One thing that pretty much everybody seems to agree on is that browsing the Web on mobile phones isn’t what it should be, The disagreement comes in on what to do about it. One the one hand, you’ve got people pointing to the content as the problem, offering up the .mobi domain as a zone for mobile-specific content. On the other, you’ve got mobile browsers that aim to deliver a desktop-like experience, such as Opera, and Minimo — the release of a preview version of that this week having spawned this line of thought. (There are also proxy services to consider, like Google Mobile or AOL’s new mobile search, but I think they’re generally fairly frustrating and useless, so I’ll leave them out).

So, basically, what should change? Should sites adapt to the user, or should we all just get Opera? While I’m interested in finding the right answer from the publisher/content provider side as well, I’m going to focus on the user experience here. My primary concern (and frustration) as a user is being able to find the right content. Knowing where to go for mobile content can be a real problem, as it always has been. There was never a standard for where to find mobile-formatted content: wap.site.com. site.com/wap, site.com/mobile, mobile.site.com, even the ill-fated mmm.site com idea. That’s assuming the URL had any sense to it at all: ESPN’s mobile-formatted site sits at http://pocket.espn.go.com/ or http://proxy.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/html/pocketpc. How the hell am I supposed to find and/or remember that?

The .mobi idea is to have something like ESPN.mobi. That makes some sense, but how do I know which sites support it and which don’t? I guess I’m just supposed to check through trial and error. Using a browser like Opera’s got a simpler solution: I just punch in espn.com like on the desktop. The page loads, sure (though I get a memory full error), and the browsers got some nice technology to render pages for the small screen. But the result isn’t always real pretty.

The second issue is what content’s there. I’ve got certain things I’ve grown accustomed to seeing or using on certain sites when I access them from my desktop, and it’s not unreasonable — or at least it shouldn’t be — to expect them to be available on my mobile too. An advanced browser promises to give you everything on a site. With the mobile-specific content of .mobi, that’s less clear. This is what Tim Berners-Lee was talking about when he came out against .mobi because it promises to create device-specific areas of the web.

So I guess the score is 1-1, indicating the solution’s somewhere in the middle. While I think .mobi is a pretty stupid idea, it does highlight the need to make it easier for mobile users to find relevant content. But why not just have sites sniff what kind of browser or device is being used and change what’s displayed? On the other hand, just having a powerful HTML-capable browser is nice, but it creates a fair amount of usability issues.

The way forward: give me a browser that can handle whatever I throw at it, but make sites a little more friendly by realizing that I’m on a mobile device and don’t have a 1600×1200 display. Design the mobile site so it’s easier to use, but don’t cut out services and content I can access on the desktop. Don’t corral me over on one small part of the Internet, either — walling me into a garden will just annoy me.

Neither having a great HTML browser on a phone nor having a bastardized “mobile-optimized” site alone is the ideal solution, and asking for both isn’t unreasonable. But until phone vendors and carriers on one side make browsers a real priority and content providers on the other side begin to understand and respect mobile users, the mobile Net will continue to suffer by not meeting average Joe Users’ expectations of the Web.

Heh, noticed just as I was publishing that I’m not the only person thinking along these lines today — Russell Beattie’s got a nice post on reformatting vs. rethinking for mobile.

British pop star Robbie Williams has signed an exclusive 18-month deal with T-Mobile where the operator will offer exclusive content, some of it embedded in handsets it sells. Williams is undoubtedly popular around the world — he’s sold 51 million albums — but are these kinds of exclusive deals what’s really going to make people believers in mobile music? It’s doubtful.

While some die-hard fans may be convinced to switch to T-Mobile for the exclusive content, the vast majority of people won’t care. When Apple launched iTunes, or Napster started, they weren’t built around a single artist, and that’s why they succeeded. There’s an implication in these sorts of single-star-centric promos that unless you’re a fan of this one particular person, that there’s nothing in the offering for you — and the number of potential users alienated by that far outweighs the number that will be attracted by it.

Cross-posted to The Mobile Music Blog.

British pop star Robbie Williams has signed an exclusive 18-month deal with T-Mobile where the operator will offer exclusive content, some of it embedded in handsets it sells. Williams is undoubtedly popular around the world — he’s sold 51 million albums — but are these kinds of exclusive deals what’s really going to make people believers in mobile music? It’s doubtful.

While some die-hard fans may be convinced to switch to T-Mobile for the exclusive content, the vast majority of people won’t care. When Apple launched iTunes, or Napster started, they weren’t built around a single artist, and that’s why they succeeded. There’s an implication in these sorts of single-star-centric promos that unless you’re a fan of this one particular person, that there’s nothing in the offering for you — and the number of potential users alienated by that far outweighs the number that will be attracted by it.

Cross-posted to MobHappy.

Crane Dragon appears to be a London, England based company founded by a bunch of bright, successful guys (no women on board - bad news) to create start-ups. A kind of next-gen tech uber-VC, that invests its own money in creating next-gen tech ventures. Very cool.

Except, I’m sorry to say, that its first concept is doomed - just my opinion obviously - which doesn’t bode well for its future.

Texxi ("the taxi you text") is a Demand Responsive Transit Brokerage system. In other words, this means that if you want to order a taxi, you text in the Post Code of your destination. Then, Texxi’s server aggregates your details with other travellers who want to go to the same place and confirms the taxi driver’s name and badge number and tells you and your fellow passengers where to meet up to board the taxi.

In turn, the taxi driver gets an sms with his/her new passengers’ booking references and is told where the hook up place is.

This sounds pretty cool on the face of it. The Texxi user pays a fixed price per journey of ¬£5 ($8.77) in the launch city, Liverpool, which is probably lower that they would have paid on their own. The driver probably gets a higher fare than they would normally get for the same work. Oh …and there’s some laudable environmental benefits too, of cutting down on CO2 emissions and stuff.

So what’s wrong with the business model? In my opinion, it’s flawed on a number of levels, from simple usability to practicality to a failure to understand human nature.

The first (and biggest) problem is the classic Catch 22 faced by this kind of business. Taxi drivers won’t sign up without passengers - and passengers won’t sign up without taxi drivers.

Just supposing I’m in Liverpool right now and 1. Know about Texxi 2. Remember the not-so-catchy short code of 87222 and 3. Actually know the Post Code of where I want to go.

So I text my Post Code in and wait. The question is, how long will I wait? Because even in a city the size of Liverpool, the chances of finding even one other person wanting to go to the same location at the same time is actually pretty remote - let alone three or four others, unless they happen to be with me already.

Will I wait an hour? Very unlikely, as I’m either in a bit of a hurry (hence the need for a taxi) or it’s late (and I’m drunk, which doesn’t make me a patient passenger able to follow instructions very well.). So after 10 minutes, I get fed up and make other arrangements, forgetting (or I can’t be bothered) to tell Texxi.

15 minutes later, the taxi driver rolls up to find no one there. Or possibly one person offering £5 for a £15 journey. How many disappointments will the driver experience before giving up and slagging the service off to all his driver mates?

Hmmm.

Their next problem is Taxi Driver Inertia (TDI). We’ve seen this problem with Zingo, which I’ve written about before. Zingo is a location-based cab calling service - you call a number and it puts you in touch with the nearest London cabbie. This has equally laudable benefits for drivers and passengers - but drivers just won’t sign up. This means lots of passengers trying Zingo and experiencing disappointing results.

You might try something new, like Zingo or Texxi a couple of times, but if they continue to fail to deliver, you stop trying.

New ventures need self-belief and a management team committed to overcoming obstacles. But at some point before launch, they need to take a hard look at the idea and really tear it apart - or get an independent advisor to critique it. Texxi appears to have skipped this stage in its development.

I hate to criticize new ventures, especially as they need encouragement and nurturing, more than anything else. Equally, sometimes the best advice you can give a management team is "give up now". I’m afraid that’s my take on Texxi.

Pic via Taxi Bot. Story: Green Car Congress, although I have a feeling I may have read about it on SmartMobs….

Following the ICE virus scam Russell wrote about, there are a couple more hoaxes making the rounds.

The first one says that even if their phone has no signal, people riding the Tube in London can reach emergency services if they dial 112. The hoax says that “ALL phone companies have signed up” for a service that routes the calls to emergency services via a satellite connection. Clearly that one isn’t true.

Down in Italy, the second isn’t about mobiles, but is traveling via SMS, spreading a rumor that terrorists had poisoned the Rome water supply. With polls showing 85% of Italians fear a terrorist attack, the SMS seems to be a prank to cause a bit of panic, and the city’s mayor has pledged to catch whoever was responsible.

My skepticism of mobile TV is no secret. I’m pretty bullish on mobile video, though, when it’s part of making personal media time-, place- and platform-independent. It’s been disappointing to see carrier and device manufacturer’s efforts thus far focus on broadcast-style content that’s either live TV or “made for mobile” fluff. But noise coming out of the US cable industry’s yearly confab says that — in a real surprise — it might be cable operators that have the best ideas about mobile video.

Cable companies have been going for some time about offering the “quadruple play: video, voice, data and mobile. The mobile aspect thus far has just been as MVNOs in a few occasions rather than anything interesting, but (buzzword-laden) quotes from some execs seem to indicate that they have a good basis of understanding of how mobile video comes into the picture, such as how users “want this phone to do everything that their TV does and everything that their PC does.”

But it’s one from a Verizon honcho that does it: “”It’s really going to be on any device anywhere… we talk about time shifting. It’s going to be place shifting.”

That’s what’s going to make mobile video big: giving people mobile access to their personal media, in this case what they’ve got saved on their DVR, their movies or their favorite shows. It’s not going to be live TV — which will be used for news and sports events — and it isn’t going to be these stupid “mobisodes” that are just ads for real television shows. If I can watch TV on my mobile device on the way to work, I want to watch something I’m interested in, not whatever crappy breakfast talk shows I can get. Time- and place-shifting something my DVR grabbed last night, now that’s something I’d pay for.

Of course, part of the problem is that technology like DVB-H is better for sending video to mobiles than as streams over the network. But that’s not something end users will really care about. If there was a market demand for mobile live TV, people would buy those handheld sets that were the sign of cool people back in the mid-80s. Just because it’s going to be on a mobile phone doesn’t mean that people will automatically take to it any better. They’ll still complain that the screen’s too small and the reception’s no good. But make the hook something a lot more enticing — by making it better than live TV — and people will eat it up.

From time to time, we see surveys that are interpreted as claiming that teens and kids are abandoning email in favour of Instant Messaging. The implication is that email might die out in due course.

The latest is new Pew Internet and American Life Project, which claims that "Email, once the cutting edge "killer app," is losing its privileged
place among many teens as they express preferences for instant
messaging (IM) and text messaging as ways to connect with their
friends."

But this really misses the point as they’re not competing technologies but complementary ones. Just because teens are using IM more, it isn’t replacing email - in fact, it probably means that they’re simply communicating more often, with more people.

Communication channels can simplistically be divided into two types - offline and online. Offline you have email, voice mail and texting - though this can be online too, which is one reason for its popularity. Online you have IM, phone and VoIP. If you fancy a chat and there’s a good chance your pal is there, you’ll try online first, very often, switching to offline if you want to leave a message.

So it’s really horses for courses, not one or the other. Just as email didn’t replace the phone, email’s not going to be knocked out by IM - no matter how good a headline it makes.

Story source: Net Imperative.

I wrote last week about the remarkable growth of the Linux operating system in SmartPhones and how it and Symbian are relegating Microsoft into a bit player in the mobile phone sector.

Regular readers of MobHappy know that I think the battle to dominate the phone platform is a crucial one for winners and losers alike. Since the phone will become everyone’s primary digital device, largely replacing the PC altogether, Microsoft’s inability to make it happen in phones could have serious repercussions for the future of the whole company.

Now, no less a figure than Harvard guru and disruption technology authority, Clay Christensen, is saying pretty much the same thing.

He predicted that we wouldn’t see Linux taking root on desktops in enterprise
networks but that it would become the dominant operating system on handheld
computers.

"That’s the way Microsoft gets unwound," he said.

Christensen’s theory is that, once in a while, new technology comes along that tends to be cheaper and comes in at the low, undemanding end of the market. Examples are cars replacing horses, or more recently, personal computers replacing minicomputers and workstations.

If you’re an incumbent in the sector, it’s almost always impossible to see what’s going on until it’s just too late. As an example, back in the 80’s, Digital Equipment Corp had to decide whether to focus on selling the minicomputers for $500,000 each (at 60% margin) that its customers said they wanted or selling low performance PCs for $2,000 (at 40% margin) that its customers were saying they didn’t want. Seems like a no-brainer, except we now know what happened.

Linux is poised to do the same thing - according to good old Clayton and me

Maybe Microsoft will sit up and take note now. They MUST change their phone strategy or live to regret it, in the same way as photographic chemical producers must be scratching their heads today saying

"Where the hell’s my business gone??"

Story source: i-Mode Strategy

A survey by UK based analyst, The Leading Question, has found that people who use pirate P2P sites, also spend 4.5 times more on legal downloads than other music fans. Typically, they spend £5.52 ($9.16) a month as opposed to the average £1.27 ($2.21).

Ahh, but …… says the quaintly named, British Phonographic Industry, pirates typically spend less than average on CD’s.

Well, they would wouldn’t they? They’re spending all their music money on downloads!

And if average spend is going down, it’s surely because with downloads, you can choose the tracks you really want instead of all the shite stuff that pad out so many CDs.

But the other issue is the dilemma that this should represent for the BPI. Suing these pirates is also tantamount to suing your very best customers, which can’t make much sense, commercially. Supposing, a Marketing Director presented a new campaign to her fellow board directors:

"Well, we’ve analyzed the market and drawn up a list of our top 100 customers. These people represent 50% of our revenues and 80% of our profits. It goes without saying that they’re damned important for the future success of the company.

So, we’ve decided that we’re going to really piss them off by taking them to court."

The fact is that piracy probably wouldn’t enjoy nearly such high usage today if the likes of the BPI had agreed to the entreaties of companies begging them to authorize a legal download service in the closing years of the last century. But suing your customers can never be a sensible business strategy. It simply shows that you don’t understand the first thing about how your industry has changed.

Via The Register. Pic from Talk Like a Pirate. This year TLAP day is September 19th.
 

We’ve written before about Shotcode and Semacode and other mobile codereaders, but over in Japan — where QR codes are  commonplace, as shown by a recent announcement from Amazon — i-mode Business Strategy reports (via Tom Hume) that NTT DoCoMo is working on a cameraphone ad server that would let people snap a picture of a printed ad or billboard, then get sent to a web site or be sent more information from the advertiser.

It’s not a new idea: barcodes are already used for this, even going back as far as the CueCat, which failed spectacularly. Although DoCoMo’s new technology does require some handset software, it’s different because it doesn’t require ads to be changed in any way, and will also work with existing advertising. This makes much more sense to me than trying to advertise via bluespamming; this seems like an easy way to offer potential customers a way to reach out to advertisers, rather than just throwing a product or message in their face.