Gamers pieced together an AIDS-like virus puzzle that has baffled scientists for more than a decade by playing Foldit.

As I drove to work recently, I heard a very uplifting story on the news. It seems that researchers at the University of Washington built a game that allowed participants to unfold a complex enzyme structure that could lead to scientific breakthroughs in retroviral drug design.

Researchers had been toiling for years using super computers to attempt to unlock the secrets of this enzyme but had no joy. They decided to put the game out to the online gaming community, and within 10 days , the gamers had solved the riddle by playing the online game, Foldit. On the surface, this is nothing short of amazing. But if we dig deeper there is a method to the madness.

A good friend once remarked that there is much more wisdom in the crowd than the leaders in most assemblies or events. If they only asked. He’s right you know. How many times have you heard a speech that provoked the question, “Have you considered this point as well?” Maybe if the person had, they would have changed the speech a bit. It’s impossible for one person to consider all angles, and that’s where the crowd acts as a force multiplier.

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Ahhh fall. Colorful leaves, brisk winds, damp days – soup season is upon us! I do love a bowl of hearty soup with some nice bread and some cheese and maybe a bit of fancy olive oil for dipping. I recently bought a cookbook called “The Best Soups in the World,” so I’m very excited to be cooking plenty of soup over the next few months.

To the letter - the mobile Web is like a bowl of soup. We can't get enough of it.

But given all the variety of soups out there, there seems to be one universal trait – they always taste better after a day or two in the fridge. Yes, a piping hot bowl is quite tasty and many of us have scorched the roofs of our mouths due to our impatience to savor its sweetness. Yet, like a wine being left open to breath, leftover soup makes a flavor metamorphosis as all the ingredients slowly meld into perfect harmony. Its flavor grows in intensity and little nuances that were not there fresh from the pot slowly reveal themselves.

To me, the mobile Web is like a soup. When it first came into broad commercial deployment, the mobile Web looked so inviting and comforting. Like a rain-soaked child presented with their favorite soup, we were so eager to dive in. Sure there were flaws and shortcomings in the technology, and as a result many business ideas got burned. But overall, it made quite an impression with folks that tasted and liked this new way of getting info on the go.

That “mobile-Web soup” has been in the fridge for a number of years, and now the reheated version has some new added ingredients, like HTML5, CCS3, 4G networks, etc. Now the taste is almost beyond recognition. What was once black and grey text screens are now colorful, rich and interactive interfaces. It’s like transforming condensed tomato soup into a rich tomato gazpacho.

For businesses, now is the time to really use mobile Web. Consumers are lapping it up and licking their bowls clean. They just can’t get enough of good mobile Web sites and content. The technology is mature, the devices are getting smarter and the networks are getting faster and faster. Soup’s on!

It’s hard to keep secrets these days. Amazon is the latest tech company preparing a big announcement this morning – the release of its new tablet. But by the time the announcement is made, the market will have already heard the message. Vendors orchestrate elaborate announcements to trumpet new products and services, but they end up more like the President’s State of the Union address – by the time they happen, there is practically a transcript already available.

Will the iPad meet its match in the new tablet from Amazon?

In the case of Amazon, this could be the first real threat to the iPad. We’ve heard it before: Samsung, Motorola, or others releasing the “iPad killer” tablet. So what’s different here?

Amazon has had the Kindle for quite some time now, and it’s been a nice e-reader. It was a fairly obvious move for Amazon to spur sales of electronic books. The release of the Kindle was not focused on whiz-bang technology, but rather it was focused on distributing content. For early Kindle readers, this content was books, now Amazon is looking to provide movies, music and apps through an Amazon Store. (Sound familiar?)

Most people think of Amazon as a big online retailer, which of course they are. But there’s more to Amazon. If you visit Amazon.com today, you’ll see product headings for Instant Videos, Music Downloads, Cloud Storage, Digital Games/Downloads, and even an Amazon Android App Store.

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This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touched on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone.

I-MODE – THE EARLY LEADER IN MOBILE DATA SERVICES

After the launch of AT&T’s initial PocketNet service, NTT DOCOMO sent a team to the United States to learn more about the offering as it attempted to build its own data phone. NTT DOCOMO,the largest wireless carrier in Japan, built a strong relationship with AT&T at that time, and would eventually become an investor in AT&T Wireless with a 16 percent stake in the company.

In February 1999, NTT DOCOMO launched i-mode, Japan’s first mobile Internet service. Unlike AT&T’s initial offering, i-mode was an overnight success. It reached 10 million users by 2000, and 40 million users by 2003. It became the envy of wireless carriers around the world and the talk of the content community. But why was i-mode successful when PocketNet failed? What was the difference between the two?

The American answer was to point to differences in the Japanese culture – the Japanese are early adopters of electronics, or dense cities in Japan meant more commuting via public transportation and thus more susceptible to data services (it’s impolite to talk on the train), or average landline costs in Japan for Internet connections, such as DSL, were much higher than the U.S., thus the mobile phone was the first connection to the World Wide Web for many Japanese. While many of these reasons have some validity, there was a better explanation that was being ignored by the rest of the world at the time.

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You can bank on it. UK consumers want mobility.

Mobile banking on both apps and mobile Web? Now there’s an idea.

Research into consumer attitudes towards mobile banking that were conducted back in June, and outlined in my colleague, Mark Watson’s previous post, “Brits Lag on Mobile Banking,” produced some interesting results – that consumers want the opportunity to bank on their phones. The challenge is that they don’t always have the tools at their disposals to let them do what they want, when they want.

Just one out of 14 banks polled in the UK offered a mobile app and a mobile Web site. Surprisingly, just four of these banks offered an app of some sort. But the app offered by those that did was for iPhone.

The U.S. fared better, as seven of the top 10 U.S retail banks had both a mobile app and a mobile-optimized Web site. This market maturity could certainly account for the fact that almost twice as many Americans as Brits use mobile banking. Yep – that’s twice as many people in the U.S. who mobile bank. Are UK banks missing an opportunity? You bet!

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This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touched on the history of the PC Internet.

AT&T POCKETNET– THE FIRST MOBILE INTERNET PHONE

By 1997, the Internet was booming. It was also the year that AT&T Wireless unveiled the world’s first mobile Internet phone. Developed by Pacific Communications Sciences Inc., the phone was branded PocketNet, and it looked like a standard mobile phone at the time, but with one major difference – it included a 19.2 Kbps modem running on AT&T’s new Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network. Two additional phones using the PocketNet service followed: the Mitsubishi Mobile Access (MA120) and the Samsung Duett.

Despite being the first to market with Internet-capable phones, AT&T’s initial phones were not a tremendous success. (Reports suggest that slightly more than 20,000 analog PocketNet phones were sold.) There were many factors that contributed to the relatively slow adoption of the first Internet phone. The PocketNet phone had a three-line, 60-character LCD screen that limited readable text without significant scrolling. This limited its use and appeal, as it was not compatible with most Web sites that were being developed in 1997.

But more importantly, the first PocketNet phone used the analog AMPS network for voice calling at a time when users were demanding digital voice features. The phone had made an interesting leap in technology to support a data connection, but it missed the popular transition at the time to move to the digital voice network (AT&T’s digital TDMA network). Moreover, users selected a channel and network, which meant that a voice call could not be received while a user was in data mode.

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The power of the mobile device is quite simply amazing. Today’s miniature computer, which is what we now hold in our hands, is not fixed to a geographical location. It travels with you wherever you are – it is mobile. And with today’s technology, it is more than a communication device. Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. Radical changes in the past decade have brought us to this point. We need to stop calling our utility tool a phone, but instead, we need to call it a device.

This six-part blog series will explore the last decade of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. By understanding its history, we’ll be able to answer why consumers and developers are faced with an overwhelming number of technology choices. But to understand mobile, we’ll need to start with the history of the Internet itself, or what I’ll dub the “PC Internet.”

British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1994. (Courtesy of CERN)

HISTORY OF THE PC INTERNET

Although the mobile Internet may sound like a separate network, it is in fact the same Internet that blossomed with PC computers in the 1990s. Although there isn’t a differentiation in actual network, the Internet viewed through the desktop computer is sometimes referred to in the wireless industry as the PC Internet, to separate it from applications and services that have been optimized for mobile devices, or the mobile Internet. Since the mobile Internet shares the same network as the PC Internet, and now the same protocols and languages (although this was not always the case), it is helpful to start with the history of the PC Internet when considering how the Web grew to support mobile devices.

The World Wide Web was first developed in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee built the protocols for communication between a client and server at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.  At that time, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, which is an important point to make. The network itself, the Internet, was already in place. In fact, the Internet has roots back to the U.S. government’s ARPANET, the first packet switching network. But in 1989, this network, for the most part, connected government and educational facilities, and each node often had differing systems that made it difficult to share information.

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