[Corrected 3/12/10, see below] When Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from CERN proposed the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and the hypertext markup language (HTML) as Internet-wide standards back in the early 1990s, they didn’t face much resistance, because there weren’t any competing ideas for doing what Berners-Lee wanted to do—that is, setting up a global network of hyperlinked electronic documents.

How different the world is today. On the online video front alone, there are at least four contenders for the title of de facto Web video standard, including Flash (controlled by Adobe), VC-1 (Microsoft), Ogg Theora (favored by many free software and open source software developers), and H.264/MPEG-4 (supported by Apple, Google, and others). Standards makers at the World Wide Web Consortium, which has 350 members from across the information technology and telecommunications industries, are still debating which video formats should be supported in the forthcoming version of HTML, known as HTML 5.

The longer this state of fragmentation lasts, the harder it will be for companies and consumers to know how to invest their resources, especially as the Web goes mobile. Mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPad can’t play Flash videos; Adobe’s Flash player, which is ubiquitous on laptop and desktop computers and is soon coming to many mobile devices, can’t play H.264 content. [Correction 3/12/10: An update for Flash Player 9 included H.264 video support. Thanks to John Dowdell for pointing out the error.]

Jeffrey Jaffe, announced Monday as the new CEO of the Cambridge, MA-based Web consortium, is parachuting directly into this mine field. In a phone interview on Monday, I had a chance to ask Jaffe for his ideas about how the consortium can come to consensus on issues where the W3C’s own members have powerful and conflicting interests. While it may be too late to short-circuit the debate over Web video, Jaffe said it would be extremely important in the future for the consortium to identify key areas for standards-making early, before too many players have proposed alternatives and taken up entrenched positions.

We also talked about the consortium’s other challenges, including a membership that’s shrinking as a wave of mergers and acquisitions rolls through the IT industry. Jaffe had been on the job for all of two hours when I spoke with him, so he was careful to point out that many of his thoughts about these questions were preliminary, and that his policies will be much more fully formed in a few months. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

Xconomy: What’s it like for you to be taking over day-to-day leadership at the organization that oversees the growth of the entire Web?

Jeffrey Jaffe: One of the things that’s quite evident, as I talked about a little in my initial blog posting as CEO of W3C, is that the World Wide Web is basically the most transformational thing that has happened in the past several decades. It’s changing everything about how we learn, how we do business, how we entertain ourselves. It’s incredibly important, and there’s lots more change still in front of us. So I just feel extremely privileged to have an opportunity to work closely with Tim in taking this to the next level. I can’t imagine anything more exciting and meaningful for me at this stage of my career.

X: How has your experience leading technology organizations at IBM, Bell Labs, and Novell prepared you to work in the nonprofit world of standards bodies? The standards-making process has so many stakeholders pushing in different directions. On the surface, it seems pretty different from creating new products or services. Or maybe not?

JJ: Great question. I think I bring a lot of relevant experience to this. Maybe I’ll just focus on four things. First of all, I’ve worked in three large companies, all of whom cherish standards and recognize the importance of standards and who really feel like they want to participate [in W3C]. I understand how the corporations who are among the stakeholders of W3C think about … Next Page »

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the standards underlying the global network, has a new co-captain. It’s Jeffrey Jaffe, a technology industry veteran who served most recently as chief technology officer and executive vice president of products at Waltham, MA-based Novell.

The W3C announced Jaffe’s appointment as CEO of the consortium this morning. While Berners-Lee remains as director of the nonprofit organization, the CEO’s job is to lead it, according to a recruitment listing that was still online as recently as yesterday. Together with the director and staff, according to the listing, the role of W3C’s CEO is to “develop the vision that leads the Web to its full potential [and] communicate that vision to the world and engage relevant stakeholders,” as well as to lead “strategic planning and change management” and oversee worldwide operations, including financial, legal, and cultural aspects.

In other words, Jaffe will manage most of the day-to-day details of running the consortium—a job formerly handled by Steve Bratt, who stepped down as CEO last year to head the World Wide Web Foundation. (The foundation aims to use the mobile Web to empower people in developing countries; see Part 1 and Part 2 of Xconomy’s November 2009 interview with Bratt.)

Berners-Lee can certainly use the help. The 15-year-old consortium is an increasingly sprawling bureaucracy—jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, and Keio University in Japan—with programs ranging from security to Web accessibility for the disabled to mobile Web platforms and international development. It has 350 member organizations, only about 130 of which are based in the United States.

“Jeff has outstanding leadership and business skills to help address a wealth of arising opportunities,” Berners-Lee said in a statement about the appointment. “Just as the Web is constantly growing and changing, so is the community around it and so is the Consortium. Jeff’s broad experience gives him a deep understanding of many different types of organizations, which will be invaluable in managing W3C’s evolution.”

Jaffe’s work history spans several titans of the U.S. computing and … Next Page »

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Yesterday we ran the first part of our interview with Steve Bratt, the CEO of the new World Wide Web Foundation, which was unveiled on November 15 by Web inventor Tim-Berners-Lee. The foundation aims to empower people in developing regions to access “life-critical information” on the Web using mobile phones and other simplified interfaces.

Bratt, who leads the Geneva, Switzerland-based foundation from offices in Boston, talked in the first half of the interview about the origins of the group, how its mission differs from that of its sister organization the World Wide Web Consortium, and the gaps in content, research, and technology it hopes to address.

In Part 2, below, Bratt details the foundation’s initial projects in Africa and South America, the role of voice technology in broadening Web access, and the foundation’s plans for growth.

Xconomy: What can you tell me about your initial projects?

Steve Bratt: There are two: the Web Alliance for Re-Greening Africa, and Empowering Youth in Inner Cities. Both are in partnership with other organizations. With the first one, the goal is to provide Web systems that will help capture local knowledge about how to plant in very harsh desert environments. There is a group, the Africa Re-Greening Initiative, that has been working for 20 years to take local innovations in how to plant and conveying them to others. This is a great example because it’s not a case of foreign aid coming in and saying, “Let’s build a dam and here’s some chemical fertilizer and some genetically engineered corn.” It’s about what is working for the 1 percent and how to convey that to the other 99 percent. I met this farmer in Burkina Faso, Yacouba Sawadogo, who figured a different geometry for making trenches to grow seeds and plants that turns out to be much more productive—what size hole to use, when to put manure in. He didn’t have any training, he just discovered it. It’s a perfect example. They’ve been busing farmers into to see him; he might see 10 a month. We want to create a digital bus to allow all of the farmers in that area to have the knowledge.

We’re working with VU University in the Netherlands, and we’re going to see if the Web can empower the conveyance of information, and how to use voice to enable the Web. VoiceXML has been heavily used commercially in the West—every call center uses it—but it hasn’t been used as much for development. There are no new standards needed. We just want to work with local developers and local farmers so they can develop something that meets farmers’ needs.

The Empowering Youth project is in concert with the Center for Digital Inclusion, a fantastic organization started by Rodrigo Baggio in Brazil. They started in the poorest areas of Rio de Janeiro and they have close to 800 community centers in inner cities training kids on computers. We’re going in to help them develop a curriculum to teach youth how to develop content and Web applications. Again, we’ll focus on mobile and voice, because those are the predominant technologies available to people, even in poor areas. Even in the Sahel in Africa, we were told that every family has access to a mobile phone and a radio. It’s the same in Brazil and Latin America. So that will be a pilot project in five cities—one in Brazil, one in Latin America, one in the Middle East, and probably one in a Western city. But this is an unfunded project at this point, so we’re looking for partners to help fund it.

X: Do you ever worry that the voice-accessible Web that you’re describing will be an extremely slow, impoverished version of the Web that we enjoy here in the United States? I mean, just to keep things manageable, you’d probably have to limit menu choices at each level of a voice interface to four or five. How do you translate a complex Website into something that can be consumed that way?

SB: We are so spoiled. We have our iPhones and our high-speed Internet. Well, if you’re making a decision about what movie to go to and it starts in five minutes, you need a pretty fast answer. But if you’re making a decision about which direction to walk in when … Next Page »

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Only 25 percent of adults around the world have access to a computer that they can use to reach the Web. But 75 percent have access to a mobile phone. So the simplest way to open up the wealth of information on the Web to more people would be to make it usable via voice connections—for instance, through some combination of speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies and voice-driven interfaces customized for each region.

Making that happen will be the first mission for the new World Wide Web Foundation, officially launched November 15 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and the director of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Berners-Lee unveiled the foundation’s plans in a speech before the Internet Governance Forum, a non-governmental organization meeting this week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (Watch the video.)

It was 20 years ago this year that Berners-Lee proposed the Web’s basic markup language (HTML), its data protocol (HTTP), and its system of document addresses (URLs). “The thing that made the Web work then and the most important thing about it today is its universality,” Berners-Lee said in his speech. “Two Webs doesn’t work. It has to be one Web for all sorts of information, no matter what hardware you have, no matter who you buy your computer from, and now more importantly, no matter what sort of device you have.”

The basic tenet behind the Web Foundation is that the Web can empower people around the world to help themselves, if only barriers of language, literacy, location, and income can be overcome. The foundation’s first efforts in this direction will include support for an emerging discipline it’s calling “Web science,” as well as collaborations with VU University in Amsterdam and the Center for Digital Inclusion in Brazil focusing on the deployment of Web-based mobile communications technologies among farmers in Africa and schoolchildren in South and Central America and elsewhere.

A non-profit founded in 2008 and operating largely under the radar until now, the Web Foundation is subsisting for the time being on a five-year, $5 million seed grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The organization (which is not using the acronym WWWF, perhaps to avoid confusion with the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wrestling Federation) is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. But its CEO, Steve Bratt—formerly the CEO of the W3C—is working from a newly opened office in Boston’s downtown financial district.

Bratt met with Xconomy on Monday morning for his first detailed Q&A session about the creation of the Foundation, the philosophy of its early projects, and his and Berners-Lee’s ambitious plans for making the Web more accessible. Part 1 of our interview appears here; we’ll publish Part 2 on Wednesday.

Xconomy: What’s the mission of the World Wide Web Foundation, and how is it different from the mission of the World Wide Web Consortium?

Steve Bratt: Our overarching theme is empowering people through the Web—giving people the power through the Web to accomplish their own goals. It’s about helping people, not just having cool technologies. You never hear Tim Berners-Lee give a talk without … Next Page »

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The inventor of the World Wide Web has arrived, somewhat belatedly, in the Twitterverse. Tim Berners-Lee, head of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium, set up a Twitter account shortly before making an appearance at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday.

Normally it wouldn’t be news when Twitter gains a new user—somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people already use the microblogging service, which makes it easy for users to share short, 140-character messages with anyone who signs up to follow their tweets. But Berners-Lee is a special case.

People follow the man who came up with the idea for a network of hyperlinked, consistently formatted electronic documents—and who still oversees its evolution—as if his every move were prophetic. As TechCrunch put it, Berners-Lee joining Twitter is the kind of event (at least in the blogosphere) that “could potentially rip a hole in the time/space continuum.”

So, how is Sir Berners-Lee making use of the new medium? As of this writing, he’s tweeted only twice—once to complain that Twitter’s user interface is confusing, the second time to say that he was “following the teens.” We gather that this wasn’t a reference to Twitter’s popularity among teens, but to the Web 2.0 summit talk that preceded his appearance, a session called “What Do Teens Want?” led by former Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy.

Berners-Lee is gaining Twitter followers fast—when we checked at 5:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning, he had 218. As of this writing, that number had zoomed up to 1,849. But the father of the Web still has a ways to go to catch up with Ashton Kutcher, who has more than 3.8 million followers.

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A “best practices” guide for creating mobile-friendly websites, published only in draft form until now, has been released as an official “recommendation” of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In an announcement today, W3C mobile Web activity lead Dominique Hazaël-Massieux said “Mobile Web content developers now have stable guidelines and maturing tools to help them create a better mobile Web experience.”

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Citizens depend on their governments for documents and information ranging from driver’s licenses to tax forms to maps. And the more of this information is stored on the Web using open formatting standards such XML, the more people will be able to access it and re-use it for the public good. At least, that’s the argument being made by the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which launched an “eGovernment Forum” today with the aim of creating new guidelines for using the Web to enable better access to government.

The forum is open to the public and is expected to meet via teleconference roughly twice a month and face-to-face once or twice a year, with the first in-person meeting slated for October. In an announcement about the new body, MIT professor and World Wide Web originator Tim Berners-Lee, who directs the W3C, urged government agencies to send representatives to these meetings.

“Open standards, and in particular semantic Web standards, can help lower the cost of government, make it easier for independent agencies to work together, and increase flexibility in the face of change,” Berners-Lee said. “Publishing linked data on the Web enables creative re-use of it—citizen mashups, and commercial mashups, which combine the data from many sources to stunning new uses.”

In some ways, government agencies are being forced into modernizing their approaches to information management. In an age when people can go online to find a job, buy a car, or even get a college degree, citizens are demanding the same kind of online, 24/7 responsiveness from government agencies that they get from most consumer-facing online businesses. “Exposure to the rapid evolution of services and functionality on the public Web has led citizens to expect and ask for improvements ranging from basic provisioning services to more advanced solutions, and cooperation between the commercial and public sectors,” the W3C announcement observed.

The W3C is an international consortium—headquartered in Cambridge, but with offices in 17 countries—where dues-paying members, full-time staff, and public representatives work together to set unofficial (yet widely accepted) formatting and technology standards for the Web. In essence, it wants more government agencies to adopt standards it’s already developed in areas such as XML, the Semantic Web, languages and internationalization, and accessibility for people with disabilities and people using mobile devices. By doing so, the consortium argues, government agencies will not only save money and collaborate more easily with other agencies, but will be able to deliver existing information to citizens in innovative new ways.

For example, using Semantic Web standards, the United Kingdom’s Office of Public Sector Information, the University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science school, and the city council of Camden, a London suburb, were able to combine data from Ordnance Survey maps and local government records of restaurant hygiene inspections. The resulting mashup showed eateries on a map of Camden, color-coded according to their hygiene score. “The ability to reuse and remix enables a third party to take various set of data from the public sector, combine it with data from the private sector, and generate new value,” the W3C observed in the summary report for a 2007 workshop on transparent government.

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The Extensible Markup Language, or XML—a way of structuring data inside semantic tags that allow it to be interpreted consistently across disparate information systems—is the key to many types of business software today, not to mention the entire Web 2.0 revolution. And on Sunday, the critical Web standard turned 10 years old.

The Cambridge-based World Wide Web Consortium, which approved XML 1.0 as a recommended standard on February 10, 1998, is collecting “XML stories” or personal reminiscences from Web luminaries and plans a series of birthday-celebration events throughout 2008, according to a press release issued by the non-profit organization today. Befitting the geekiness of the anniversary, the W3C has also published an online guest book where netizens can leave their thoughts about XML.

“There is essentially no computer in the world, desk-top, hand-held, or back-room, that doesn’t process XML sometimes,” Tim Bray, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems and a major contributor to (and co-editor of) the XML 1.0 standard, said in the W3C’s release. “This is a good thing, because it shows that information can be packaged and transmitted and used in a way that’s independent of the kinds of computer and software that are involved. XML won’t be the last neutral information-wrapping system; but as the first, it’s done very well.”

Bray has already published his own XML recollections, and Uche Ogbuji, principal consultant for Fourthought Inc., has published a paper on IBM’s DeveloperWorks website calling the last 10 years “the XML Decade.” Ogbuji tells an interesting story about the COBOL programming language, a business-oriented language that had nearly gone extinct until the late 1990s. That was when hundreds of companies still using decades-old legacy COBOL software realized that the Y2K problem could sink their systems—resulting in a huge new demand for COBOL programmers who could write around the problem.

Ogbuji calls the crisis “an extraordinary waste in resources spent agonizing over past assets rather than productively developing new ones”—the main lesson being that “it is extremely valuable to develop data so that it outlives the applications that presently operate on it. XML, used properly can help prevent such crises in productivity as the artificial COBOL boom of the 1990s, and even better, it can be a building block rather than a stumbling block for productivity by pointing the way to new applications in the constant quest for competitiveness.”

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in Cambridge, MA, today announced the release of “mobileOK checker,” software that automatically evaluates Web pages for compliance with the group’s guidelines for improving users’ browsing experiences on phones and other mobile devices. We’ll have more details about the mobileOK initiative tomorrow. Also tomorrow, W3C director Tim Berners-Lee will discuss the mobileOK checker and its place in W3C’s vision for the mobile Web in a keynote talk at the Mobile Internet World conference at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center.

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