Apparently according to a report by O2, 9 out of 10 people who took part in their six-month trial were happy to pay for stuff using their mobile phone, instead of the traditional credit card. The technology, called field communications technology or NFC for short, works by waving or touching a mobile phone against a reader.

The technology has been tested widely across Europe and has infact apparently been in use in Japan for years now, although the take up over there accounted for less than 1% of all retail sales in 2006.

Unfortunately though the takeup here might be quite slow though due to the number of people involved in actually making it happen, and the length of time it would take to re-coup the costs and make it a worthwhile replacement for a traditional credit card transaction.

One very neat application for the technology would be paying at parking meters. You could then be sent a text message when your parking was running out. A very handy feature, although I’m sure it wouldn’t be too popular with the NCP tax collectors!

You can read the full article on the Reuters website here.

We’ve touched on mobile web development in the past couple of posts. It’s an exciting new area which offers a huge potential for growth as more people get online with their mobile phones. Well rather than just talk about it, we thought we’d give it a go, and Pricecheck.at is the result.

Imagine the scenario…

You’re on your way back from work when you happen to walk past a window with a big sign that says, ‘Sale today only! Nintendo Wii Console just £190!’. The shop is closing in 20 minutes so you don’t have chance to get home and check the latest prices available online. Luckily you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, so you quickly call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Nintendo Wii Console’, and with the single click of a button you get a list of prices for the Nintendo Wii, and where it’s available online. It’s a good job you did too, as it turns out that you can in fact get a brand new console online from game.co.uk for just £179.99.

You are in PC World and you want to buy a brand new digital camera. You’d checked prices on the Internet before you left, but the sales assistant recommends a model you hadn’t considered. You think it seems perfect, but you don’t want to buy it from the first place you find, and would rather check the price available online first. The problem is PC World is about 10 miles from your house, so going home first is a bit of a mission, especially with the price of petrol these days. So you call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Canon IXUS 75 Digital Camera’ and click ‘Check Price’. You’re then presented with 12 different prices for where the same model is available online. As it happens the price available from PC World is the same as the cheapest price available elsewhere, in this case either Curry’s or Amazon Marketplace, all three offering the camera for £129.99. But had you been in Jessops this service would have been invaluable, as they list the camera for £159. So you would have saved yourself £30 + a lot of trouble finding out.

People have been benefiting from price comparision services on their PC’s for years, with sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner becoming incredibly popular, but the Pricecheck.at service packages up all this functionality and makes it available to users on their mobile phones when they are actually out and about shopping in the real world as a last check to do before buying anything in a shop.

Another great example of when the Pricecheck service could really come into it’s own is in the huge market of mobile phones themselves!

A friend of mine just got stung when he mistakenly signed up for an 18 month mobile phone contract which it turned out he didn’t want. Despite taking the phone back to the shop just 3 hours after he bought it, they wouldn’t let him get out of his contract and he was completely committed to paying off the 18 months contract! There is apparently NO cooling off period when buying a mobile phone in store which I was very surprised about… However this makes a service like Pricecheck.at incredibly useful.

A quick search on Pricecheck.at for the ‘Sony ericsson K850i on the O2 Network’ reveals an incredible 163 prices, with mobiles.co.uk being the cheapest at just £15! Now presumably this is a contract arrangement, but still it gives you a good indication of what’s available online, and may just stop you signing up to a cast iron instore contract, when you can get it cheaper online.

These are just a few of the scenarios that sprung to mind, but I’m sure there are plenty of other situations where being able to access a price comparision service, while on the move, could prove to be immensely useful.

Pricecheck.at also offers a mobile friendly web directory, which is a list of sites that are particularly aimed at working well on mobile devices. You’d be surprised how much on the Internet simply isn’t accessible from a mobile device. You can also browse the site for products and prices.

The site is currently just a basic service, but if it proves popular we plan to expand and improve the browsing and shopping service to make it more user friendly and useful for mobile shoppers. It’s a tricky balancing act between attractive design, and accessibility on as wide a range of platforms as possible.

I’d welcome any feedback or comments about the site and the ethos behind it. Also if you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, let me know how Pricecheck.at looks on your phone.

This might seem a strange thing to ask considering my previous 2 blog entries, but it’s a view shared by a couple of long standing mobile web entrepreneurs, and highlighted in an article I’ve just read.

Personally I think this is a prime example of link baiting! By stating something controversial to stimulate debate and get your site noticed (It worked!) I don’t believe it for a minute. It also sounds a little like the kind of dot.com crash talk; you can’t make money just from advertising… But that all turned out ok.

It makes for an interesting read though, I wonder what the future holds for the mobile web…

There are a few basic things to consider when building a site that’s mobile friendly. It’s all pretty common sense when you think about it, and infact I’ve found most of these rules simply apply as good ‘general’ rules anyway. I.e. Use of good quality well-formed code, css based design and semantic markup. But there are also a few extra tips you can use to make the user experience that little bit better for the mobile user.

Use the Correct Character Encoding

It’s important to tell your browser what character encoding your content will be in. This appears on the first line of each XHTML Basic page for example
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>

UTF-8 is a good choice as it includes quite a wide range of characters.
ISO-8859 is another commonly used character set

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>

You can also include this as a meta tag
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />

Doctype

The document type (doctype) tells the browser how the page needs to be rendered, including the rules and how strictly to follow these rules.
Here is an example of a doctype declaration for XHTML Strict
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

Use Well-formed Code

All the code your write should be well-formed and valid code. Depending on the rules you choose to follow and how strictly these rules are applied, as defined in your doc type declaration above. XHTML has the following requirements.

• All elements should be closed. I.e. <br /> <p>Blah text</p>
• All elements must be properly nested. I.e. <p><strong>Title</strong></p>
• The alt attribute must be used for all images. I.e. <img src=”blah.jpg” alt=”My Image” />
• Text should appear within a block level element and not directly in the body. I.e. <body><p>My paragraph</p></body>
• Inline elements should always nest with block level elements. Inline elements include the span tag for example, which should therefore be nested within a block level element such as <p> or <div> tags.
• All attributes should appear within double quotes. I.e. <img src=”blah.jpg” alt=”My Image” />
• All elements and attributes should use lowercase. Just keeps things looking neat if nothing else!

Avoid using tables for layout - CSS based design

CSS evangelists have been harking on about this for years now. But when developing for a mobile device, where the page size is all important, makes this even more relevant. Most professional web designers have been coding 100% CSS layouts for a while now, so this shouldn’t come as much of a shock.

Use accesskeys in the Primary Navigation

This is about the first rule which I think most traditional web designers making sites for a computer would perhaps not consider. But using accesskeys could make navigation on a mobile device considerably easier.

<li><a href=”home.html” accesskey=”1″>Home</a></li>

This links the “1″ key on the mobile device to the Home link.

Use Ordered Lists for Navigation

Again something most professional web designers using CSS layouts will be quite confident with.

Link Phone Numbers

One of the benefits of the Mobile Web is that its users primarily view it on their phone, so allowing the user to quickly and easily make phone calls is a pretty cool idea.
<a href=”tel:+12065450210″>+1 206 545-0210</a>
Like any hyperlink, any text could appear between the <a> element to initiate a call. However, the recommendation is to display the phone number.

Caching

“Limited bandwidth and high latency can reduce the usability of Web sites on mobile devices. Using caching information effectively can reduce the need to reload data such as style sheets, images and pages, thus improving performance and reducing cost of use. It can also prevent the reuse of content where this is not appropriate, for example content that is adapted for one device should not be re-used by different devices. Devices and network caches are both affected by caching information.

How to do it:
Set expiry times in a way that is appropriate to your application. Consider using Cache-Control: public to allow sharing of pages between devices, Cache-Control: private to allow re-use but only by the requesting device and Cache-Control: nocache to prevent caching.”
- W3C Mobile Web Initiative

Tab Order

Consider the order of elements on your page by either completely avoiding the tabindex attribute and allowing the browser to determine the logical order of elements, or by specifying the order explicitly. Either way it’s worth checking the page works as expected when tabing through links and other elements.

Labels on Forms

It’s good to use the <label> tag to link labels to form elements. I typically build forms using a definition list, as this represents in my opinion a semantically correct markup for a form which also looks perfectly ok even without any styling at all.

References

Mobile Web Developer’s Guide from dev.mobi

W3C’s Mobile Web Initative

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

I’ve been reading a fair bit lately into what many people suspect will be the ‘next big thing’ on the Internet; the final ‘coming of age’ of the mobile Internet.

There are a lot of people doing a lot of things in the mobile web world, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of a whole new world of innovation, but here are my top finds so far.

www.gypsii.com - A social networking tool which is location based. There’s a neat little introduction video which explains it all.
www.mofuse.com - Create a mobile version of your site.

Here’s one vision that I especially like, entitled The Future of Internet Search: Mobile Version, from the PetitInvention blog.

But you might ask why this has happened before. People have been talking about the mobile web for ages, but it’s not really caught on… There are a few reasons for this, but many people now believe we’re literally standing on the edge of a precipice of a new cultural revolution where access to mobile web technologies and services will literally change the way we live and organise our lives together.

Buy why now?

i) Web developers are finally embracing the use of good, high quality, semantically rich code. CSS layouts are replacing the bloating table based layouts of the late 90’s and early 00’s.

ii) Mobile phone technology is also finally catching up to the demands placed on it by the content. XHTML is becoming more widely supported in place of the older more basic mobile markup languages such as WML. The iphone is the obvious example of how people are starting to realise they will be able to access fully featured websites via their phones.

iii) It might be a small factor, but a new announcement by the European Commission to support in-flight mobile use by harmonizing the technical and licensing requirements.

iv) Mobile Internet companies are starting to offer the consumer a realistically affordable tarrifs for going online.

v) Firefox on your mobile. - Mobile Firefox prototype browser arrives for eager early adopters to play with.

So the infrastructure is there, the technology is there. The software and applications are fastly becoming available. All that remains now is the slow but inevitable adoption of all this by the average joe on their mobile handset.

If anyone would like to show us some examples of their mobile based services and applications we’d love to see them.