BCS South West: The Birth of a Third Platform

(C) Blake Patterson

“The Birth of a Third Platform” was a talk given by Lawrence Stephenson from Apple UK on the 27 September 2010. It wasn’t entirely clear what the talk would be about or what direction it would go in before it started, but something relating to mobile seemed a safe bet.

Indeed, Lawrence’s talk was about the emergence of the mobile platform and its implications for Higher Education (HE). It struck me as a slightly odd topic because I wasn’t sure how many BCS members have an interest in HE issues, but the impression I got was that Lawrence is some kind of evangelist for mobile technology (specifically Apple’s mobile tech, naturally) in HE.

Fortunately the talk had drawn quite a crowd (easily more than the 40 that the committee had decided to cater for at their previous meeting), and they seemed to mainly be students, so I’m sure there would be something of interest for them.

For this talk, the mobile platform meant smartphones and there were quite a few facts and graphs sprinkled around, some of which Nick Charlton has written up on his blog. Of course, the emergence of mobile as a major platform isn’t limited to HE, and the ideas Lawrence presented can easily be transferred to other domains.

First we were reminded of the progression from large, bulky mainframes to ever smaller devices, then he talked about the increase in mobile use.

One point I take issue with, is the graph comparing the adoption of emerging mobile internet use with the historical adoption of the emerging internet. Whilst I’ll agree that mobile adoption is growing much more quickly than the original internet adoption, I’d argue that the rate of mobile growth is driven by the number of people already online, who are augmenting their internet access with mobile devices, and that the growth of mobile internet use wouldn’t be as rapid if people weren’t already using online services. You can’t appreciate this by looking at the graph, however, and may well lead you to think that mobile is somehow inherently more attractive and would have grown at this rate regardless of other influences. A much more useful graph could show the cumulative internet traffic over time for fixed lines vs mobile access (there are several ways of breaking it down further). Indeed, smartphones have been around for a lot longer than the slides suggested, but, whilst acknowledging how it brought the smartphone into the mainstream, I suppose it suits Apple to ignore any smartphones before the iPhone was released.

Moving onto how to capitalise on that growth in mobile usage, Lawrence outlined three ways of providing content via mobile platforms:

• Media
• Web Applications
• Native Apps

iTunes-U was the example of choice for media via mobile, but of course there are many ways to make media content available via the internet, and the nice thing about producing media is that it can be viewed on most platforms, such as a laptop as well as smartphone, using software (e.g. iTunes) that is tailored to the platform and produced by someone else rather than the content creator.

Web applications leverage existing internet technologies to deliver content to mobile devices. We can be broader than this, however, and talk about websites in general. As with media, web sites and applications are accessible across a variety of platforms using generic software such as web browsers, but there is an added burden because web sites/applications will need to display correctly regardless of what platform they’re accessed from. One of the examples of a web application is the University of Iowa’s LaundryView system for checking what washing machines are available on campus (see it in action).

Finally, native apps are the most intensive to create and maintain, as they are specific to the device they are developed for (such as an iPhone app), but they take full advantage of the device. Some universities have produced suites of apps that give students timetable information, campus maps, directions, and access to student record systems all from their iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch (unfortunately I’ve forgotten the specific example, if you can remember it perhaps you could remind me in the comments?).

Lawrence was able to take a good number of questions, and unsurprisingly there were just as many about Apple’s products in general as there were related to the talk. Although there were quite a few questions that were off-limits or rather coyly responded to, Apple’s culture of secrecy is nothing new, and I expect that was the main reason for Lawrence being so careful with what he said. I also think that’s why the branch couldn’t film the event: at one point Lawrence mentioned that Apple had paid a lot of money for the information on his slides and it was “OK to share with [us], but no to take away”.

Putting aside the limits on what he seemed to be able to say, Lawrence did a fair job of talking about mobile in general, rather than turning the talk into an Apple sales pitch. Overall, the talk was interesting and certainly demonstrated the potential for organisations if they embrace mobile, although I wouldn’t be surprised if most large organisations in HE were still struggling to embrace the potential of the internet in general, let alone the third platform

Following the talk, there was a buffet and networking opportunity, and I was pleased to bump into Chris Hunt and Nick Charlton who are both involved in the University of Plymouth’s Termisoc society, and also to meet György Straub who’s doing cool stuff such as a game development framework called XRhodes at his website, Nuclear Heart Studios.