people who had never used computers before, and unleashed a wave of new applications development the likes of which had never been previously seen.

But the desktop itself—the notion of the “computer” as a completely general-purpose device, a sort of “Swiss Army knife”, if you will—is itself an artefact of the fact that, at the time the metaphor hit the street, as it were, computers were extremely expensive devices; few people could afford to have more than one of them. However, times have changed and are still changing, in dramatic ways.

Computing power is cheaper than ever: if you compare a current cell phone (at around $400) with a desktop system of five years ago (at around $2500), they’re remarkably comparable in terms of their general specifications. In fact, the phone does more, in terms of being able to support GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and other capabilities right out of the box; it probably has at least as much memory and, more than likely, a larger amount of mass storage. We don’t, however, tend to think of it as a “computer”.

Synopsis

This multipart article discusses the future of privacy in a ubiquitous environment.

The discussion spans many domains including Web 2.0, Telecoms and the Cloud. We focus on two interrelated issues in this environment – Interoperability and Privacy. We then discuss two possible ecosystems for such an environment: Federated Identity and Open source.

In this section, we discuss the conceptual issues and in the following section of this article, we will discuss the role of open source in greater detail.

Why now?

As the Web and communications architecture evolve into a ubiquitous computing environment, we are addressing the domains of machine to machine (M2M) communications and sensor networks. M2M has been on the research agenda for many years but Smart Grids provide a new impetus to M2M and a ‘killer application’ if you will.

In a nutshell, a smart grid starts with a 'smart electricity meter' which is capable of two way communications and lets the user and provider manage electricity consumption in a more granular way. If the customer's power consumption can be captured in a granular manner, the provider can offer specials/ discounts to the customer. The added potential of smart grids arises from knowing data trends and also, from extending power management to other devices.

Smart grids are ‘smart’ because of their near real time potential to manage energy usage by recording data consumptions in intervals as low as half hourly readings.[1] Smart grids could provide a ‘killer app’ for M2M deployments –and this takes the discussion of M2M applications on the near term agenda

Data ..

Over the last few years, the ideas of Web 2.0 have become mainstream. Web 2.0 can be seen as building a database that is enriched with incremental users. While the principles and benefits of Web 2.0 apply to emerging domains like the Smart Grid, the caveats apply as well - especially privacy considerations.

Black Duck recently completed an analysis of programming languages used in open source projects.  While the universe of open source projects is much larger than those projects frequently used for mobile applications, the trends seem to reflect those of the mobile industry and the LiMo Platform in particular.

The analysis, which looked at language usage by counting lines of source code across all open source projects, shows static programming languages losing share to dynamic languages.

C and C++ taken together, account for the majority (>50%) of code in open source projects.  While Black Duck did not run the analysis on the LiMo platform, our understanding is that C is its most common language as well.  Trends in open source code are more interesting.  When analyzing project releases from the past 12-months, static programming languages C, C++ and Java are being used less often (-1.8 percentage points of share) in open source projects than dynamic languages JavaScript and PHP (+2.4 percentage points). Also gaining ground are SQL (up over 1 percentage point) and Ruby (+0.2 percentage point).

Data points drawn from the analysis include:

I have to start this blog with a small technical note for those people that do not know Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is a browser for mobile phones based on a client-server technology: a light client (J2ME) that provides user interface and local handling of web pages, together with a powerful server to which is offloaded the heavy-duty task of downloading and rendering web pages. The result is a thin client, installable on virtually any mobile phone, which allows access to full internet with a reduction of bandwidth usage up to 80%.

Now that it's (hopefully) clear what Opera Mini is, I can start this month's blog post on a happy noteJ .  For the first time, people using Opera Mini viewed more than 10 billion pages in one month, 8% growth over the previous month.  At the time of writing, the number of active users for the month of August is over 29 million; it's very likely that Opera Mini will be able to celebrate the ambitious target of 30 million monthly active users.

These numbers may be significant for Opera Mini, but they are far more important for the mobile Web itself. These numbers prove that experiencing the mobile Web is not confined to the relatively small club of expensive smartphone users but can be available to any mobile phone user.  In effect, feature phones are the larger contributors of Opera Mini transcoded pages.

Today, I would like to introduce one of the golden rules of human social behavior passed on from generation to generation, called “Metcalf’s Law”, to better understand and put mobile communications and social relationships in a proper context.

Metcalf’s Law states that “the value of a network increases proportionately with the square of the number of its users.” This law characterizes many of the network effects of communication technologies, the Internet, social networking, and the World Wide Web.   Network effects were used as a justification for some of the dot-com business models in the late 1990s. These firms operated under the belief that when a new market comes into being which contains strong network effects, firms should care more about growing their market share than about becoming profitable. The reason being, market share determines which firm can set technical and marketing standards, thus establishing the basis for future competition.

In his 1974 book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig argues that embracing both the creative, “in the moment,” and rational views of the world may afford the individual a higher quality of life. Pirsig expressed this concept through the description and exploration of a long distance motorcycle journey across the United States, contrasting the approaches toward motorcycle maintenance of the two central characters in the book. I shall explore the same concept through the medium of mobile software platform development and maintenance. Perhaps I will even succeed in drawing some parallels!

Should mobile technologists strive to understand intimately the systems that they work on or instead rely on an intuitive feel for what is right and “in the moment”? Clearly, as Pirsig suggests, we need to embrace both. Without a rigorous framework and approach, a software platform becomes a “bag of bits.” On the other hand, without freedom of creative expression within such a framework, opportunities for innovation and revolution are removed.

Traditional mobile software platform development has proceeded along functional lines, with clearly defined frameworks, entities and schedules of work. This gave birth to successful platforms but has arguably reduced the pace of innovation in certain areas given the inertia associated with such success. Meanwhile, the open software movement has come from the other direction of enabling “in the moment” development of new features by individuals and has struggled to shape these features into a cohesive platform.