"Standard". Possibly the most boring, yet misunderstood and undervalued word in English language. Another one is "telecommunications". "Oh, that's so 1990s". But in the midst of all the current web 2.0 (3.0), and OSS hype it's good to remember that these technologies don't just miraculously work together by themselves. Someone, at some time, was clever enough to design an interoperable framework for web and mobile services, at the time when iPhone was not even a glimpse in Mr. Jobs' eye. And that work still continues.

This is a very dear topic for me. I've worked promoting open standards for a number of years, most of my time at Nokia, actually. I've written hundreds of slides, articles, interviews and  newsletters, organized tens of events on how OMA (incl. Wap Forum, MMS-IOP, Wireless Village, SyncML and LBS), DLNA, W3C, mTLD, TCG, Liberty Alliance, WS-I, Oasis etc. will make a better global user experience for mobile services. Back in the day I even created a website where Nokia announces all open standards in each phone, platform release and server product (I can see it hasn't been updated since Jan. 2008. Standards are no longer cool)

Someone has said that you're becoming old when you start looking backwards instead of forward, so let's cut the memory lane short, and focus on what's coming.


Augmented Reality

Based on my work history, you may understand the excitement that this article  raised. It discussed the obstacles for Augmented Reality (AR) to catch on, and lists 5:

• Spam and Security
• Social and Real-Time vs. Solitary and Cached
• UX
• Interoperability
• Openness

From the article, on interoperability:

"Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever."

..and on openness:

"What kind of standards will AR platforms have in deciding which layers their users can see? Is that the right question? Will we have Augmented Reality Neutrality? Or will we have an AR version of the fickle, anachronistic, tiny despots of the iPhone App Store? I have a right to Augment my Reality with whatever information I want! "Not while you're using our AR browser/network/handset/etc.!" It's not hard to imagine the coming of a Firefox for AR."

What should we make of this? I'd say that it's time to redefine cool. Standards are back.

PS. Nokia please make Point and Find download available for non-UK phone numbers NOW! (please...)