Tom Hume is Director and founder of Future Platforms (www.futureplatforms.com), a mobile software company based on the seaside in Brighton, UK. Previously he spent 5 years working for Good Technology, one of the UKs first web development companies. He likes cats, aikido, and cheap cider, and can be found online at tomhume.org

mo:life
Could you outline the scope of futureplatforms?

Tom Hume:
We’re a software company specialising in mobile product development. Broadly speaking, our work breaks down into design consultancy and prototyping for the telecomms industry, and full mobile product development for media/content businesses or mobile-related startups.

mo:life
Can you give us a run down of some of the ” blue-sky prototyping” you have been doing recently?

Tom:
This year and last year we’ve been working on prototyping projects for Orange and Nokia. The details of what we were doing are (like much of our work) locked behind confidentiality agreements, but in both cases we were taking a service our client wanted some help with, providing some assistance with interaction design, and building it up into a working prototype.

mo:life
Can you give us some examples of the “in development” commercial products mentioned on your website?

Tom:
We’re working with the UKs largest puzzle magazine publisher to bring their catalogue of puzzle formats and 30-year archive of content onto mobile phones. That’s a really exciting opportunity for us; puzzles have mass appeal, they’re well understood, and are a good fit with the typical patterns of phone use. We think that the models which most of the games industry are pursuing for mobile aren’t necessarily that well suited to the medium, and that “casual gaming” will bring mobile games to a wole new market.

Another project that’s been keeping us busy this year is Flirtomatic, a mobile messaging service which is (as you’d expect) based around flirting. We’re working on all aspects of the product, from the client which sits on customers handsets to the server side (which involves some serious database wizardry), and everything in between: communications protocols, payment services, the lot.

mo:life
Can you elaborate on your open-source projects? How is the “Wireless Universal Resource File” (WURF) going? Have you any plans to release any other mobile-specific software?

Tom:
The WURFL is a fantastic resource which is going from strength to strength: it’s the de facto standard for identifying handsets and working out their capabilities, and it’s key to solving some of the serious problems of diversity which face the industry.

We don’t do as much for open source as we should. We contribute to the WURFL as and when we have data which isn’t currently included, but as the project has grown and gained critical mass this is less and less frequent.

mo:life
How do you, as mobile content developers, deal with the diversity of handsets available today. What impact is this having on the way mobile applications are developed?

Tom:
There’s an inverse relationship between capability and penetration: SMS is very limited in what you can do with it, but it’s everywhere. Conversely, writing native Symbian apps gives you incredibly flexibility, but at the cost of only reaching a (relatively) small audience. So working out which channel or channels to address is a commercial decision for our customers, as well as a technical one for us.

The costs of addressing diversity in handsets are also a significant factor, particularly in J2ME development: there are still massive variances in the capability and reliability of Java implementations on phones, and dealing with this can be expensive (in testing time, porting time, and hair lost as a result).

Typically we see clients adopting a hybrid approach: browser-based versions of the service to give themselves reach, and Java applications for key handsets. But it depends on the product we’re building: it’s just not possible to build a fun-to-play crossword game using SMS, for instance.

mo:life
What is the current and future relationships between the already-established internet/www and the world of mobile media? Will the mobile platforms emulate and enhance the web platform - or will the two be co-dependent?

Tom:
There’s obviously a technical relationship between the mobile and fixed-line internet: much of the underlying software is identical.

I believe that the kinds of services which will succeed are different on different channels. Interactive TV and the web are different in terms of their audience, usage patterns and commercial models; the same can be said for mobile.

As such, I think the two are complementary. The web is great for consuming large amounts of information. My phone is great for getting me what I need when I need it. Maybe the lines between these two will blur a little over the years, but there’s a large percentage of mobile phone owners who aren’t online in the traditional, fixed-internet sense.

mo:life
From your vantage point, can you signpost the next five years in the mobile media sector?

Tom:
I can only make very broad predictions for that timescale; my main one would be the mobile phone replacing the desktop PC as the primary means of internet access for the population. For a long time mobile has been seen as an adjunct to the fixed-line internet, but this will change. Even today a large percentage of the population are online all the time - they just don’t realise it.

mo:life
If you were to invest in tech stocks limited to mobile companies/products, where would you put your money? Any particular handset makers? Content providers? Service providers? Infrastructure companies? And if any, why?

Tom:
For handset vendors, I’d look for companies which are doing things differently to the Nokias and Ericssons of this world. Look at the success of the AU Design Project in Japan - a tiny team of half a dozen, I believe, doing the complete design of stylish new handsets for the Japanese market. It’d be interesting to see if this sort of thing could operate as a business outside of an operator.

Otherwise… the infrastructure companies are probably a safe investment; a few years ago we were hearing how no-one’s going to be using 3G and those fees paid for licenses are a waste of money. Now I’m seeing stories of how 3G doesn’t offer enough bandwidth to meet expected demand!