Ever wonder what Google plans to do next? I just spent the last two days finding out, and the results were pretty interesting.Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google, yesterday opened Google I/O, Google’s first developer conference, by saying that Google has three goals for its business:

1. Making the [Internet] cloud more accessible
2. Keeping connectivity pervasive, and
3. Making the client [browser] more powerful.

Those points may seem generic, but they add up to an important idea: the web is the pre-eminent movement of our time. And Google wants to make everyone a part of it — and in the process make more money than ever before. Read the rest of this entry »

At Yankee Group, we’ve been researching and predicting the future for a while now. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes not so much. Our biggest Big Bet is the one we’re making around Anywhere — the notion that the global connectivity revolution will introduce dramatic changes in the way we live and work.

A key part of our Big Bet is around something very tiny. Made from plastic and glass and silicon, mobile phones are getting smarter every day. Even better, the increase in flat-rate data plans means that the mobile internet usage is going to explode. This broad macro trend — increased mobile internet usage — has profound implications for security, and in particular for mobile identity. If you take your phone, keys and credit cards with you, it seems to me that you will want to take your identity along too.

With that background in mind, I’m pleased to give YG blog readers a quick preview of a report I just finished today called Sizing the Mobile Identity Opportunity that puts numbers around how big mobile identity might be. Based on a model derived from our consumer data and mobile forecasts, the numbers, which I believe are conservative, are eye-popping. Assuming our forecasted mobile usage trends continue as we expect, by 2012 US mobile subscribers could generate over 360 billion identity events per year. By “identity event,”  I mean the act of authenticating to an online service or website. Applying the Law of Large Numbers to a miniscule fee per event yields another big number in the hundreds of millions of dollars. These are dollars that mobile operators and identity management vendors could leave on the table unless they capitalize on the opportunity.

This report won’t be available for several weeks. It usually takes a little while for our Editorial services group to bang out the dings in my dented prose, and for our peer reviewers (which in this case will include several outside organizations) to weigh in. More about this soon!

Big day for the future of wireless in the U.S. market yesterday — the announcement that Sprint Nextel, Clearwire, Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner, and others have formalized their plan to collaborate in a nationwide rollout of a fourth-generation WiMAX network is nothing short of huge. This demonstrates how diverse the convictions are in the tech sector about the opportunity for an open, data-centric wireless broadband fabric, and it should end a great deal of debate about whether a Sprint-only effort to do that was going to succeed.

That’s progress of a very real sort. Just a month ago, April 2nd was a whip-saw day for wireless in the Wall Street Journal: The U.S. edition featured two contradictory stories cheek by jowl on one page. At the top, a report from Beijing on Intel’s splashy launch of so-called “ultra-mobile devices,” showcasing a number of new product concepts using a purpose-built low-power chipset and functionally offering something less than a PC but more than a phone.

But just below the fold, you’d have found a summary of the FCC’s reluctance, announced at CTIA, to force the U.S. wireless operators to open their networks to devices not authorized by the operators themselves.

The national WiMAX announcement, along with that first story on April 2nd, speaks to the opportunities we see at Yankee Group for an internet of devices well beyond today’s PC and phone approaches – although frankly I saw little in these early concept products to spark the demand that I do believe lurks in that gap.

That below-the-fold April story showcases the resistance of U.S. wireless operators to recognize one of the imperatives of the Anywhere revolution, which is for an open platform. The FCC thinks the operators are doing enough to open up their networks. But can a network be ‘kind of open’ any more than someone can be ‘a little bit pregnant’?

The good news is, we’re going to find out!  Onward and upward.

I am not a mobile web developer. Rather, I am more of a “weekend programmer” focused on traditional web applications. (I am a co-author of Apache JSPWiki, a Java-based wiki software package. No prizes for guessing that I wrote the security bits.) But even though I haven’t tried to do any mobile development just yet, my iPhone’s web browsing capability has gotten me curious about makes a good mobile application — from the nuts-and-bolts perspective. So it was with great interest that I read Brian Fling’s excellent Web 2.0 Expo presentation, Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond. I recommend it highly: not only did Brian teach me a few technical tips, he also clearly explains the mobile development stack, from the mobile operators up through the application toolkits. It’s a cracking good deck, too; almost as elegant and entertaining as Dick Hardt’s rapid-fire Identity 2.0 presentation from 2005.

The rattle of jackhammers and traffic gridlock welcome any visitor to London after the ides of March.

The UK financial year is ending: Spend your budget by April 5 or expect a cut, particularly if you’re in public works.

This year, the thud of suitcases locking and money swooshing down the Thames join this noisome mix. London’s non-doms and investors are in startled exodus.

The cause: severe new UK tax laws. And they’re empoverishing our industry.

Read the rest of this entry »