EmTech Spain

Erik Schultink CTO

Last week, I had the chance to speak at EmTech Spain as part of a panel discussion on “The Future of the Internet”. Our challenge as panelists was to envision what the web would look like in 10 years. I talked mostly about mobile and its implications, which, given the launch of Tu, our MVNO, have occupied a lot of my thinking during the past year.

The biggest change in the mobile web over the last 2-3 years has been the emergence of Apps, driven by the success of the iPhone and its application platform. The signature user experience that the iPhone introduced, with its mass consumer appeal, has earned Apple the market power to control not just the OS and its UX, but to control the App distribution platform as well. This is without precedent; Apple, a device manufacturer, is in a position to gate the individual apps for UX and functionality, as well as control the payments coming from users to download and transact within those apps. Other device manufacturers have followed suit – Android, Blackberry, with Microsoft/Nokia and Amazon soon to follow. This is the biggest shift we’ve seen producing software products shifted from building native applications to building web applications. Now we must build device applications – again native – but with different UX considerations (touch v keyboard, screen resolution, tablet v phone) on each. Cross-platform development is no longer just a technical challenge of trying to build the same product experience on Mac + Windows or on IE + Netscape/Firefox. It’s now a product and design challenge to reframe that experience within the unique bounds of each platform/device – as the signature UX of the device carries through into the product experience.

Consider our case at Tuenti. Tuenti today builds two HTML clients – www.tuenti.com and m.tuenti.com – and mobile clients on 4 platforms (iPhone/iOS, Android, Blackberry, J2ME). Already we have two distributions of the J2ME, built to target lower- and higher-end devices. It’s foreseeable a similar need will emerge for Android, and potentially as the tablet markets for iOS and Android grow, we’ll need to target those with variants targeted towards that specific form factor. That’s 6 different UXes currently (and more coming) built to let users do the same fundamental things: chat, view friend’s content, share photos, etc.

The above is without mentioning an entire class of platforms we don’t build for now, but I expect to be an increasingly relevant way for people to access the Web: video game consoles. Of course, these consoles are increasingly used for a lot more than video games: casual web browsing, video on-demand, etc. It’s something that Tuenti – and anyone planning to deliver products that people use multiple times per day – will need to address.

How this ecosystem evolves in the next few years will dictate what products are brought to market and what types of companies bring them to market (how can start-ups build 6 apps?). I expect some convergence, driven probably as much by the people building products (eg us) as the dynamics of the consumer markets. Apps are a major aspect of the user experience of the phone; consumers will be drawn to the platform that has the apps they want to use. And App makers, particularly start-ups, will need to make tough choices about which platforms they build for. The next generation of innovative apps won’t be available on every device platform. I would also guess that the most innovative apps will be built for the most-open platforms – with the fewest limits on UX and what device functionality the developer can access.

Finally, I want to thank the organizers (MIT Tech Review Spain, Club Malaga Valley) and sponsors of EmTech Spain for the invitation; Ariel Poler for moderating the panel; and the fellow panelists – Geoff Ralston (Co-Founder, Imagine K-12) and Othman Laraki (Director of Growth, Twitter).

On November 24, I’ll be speaking more about the evolution of the mobile web and how Tu fits into that at FICOD.