Yesterday I went to the mobile seminar hosted by The Reference at NH Hotels in Ghent with 2 colleagues. We arrived just on time and I was immediately impressed by the beautiful venue. It looked very nice and was well organized.

We started a little bit to late but I didn’t bother. We got welcomed by someone from The Reference who passed on the mic to another employee of theirs. He introduced us to the new mobile landscape and told us that he believed it wouldn’t be like this right now without the iPhone. I agree with him because the iPhone was the first ever device who brought the internet into your pocket. The figures that I saw from Google last week clearly proved that. This person also had some interesting figures, for example 38% of the phones in Belgium are 3G ready but only 9% is using 3G at the moment. While in other EU countries like Germany, France and Italy approx. 30% use 3G. It’s obvious that the cause for this significant lower number in Belgium is because of the high cost data rate plans in Belgium. He also wanted us to know that 2009 will be the year of mobile, it’s a booming business. I’m motivated to hop on the mobile “train” and contribute. Again we were made clear that a desktop site and a mobile site are NOT THE SAME. You should adapt to the device the visitor uses to browse to your site. The Reference reviewed 40 websites from the biggest companies in Belgium and they concluded that only 14% is “mobile ready”. They had this tool which they used for in-house testing of these sites. It was interesting but quite repetitive because I’ve been to Web Goes Mobile last week.

Next up was a French mobile specialist from Lille, his session was in French and he spoke very quickly. I was suprised that I understood 80-90% of what he said. He wanted to make clear that there is a new trend arising. Companies want a mobile site and sometimes a mobile application, to attract users to the brand, to give them a feeling of participation, they  want the user to feel part of the brand.

He showed us Google Mobile Ads and Admob, a way to make your applications cost-free but win money from advertisement. Another thing I didn’t know about was that the W3C also has a standard for mobile called W3C MobileOK.

After a short break they showed us 3 cases: De Redactie + Sporza, Telenet and Truvo. The Reference had been developing these mobile sites for these companies and I have to say that I really like the mobile site from De Redactie. I would like the possibility to view videos from Sporza on my smartphone aswell. But they said it was in the making. De Redactie + Sporza sites were testcases and have been approved by VRT now, the results are good. This, again, proves that 2009 will be the year of mobile! The sites made for Telenet (Zita) and Truvo were impressive aswell. These sites are automatically adjusted to the type of device. If u have a low-end smartphone then you get the low-end version, without images.

Last but not least was Siruna. A spin-off from a Belgian university. They made this impressive online tool called Composer (visit it at composer.siruna.com) to transform a desktop site into a mobile site. I’ll try out composer myself and blog about it later, it looked very promising though. This company helped The Reference to develop the sites for VRT, Telenet and Truvo. They also developed sites like imdb.siruna.com, delijn.siruna.com and www.filebeeld.be (where you can see images from cameras on the Belgian roads to see if a certain traffic jam is big or rather small).

Afterwards we all got down to the bar and were treated with wine and some snacks. It was another fun seminar, it’s cool to go to these events, meet people and get connected! Thanks to my buddy, Robbe Vandecasteele, for the picture!

Greetings

The kind people from MobileWeb.be have uploaded the presentations from the seminar last thursday. I would strongly recommend to check them out! Thanks also to MobileWeb.be for putting a link to my thoughts on the seminar on their blog! You can read it HERE.

This thursday I’ll be attending “The Reference Academy: Mobile means more” Seminar at Ghent. I really hope it will be as inspiring as the Web Goes Mobile Seminar was. Check back to read my thoughts about it later on (by the end of the week). I’m a little bit dissapointed I can’t attend the FlexCamp organised by the Adobe User Group Belgium though.

Thursday I went to the Web Goes Mobile Seminar in Grimbergen at Salons de Romrée with my partner Miquël Vermeulen and a friend, Dimitri Van Heucke from MobileMinds. We were welcomed with a nice breakfast. At 9 o’clock MobileWeb.be, the host of the event, gave us a quick overview of what would turn out to be a great seminar.

The first speaker was Nanno Palte (from InSites Consulting) who showed us the results of a large survey his company had done to be able to know what is going on today from a mobile point of view. He showed us some interesting figures. Did you know that only 9% uses 3G on a regular basis? That 30% of the owners of a mobile phone buy a new one each year? He also plotted some of the key figures so we got a real good overview of the treats we, as mobile developers, need to work on and which are slowly dying. The basic applications (calendar,…) are still the most sold applications.

Next up was Peter Vandermeersch from the Corelio group, owner of De Standaard (a famous newspaper in Belgium), Het Nieuwsblad (another famous newspaper), Spotter etc. He gave us an insight on how Corelio benefits of the possibilities the mobile market holds. There was a very interesting strategy he showed us which he called the 0-1-7 strategy. Basically it means that you can feed the people with news on different times if you represent that news in a different way. The 0 stands for today, something happens today and gets posted to their mobile sites directly. This type of news is short and straightforward. The 1 stands for the news of yesterday which is being published in the newspaper or on De Standaard or Nieuwsblad websites in a more extended version, still straightforward but we get more side-information. And finally the 7 stands for the way they publish the same news in the weekend-newspaper (Passe-Partout). Where they look at the news from a different angle so people get another insight into that same news. This way the user gets informed in a really great way and is offered with the most complete vision on the facts. They also showed off their mobile sites (made by MobileWeb.be). I’m definitely going to bookmark this on my mobile phone.

After Peter’s talk we got a short coffee break and then got back to the conference room where we listened to Paul Golding, a mobile 2.0 expert who is working for Wireless Wanders at the moment and has worked for many big companies including O2, Motorola. He also writes books about the mobile evolution. Before he started with his talk he snapped a picture from the audience to send it to his kids :). Basically what he told us is that we need to understand that the mobile web isn’t the same as the web we are browsing everyday on our computers. We can’t just make a website for use on desktop computers and expect our customers to watch that same site on their mobile device, it’s not done. We have to create a separate site for our mobile viewers and focus on the user experience, which is very very important. It’s different on a mobile device than it is on a desktop computer. This means that sometimes you have to go for a simple and lightweight site instead of a nice looking but heavier site for mobile use. He was really inspiring and you could see that he loves his work and is driven to help the mobile community.

After P Golding’s motivating talk came a person from MobileWeb.be who showed us what his company exactly does and what they are doing to make the mobile web a better place :).

Last but not least was Marc Vanlerberghe (Google), who showed us some figures based on Google searches. First he showed the number of mobile phones per brand. Than the plotted toe Google searches on top of them weighted with the number of devices per brand. iPhone was on top with like 8 times more searches then the second one. It is and was clear to us that the iPhone has the best mobile browser out there. These figures don’t lie. In my point of view the iPhone has really been a catalysator in the evolution of the mobile web. Other manufacturers are trying to bring the same mobile experience to their device and this is a good thing for the mobile market. He showed us the different applications Google has made for mobile devices and that the technology they created can be used freely. He showed us WikiTude, an example of an application made which used the location-function of Google Maps to give live Wikipedia information from objects the user is watching on his mobile phone through the camera, that was STUNNING, to say the least! Check out this video about WikiTude’s travel guide mode:

Then he talked about Android, which is a good concept to me. It’s OpenSource, so you can just make your own modifications to the Android OS and publish it. They also have an Android Market where they are going to sell their mobile applications. The Android market though is limited, I mean that not everyone can post their applications on there, you have to meet with certain agreements. So in my point of view it isn’t that open. But it’s definitely more open than the Apple AppStore. But I’m looking forward to Android and I want to test it soon!

The seminar closed with a nice lunch (great food!) and some networking, I got in touch with some interesting people who maybe want to partner with us to create our mobile application. It was a great seminar and I’m happy to have been a part of it. Thanks to Dimitri to help me get acquainted with the good way of networking.

That’s it, see you next time