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Anything Sony Ericsson can do, so can a Treo, apparently. Now a speaker dock made for the device is available.

Wired magazine’s latest cover story attempts to dissect the ROKR and why it turned out so poorly. A decent article, but no new info, really, for readers of this (or pretty much any other mobile) site. It would have been good two months ago — but damn your old-media lead time!

One of the big problems with technology is the prevalent attitude that just because something can be done, people will find it useful. It’s best seen in engineering-led cultures where there’s a feeling that “all that marketing and usability stuff can be worked out later…man, isn’t this damn cool?” In other words, marketing and usiblity is the easy, common sense stuff that you put in place when you have a neat-o piece of tech.

There’s an example of this that Nicolas at Pasta and Vinegar pointed me to, with Intel’s new, undoubtedly, very clever positioning system. The idea is that a device connected to a network can work out where it is in relation to another device on the network. This gets round the main limitation of GPS, which requires line of sight access to a satellite and which is absent in most offices.

It’s certainly neat-o and doesn’t require a huge investment, as the network is already there. Nice piece of thinking, guys.

But that’s where the idea runs out of steam, as there were no compelling ideas about how to use this at the press conference. The examples they give are just rather boring, quite frankly, such as being able to continue a conference call on your tablet PC when you need a cup of coffee and switch it back to your desktop. Or getting an alert if your dog leaves the yard. Hmmm.

There’s two ways of inventing technology. Firstly, you to look at user behaviour, identify a problem and then look to invent something that’ll solve it. To take an example, when cars were invented, we needed better roads, so the roads were built. No one started building roads in the hope that someone would find a use for them ie that cars would be invented to go on these new smooth, shiny highways.

The other way is to invent something cool and clever and hope there’ll be a use for it. That’s how, for instance, Post-It Notes came into being. 3M accidentally invented a low-tack adhesive (they were looking for a high-tack one) and one of the engineers started marking his place in his hymn book with notes coated with it. The rest is history, as they say.

There’s room for both ways of approaching invention - the planned, marketing led method and the typical skunk works method. But if you do the skunk works approach, you need to go the last mile and work out what the hell it can be used for (assuming anything) and tell people. Otherwise, their reaction is “that’s cool, what’s next?”.

In the same way that marketing and selling needs to translate features into benefits, technology needs to approach things in the same way - and that’s to append the phrase “which means that…” to the pitch. Take this example; “So if we have this really cool way of locating a device on a network….which means that you can grab a coffee during a conference call.” Is this a compelling application? No - let’s try again.

If you’re coming up with cool technology, why not give it a try? “…which means that” is a powerful little phrase.

Both Russell and I have said we don’t like the idea of the .mobi top-level domain. It’s the wrong solution to the wrong question — while mobile Web usability is an issue, it’s not one of mobile-only sites vs. powerful mobile browsers. The way forward is a better understanding of Web and information design for mobile users, coupled with a smart browser, that gives them access to whatever content they want — not just content created specifically for mobile devices.

Now, .mobi threatens all that. We’ve questioned the idea of creating a “mobiles only” part of the Web, but now it’s even worse: unlike any other top-level domain, owners of .mobi sites will be forced to follow a set of “best practices”, which the .mobi administrator, mTLD, will develop along with the W3C. This could set a dangerous and, frankly, stupid precedent that allows TLD administrators and registrars to be the arbiters of content and conduct on the Web.

The implications for mobile are a little different. mTLD says the motivation for .mobi is to “enhance and improve the ease of use of Internet-based mobile data services through discoverability and predictability, as well as, speed and delivery to market.” That sounds really nice, but it’s a bunch of bull. Adding another domain doesn’t make things easier at all for end users. All it does is add another possibility users will have to remember when hunting for somebody’s mobile site — is it mobile.XYZ.com, or wap.XYZ.com, or XYZ.com/mobile or XYZ.mobi?

.mobi really is a wolf in the sheep’s clothing of usability. Look at the companies behind the proposal and mTLD: three infrastructure and device manufacturers, then the GSM Association — the trade group of GSM carriers — and five major operators: 3, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia Mobile and Telefonica Moviles. The operators will use .mobi and the usability red herring as the basis for the next generation of walled gardens.

The argument will be “We only want users to access sites on their mobile devices where they’ll have a good user experience. Therefore, they’ll only be able to access our own portal, and .mobi sites.” Why would they do this? Because through the “best practices” owners of .mobi sites must follow or lose their domain, they can exercise control over the content people view — and more easily bill for it. And by limiting access to content that follows the rules laid down by this supposedly impartial third party that says it’s beholden just to users’ best interests, they can avoid the claims of unfairness that dog letting people access content only from providers that have paid for portal placement.

“You can’t access that content you want because we’re looking out for your best interest,” will be the party line.

It’s great to act as if you’re concerned about usability, but .mobi won’t do anything for end users. It’s just a trojan horse for operators to, yet again, try to exert unwanted control over what their users do. Having to give their users open, unfettered access to the Internet is most operators’ worst nightmares, but it’s the consequence of trying to be both the bit pipe and the content provider. It’s so typical of operator thinking — instead of doing anything to make their services better so people will choose to use them, they just try to eliminate the choice altogether. .mobi is a trojan horse designed to do just that.

Ringo has launched a model that attempts to combine two different ones - ZagMe meets Zingo. It’s not auspicious that neither predecessor worked terribly well, though both sounded damn fine ideas on paper.

Ringo allows you to order a Taxi based on your location. You dial “*TAXI” on your mobile. Ringo then tracks where you are, identifies the nearest free Taxi to you and sends it round to collect you. Great idea!

Then while you’re in your cab, it sends you advertising for businesses in the immediate location. This is based on the frankly rather gimmicky “Cost per Radius” concept ie the closer your taxi’s drop off point to the advertiser, the more the advertiser gets charged. So if you’re within 351 feet or more of the advertiser, you get charged 5c, ranging up to 25c for within 50 feet. Advertisers can specify both the maximum cost per ad they want to pay and a daily budget (like Google’s AdWords, which they invite comparison to).

Ads can be sent to the phone or printed out in the taxi, if the advertiser wants a paper-based fulfillment option.

As I say, all this sounds terribly logical. Except that Zingo - another service that allowed you to order a location-based cabs - essentially failed, being sold off for £1 after millions were spent developing the system. You can read my analysis, subsequently validated by the founder here. But the basic problem was failure to sign up enough drivers, leading to serial disappointments on behalf of the users. Once users have been let down a few times, they simply give up.

For this sort of model to work, simultaneous critical mass of users and suppliers is crucial. Users need to know that when they order a cab, it arrives. Cabbies need to know that it’s worth their while doing, as there’s lots of users gagging for the service. This simultaneousness is incredibly difficult to achieve.

ZagMe (which I was involved in founding) was a location based marketing play, that did achieve much success before running out of funding. It didn’t help that we ran out very soon after the 9/11 thing either. Having said that, we recruited 85,000 users and ran 1500 campaigns for some blue chip and independents and learned a lot about location based marketing. Sorry, if you’re sick of me writing about it, but if it has escaped your notice, ask for my free white paper on the whole story.

The main trouble with ZagMe was that it was far, far too early - it’s still too early in my view, which if I’m right doesn’t bode well for Ringo’s secondary business model.

But, the key issue here is recruiting enough paying advertisers to make the business model work. Where the Ringo model does make sense is that the users are primarily travelling in a Taxi, as opposed to waiting with baited breath for an ad to arrive. Therefore, user acquisition isn’t such an issue. Although, presumably, they will have to get users to agree to accept the ads and offer some kind of targeting over and above the location.

As an example, if I agree to get an ad and it’s for women’s shoes, it’s going to piss me off for wasting my time, more than encourage me to rush into the store. Result; pissed off customer who won’t use the service in the future and pissed off advertiser who has just wasted the cost of the ad and pissed off Taxi driver who won’t be sharing the thousands of dollars of commission she was promised.

Edward DeFeudis, is the President and CEO of Ringo, and has been dreaming of boundless wealth being delivered by the Ringo model. Here’s his calculations:

“Our revenue estimates project that our vehicles will each print one coupon per trip with 10 trips per day at an average of $0.15 per coupon. Assuming that we achieve our goal of 100,000 vehicles, our CBR ad model will generate an extra $150,000 per day or $54.75 million per year in addition to our basic taxi and tow transportation services increasing our total projected annual revenues to over $127 million.”

As any wet-behind-the-ears VC knows, this is not a remotely feasible way of calculating revenues. There are four HUMONGOUS hurdles to this;

Finding enough advertisers - it’s going to be unbelievably difficult to find local businesses who understand enough about marketing to get this concept. Based on my experience, it simply won’t happen.

Cost - even if you find advertisers, they won’t pay this kind of cost to start with.

Location - even if they have a raft of advertisers, if you factor in time and location, the chances of the taxi dropping off someone within 350 feet anywhere in the US, that has an advertiser signed up on the correct tariff and who wants the traffic at that time of day, must be millions to one against. The math is far too complicated for my humble brain, but I’d go so far to guess that it’s actually billions to one against.

Taxis - how are they going to get the 100,000 vehicles he blithely mentions? Zingo struggled to get 1,500 in a city the size of London.

So, I’d say likely revenues will be in the region of peanuts for the foreseeable future from the location element. Maybe they’ll have better luck with the Taxi-calling side of things, but unless they’ve worked out where Zingo went wrong, that doesn’t look too promising either.

Sorry, I can’t be more positive about Ringo. But shoving together one failed and one inconclusive business model just means a greater chance of failure as far as I’m concerned.

UK 3G operator, 3, is about to launch two Euro 9 ($10.75) handsets into the Irish market, according to The Sunday Times.

Signing up for its Euro 60 a month package ($71.74) entitles you to either a Sony Ericsson K608i and the NEC 338. This undercuts Vodafone by c. Euro 40 for the SE model.

While heavily subsidised handsets are nothing new in the industry, it’s interesting that 3 is resorting to the only tactics that seem to work for the company - discounting the hell out of its products. It famously struggled in its early marketing in the UK by trying to persuade us that we should all go 3G to get mobile video calls. Finally, they were forced to abandon this and simply offer cheap voice rates.

Of course, signing up subscribers with attractive price-led packages isn’t necessarily a poor strategy. If people sign up to one thing (cheap voice calls or handsets) and then discover all the other compelling benefits of using your service, they may remain loyal in the future. However, if your service has little to differentiate it from that of your competitors’, price-led activity leaves you very vulnerable as users will simply switch to cheaper offerings as they emerge.

It’s too difficult to say if 3 has a compelling and sustainable competitive advantage, but my current feeling is that they probably don’t in comparison with the fearsome competition in the UK and Ireland.

Time will tell.

I’d reported earlier that the ROKR wasn’t selling well, and alongside all the other bad press it’s been getting comes a pretty damning report from an analyst.

Albert Lin of American Technology says in a Bloomberg article that customers are returning the ROKR at six time the normal rate for mobile handsets, and that there are “compatibility bugs” between the iTunes computer software and the phone.

MotoCEO Ed ZNDR is getting a little more realistic about the device, too: “People were looking for an iPod and that’s not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there.” He says the company didn’t make it clear enough that the ROKR only holds 100 songs. Of course, had they done that, even fewer people probably would have bought it. Motorola sold an average of 83,000 ROKRs per week when it was on sale last quarter — that’s shipments to carriers, not end-user purchases, which are probably much lower — compared to 500,000 per week for its iconic RAZR device.

We’ve had some debate of what’s the proper term for sousveillance/ coveillance/ equiveillance, but I’m pretty sure this is sousveillance — a youth in London filmed a cop putting his friend into a garbage can.

Textually and The Times call it “a twist” in happy slapping: apparently a couple of police officers went to a park where some kids were supposed to be throwing conkers (horse chestnuts) at people. The two guys started filming the police, and wouldn’t stop, and one of them ended up in the bin. That must be some of that new community-based policing people are talking about…

Anyhow, they’ve got the video, and are considering legal action, and the cop’s under investigation too. The lesson here is that nothing is really secret anymore — everybody’s carrying a recorder of some kind around.

Carlo and I have been kicking around what would happen if a car company only employed people from the telecoms background. This is what we came up with.

1. New cars would come with wheels that you need to change before you can drive it on A roads and you’ll need to reconfigure the brakes before they work.

2. Ads for every car will promise speeds up to 450 miles per hour.

3. Access to gears 4, 5 and 6 will be hidden.

4. Changing lanes sometimes makes the car stall.

5. Running costs are a closely guarded secret. But what is clear is a surcharge if you exceed 8,000 furlongs and 3 chains a month and driving your car outside your country of residence makes you eligible for a very nasty surprise indeed.

6. You can listen to the radio — but it costs extra.

7. When you buy a car, you have to promise to keep it for two years, during which you can only use one brand of fuel - although some shady garages will “unlock” your car. You can also refuel over the air, as well as garages but over the air costs twice as much as it’s so convenient and cool.

8. Every car converts into a submarine, a hair dryer, a solarium, a sauna, a cooker and a toaster. The main benefit of car ownership becomes “she sure makes grrrreat toast”.

9. You’ll notice quirky little changes in the car controls depending on the manufacturer. Some cars put the gas pedal on the left, some favour the traditional right - with hilarious results!

10. Come on… you have a go. Leave a comment with some ideas!

(Pic from Car Art Agency).