Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Web is fast transitioning from the PC Web to mobile Web. This has huge implications on developing web apps and services. Fred Wilson has a couple of nice posts on the important trends shaping the mobile web.

The first blog post is called ‘Mobile first and Web second’.

Using the mobile web as a constraint to think about web design is growing in popularity. I see it in my own efforts and the efforts of our portfolio companies. When users spend more time accessing your service over a mobile device, they are going to get used to that UI/UX. When you ask them to navigate a substantially busier and more complex UI/UX when they log onto the web, you are likely to keep them on the mobile app and off the web app.

I’m starting to think a unifying vision for all apps should start with the mobile app, not the web app. And so it may also be mobile first web second in designing web apps these days.

The second post is called ‘HTML5 mobile apps’.

I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.

I’ve always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I’ve accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years.

Mobile platforms such as iOS and android provide new distribution channels for web service developers. But they also increase the complexity of supporting many different platforms and form factors. This is not helped by Apple not providing support for an important tech like Flash. Things will continue to evolve and change and web and mobile companies need to tread carefully in the platforms and technologies they use so as not get blindsided by these sudden shifts.

Success of Apple’s iPad has created a new mobile device category: tablets. This category is currently dominated by Apple’s iPad. Market research company iSuppli estimates iPad will sell 13.8M, 43.7 and 63.3 units in 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively.

But many new alternatives are entering this space based on android and other OSs. Samsung’s galaxy (android based) tab has received positive response. Many other companies around the world are following suit.

You may say ‘Big deal. This is just another mobile device’.  You would be wrong. These devices offer a whole new form factor that is ideal for living room usage. They also enable new types of applications that take advantage of multi touch interface to provide much richer and more immersive navigation experience than the mouse and keyboard based interfaces. Flipboard and Aweditorium are a couple of good examples of these new genre of tablet applications. (see their videos below).

So many of the current applications can be redesigned to take advantage of this new platform. More importantly this will spawn a whole new set of applications that were not possible before.

I see iPad and other tablet devices as excellent gaming devices. Gaming will be the killer app for these devices. Currently most iPad games are repurposed iPhone games. But we will see increasingly more games that provide rich immersive experiences that are optimized for the tablet form factor.

I also see many enterprise uses for tablet devices. Healthcare is a no-brainer. Education is another. I see increasingly more people with iPads at business meetings. Think of all the business applications that can be reinvented on iPad and tablet devices.

We are living in exciting times. We have multiple killer platforms disrupting the consumer and business app landscape providing new opportunities for creating future giants.

Flipboard video:

Aweditorium Video: