IT Watchdog - News and Views on IT

Google has big plans for conquering the mobile market

There have been rumors about Google's grand entry into the mobile market for months. Some were expecting a Google-branded mobile phone, the gPhone, but it turned out to be a open source-based mobile application platform that should be available on various mobile (smart)phones from e.g. Motorola, Samsung, HTC and LG by mid-2008. Actually, Google will not just deliver the platform called Android but it will also its application suite (Google Maps, search, Gmail, calendar, chat, ...) to that mobile platform to conquer the mobile market. Because Android is an acquisition that Google made in 2005, it is interesting to look at the acquisitions that Google made since then but also the patents that Google has submitted. On the acquisition front, take a look at what Google can do with Jaiku, the Twitter-like microblogging and social networking tool, or the mobile social network Zingku. The acquisition of Grand Central has gone a little bit unnoticed by the analysts, but may turn out to be extremely important for Google's Gmail and Gtalk success). On the patent side, the text message micro-payment solution could turn out to be the most interesting of all.

While the Android platform announcement was a bit of an anti-climax for some analysts who had expected to see a real mobile device running Google's killer applications, we think this is a very significant move in Google's Web domination campaign. However, a few questions and issues remain unanswered:

• Given that the Open Handset Alliance relies heavily on Linux and Java, why was Sun not a part of the Android announcement ? Could this have something to do with the Apache license that Google uses for its open source platform ?


• Given that this will be Linux-based, how will this influence the battle between the Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Symbian, Apple IPhone and Mobile Linux platforms ? Om Malik has an interesting discussion about this, including a confidential smartphone market share slide by Symbian. Will Android impose a landslide in market share for Linux ? Will open source developers start developing a compatibility layer for Google's apps for Windows Mobile, Symbian and IPhone based on what they see in the Android source ? Why wouldn't these clever open source developers produce a version for high-definition television sets, a market that Google definitely not wants to miss, but is pretty quiet about.


• Will the strong bond between Google's applications and the Android platform - even though it is open source - not give rise to antitrust discussions about monopolies, consumer choice, ... ?

Will definitely be continued ...

2008: the year of the "enterprise mashup service"

During our seminars on service-oriented architectures (again scheduled in 2008 because of their huge success), there was a lot of discussion about how this SOA solution will interact with its users. In other words, will the trend towards flexible architectures also influence the way we deliver applications in the future ?

The answer is probably yes: the services of the SOA will be combined with other services from external partners and external data sources to deliver the information that the user needs. These so-called mashups are still highly experimental and overhyped, but there is a big chance that reliable, robust and secure "enterprise mashup services" will be the buzzword of 2008.

Anyone who wants to track the success of mashups should take a look at ProgrammableWeb, where you can find out what's new and interesting with mashups, new applications, new APIs, and about the Web 2.0 as a Platform. For the moment, there are not a lot of very useful enterprise mashups, even in the category "Enterprise Mashups", among the more than 2500 mashups that are listed there.

When you try out some of the mashups at ProgrammableWeb, you will see some of the problems and challenges facing mashups:

• Reliability and robustness: when a service is unavailable, every mashup that relies on this service, gets broken - when we browsed, I think 10% of the mashups had this problem


• Data quality and governance: the quality of a mashup is only as good as the quality of the services it uses - and some are really bad


• Security and privacy: although there are no real cases of public mashups that use private, secure services known to us, it will be a big challenge to implement single sign-on and federation in such a loosely coupled environment.


• Dion Hinchcliffe has many more challenges in his Enterprise 2.0 weblog entry.

I.T. Works will continue to track this evolution in application delivery, and we will probably organise a seminar about "enterprise mashups" in 2008. Particularly the "how to build an industry-strength mashup", the impact that such tools may have on business analysis, and the use of tools such as lower-level Microsoft Popfly or Yahoo Pipes, or higher-level Serena Business Mashup Composer or Openkapow's Robomaker would be very useful parts of such a seminar.

Hence, we are interested to hear from your experiences with mashup applications, API's, tools, etc. Just email us at mashupseminars@itworks.be.