Under 10 seconds is a world class time in 100 meters. Coming into the stadium like a normal person and running under 10 seconds without all the self-indulgent systematic warm-ups of most athletes is a rare thing. Jamaica is supremely justified to idolise the living legend that is Usain Bolt. Bolt delivers speed in an approachable way that ordinary people can understand. It is almost effortless (but we all know it isn’t really!).
And so today we are pleased to spill the beans on some new work we are doing with the super-fast US mobile carrier Sprint and mobile data innovators Openwave. With our touchscreen search and directory service, we bring touchscreen-optimised websites right to the fore in what we serve up to our users. These sites provide an optimised user experience for touchscreen phone users, easily displaying content and responding to taps and gestures in a way that we are all learning to appreciate. The alternative is desktop website pages on 3.5 inch screens and doesn’t that pinching and zooming really suck?
But more importantly, it really is about speed. A typical touchscreen website page is around 20-30kBytes and takes just a couple of seconds to display over a cellular network. A desktop page is likely to be 500kBytes and takes more than 10 times as long to load. In a sense, the touchscreen-optimised sites load effortlessly and the data transported by the carrier is less than 10 times that of desktop sites.
And that is the what our work with Sprint and Openwave is all about – creating effortless speed for users without consuming excessive cellular network bandwidth. Taptu is easily accessed on a tool bar, created within a new development environment from Openwave that allows third parties to build added value products delivered on the wireless network gateway. From within the browser, any mobile user can click on the Taptu icon to search or browse the touchscreen web and experience speed, even in congested cells. Sprint do indeed have 4G, but not everywhere and not all the time. So this is a smart move by Sprint, as touchscreen-optimised websites deliver speed independently of transport network capacity and Sprint can further differentiate their service in the super-competitive US mobile carrier market.
Of course there are many other service elements to get right in creating a world leading mobile data service but I wouldn’t bet against Bolt. His trademark TV camera pointing antics may agitate competitors but the ease of his victories is something else. Sprint along with Openwave and Taptu are betting on the fast effortless touchscreen-optimised mobile web and we just have to think up a little dance routine if we want to export it to Jamaica Telecom.
