Iain Thomson, The Register, 2/7/2012

Android power users may face hobbled handsets

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Ryan Paul, ArsTechnica, 2/7/2012

The Document Foundation (TDF) announced plans last year to create mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice. A preliminary iOS porting effort that was undertaken earlier in 2011 demonstrated the viability of the project and showed that the open source office suite could have a future beyond the desktop.

In a presentation this week at the FOSDEM conference, SUSE developer Michael Meeks shed some light on the current status of the porting project. The presentation slides, which he published on his blog, offer insight into some of the underlying technical details and the rationale for some of the high-level design decisions.

Reusing code

The LibreOffice developers aim to maximize the amount of code that is shared between the desktop, mobile, and cloud variants of the office suite. Instead of rewriting the software or maintaining separate implementations, the existing code base will be adapted to work in new environments.

Due to the inherent complexity and sophistication of an office suite, writing a separate version for each environment or rewriting from scratch in a form that is more conducive to portability would be impractical. Meeks cited several examples of failed office suite rewrites in his presentation slides—including Microsoft’s defunct Pyramid project and Corel’s abandoned Java-based rewrite of Corel Office—to highlight the risk of such an undertaking.

Meeks also pointed out some of the major advantages of sharing code between environments. It will ensure that a good selection of LibreOffice features is available across all target environments and that interoperability between them will be robust and predictable. Improvements to the underlying code will transparently benefit all users, regardless of where they are running the application.

In particular, the performance optimizations that are made in order to get the current LibreOffice code running on mobile devices will also be felt on the desktop. The office suite’s poor startup performance has been identified as one area where significant improvement is needed. According to a slide in the presentation, approximately 15 percent of LibreOffice’s CPU consumption on startup is dedicated to parsing configuration files—and a non-trivial portion of that is used merely to load user interface text.

The effort to port LibreOffice to resource-constrained devices will help raise the visibility of performance and memory issues so that they are more likely to be fixed. The result will be a LibreOffice that is faster and lighter for everyone. We’ve seen this phenomenon work before, most notably when Mozilla aggressively reduced Firefox’s memory footprint during the early days of the Fennec project.

Port status

The mobile ports of LibreOffice are still at a very early stage of development. Experimental prototypes validate the technical strategy and show that the ports are possible.

LibreOffice developer Tor Lillqvist has been working on getting the office suite to compile for Android and iOS. He released a screenshot last year that showed a LibreOffice debugging session in Xcode, with a headless instance of the office suite running in the iOS simulator. Meeks has also included a screenshot in his slide presentation that shows a LibreOffice Prototype running in an emulated Android tablet environment.

The experimental Android prototype merely demonstrates that the office suite can be made to run on Android devices. A touchscreen-friendly user interface that matches the platform’s native interface conventions will be implemented before the tablet application is released to end users. The initial goal is to make a “high-fidelity” document viewer and then add limited editing capabilities.

A screenshot of the LibreOffice Android prototype

Michael Meeks

Much like the mobile ports, the cloud port will be powered by the existing LibreOffice code. The application will run on a server and its user interface will be painted in the user’s browser window on an HTML Canvas element. The LibreOffice cloud prototype is powered by Broadway, an impressive HTML-rendering backend for the Gtk+ widget toolkit.

Communication between the frontend and the backend will be facilitated by WebSockets, which allow real-time communication. The screen updates will be sent as compressed PNG slices. Only the parts of the screen that need to be updated will be sent, which means that the network overhead for simple operations like text input is relatively low.

An explanation of how the HTML5 prototype works

Michael Meeks

One of the major advantages of this approach is that it will ensure that formatting and layout is entirely consistent between the cloud and desktop versions of the application. The browser-based interface won’t be limited by the constraints of HTML presentation.

A screenshot of LibreOffice Online running in Firefox

Michael Meeks

It’s already possible to self-host your own single-user LibreOffice online environment by running a LibreOffice development build with the Broadway backend on Linux. According to the slides, this will be supported out of the box in the upcoming LibreOffice 3.5 release that is expected to arrive later this week. There are still rendering glitches, however, and areas that need further optimization.

Support for multitenancy, user authentication, and other features that are needed to accommodate large-scale LibreOffice Online deployments haven’t been implemented yet. Meeks believes that the office suite will scale acceptably well on servers. In his slides, he pointed out that LibreOffice already works well in large mulituser X11 environments. He estimates that a server with four quad-core CPUs could potentially handle between 200-300 concurrent LibreOffice users.

Remarks on scaling LibreOffice Online

Michael Meeks

Scaling

OpenOffice.org (OOo) never had a reputation for being svelte and efficient. Users are naturally skeptical about whether LibreOffice can overcome OOo’s legacy of performance problems, and scale down to work well in mobile environments.

The dysfunctional culture of the OOo project under Sun and Oracle created a high barrier of entry for participation and worked against the success of the office suite. The LibreOffice fork tore down those obstacles and created a healthier environment in which the software can flourish.

LibreOffice has already succeeded in building a more inclusive community with a better governance model. As we reported last week, LibreOffice has seen rapid growth—in the form of high developer engagement, a more diverse base of contributors, and a large number of monthly code commits.

A major code cleanup effort has already resulted in the removal of many unused functions. The LibreOffice community clearly has the operational agility that it needs to cull the bloat and make the office suite more efficient. Scaling down to support mobile environments and scaling up to support large cloud deployments is easily within the realm of possibility.

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Ryan Pau, Ars Technica, 2/3/2012

Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

The project is part of Mozilla’s broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

Mozilla developer Jeff Balogh described the new push notification system in a recent blog entry. The post sketched out a high-level overview of how the system might work and provided some sample JavaScript code.

“Push notifications are a way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not on the site. iOS and Android devices already support their own push notification services, but we want to make notifications available to the whole web,” he wrote.

The way that the system works is relatively simple. Mozilla or some other party would host a notification service that is capable of delivering messages to the browser. The service would have a unique URL endpoint for every active user.

The Web browser would provide a JavaScript API that websites can use to request permission from the user to send push notifications (such a prompt would be necessary to minimize spam). When the user grants permission, the browser hands the website the URL of the notification service endpoint associated with the user.

When a Web application sends a POST request with notification data to that endpoint, the notification service passes the message to the user. An instance of Firefox running on the user’s desktop would likely maintain some kind of persistent connection to the notification service so that it could receive notifications instantly.

In addition, the notification service would hypothetically be able to relay messages to mobile devices. It could use Google’s Cloud-to-Device messaging to send push notifications to mobile Firefox on the user’s Android handset. Or it could use the Apple Push Notification Service to send notifications to users of Firefox Home, Mozilla’s iOS application.

It’s important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla’s push notification system moves beyond that limitation.

The push system is still at a relatively early stage of planning and isn’t available to test yet. Balogh has defined the JavaScript APIs that the browser will use to enable the functionality and ask the user for permission to send notifications. He has also proposed the set of properties that will be associated with each individual notification that gets transmitted to the notification server.

Mozilla’s push system will be especially useful for websites that want to send notifications to their users’ smartphones without having to build a native mobile application. If the concept evolves into a standard, mobile browsers could someday potentially have the feature built in.

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Electronista, 1/14/2012

Sprint to move phones wholesale to 4G and NFC

Sprint in commentary during CES confrimed that it was dropping WiMAX on smartphones. The initial LTE smartphones were ultimately representing a full-scale switch to the technology for 4G phones, PCMag was told. The carrier was being more aggressive than it had suggested before and, when promising LTE in mid-year, had meant between January and June, Owens explained.

Simultaneously, consumer product marketing VP Trevor Van Norman mentioned to Light Reading that the company planned for NFC (near-field communication) to be a standard feature in every smartphone. While there would be some edge case free or low-end phones tat wouldn’t have it, every other smartphone would get it from now onwards.

The planned switch may have given clues as to future iPhone releases. Sprint has committed to a multi-year deal with Apple to carry the iPhone and would have to either make a special exception for a 3G phone or else knows to expect LTE, NFC, or both. Both technologies have usually been left to Android, where Google takes a piece of Google Offers discounts.

Sprint regularly adopts basic technology first. It picked 4G well before other carriers were ready to deploy. Google helped it become the first to ship with a full NFC payment system in place through Google Wallet on the Nexus S 4G and now the Galaxy Nexus.

On Windows Phone, Owens said the HTC Arrive had sold poorly enough to reduce reasons to “jump back into the fire.” A return might come in August or September, although with who wasnt mentioned.

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Michelle Ruhfas, MobileBurn, 1/12/2012

CompanionLink Software announces two-way synchronization of contacts, calendars, tasks, and memos between popular CRMsolutions and the latest smartphones and tablets announced at CES 2012 in Las Vegas. Over 25 new devices on both the Android and Windows Phone platforms were announced, including the Samsung Galaxy Note, Sony Xperia S, EeePad Memo 7″ tablet, Motorola DROID 4, Nokia Lumia 900, and many others. “The months that follow CES are a busy time for us as we update our products to ensure compatibility with the latest mobile devices”

CompanionLink offers four sync options: USB, Wi-Fi, Hosted Wireless, and via Google®. New smartphones and tablets can sync with a variety of CRM platforms such as Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce.com, Sage ACT!, Google, Zoho CRM, SugarCRM, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, Highrise, GoldMine, and more. “The months that follow CES are a busy time for us as we update our products to ensure compatibility with the latest mobile devices,” said Rushang Shah, Director of Marketing at CompanionLink.

CompanionLink licenses start at $49.95. A 14-day free trial is also available. Free phone support, free updates, and a 90-day money back guarantee are included with every license. To learn more about CompanionLink, visit www.companionlink.com/.

About CompanionLink Software
CompanionLink Software, Inc. is a pioneering developer of data synchronization solutions for mobile phones and CRM software and services. They also develop a business-class CRM app called DejaOffice for Android, iPhone, and iPad devices. For over 15 years, CompanionLink has helped mobilize information across devices, computers, applications, and web-based services. For more information, please visit www.companionlink.com or www.dejaoffice.com. To watch a video explaining CompanionLink, visit www.companionlink.com/videos.

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Angela Moscaritolo, PCMagazine, 1/11/2012

Online payment company PayPal processed nearly $4 billion worth of mobile payments in 2011, an exponential increase from the previous year.

To put this figure in perspective, the company processed $750 million worth of mobile transactions in 2010 and $141 million in 2009, David Marcus, vice president of PayPal Mobile, said at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The huge growth in mobile payment volume is the result of an overall increase in mobile commerce, combined with the availability of more useful mobile payment apps, Marcus told VentureBeat.

PayPal had originally kicked off 2011 predicting $1.5 billion in mobile total payment volume for the year, a company spokesman said. As the year went on, the company upped its projections three separate times, to $2 billion in February, $3 billion in June, and $3.5 billion in October.

“Over the course of [2011] we raised our initial prediction by a total of $2 billion, and still managed to surpass our goal by a wide margin with a total of $4 billion,” a PayPal spokesman said in an email.

PayPal has actually seen mobile payment volumes ratchet up each year since at least 2006, when it processed less than $1 million in mobile transactions. In 2007, it hit $7 million and by 2008, it reached $25 million.

Despite the huge growth in mobile payment volume seen by PayPal, those in the payments industry do not expect the new transaction method to reach ubiquity this year. A group of mobile payment executives in September said consumers will be quicker to embrace mobile payments than merchants, who have been slow to accept such transactions.

Some merchants have been early adopters, however. Starbucks, for example, in July unveiled a new mobile payment system available in all U.S. stores for BlackBerry and Apple iOS users.

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Forbes, 1/11/2012

Capitalizing on a booming smartphone and tablet market, we expect that Google’s mobile search segment adds almost as much value to the company’s stock as its PC search division. While monetization on mobile search is still low for Google, smartphone/tablet growth in emerging markets as well as bandwidth improvements should help mobile search queries match PC levels in the next five to six years, which we account for in our discounted cash flow analysis.

We recently updated our model for Google, dividing its search business into PC and mobile-driven search.

While we retain our price estimate of near $627 for Google’s stock, our forecast estimates indicate that mobile search is comparable to PC search in its contribution to Google’s overall value, with both divisions contributing around 32%-34% towards the stock.

Android’s Mobile OS Dominance and Emerging Markets to Drive Growth

Android recently crossed the 50% global market share barrier in the mobile OS market helped by both its wide range of manufacturer-partners as well as its free and open source roots. Google’s mobile OS is also becoming the preferred choice for cheaper tablet versions in emerging markets like India, with the $35 Aakash tablet being a prime example. Developing economies are expected to be a growth hub for mobile devices due to their current low penetration levels especially in non-urban areas. It is this potential future market that places mobile search in the limelight for Google, despite the relatively modest revenues of $1 billion Google generated from mobile search in 2010.

Having said that, patent litigation from arch rival Apple continues to threaten the Android’s market share through sales bans and injunctions on Android-based devices. Google’s mobile search could also be seeing some competition from Apple’s interactive search tool Siri, which employs not just Google, but competitors Yahoo and Bing as well.

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Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service, 1/10/2012

T-Mobile is offering a calling service for iPhone and iPad users, even though it doesn’t sell those devices.

The operator is expanding its free voice-over-IP service, called Bobsled, to iPhones, iPads, and Android phones. Users with the app can make calls to mobile or landline phones in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico without incurring charges. Users can make the calls over cellular data networks, which typically charge for the data usage, or over Wi-Fi, which could be free.

T-Mobile’s Bobsled for iPhone

The new services are an expansion of the Bobsled service that T-Mobile first launched early last year. Initially, it let people make calls only to Facebook friends from PCs. In October, it began letting people make calls from Facebook to mobile devices and make calls from PCs to U.S. mobile and landline phones.

T-Mobile is also separately launching a Bobsled Messaging app on Tuesday for Android phones, with plans to also offer it for iPhones and iPads later this year. That app lets users send group text and multimedia messages.

Key to both apps is that they are tied to a user’s mobile phone number. That means a user can download Bobsled Messaging on their Android tablet and tie the app to their mobile phone number, so that when they send a message, the recipient will see that the message is coming from the sender’s regular phone number.

Users will find some benefits to downloading the app on multiple devices. For example, a user can read conversations on their tablet that were started on the phone. They’ll also be able to access their contacts list from the app on both devices.

In the future, T-Mobile plans to start issuing phone numbers along with Bobsled. That means someone with a Wi-Fi-only iPad, for example, could attach a phone number to the tablet that friends would recognize when the user made calls and sent messages from Bobsled.

T-Mobile has a number of reasons for wanting to get into the VoIP business, said Brad Duea, senior vice president of marketing for T-Mobile. VoIP traffic is only expected to grow, he said. “It might cannibalize some revenue, but we think it’s a much greater opportunity. We don’t have a fixed-line business to protect. So we’re saying, ‘cut the cord, here’s how we can empower you,’” he said.

Some other mobile service providers that have landline businesses are often less keen to promote VoIP because it competes with traditional landline phone service.

For now, T-Mobile isn’t saying much about how it will make money from the service. It plans to bring some new business models to the market, including ad-supported services and contextual advertising, he said. The company will talk more about that in a couple of months, he said.

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Nancy Gohring, IDG News Servic, 1/9/2012

The operator also said it plans to launch an online store for HTML5 apps this year

AT&T is hoping to encourage developers to use HTML5 with the release of a new API platform. “It’s essentially a rich set of APIs and tools aimed at furthering the HTML5 appeal as an app development choice,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer at AT&T. “Why are we focusing on HTML5? We think it has the potential to address fragmentation.” He spoke Monday at the AT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Developers must rewrite native applications to run on iPhones, Android phones, Windows Phones, and BlackBerry phones. HTML5 simplifies things for developers by letting them instead build apps that run in a browser accessible by any smartphone. HTML5 apps look and act similar to a native app. By 2016, 85 percent of smartphones will have browsers capable of running HTML5, Christopher said, citing a prediction made by Strategy Analytics.

A spokewoman told InfoWorld she was not sure whether the APIs could be used for apps expected to run on devices provisioned by any carrier — the norm in most companies given the mix of corporate-supplied and employee-owned devices — or just on devices running on the AT&T network.

The new API (application programming interface) catalog includes APIs for MMS, SMS, location, and mobile-health capabilities. In addition, it allows developers to let users make payments in the app that appear on their AT&T bill. It also includes technologies that sense what capabilities a smartphone has to optimize the app for the individual smartphone.

The APIs are hosted on cloud services, including Heroku and Microsoft’s Azure. Developers must pay a $99 registration fee to start using the APIs.

AT&T also said it plans to launch an online store for HTML5 apps this year. It will initially be accessible by Android and iPhone users but will expand to include other phones, said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president of devices for AT&T. “The two things that are the biggest challenges for HTML5 to reach its full potential are distribution and monetization,” he said. The API platform and the new app center are designed to address these challenges, he said.

The operator hopes to take a fresh approach to app stores with the store. Rather than simply listing apps by category, like most app stores do today, it will have a “magazine-like” format, he said. Developers can sign up to be part of the beta of the new app store at developer.att.com/appcenter.

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John Paul Titlo, ReadWriteWeb, 1/5/2012

In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money.

The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT’s existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.

Assanka had evidently won the FT over with the work it had done previously for the company. After they refused to adhere to Apple’s revised subscription revenue share, the FT saw its native iOS app pulled from the App Store. Rather than give in to Apple’s terms, they simply focused on developing a Web-based mobile and tablet app written using HTML5 and related technologies. Ultimately, that Assanka-produced app saw more traffic than the publication’s original iOS application.

In addition to forgoing Apple’s revenue share, the HTML5-based app, which looks and feels a lot like a native tablet or smartphone application, has the advantage of being accessible from a range of devices and much easier to update. It also enables them to build out sites with the kind of responsive design techniques utilized by publications like the Boston Globe.

Mobile and tablet development is only going to increase in importance for publishers in the future. With this acquisition, FT can continue to enhance its existing mobile apps and use the development talent at Assanka to help build out future initiatives on various devices.

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