Mobiwire launches 'post app' Android user interface with cloud links

'Post-app' UI combines SuperWidgets and connection to the cloud

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

MobiWire - formerly Sagem Wireless- has launched a user interface for Android smartphones that simplifies usage and encourages exploration and conversion.

Surface UX builds on the Android platform to combine personalization with a deeply branded and connected experience with the user interface software connected to cloud-based content. It aggregates content and presenting it in a contextualized and easily navigable and surfaced UI.  

MobiWire has made both general usability improvements to the basic Android UI and developed a series of patented Surface Apps which act as ‘super widgets’, aggregating relevant content into a series of UI panes that can be defined and branded by the service provider.  By providing a direct connection into a back-end infrastructure, MobiWire’s Surface UX helps drive users’ discovery, consumption and engagement with a brand’s digital assets, leading to service and mCommerce conversion.

“We are already in a post-app world where silos of data are being superseded by an aggregated, real-time, multi-tasking user experience,” said Jerome Nadel, EVP User Experience at MobiWire.  “As we look beyond apps, the user interface is a dynamic environment where multiple feeds of data, content and services come together to create a definable experience.  By bringing the principles of relevance, context and intuition to the UI design process, Surface UX delivers a connected user experience that is unmatched in the way it takes full advantage of the power and flexibility of the Android platform, creating a UI that encourages usage and exploration, and simplifies conversion to buy services and products.”

Patented improvements to the generic Android UI include:

·         Home screen main menu structure – Apps can be ‘tagged’ and presented in a tiered menu structure so that pre-loaded and branded apps are separated from a user’s downloaded apps and not lost in an alphabetized listing.  A personalized speed bar enables the user to quickly go to their favorite apps.

·          A powerful ‘switcher’ for easy multi-tasking between open apps – simplifying existing implementations of Android task switching, the Surface UX switcher enables the user to easily navigate directly between panes and open applications.  It also enables personalization to add, remove, and reorder panes.

·         Menu button with personalized shortcuts that remain visible on any pane – the menu button includes shortcuts to both key features such as phone and contacts and user-defined shortcuts to their most used apps.

The Surface Apps enable the brand partner to push services in real-time and provide a one-tap access to their stores and digital services.  The Stream surface app provides a unified inbox, expandable preview window and contextualized actions for email, SMS, social networking and RSS feeds.  The Post surface app creates a central place for the user to share and update all their social networks.  Finally, the Music and Web surface apps provide a direct connection into the brand’s digital assets such as a mCommerce site or online music store.

“An optimized Android UI simplifies the out-of-the box experience, encourages usage and device mastery” said Sylvain Gommier, director of User Experience at MobiWire.  “The general improvements to the Android UI, together with the patented Surface Apps, means the content that matters most can be aggregated, surfaced and presented in a way that is consistent, easy to navigate and contextualized.”

Surface UX runs on Android 2.3 multi-touch smartphones. It is available to brand, retail, and device partners with the first devices with the Surface UX available to consumers in Q2 2011.  Surface UX will be available on Android 3.0 tablets in H2, 2011.

Related articles

• Sagem Wireless rebrands to MobiWire to focus on branded devices (intomobile.com)
• Why Android Smartphone Apps Are About to Improve (gigaom.com)

Sagem Wireless moves to become software supplier

MobiWire, formerly Sagem Wireless, today announced  its open Android OS user interface software, Surface, as part of a strategic move to focus on user experience and connected services integrated into branded consumer electronics (CE) devices and professional industrial applications.  MobiWire combines user interface software connected to cloud-based content with its award winning device design to take global and luxury brands mobile. From design to delivery, MobiWire connects brands’ customers to services through customized connected CE devices.

Building on the company’s 15-year heritage of mobile operator relationships and handset development, MobiWire delivers brand-customized wireless devices based on advanced open and standard compliant technology.  MobiWire enables its customers and partners to deliver connected CE devices that quickly and economically allow them to engage with their consumers in a new way. MobiWire works with retail and luxury brands like FNAC and Porsche Design, device OEMs, and industrial device systems integrators to design, develop and deliver connected CE devices based on industry standard reference platforms. 

A key part of this focus on connected CE devices is the MobiWire Design Lab and its most recent patented invention, Surface, an enhanced Android user experience. Surface simplifies the complexities of Android by surfacing content and applications so they are easy to access and use. “With our increasingly powerful handset and tablet devices, the user interface, both physical and digital, can open or limit the potential of the device and the services it delivers.  Using intelligence to improve experience, Surface presents content from applications and the web, removing the need to navigate between them and simplifying access to a connected experience,” said Jerome Nadel, EVP User Experience at MobiWire.

MobiWire works with brands to deliver connected CE devices with a distinctive and customised user experience that is highly differentiated and customized for the requirements of specific user micro-segments.   System integrators work with MobiWire to develop smart connected devices for professional and industrial vertical markets based on a proven 2G/3G and forthcoming LTE core platforms.

Market forces will overcome mobile device fragmentation says Analysys Mason

Fragmentation is a major issue for portable multimedia
As the mobile industry catches up with the iPhone, device fragmentation will increasingly become an issue and  the costs and effects of potentially needing to rewrite (and maintain) every application for every device and platform combination will become increasingly noticeable, says Jim Morrish, Principal Analyst at Analysys Mason. This has recently been highlighted by Adobe’s desire to use Flash CS5 to write software once for deployment across multiple mobile platforms, and Apple’s recent actions that effectively prevent Flash-compiled software from being admitted to the App Store.
In the medium term, defragmentation may be driven by developers of more-sophisticated applications, mobile operators, handset manufacturers and the use of browsers as runtime environments, and combating device fragmentation is currently high on many agendas in the mobile industry.
This is in the context of a boom in smartphones worldwide, forecast to grow at an annual rate of 32% between 2010 and 2014, according to a Analysys Mason report, Smartphones forecast to grow to 26% of handsets by 2014.
More than 50% of this growth will be generated in developing Asia–Pacific and Latin American markets. Western European, North American and developed Asia–Pacific markets combined will account for less than 30% of total growth, so it is clear that the market for smartphones will transform over coming years.
This means initiatives to combat the effects of device fragmentation are now moving centre-stage. The GSMA recently announced the Wholesale Application Community, which will take the JIL (browser widget) and BONDI (handset API standardisation) initiatives and develop them into a common standard for widget-based applications. It will also take advantage of the work that the GSMA has already undertaken in developing open network APIs (OneAPI).
Others are taking an alternative approach to the same problem, promoting a ‘write-once, deploy-many-times’ scheme. For instance, Tech Mahindra is working to develop software that will ‘translate’ applications between incompatible OS environments, and Nokia is seeking to exploit the Qt application development environment, which is capable of compiling applications into code suitable for a variety of devices and platforms. Writing a mobile application once and then compiling it into many OS environments (cross-platform compilation) is also something that Adobe is pursuing with Flash CS5, as are Appcelerator with Titanium, Metismo with Bedrock and Nitobi Software with PhoneGap.
Another theme in the battle against device fragmentation is the extension of a ‘smart-like’ environment to non-smart phones. Opera Software is mining this vein, with its server-side widgets that are accessible via a handset web browser client, and shift application processing requirements off the handset and into the network. Another example is Silent Communication, which has written a proprietary software client that it claims will work on the majority of handsets shipped in developed markets during the past two years. The client acts as an abstraction layer, enabling the effective roll-out of standardised applications across a large range of handsets. An example is visual voicemail, which the company soon expects to roll out across the whole range of handsets from a leading manufacturer.
From a developer’s perspective, many of the defragmentation initiatives can simply seem to result in more fragmentation. Apple’s recent stipulation that all App Store applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine – not, for example, in Flash and then compiled – adds further complexity (although cross-platform compilers that use Apple’s SDK may sidestep this restriction).

Moving forwards in a fragmented world It is unclear how this situation will evolve, but fragmentation is certainly here to stay for the foreseeable future and will continue to affect different applications in different ways. For example, it might be easier to port sophisticated games that depend on specific handset capabilities (such as a touchscreen interface) between OS environments for handsets with similar capabilities than it would be to port them within OS environments for handsets with different capabilities. Such an effect may drive some standardisation among high-end smartphones – for example, manufacturers and developers might adopt the latest iPhone capabilities as a lowest common denominator. The reach of sophisticated applications beyond this set of phones would then be determined by a simple business case: the incremental cost of tailoring the application compared with the addressable market per additional handset type, combined with an expected sales-conversion rate.
Many simple applications are relatively untroubled by fragmentation within OSs. For example, Nokia’s Ovi app wizard enables users to construct an RSS newsfeed client in a few minutes, and the resulting application runs on nearly all Nokia devices that support Ovi Store. Other relatively simple applications may simply be developed as browser widgets.
Operators and handset manufacturers are likely to be the driving force behind the development of more-sophisticated applications that are suitable for a large cross-section of devices. Such effects suggest that in the medium-term new dynamics may emerge in the market for mobile content and applications, including:

• a range of high-end handsets (running various OSs, but similar in terms of functionality) that benefit from an extensive and sophisticated developer community, using cross-platform compilation and application translation tools
• a significantly larger group of diverse handsets (not necessarily smartphones) that will have access to a more restricted set of moderately sophisticated applications for which investment by operators or handset manufacturers to overcome device fragmentation is financially viable
• an extensive range of less-sophisticated applications, available via a browser interface across an extensive range of handsets.

Against this framework, the main opportunity for mobile operators will be to drive the creation of high-quality applications that transcend the boundaries of OSs or specific handset types. These applications’ ability to drive customer acquisition and limit churn will provide the justification to do so.

Related App Developer articles

• Daring Fireball: New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone Compiler (dccrowley.posterous.com)
• Apple iPhone move kills Mac coding conference (news.cnet.com)
• Android 2.2 May Deliver More Performance, Less Fragmentation (gigaom.com)
• Apple: PhoneGap Framework Is Ok for the App Store (macstories.net)
• 100 Million Club H2 2009: Breaking the 500 million barrier of mobile software (visionmobile.com)
• iPhone 4.0 SDK bars un-Jobsian code translation (go.theregister.com)

Motorola backs TuneWiki as it goes for mobile games

Handset maker invests in music-based social media site driving faster CPUs

Motorola, through its strategic investment arm, Motorola Ventures, has led the second round of funding for TuneWiki, a provider of next-generation social media music players that is planning to enter the mobile games market.
TuneWiki has the largest legally-licensed lyrics database in the world and combines subtitled lyrics with music and music videos, lyrics translations into over 45 languages, real-time mapping, geographical charting and social networking. The proprietary technology combines lyrics with the music you play whether from your locally stored library or a streaming Internet source. It also allows the TuneWiki community to contribute to and update lyrics and translations. Founded in 2007, the company is headquartered in the British Virgin Islands and has offices in Los Angeles, Ohio and Tel Aviv, Israel. 
Motorola acted as lead investor and was joined by new investors Intellect Capital Ventures, a venture fund initiative of TeliaSonera, the leading Nordic Telecommunications operator, managed by Intellect Partners, as well as HillsVen Capital, LLC and Novel TMT. TuneWiki's previous venture capital investor, Benchmark Israel, also participated in the round.
TuneWiki will use the investment to expand and enhance its product offerings for leading mobile platforms and the Internet. The company's upcoming releases will take further advantage of platform capabilities and new features found in recently released smartphones, including stronger CPUs, always-connected capabilities, larger displays and high-resolution screens. TuneWiki will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new and exciting ways that connect music fans around the world with new products, including an upcoming mobile game.
"Music is rapidly emerging as a key feature for smartphones, and TuneWiki is changing the experience of listening to music from a solitary experience to a social one," said Reese Schroeder, managing director of Motorola Ventures. "We believe that TuneWiki has developed an innovative interactive social media player that can dramatically change the way people will listen to and interact with music."
"Teaming up with a global company like Motorola is very exciting for us," said Rani Cohen, CEO of TuneWiki. "We are passionate about connecting people through music, and having our applications running in many countries with different languages will allow our users to explore the world of music and better understand its meaning as part of a vibrant and engaged community."

Related articles

• Mot invests in acoustic touch technology (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• Dilithium lands $10.9M for wireless multimedia systems (deals.venturebeat.com)
• You: Ruckus nabs $10.7M for Wi-Fi for internet TV (deals.venturebeat.com)
• Vivox Raises $6.8 Million from IDG Ventures and Existing Investors (eon.businesswire.com)

Mobile standard for windowing graphics

The Khronos Group has released version 1.0 of the OpenWF standard for building windowing systems and providing display control functionality in accelerated mobile
and embedded devices.
OpenWF enables a new degree of portability, acceleration and abstraction for windowing systems while adding functionality and features through close integration with Khronos application APIs. OpenWF acts as the underlying route to the display for advanced graphics and multimedia content generated using APIs such as OpenGL ES for fast and portable 3D graphics, OpenVG for vector graphics acceleration and OpenMAX for multimedia.
OpenWF provides two separate but complementary low-level APIs for composition of content and the configuration of display devices: OpenWF Composition and OpenWF Display. OpenWF Display enables portable access to display control hardware for manipulating screen attributes, while OpenWF Composition allows for layering and system-wide composition of application content. The two APIs can be used together or independently, depending on specific platform needs.
OpenWF enables highly-optimized mechanisms to display application content in a windowing system. By eliminating redundant memory accesses, consumed memory bandwidth may be reduced by more than half, resulting in significant power savings.
“If the UI is slow, nobody cares which CPU or GPU is inside the device,” said Petri Kero, CTO of drawelements Ltd. “System software needs to take full advantage of whatever is under the hood. We have been working on this for a long time already, and we're very excited to see OpenWF standardize the key interfaces.”
“OpenWF provides a critical missing link for rich media content presentation pipeline. It rids the industry of proprietary methods of uniting media sources with displays and results in faster time to market and better utilization of hardware,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, Director of Platform Business at Symbio.

OpenWF’s key features include:

OpenWF Composition:

• Provides layered 2D composition functionality implementable on low-power
hardware

• Enables system-wide composition of application content

• Includes alpha-blending, masking, resizing, rotation, mirroring

• Defines scalable acceleration for low-end dedicated hardware through to
high-end GPUs

• Optimizes use-cases, such as long-running video playback with subtitles,
for low power



OpenWF Display:

• Defines a windowing system-level interface to control display hardware

• Provides configuration control over mode-setting of built-in and external
displays

• Includes discovery, power, resolution, rotation and pipeline control

• Supports multiple interfaces including HDMI, DVI, S-Video, embedded LCD
panels and legacy display adapters

Motorola has launched Android development resources through MOTODEV, including a new App Accelerator Program and MOTODEV Studio for Android Beta. MOTODEV will offer developers early access to a new suite of Google Android developer tools and programs to accelerate the development of applications to be used on Motorola's mobile devices using the Android operating system scheduled to ship later this year.

"Motorola is focused on helping our global network of best-in-class developers create, deploy and successfully market their Android applications to ultimately unleash greater innovation into the mobile application development space," said Christy Wyatt, Vice President, Software Platforms and Ecosystem, Motorola. "We believe Android and open software has the freedom and flexibility to foster innovation, accelerate time to market, and deliver the most personal and customized mobile experiences for consumers."

MOTODEV provides:
-- Early access to tools, technical specs, documentation and other
development support resources.
-- Exclusive pre-release access to upcoming Motorola devices for testing
and debugging.
-- Direct access to Motorola's developer support engineers via private
discussion boards.
-- Maximum market exposure for applications as soon as new mobile devices
ship to users.
MOTODEV Studio is an Eclipse- based integrated development environment that works with Google's software development kit. Among the resources available to developers are design and development tools; handset emulators and virtual testing labs; intuitive interfaces for deploying applications; application creation wizards and frequently used code templates; and access to marketing and distribution channels.