Optimize Everything For Mobile Before It’s Too Late

Michael Hedges February 29, 2016 Follow on Twitter

Technology is better than work. It has a way of expanding to fill not just all available time but every possible space. The great technology heralds report this as transcendent progress, a notion appealing to financial rainmakers. Where technology goes money flows. That explains the sight of so many people holding buckets while dancing as fast as they can.

This year’s Mobile World Congress expired right on time, giving the good citizens of Barcelona a bit of fresh air, not to forget access to subways. It was a week filled with new things, mobile things, everything. Just as media people fell in line with the mobile revolution the techies have moved to things, “phones” being so yesterday. Employing mobile technologies are snappy new devices to monitor your health, your food, your house, your children and your pets. There was even a tool allowing employers to monitor sitting, standing and dozing off.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a triumphal - and unannounced - appearance on behalf of Samsung’s hot new virtual reality headset. "We're moving at a pace so fast, looking for the next big thing, that we may discard the next big thing,” said one attending that press conference, quoted by CNET (February 26). Mr. Zuckerberg then discarded Barcelona for Berlin to receive the first Axel Springer Award for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Google, the search engine subsidiary of Alphabet, formally introduced its AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) coinciding with the Mobile World Congress. AMP is open source code meant to accelerate page loading on mobile devices. “Publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere,” said the announcement. Several publishers - 180 officially - have been tinkering with AMP for several months. More seem ready to redirect overwhelmed tech staff to yet another code change.

AMP is designed to leap over Instant Articles, which captures publisher’s content for Facebook’s walled garden. WordPress blog publishers can already benefit from an AMP plug-in. Twitter and Pinterest are expected to follow. Google AMP accomplishes faster loading on mobile devices - 3 seconds and attention deficit sends folks somewhere else - by hosting the content on its own servers and stripping out time wasting Java script. It has been suggested that Google search results could possibly sometime in the future be influenced by AMP code.

“For media companies, mobile presents challenges and opportunities,” noted the European Publishers Council (EPC) in its annual Global Media Trends Book released as the Mobile World Congress was in full-swing. (See EPC presser here) Opportunities, said the report, include more people accessing news content via smartphones. Challenges for publishers are home-pages being denigrated by Instant Articles (et.al.) and ad-blocking. If it isn’t one disruption it’s another.

Ad blocking received a thrashing in Barcelona from just about anybody streaming ads. And they really don’t like mobile telecoms getting in the way of the money. “I’m very uncomfortable by the idea that an operator (mobile telecom) or an ad-blocking company can decide on my behalf that I’m not seeing any ads,” complained Google Media and Platforms managing director Benjamin Faes, quoted by Ad Week (February 23). “More and more, publishers just can’t afford to give that content for free without the fair trade of ad-business content.”

"What we are doing can be considered blunt, but we believe that our strategy is more about helping expedite a solution rather than sitting and discussing it,” said Shine CMO Roi Carthy, rather bluntly. Shine provides opt-in ad blocking technology through mobile telecoms. “We’re talking about military-grade tracking, targeting and profiling. Consumers do not have the ability to protect themselves.” Mobile telecoms, some observers suspect, are less interested in protecting their customers from intrusion than exacting revenues from everybody using their pipe.

What the techno-elite in Barcelona would not “touch,” reported CNET (February 25), is that row between Apple and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over a recent court order to “crack” an iPhone once in the possession of a now dead terrorist. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly,” said FBI Director James Comey. Apple was directed (February 16) by a US District Court “to assist law enforcement agents in enabling the search of a digital device…”.

Apple’s lawyers filed a request with the court asking the order be reversed, which is their right, saying the “boundless interpretation” of US law would grant the government “dangerous power.” Privacy experts, who tend to agree with the Apple position, see other governments pursuing access to digital devices, perhaps with mean and nasty intent. "The protection of people's data is incredibly important, and so the trade-off here is we know that doing this could expose people to incredible vulnerabilities,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook to ABC News (February 25). Apple, again, was not represented in Barcelona.

CNET’s James Martin chased down several mobile techies in Barcelona for views on the Apple/FBI vexation. Comments ranged from “no way am I saying anything” and “pass” to rather general statements about the importance of privacy. Google, Twitter and Facebook executives weighed in on the side of Apple as did the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The essential problem,” said big advertising’s big voice WPP chief executive Martin Sorrell, in a Barcelona keynote, “is that big companies are not thinking about mobile in the right way. They're thinking of it as an extension of digital, just a way to reach consumers. They're not thinking of it in a way that changes their businesses or adds values in a way they weren't able to do previously."

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