I’ve been in San Diego for Qualcomm’s BREW 2008 event, and yesterday in the expo, I saw some neat stuff from a company called GestureTek. It’s a company that’s been around for a while doing motion-sensing technology, and they’re putting it into mobile phones now. However, they use a handset’s camera instead of an accelerometer to detect movement, and it allows them to do some cool things. You can check out this video with my mad editing skills:
What’s cool is that they can use the video call camera, so on a flip phone, you can set the device down, as in the last part of the video, and interact with it. The demo shown is some sort of Japanese exercise app that tells you to do squats, and watches to make sure you do them. There are a lot of other games out in Japan that use this functionality, say for boxing or throwing darts. It’s a cool little tweak to motion-sensing.
Regular readers will know we don’t really talk about handsets much here on MH, except for the occasional shiny-object lust, but I wanted to point out this post I just saw over at IntoMobile about some forthcoming Motorola cameraphone. Moto has been working on devices with Kodak-branded cameras in an attempt to reinvigorate its ailing brand, and this is one with a 5-megapixel job in a slider form factor. But as the post’s author, Will, notes:
Much like the MotoZINE ZN5’s lack of 3G data connectivity, this new 5 megapixel Kodak cameraphone will be limited to WiFi and EDGE for all its data needs. Even worse, there’s no auto-focus on that badass shooter… No autofocus on what could have been an incredible 5-megapixel cameraphone. No 3G on a device that’s supposed to compete with the latest and greatest from the world’s top handset manufacturers. Fairly bland exterior styling.
I’ve given up on expecting anything great from Motorola in the short term. After all, when your bosses (at least the ones that haven’t already fled) are openly shopping your company around, I imagine it’s pretty hard to keep motivated. But damn, 5 megapixels without autofocus, why even bother? Why try to make a high-end device if you’re going to pull up way short? What’s the point? And more to the point, how’s it going to help the company?
Portio Reseach have just published a free downloadable PDF, which contains tons of market data on the state of mobile. It’s a taster for the whole report that they want you to buy (fair enough), but there’s loads of facts to get your mind around in the free version.
On this basis, penetration will be about 70% at the very start of the timeframe they were talking about - though not all these phones will be internet-connected at that point. So they’re certainly in the right ballpark. Having said that, right or wrong in terms of exact numbers, the point remains that the mobile and importantly, the mobile web, is going to be very important.
Another factoid of relevance to a recent post is about MMS, where I suggested that it was finally coming of age - to some scepticism in the comments. The report shows that MMS currently accounts for 14.4% of all data revenues or about $11 Billion, if I’m interpreting the data correctly, which by any standards is a nice market. OK it’s certainly dwarfed by voice revenues, but it’s a nice chunk of change if you don’t compare it too hard to where the real money is still generated.
But a final thought I had when reading about these humungously large numbers, was how very, very small mobile marketing is when compared to overall telecom revenues. By 2011, total worldwide mobile telecom revenues is expected to be $1,045 Billion. Estimates vary how much mobile advertising will be by then, but let’s take $10 Billion as a very rough estimate - to put this into perspective, digital advertising as a whole is currently worth $50 Billion and growing, so $10 billion for mobile in 3 years is likely to be generous.
So, even if all mobile advertising flows to mobile operators (which they won’t), it’ll only increase their revenues by a maximum of 1%. Which isn’t going to get much sustained senior management attention - it’s barely more than a rounding error in their financial results. Although interestingly enough, it still might be bigger than good old MMS, which has attracted a lot of investment too over the years.
Plus ca change….. it ain’t easy being a mobile operator trying to find growth opportunities in an era when margins are under pressure and many developed markets have maxed out subscriber bases. Perhaps Vodafone’s Arun Sarin was very wise to quit today - at the top. And maybe the rumours of a new career in private equity are true. After all, once you’ve done what he has, the world of the VC, arguably almost as tough as the mobile operator one, might seem to be altogether more attractive.
A new survey by Millward Brown, admittedly commissioned by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group themselves, has found that 85% of people are now aware of Bluetooth as a technology and an impressive 68% even recognising the Bluetooth logo itself.
This seems pretty high on first consideration. But the survey methodology was to poll 2,500 consumers in China, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, US and the UK “between the ages of 18 and 70 who make decisions within their household on mobile technology purchases”. So in that context, it seems more understandable ie take a bunch of advanced mobile cultures and markets and only question people who buy mobiles. In that way, the survey excludes those who would have no idea what Bluetooth was if it ambled over, introduced itself and tried to pair with them at a party.
However, even taking the favourable methodology into account, this is an impressive achievement, especially as Bluetooth is only just 10 years old.
While Bluetooth has its uncontroversial uses, such as pairing two devices together wirelessly, I’d hazard a guess that it is also responsible, more than any other single reason (well, perhaps with the exception of the subscription mis-selling scandals), for the current stagnation in mobile content. Bluetooth has enabled a whole generation of savvy kids to share content, quickly, easily and for free.
I’m surprised that mobile operators haven’t done more to repair this leak in the mobile content paddling pool. Although, just as with the record industry, a free download doesn’t automatically mean that it’s a lost purchase.
I meant to post about this last week, but a hectic schedule prevented me. So, sorry if you’ve read about it already.
The Churchill Club, is a prestigious Silicon Valley tech forum, well known (among other things) for its Annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate. This year, the panel consisted of VC luminaries Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee and Joe Schoendorf.
The Top Ten included no less than 4 mobile-specific ideas, which shows that Valley thinking is finally coming to focus on our industry. Which is probably good news - at least if you have an idea and are looking for funding right now. The iPhone is responsible for a lot of this new thinking, in my opinion, though I still believe that it’s destined to play the role of The Sex Pistols in music - they made a lot of noise and were hugely influential. But someone else made all the money.
You can read the whole list at Venture Beat, but the mobile ones were:
- The migration to smartphones will cause great disruption, especially for Motorola, Microsoft and probably LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. According to AdMob’s metrics, smartphones now account for just under 25% of the market. This figure will be ahead of the overall market share, as it’s made up of people who see mobile web advertising - in other words, power users of mobile - and is thus a good snap shot of where the future lies.
- 80% of the global population will carry a mobile internet device within 5 to 10 years. Hmmm….. I’m not so sure about this one. It seems a little ambitious. I think that about 20% of the global population live on less than $1 a day, which is one definition of extreme poverty, so this is basically saying that everyone else will have a connected phone. I guess that if the future holds increased prosperity for all, in combination with much lower prices for mobile phones, this is possible. But, I’d bet against this one.
- The mobile phone is your most important device. No arguments from me on that one. I’ve been saying this for years.
- Within five years everything that matters to you will be available on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. This is actually pretty similar to the previous one really and again, I’m not going to disagree.
No less than 4 out of the Top 10 are mobile specific, which is an interesting trend in its own right. But consider that 5 of the rest are not about computing technology at all (being concerned with things like healthcare, water and alternative energy) and perhaps we could identify a meta-trend here in that Venture Capital 1.0 and its focus on the PC is pretty much over. While I’m sure that millions of dollars will continue to be invested in PC-centric stuff in the coming years, it may well be that the golden years are in the past.
I’m behind on the blogging front this week - too much work and travel. But on Monday, I went to my third Mobile Monday in a month. This time I was playing at home, in Munich, which I co-founded.
This was really well-attended, with about 200 people, all turning out for the ever popular Demo Night, excellently organised and hosted by Christian Ehl and Harald Mueller. The format is a 5 minute Demo (that’ll be where we got the name from then) of the product or service. And strictly no PowerPoint.
There was a strong field from as far away as Spain and Finland, as well as some interesting location based social networking startups like BuddyCloud. There seem to be a lot of these emerging at the moment, so maybe the time is right for Location Based Social Networking (LBSN - you read it here first), although an ad-funded monetisation engine is quite a long way out, or certainly one that is capable of actually using much of the data these sorts of services generate.
The winner though (chosen by the highly scientific method of the loudest audience appluase) was Kooaba from Switzerland, which is a visual search engine. So you take a photo of an object with your phone, send it to a central server and it gets indentified. This can be done by an installed application or via MMS, so it’s going to have a challenge getting distributed, whichever methodology proves most successful.
However, assuming that this (very big) hurdle can be overcome, you could identify and order an album from its artwork, or a book from its cover. Or even take a photo of an interesting building and read what other people have to say about it, in a kind of real world Wikipedia.
It’s actually pretty clever and themes well with my concept of using the mobile as a virtual mouse to access digital content. I think that this area is going to be huge and very exciting for the company that gets it right. Good luck to Kooaba and I hope it’s them, but the key is going to be getting the client pre-installed on a large number of devices and then converting these mobile owners to actually start to using the service. Neither of these challenges is by any means trivial and I suspect the winner will be someone like Nokia or someone aligned closely with them.
As an aside, if you’re going to enter this kind of competition in the future, please think through what you’re going to say and practice, practice, practice until you choke on it. Too many companies let themselves down by an obvious lack of rehearsal. And some even finished earlier than the 5 minute time limit. If you can’t use one of the minutes alloted to you, out of the 5 available, maybe you don’t have much of a product or at best, you’re seriously underselling it.
Well done to all the competitors though and especially Kooaba. More details here if you want them.
MH pal Tomi Ahonen writes in to share a post about some very cool mobile marketing from Japan. Snack food maker Tohato launched a couple of spicy snacks called “Tyrant Habanero Burning Hell Hot” and “Satan Jorquia Bazooka Deadly Hot”, and to promote them, set up a mobile multiplayer online game.
Users bought a packet of snacks, then scanned the 2D barcode on the back with their mobile, and joined the Habanero Evil Army or the Satan Jorquia Evil Army (depending on which one they purchased). They could then recruit friends to join and get promoted in rank in their army. The armies then fought wars over 31 battlefields with excellent names like “Ouch, the City of Anal Torture” and “Shadap Bay”, and users got all sorts of SMS news alerts from “war reporters” to make the experience more immersive.
Wireless Watch Japan found a video about the campaign that gives some more info about it. Very cool stuff, and as Tomi wrote:
Now, I love this concept in a million different ways. Its clearly interactive and very viral. It is true engagement, in that the users had fun playing with the brand, their characters had shapes in the style of the death masks of the snack of choice, and they had to go and literally fight (and virtually even die) for their preferred brand. Talk about creating passion and involvement. It is clearly capitalizing on many of the the 7th Mass Media benefits, personal (my gaming character on my phone), permanently carried (alerts), always on (4 AM wars), user data (redeeming the 2D coupon) and social context (viral marketing).
Update: Nokia has apparently changed its mind and says it will allow users to transfer their games to their new devices. That’s nice of them, well done Nokia.
I do have to take issue with their statement, though
We have noticed a number of media stories about N-Gage game transfers and wanted to clarify the issue. Due to copy protection, N-Gage games, like most mobile games, are linked to one device. As the value of content increases, a robust copy protection mechanism is essential as it makes it possible for the games industry to invest in N-Gage content.
1 - how is the value of content increasing? or are they confusing value with price?
2 - copy protection doesn’t “make it possible” for game publishers to make games. Not hardly.
(end update, original story below:)
Nokia relaunched its N-Gage brand recently with a lot of fanfare, trying to move past the poisoned image of sidetalking and tacos and recast it as a fully clued-up, super-cool 21st-century online mobile gaming service. The new games are pretty cool (FIFA on my N82 is great IMO), and the online features of the N-Gage Arena are a nice touch as well.
So all’s well, right? Wrong.
All those great N-Gage games people are buying at 10 euros a pop are locked to a single device. Buy a bunch of games, then get a new phone? Get ready to shell out again. As the All About N-Gage crew points out, Nokia’s Music Store will let you move tracks you purchase from them to a new device — but not with N-Gage games. That seems pretty seriously misguided, especially considering heavy N-Gage users (aka Its Best Customers) are probably also the most likely to upgrade their handsets frequently.
The AAN crew also point out a couple of ways Nokia could get around this, which you’d imagine should be a little straightforward since it’s, you know, an online service and all. I’d add another: just don’t bother with the DRM, since it’s really not likely to do anything for the business in the long run. Furthermore, why are we still having to deal with crap like this? Check out this comment from back in 2005 by MH reader Ian Wood, bemoaning the fact that by extending his contract and upgrading his phone, he’d have to re-purchase all the content on his old phone he wanted to keep using.
The net result of that sort of thing, and this N-Gage stupidity? People will be discouraged from buying N-Gage content, and from upgrading their phone once they buy content. How does that help Nokia’s business?
Back in 2005, I met with some people from the Open Mobile Alliance and talked about DRM, and they really tried to push the message that DRM wasn’t about copy protection, it was about “enabling” new business models. The fact remains that the only business model DRM enables is forcing legitimate customers to pay for the same content over and over again.
So, great work, Nokia. I’d been thinking of buying the full version of FIFA on my N82 because the demo was so great — but now, not a chance. So while you’re sitting around justifying stupid copy protection and DRM schemes because of how much money you’ll “lose” to piracy, why not consider how much you’re losing because of your DRM?
U.S. purchases of new cellphones declined in the first quarter for the first time in several years, signaling that worries about an economic slowdown are hurting the handset market, according to two new studies.
The drop was concentrated among poorer customers using prepaid plans and among households earning $75,000 to $99,000 a year. The upper end of the cellphone market — phones featuring full keyboards for email and text messaging, and extra features for music downloads and video viewing — continued to see growth.
The dip doesn’t seem too surprising, given the belt-tightening that a lot of people are doing, along with the market continuing towards saturation (the WSJ says mobile penetration is at 83% in the US now). But check out what the story says about high-end devices and how their sales are up.
So, is it a tale of economic malaise, or are US consumers just tired of the crappy selection of handsets most operators here offer? The slowing economy is a convenient excuse for any business seeing slowing sales — but it’s also a smokescreen covering up plenty of other ills.
Mobile phone tracking technology is being put to good use watching how punters migrate around a shopping centre, thanks to gear from Portsmouth-based Path Technologies.
By installing receivers around a shopping centre the company can pick up communication between handsets and base stations, enabling them to track shoppers to within a metre or two - enough to spot the order in which shops are visited. Two UK shopping centres are already using the tech, with three more deploying in the next few months.
This information is used to work out if shoppers are dropping in to visit one particular store, or doing the rounds of 15 different shoe shops before going back to buy the first pair seen. Retailers will pay good money for this kind of data, but while existing solutions are based on counting heads or asking questions of a selected few, watching where the phones go is far more useful.
Now users are tracked anonymously, the company claims, because the only thing it can see is a Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity (TMSI), which is a dynamic address that changes when users reauthenticate with the network (ie shut their phone off and turn it back on). So perhaps it’s not too different than somebody watching a person on CCTV or simply following them around — but it still doesn’t seem likely to sit well with a lot of people.
MH pal Tomi Ahonen writes in to 
Wireless Watch Japan 
