Back in 2006, I wrote a post called “The Death of Intel” as the chip maker announced the sell-off of its Marvell Technology Group (which made chips for mobiles) in order to focus on “chips for personal computers and servers amid stiffer competition”.
The reason for my dramatic headline was that if mobile is the future, Intel’s curious decision doomed them in the long term.
They are still hedging their bets on what exactly is a mobile device - they include notebooks - but it seems that Nokia, as an example, is certainly in their sites as a potential customer.
Also interesting is their investment alongside Yahoo!, HP and three universities in a cloud computing project. There was a time when doing something like that without Microsoft as a partner would have looked a little odd.
Beijing’s 70,000 taxis have had equipment installed in the run up to the Olympics, that enable the authorities to bug them, track them via GPS and disable them remotely. Apparently this is all in the name of driver safety, but then, that is the official line.
This kind of technology is often compared to Orwell’s 1984, but the reality is that we have far better technology in place than Orwell ever dreamed up. In Orwell’s landscape, it was possible to find private places that were unobserved, even though many of these actually proved not to be private at all. Such places are now rapidly disappearing, especially in urban areas, with the rise and rise of CCTV and other forms of security and monitoring.
China is an interesting case study for this kind of invasive technology. In democracies, we often believe the line that people, who do no wrong, have nothing to fear. While it’s possible that regime change would happen, it seems a pretty remote concept, even though I’m sure most Germans felt the same thing in the early 1930s. But imagine what Hitler and later, Stalin and his successors in East Germany, could have done if they could track every move their citizens made and every word they spoke, along with the ability to monitor patterns of words analysed by the powerful computing technology of today.
China, of course, is not a democracy and we don’t have to imagine regime change to understand that this kind of technology is potentially the most oppressive tool ever devised.
The sad thing for democratic society is that it’s politicians who are making the decisions to monitor the people (and often unaccountable private businesses) and there’s not even public debate, let alone any form of protest. I hope we don’t live to regret this. It’s like we’re standing mutely and happily by, watching our leaders build us our prisons of the future.
The ever informative eMarketer has an interesting stat based on Informa’s recent report on mobile data. The worldwide market for mobile data in Q1 of 2008 was about $50 billion.
What’s so interesting about that?
Well, it just happens that the worldwide digital media market is worth $50 Billion too, but that’s per year, not per quarter. So operators make four times as much from one part of their business (and not even the largest part) as the whole of the digital advertising market.
Obviously, if we used the part of the digital spend that actually relates to mobile, it would be dwarfed by data revenues alone.
When you look at it in this light, it makes you wonder if operators should really bother chasing any revenues from mobile advertising, as even great success will be lost in comparison to their core business. And it’s certainly not going to contribute to the industry problem of declining ARPU in any significant or meaningful way.
Young Carlo, my talented co-editor, is getting married in a few short weeks (August 8th), though it’s probably not too late to warn off Alex, his bride-to-be.
But failing that, if you fancy ganging together and buying him a fancy gift for all his hard (and unpaid) work he’s put into MobHappy over the years, please feel free to do so. Just send some cash to me via PayPal russell AT thebuckleys.net and I’ll do the rest. It doesn’t need to be very much to buy something very nice if lots of you chip in, so do it now, before you forget.
And if you really can’t afford it, just leave a nice comment below. We love to hear from you. Really.
Most of the press coverage of Microsoft recently has obviously been focused on their on-off pursuit of the coy Yahoo!. Followed by lots of analyses of what Redmond needs to do now to catch up in Search and Advertising.
Mr Ballmer has also spoken a lot about how they understand that software is moving to cloud based services and that they are responding to this too.
But, as readers of MobHappy will know, the cloud is only half the future.
The other half is that the mobile will become the most important digital device on a number of different levels; more people have web connected mobiles than connected PCs - and that’s already happened; outside N America and Europe, the PC itself is going to be either leapfrogged or annihilated, which will profoundly affect the way that digital data is consumed everywhere; and in the words of my ongoing mantra, the mobile will do to the PC, what the PC did to the mainframe*.
This means that mobile needs to be central to Microsoft’s strategy if they are to have a future and a lack of success in this area means that their current problems are going to seem trivial in comparison.
Which is why their current sales on Windows Mobile must be worrying them more that they’re letting on, with their recent admirably jaunty “What? Problem? Us?” press conference, where they admitted missing their target by 10%, or some 2 million units in real money. However you spin this - and they tried with this great quote “It sounds like a large number of units, but actually, it’s less than about a month’s worth of a run-rate.” - it’s bad news.
There is some comfort in the rising market share - currently at 13% of smartphones. But let’s just look at that. According to AdMob Metrics which measures consumption of mobile web pages in the wild, yes 13% of pages were viewed worldwide on Windows Mobile devices, out of a potential 3.5 Billion. But already iPhone has a 5% share and don’t forget these Metrics (and Windows Mobile results) were before iPhone 3G kicked in and before it was available in so many more territories, which surely must take a chunk out of the future sales. They’ll also have to contend with Symbian going open source (who already dominate the market with a 58% share based on these Metrics), the rise and rise of the Crackberry by the besuited amongst us and possibly the launch of Android, although I’m not sure how influential that’s going to be now.
It actually gets even bleaker than this. As I observed above, some of the great changes in mobile are going to be led by markets where the mobile is already, and will continue to be, the primary digital device. But outside the US, Windows Mobile is nothing. Look again at the Metrics and while Windows has a healthy slug of 27% of the US, in the other top markets for mobile web consumption, it’s insignificant, with the best success coming in the UK, where they have a measly 4% share**.
I don’t wish to add to their troubles and certainly take no pleasure in observing this. However, it’s far more important that Microsoft gets their mobile strategy sorted out than worrying about Search - as it’s no less than a matter of medium-to-long-term survival. I’d suggest that Windows Mobile probably isn’t going to be the answer and they need to think of a radical and brave new direction to assure their future in a world where the mobile is rampant.
* If you’re not a regular reader, please don’t bother to point out that the PC is irreplaceable for tasks like writing a document, preparing a presentation or editing video. If you dock your mobile into a monitor and keyboard combo (using today’s technology), you don’t need a PC.
** There may be other markets where Windows Mobile might be doing better and please let me know in a comment if you have access to knowledge that I don’t. But overall, I don’t think this is unrepresentative of the state Windows today.
Years ago, I read a scifi novel (can’t remember who by) where the author referred to an all-too-common crime inflicted on women. Saddo blokes would call them on video phones (while blocking their caller ID), with the camera focused on their genitalia and sort of gig about a little.
It actually sounds pretty harmless, albeit very irritating, if it happened to you a lot. But perhaps, on first consideration no more than say, a persistent window replacement sales person calling repeatedly.
I read this story this morning about a poor women who this is happening to now, in another case of scifi proving to be an accurate portrayal of the future. She’s been receiving pics of a penis sent anonymously to her phone. The thing is, her husband was killed about a month ago (in a completely unrelated traffic incident) and she understandably finds these photos really upsetting.
A Penectomy should put a stop the guy doing it, if that doesn’t sound too extreme. No, I don’t think it does, on reflection - you can’t waggle your bits if they’re not there anymore and perhaps we need some new creative solutions for new creative types of crime.
One of the Autumn events that I’m speaking at and is shaping up to be very interesting is Informa’s Mobile Web Europe. Lots of great speakers and officially a hot topic these days - at long last.
In fact, now that even mighty media organisations like the BBC (”Boom Times Ahead for the Mobile Web”) are starting to cover it more seriously, I think we’re going to see a frenzy of coverage like we saw back in 1995/6 for the PC web. It’s been a bit of a puzzle for me in the last few years that usage of the mobile web is higher than the PC web back in those days and yet the media has been curiously silent on the subject.
However, once the media weighs in, we’re going to see explosive growth. It’s already growing at 100% year on year according to some recent tracking we did at AdMob, but there’s plenty of potential yet.
One of the ways to get mobile is to set up a .mobi site and as part of the conference, The .mobi Advisory Group are sponsoring the ILovetheMobileWeb Awards, which will showcase the very best .mobi mobile websites. So if you have a whizzy, wonderful or wacky .mobi site, get entering (free) before 22nd August.
You might find this previous post useful, where we looked at 10 Rules for Mobile Website Creation.
You’ve probably seen us talk about Alfie Dennen and all the cool stuff he and his team have done at moblog:tech before, but he never fails to turn up with cool new things. His latest trick is a brand new platform that’s powering their moblog community. You can check it out in action at Leave No Trace, a moblog put up by Greenpeace, Oxfam and WaterAid about the recent Glastonbury festival.
You can also see it in action at We Love Your Accent, a cool site that shows off one of the new features — integration with the Spinvox service. People in the UK can call in and leave a voice message about their favorite British accent. Spinvox converts it to text and makes a new blog post that also contains the audio file. The best caller will win a free Nokia N82 (my current mobile of choice ) and a year’s subscription to Moblog and Spinvox, along with some Moo cards.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this new release: the ability to users to put their moblog on their own URL (such as Alfie’s at moblog.4lfie.com; easy changes to the styles of both web and mobile sites; support for audio and video, which get displayed in inline Flash; SEO enhancements and plenty more.
A big part of the new platform is the support for group moblogs, as used on the Leave No Trace site. It uses SMS/MMS keywords — so anybody can set up a group, grab a keyword, and start their own campaign. Lots of possibilities there, both for brands and individual users.
So much good stuff here on top of what I’ve mentioned: GPS support, Twitter autoping — and there’s an API coming so people will be able to build their own apps and services on top of the platform. Be sure to go on over to moblog.net and see what Alfie and company have knocked up.
However, if Italians feel that their local food retailer is charging unreasonable prices, they can now call on a new service to help them haggle or walk away. Thanks to a short message service (SMS) text system set up jointly by the Italian agriculture ministry and consumer associations, shoppers can check the average price of different foods in northern, central and southern Italy.
Users fire off a message to the SMS Consumatori service, and they get a response showing the average consumer prices in different parts of Italy, as well as wholesale prices.
Interesting — another example of mobiles being used to spread information so markets function more efficiently. We’ve seen several examples of this in Africa, where farmers and fishermen use mobiles to check on market prices and get other information. Reuters is testing a similar mobile market information service in India.
I’m not sure how directly this Italian service will benefit consumers, though it could help keep produce sellers in local markets from over-inflating prices. But I’m interested to see these sorts of services that provide consumers with more information, in particular, about their food, flourish. There have been several services in Japan that use QR codes to provide information on provenance of different food items — something that could become popular given peoples’ concerns over contaminated or GM food, and their desire to eat more organics or humanely raised meat.
I was out in San Diego a while back for Qualcomm’s annual BREW confab. It’s pretty easy to think of Qualcomm as this monolithic and slightly nasty company that does little more than bully its way to profits with patents and intellectual property and some chips, and is only interested in things that lead to more CDMA device sales so it can grab more royalties. That may or may not be the case, but I do think there’s some pretty interesting stuff coming out of the company’s Internet Services unit that’s not solely CDMA-centric and is genuinely cool.
One thing that caught my eye is the Plaza widget technology it announced. On the face of it, Plaza is YAMWP — yet another mobile widget platform. But this is one that definitely bears watching for several reasons, but one of them being Qualcomm wants operators involved. That’s likely to cause some kickback right away, because for many people, operators have a reverse Midas touch. But it’s important to remember that they still play a huge role as gatekeepers to the mass market, and their support of one widget platform over another, and the ability to give it a prominent place on the devices they sell, give them a lot of power as kingmakers.
Plaza is not a BREW-specific solution, it’ll be available across multiple platforms, and the QIS exec I talked to about it went to lengths to stress that Plaza and BREW are separate, but complementary technologies. That said, it’s easy to see how some of the lessons and strengths of BREW could be rolled into Plaza and strengthen it. For instance, BREW offers a pretty solid end-to-end application discovery and download solution. It’s completely closed, yes, but it’s probably about the closest thing out there to the iPhone App Store (which, of course, is closed too).
The BREW marketplace is really good at monetization, especially from the operator perspective. So it’s easy to see how Qualcomm could put some similar stuff into Plaza, and create this widget environment that operators would love, charging users for each widget and all the content coming through them. But, they don’t want to. They get that for widgets to take off, they can’t work that way. They see the monetization for the operator coming indirectly, and forsee the widgets themselves being free to download. That said, if an operator wanted to offer their own widgets as gateways to pay services alongside the Plaza gallery of free widgets, that’s an option. But Qualcomm sees Plaza as primarily being a tool for operators to improve the user experience, increase takeup of data services, and reduce churn.
I think the parts of BREW that Qualcomm hopes will most show through in Plaza are the relative ease of the developer experience and its appeal to operators. By embracing operators and making them part of the value chain, Qualcomm can steal a lead over other mobile widget platforms.
) and a year’s subscription to Moblog and Spinvox, along with some Moo cards.
