I wrote last week comparing the mobile with the computer, concluding that for most things, the computer was still better. However, I also believe that our phones will turn into our computers and be our primary digital device.
Someone left a comment challenging me on this, which is great, as I love comments and the debate surrounding them. They pointed out that for some jobs, like desktop publishing or website design, a mobile screen and tiny little keyboard will just never hack it.
So let me explain more.
My vision is that our mobiles are going to morph into something like our digital, thin client, key to our digital data, as well as a communication device. Sometimes we’ll access that data directly, as it’s stored on our phones - much as we might keep games on there today. And some will be stored on the web, so we’ll use our phones as a way of accessing and unlocking this data.
And yes, sometimes, we’ll need to see that data on a larger screen and use more sophisticated tools to manipulate it - a keyboard and mouse and whatever comes next in that line. But rather than go to a computer, we’ll slot our mobiles into a docking port in a keyboard/screen combo. These already exist in early iterations, as I’ve written before.
But how about when you want to give a presentation, you’ll still need a laptop, won’t you? Actually, no. You’ll have the presentation on your phone, or stored on the web and accessed live with your phone. And you’ll plug it into a projector, specially made for the purpose.
Sound far fetched? Well, you can get a glimpse of that future with the Project-a-Phone - yours for a mere $199.
The only slight issue is that you still need to connect it to a computer in order to project your mobile phone’s screen, but hey, it’s a great start.
But it’s a definite boon to all of us who have to demo mobile phones, applications and games to more than one person at a time. Cool.
A new research report says that full-track mobile downloads increased 20 times in 2005 (via Abiro) over the previous year, with global revenues leaping from $12.4 million to $251 million. Let’s focus on that, rather than the ridiculous prediction that the number will be $9.3 billion in 2011 (since there’s no telling how they got it).
First, let’s discount Japan. KDDI’s Chaku-Uta Full service has been growing like crazy for a couple years now. Last year, it did about 29 million downloads, finishing with a rate of about 10 million tracks per month. Songs cost about 300 yen (about $2.50), so it accounted for about a quarter of the world’s total. And it sold less than 1 million tracks in 2004, so its growth outpaced the world as a whole as well.
Other operators are reporting successes too: 3 UK says that it’s sold its millionth full track in about four months since its service launched, which MocoNews points out is a similar timeframe to Sprint in the US (though it’s unclear how many of its downloads were free promos). 3 is also touting its strength in the British singles charts, saying it’s responsible for 3.7% of the country’s singles chart and 7.5% of the digital download chart. Keep in mind, though, that when Apple launched iTunes in Japan, it sold a million songs in four days.
I’m going to be a little more skeptical than the firm behind the report (surprising, I know), and venture that many of the current downloads can be chalked up to promo deals (Sprint gave its users 5 free downloads, for instance) and early adopters, and have come in spite of some drawbacks in the shape of high prices and problematic DRM. Both of these manifest themselves in limiting competition — so imagine what the growth could be like if they were sorted out.
There are signs things are beginning to change, though — for instance, Vodafone is now wholesaling GPRS access to music-store providers, letting them establish a fixed price for downloads, rather than “£1.50 plus traffic charges”. It still gives the operator a significant advantage, though, as eating the cost of providing the file to a user is far easier for them than for an outside supplier.
Pricing undoubtedly remains an issue, though, with operators’ services typically charging double the price of download stores like iTunes. Their argument is that there’s a premium in providing users the ability to download songs at any time from anywhere, and it’s an argument with which I still don’t really agree. But whatever the answer to that is, I think they’d be hard pressed to deny their services are much more attractive — and would gain far more users — at market pricing.
Update: The UK’s Official Charts Company says 7% of the music that accounts for the charts this year has been sold via mobile, about 70,000 tracks per week.
[tags]sprint, 3, hutchison, 3g, mobile music, vodafone, kddi, chaku uta[/tags]
I was listening to the great This Week in Tech PodCast and they came up with a fascinating little story about Yahoo! and Flickr.
Flickr now has 10 million members, all posting photos like crazy. Guess how many orders for prints etc they get every week? 100,000? 10,000? Actually, it’s 80.
To rub salt into the wound, it isn’t a cheap service to run, especially as it hogs bandwidth. For instance, many sites link to Flickr, like I have above. And guess what - it’s their bandwidth that’s being used, not ours.
It would be interesting to know how many $24.95 Pro accounts they have. But it seems overall, it’s a big loss maker.
Clearly, it wasn’t the worst deal of last year - how can you beat eBay’s purchase of Skype? But it doesn’t look like being great value, unless another business model emerges.
We had a great 3GSM Gathering Of The Mobilists, so we felt ready for a second one - this time at CTIA Wireless 2006, April 6 in Las Vegas.
Caroline Lewko from the Wireless Industry Partnership will be your mobilist host that evening. And many thanks also to Rudy De Waele for making this happen behind the scenes. We’ll miss you in Vegas, Rudy.
The Gathering will be well attended b Mobilists, such as me and Carlo, Oliver Starr from MobileCrunch, Justin Oberman from MoPocket, Rafe Blandford from All About Symbian and Dorrian Porter and last but not least, our only female Mobilist able to make it, Xen Dolev. Xen isn’t coming apparently. Plus we have lots of special guests in an explosive cocktail of experienced mobile value chain players, fresh mobile startups, venture capitalists, journalists, etc.
Here are the details of the event:
Piero’s Restaurant - Monkey Bar
Thursday, April 6, 2006
5:30pm - 7:30pm
355 Convention Center Drive - 3 blocks from the Convention Center
http://www.pieroscuisine.com/location.htm
Invitations are very limited due to the available bar space so don’t hesitate to confirm quickly. Just as for the Barcelona event, we will accept invitations on a first come, first served basis.
To apply for a ticket send an email explaining a bit about yourself and your business to Caroline Lewko - caroline(at)wipconnector(dot)com
This event is kindly sponsored by Wireless Industry Partnership and Gramercy Ventures.
NOTE: if you know about some good mobile conferences coming up, and/or you would like to organise a mobilist event yourself, please get in touch with Rudy for event co-ordination. rudy AT m-trends DOT org
In case you were wondering why mobile companies, particularly handset manufacturers are paying so much attention to emerging markets, from TeleGeography:
Warid signs up three million users in 300 days
Pakistan mobile operator Warid Telecom says it has signed up more than three million customers since launching in May 2005 and has revealed plans to invest USD1 billion in its network over the next fifteen months. In a statement Warid Telecom said it had invested USD450 million in the first phase of its network rollout, achieving coverage of 100 cities and their surrounding areas, up from 29 cities at launch.
And with the way the overall market in Pakistan is growing, those are likely new subscribers, for the most part, not churn from other operators. For comparison’s sake, it took about 18 months for 3 to reach 3 million users in its first four European markets (though they have a smaller population than Pakistan, to be fair).
Finnish operator Sonera today announced the launch of its mobile TV service, which streams content from a few channels over its 3G network to phones with Real Player. For €1.90 per day or €9.90 per month, users can watch “all the programmes of Nelonen as they are broadcast, all TV news broadcasts of YLE, news and current affairs programmes of MTV3 and all the programmes of The Voice
TV.”
10 euros a month for news from the country’s public broadcaster and one of its other channels and music videos is pretty steep, but “all the programmes of Nelonen” could be pretty interesting — Nelonen is one of Finland’s independent channels that has a lot of popular content like the UEFA Champions League as well as many shows from abroad. So does that “all the programmes” mean everything they show, or just shows they produce themselves? UEFA, for instance, tends to keep a pretty tight hold on its rights, and has an exclusive deal with Vodafone for mobile Champions League content (though it appears like live video coverage may not be included).
Who has to get the rights, anyway? Does the TV broadcaster need some additional rights before they give their content to the operator, or does the operator need to secure the rights? These are important questions — if a user thinks they’re getting more content than the broadcaster is actually providing, it could be pretty disastrous for sales.
This is particularly true in the case of live sports, which is one of the few areas in which the straight rebroadcasting of traditional TV to mobiles makes much sense. Video content like news and weather is largely commoditized — it doesn’t matter where it comes from as long as it’s providing the proper information. Entertainment content could be seen as a commodity as well. Maybe you want to see an Aqua Teen Hunger Force video, but if that’s not available and you can watch something else you’re into instead, like music videos, that typically works. But there’s no replacement for live sports content, and it could be a strong differentiator — and one of the few real selling points — of mobile TV.
How cool is this? Wikipedia has used MobHappy’s definition of MoSoSo, or Mobile Social Software.
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia and find myself using it more and more every day. So I’m really flattered to be quoted in it.
Thanks to who ever wrote the entry.
PayPal last week took the wraps off its initial mobile offering, and as I pointed out, it held few surprises beyond the fact that it ignored mobile content — when they was the very place many people felt it would attack first, and could affect the most change.
Today, MocoNews point out a study that predicts huge growth in the mobile content market through 2010. The wild prediction isn’t remarkable, but rather its sponsor — PayPal. A PayPal exec is quoted as saying, “As new wave services such as wirelessly-delivered music files, movie clips and mobile TV are delivered to handsets, the levels of spend are likely to be spurred once again. The challenge will be in creating payment mechanism that means businesses can monetise their content without being entirely beholden to the mobile networks.” As Mobile Europe says, he’s talking about PayPal.
So no huge news or anything, just affirming that it’s a matter of when, not if, PayPal launches its mobile content offering.
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