Paul's posts

27 June 2012

Seminar lifts the lid on HTML5

Paul Greenwood Social Media Analyst | Read all Paul's posts

Yesterday, in association with Communicate magazine, we hosted a seminar on HTML5 and its potential for online communications. The seminar aimed to provide senior corporate communicators with practical insight and inspiration into how HTML5 can create engaging and interactive web sites and apps that will work for the widest range of audiences across tablet, PC and mobile devices.

We were lucky to have a varied and experienced panel of speakers.

First up was Andrew Betts from FT Labs. He discussed the thinking behind the FT’s decision to develop a HTML5 web app instead of another native app (the FT had several native apps when they first become popular and had won a best app award).

Andrew explained that an HTML5 web app can be tailored to the individual, is available across many technologies and maintains all the advantages of the web.

The company decided to switch to an HTML5 web app for a number of reasons:

• You can publish upgrades direct to the app so there is no need for people to visit the app store for the latest version
• Using the web makes the app future proof (or, at least, less likely to become obsolete)
• You only require one app across all platforms so it is relatively cheaper to build and maintain.

Benedict Evans from Enders Analysis provided lots of interesting stats on the growth of Android on mobile and tablets and discussed how the major players are faring in terms of global sales. He thought that Apple invented tablet and as a result continues to dominate.

Interestingly, app discovery is becoming more difficult due to the vast amounts of apps  produced (there are over three quarters of a million apps in the app store). How to you solve this problem? Apple has been fiddling around with its algorithm to make discovery easier but there’s no hard and fast solution.

Martin Bryant from The Next Web showed us some cool examples of how you can use HTML5 to create lots of stunning effects.

You can find the presentation on his blog and I’d highly recommend you check it out. If you don’t have time to take a look, here are a few of his examples.

• Chrome experiments and Wet GL
• Deviantart Muro
• Arcade Fire's video The Wilderness Downtown
• Ramayana.na

Centrica’s Simon Henderson gave us a corporate perspective on HTML5 and explained the company’s decision to build the first FTSE100 web app. Andrew Rigby, who led the project here at The Group, has blogged about it in detail previously; his post neatly summarises the points in Simon’s impressive presentation.

Our very own Cathal Smyth wrapped up the session with a look to the future of corporate communications and how HTML5 will affect not only the web app market but the corporate web site (and all other sites). Cathal predicted a future of responsive design, where content is king (really, this time) and silos are broken down. You can find his presentation on our Slideshare page. We hope to add the other presentations to the page as we get the go-ahead, so keep an eye out for them.

If you have any questions about the seminar or about how HTML5 will transform online corporate communications please contact me on the blog or on paul.greenwood@the-group.net.
 

Any statements made in these blog posts are the views of the blogger and do not necessarily represent the views of The Group.