Near-Time is one of the leading on-demand, Enterprise 2.0 platform for cross organization collaboration. Near-Time combines blogs, forums and wikis and it enables business professionals to create rich interaction with their prospects, customers, partners and suppliers. Near-Time has recently launched Near-Time connection which extends the Collaborative Capabilities of Near-Time to other Mobile Devices and to iGoogle via Widgets. It is an example of a single interface / service (driven by the Web) and extending it to mobile devices and to iGoogle and thereby increasing the reach to existing (and potentially new) users. By that I mean, while Symbian /Nokia support is absent at the moment on Near-Time; Nokia also supports Mobile Widgets in a big way. Hence Near-Time could easily extend the reach of their application to all Nokia/Symbian devices using the same Widget code base. Through this strategy, application discovery will also be driven by the Web and via multiple channels (for instance – the Widget may be first discovered in iGoogle but the user may also have a Pocket PC device and may use the near-time application on the Web and also on the pocket PC.) Finally .. By providing the ability to embed widgets into a home page, the user gets a customized product and at the same time overcomes the limitations of widgets themselves(i.e. the single, monolithic focus of a widget). The choice of launch platforms is also interesting (Web + iGoogle, iPhone, Pocket PC and the Blackberry) I think leveraging the power of the Web, Mobile Web and Widgets by incorporating the ideas of Mobile SAAS, Mobile Web, Mobile Widgets and Mobile Ajax will be increasingly the way to go – fuelled by the greater uptake of the full Web on Mobile devices, Mobile Ajax and Mobile Widgets.

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Ajit Jaokar is the CEO of a London based publishing company futuretext focussing on mobility and Digital convergence. Ajit Jaokar also chairs Oxford University's next generation mobile applications panel and is working extensively with mobile web 2.0 i.e. the impact of web 2.0 on mobility and digital convergence. His book Mobile web 2.0 will be released in June 2006. He currently plays an advisory role to a number of mobile start-ups in the UK and Scandinavia and works with the governments and trade missions of a number of countries including South Korea, Ireland and the Faroe Islands. He is also a member of the Web 2.0 Working Group.

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