Personally, I wouldn’t buy one, especially as, like many people who got bit by the shiny-shiny bug in the last month or so, I already have an iPhone. Obviously, I’d like to put it through its paces and will read reviews with interest, but that’s different from forking out the loot.
Will you be buying one soon? Please leave a comment and let us know.
Anybody remember a few years ago when Steve Jobs said that Apple wasn’t that enthusiastic about launching a handset because they’d have to sell it through US operators — which he referred to as “the four orifices”? Steve’s view that the operators made life difficult for innovators and stifled innovation weren’t too far off, but it must not have been a view he held too deeply, given the way Apple got into bed with AT&T and other operators around the globe to sell the iPhone, rather than selling it directly to users.
Others have claimed it before, but it would certainly appear that Apple’s transformation into an orifice of its own is complete, given the way it’s refused to allow a podcasting app to be distributed through the iPhone App Store. The app, called Podcaster, lets users stream, manage and download podcasts directly from their iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple says since the app “assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes,” and therefore it won’t be allowed in the App Store.
Of course, the iPhone and iPod Touch can’t access podcasts without syncing their device with their computer. Accessing podcasts over the air, wirelessly, would seem to be a pretty natural capability of the devices, but El Jobso and Co. have decided that users shouldn’t be able to do so. What’s the harm in selling this application that adds this nice bit of functionality for interested users? Particularly given that Apple doesn’t profit from distributing podcasts through iTunes, or from the sync-only model, why do they care?
“Think different,” etc etc etc. But when it comes to mobile, does Apple really think any differently than all the other operators and handset vendors and platform providers it and its overzealous army of supporters have so long derided?
Not exactly mobile-related, but this latest marketing campaign from Oasis and venerable British music mag NME is a pretty genius way to get people excited about the band’s upcoming record.
The band have teamed up with NME in a musical first, which will see the magazine release the sheet music and lyrics to three brand new album tracks – ‘Bag It Up’, ’The Turning’ and ‘(Get Off Your) High Horse Lady’ in an exclusive companion disc give-away.
Packaged as an official collectable item featuring a unique Big Brother Recordings catalogue number, the Oasis ‘NME Dig Out Your Soul Songbook’ will be free with NME’s September 17th issue and will also include a CD-Rom packed full of exclusive content and artwork.
The songbook will invite fans to play the as-yet unheard tracks themselves by filming their efforts and uploading them to a dedicated microsite housed at www.oasisinet.com/digoutyoursoulsongs. This radical move adds a new dimension to the ‘free music’ debate and encourages all you die hard fans out there to pick up your instruments!
The music’s also available on the Web. The site says people should upload their performances to YouTube, but I can’t figure out what the proper tag is (indeed, it seems the group’s trying to only make the content easily accessible through its own site, which would be my only criticism). In any case, clever.
MobHappy pals and leading Spanish (and Mexican) mobile player, MobileDreams Factory is looking for a Biz Dev Director to kick-start their new US operation in New York.
This is a very cool job as they’re really going places, having won loads of awards and are a real hotbed of creativity. Clients include as Coca-Cola, Diageo, Heineken, Vodafone, Nestle and Mercedes, which takes some beating.
Write to alberto AT mobiledreams DOT mobi for more details. I think it’s safe to say that agencies aren’t welcome at this point.
P2P SMS is clearly a huge market - nothing new there. According to Wikipedia, there were around 500 Billion sent worldwide back in 2004 and based on what’s happened in the UK since then, I think it’s reasonable to assume that today, it’s about 1,000 Billion.
The sheer numbers involved have got many companies (mainly operators and vendors) salivating about the potential for ad-funded P2P sms. The idea goes that if an advertisement were to be inserted into every sms sent, they’ll be as rich as a very rich thing on Planet Rich.
So I thought it would be worth exploring, as a concept to see if there’s any real market here.
The main issue is the business model itself. If operators suddenly started inserting ads, I think there would be a backlash from consumers, unless there was some kind of value exchange. In other words, the sms would need to be reduced in price - or even offered free. Let’s assume that an sms currently costs about US 10 cents to send - and I appreciate that this is a huge generalisation, but it’ll do as a round figure. In that case, to replace that revenue, the operator would have to charge $100 in advertising, for every 1,000 they send out.
I’m not sure how attractive such advertising would be to potential advertisers, but let’s assume for a moment that it will be no more or less attractive than say, mobile web advertising. Actually, I doubt it would be, but let’s leave that for the moment. I’d say a very good rate for mobile web ads would be $25 per 1,000 ads (CPM) served, so you can quickly see that in order to make the same money that they do today, they’d have to sell ads at 4 times the current prevalent rate. So free is hard to make work.
Don’t forget that all this does is actually replace one source of income for another - there’s no guarantee that sms is price sensitive and that a free or discounted rate would result in greater volumes and thus more advertising and in turn, incremental revenues. So what the operators would have to do would be to ditch a highly effective, proven and highly profitable model, for one that is unproven and pure speculation, as well as one with no incremental upside. Hmmm - this isn’t a likely scenario, wouldn’t you say?
There are other considerations around this whole area, such as how the user experience works, but they seem to be largely academic if the fundamental business model doesn’t make sense. There may also be other workable business models in the sms area, such as sponsorship of sms alerts, although I’d speculate that this sector will start to decline at some point.
Naturally, I may well be missing something with this brief analysis, so please shed light if there is light to be shed. But I would suggest that the people talking this up haven’t thought it through too much, having been blinded by the very big numbers at the top of the page. And big numbers don’t automatically lead to big incremental revenues. After all, there are apparently 17 quadrillion flies in this world - or roughly 17,000 times as many flies as sms sent, if my maths is right - so all we need to do is charge a cent for every one of them and hey - bingo! I wonder why no one thought of that before.
Services, services, services. Lots of handset vendors and operators have been talking about services, and how they’re key to the future. I’ve had a hard time buying into the talk too much, given the long and storied track record of big-name companies in the mobile industry rolling out dreadful applications and services. It’s hard to see this new generation of services having much success, either, unless some things really change.
I’m going to pick on Nokia a bit, if only because they’ve probably talked the loudest about becoming a services company and have launched several, well, useful examples. But they illustrate the biggest problem facing vendors and operators trying to launch services — yet again, they’re trying to pull users into walled, closed services, rather than going to where the users are, and enabling services for mobile.
For instance, check out Nokia’s recently launched Sync on Ovi. In short, it lets users of certain Nokia devices sync up their calendars and contacts to Ovi.com. That’s great — sort of. Anything that backs up users’ contacts so they’re saved in case of some problem, or for easy transfer to a new device, I’m all for that. But the problem is the only way to get contacts and calendar entries into the service is to enter them on the device or on the Ovi.com site. And the Ovi calendar and contacts app don’t hold a candle to the online services like Google Calendar that people are already using. So if you are an active Google Calendar user that wants to sync your calendar to your phone, you’re on your own. Unless you want to switch over to using the Ovi calendar app on the web. Somehow, I don’t see too many people doing that.
We’ve seen lots of attempts at social-networking services and IM apps that have fallen flat on their face because they’ve either been closed off in a stupid way (such as being limited to users of a particular operator or handset brand), or because they’ve been absolute crap. Since I’m picking on Nokia… check out Nokia Chat and the Nokia Email service beta. The former does some neat stuff — as long as you’ve got lots of friends with compatible S60 devices. The latter, at least for me, simply didn’t work at all.
So one isn’t much use, unless you’ve already got lots of friends with Nokia smartphones. The other (at least in my case) had a horrible user experience, and generated, if anything, some ill will towards the Nokia brand. Good outcome. I appreciate the Nokia Email beta a little bit, because it’s trying to improve the rather poor email app on my E71, and it’s an attempt to make my Gmail account more useful and better on my mobile device. But it didn’t work. Nokia Chat I can appreciate because it’s cool new tech — but unless it’s going to support those cool features on a wide range of devices, including non-Nokia ones, it’s pretty pointless for me.
So one service sucks, the other is so closed off it’s useless. That’s the recipe for failure.
Let’s jump back to the sync service. It would be great if it helped users get their existing calendar data onto their devices. Importing their Gcal info, or Ical feeds, or from Outlook. But instead, that option doesn’t exist. Use the Nokia service on the web, or find another solution. So what will most people end up doing?
Compare this to third-party solutions like, say, Zyb. It syncs and backs up contacts, much like the Ovi Sync service. But it lets users pull in contacts from a wide range of other apps and services. Or check out ShoZu for media sharing. It offers a great app for uploading media from phones, but it doesn’t try to force users to upload and share their media to some closed-off community. It supports a huge list of communities. It goes where the users are, it enables a better mobile experience for users with the services they’re already invested in. Trying to drive them from Flickr and YouTube and Moblog and Blogger to some substandard sharing service wouldn’t work. But ShoZu builds its brand by bringing a better experience to mobile users of those big communities. (Yes, I know that Nokia’s Share on Ovi supports uploading to Flickr and Vox… but it’s not added support beyond those two sites for quite some time now.)
So, to sum up, if you’re an operator or a handset vendor, don’t try to sell your users on some new social-networking site. Make it easier and better for them to access Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever social site they’re already invested in. Don’t try to sell them on some new IM service that’s closed off to most of their friends; make Skype or AIM or MSN work better on their handset.
By enabling better experiences with the services your customers already use, you’ll create a much more favorable impression of your brand than if you try and force them into closed and substandard services of your own.
First it was digital cameras, then watches, then as Russell predicted in April, GPS-enabled mobile handsets will this year outsell standalone GPS units.
Tesco has launched its new Talk Wifi service (via Pocket Picks), offering users of a few Nokia S60 devices a downloadable application that lets them make cheap calls over WiFi, to go alongside its low-cost MVNO and fixed VoIP services
It’s fairly similar to services like Truphone or Fring (indeed, I assume Tesco’s using a white-label implementation from one of these companies or their competitors). I’ve generally been pretty bearish on the short-term commercial prospects for services, for a number of reasons, but mainly, they require far too much effort on the part of users, both for discovery and installation and regular use. Part of that’s because, of course, handset vendors don’t want to make it too easy to access these services, lest they upset their operator customers. The applications are far from seamless, but they still require more user intervention than just hitting the call button — which is too big a hurdle for many people. And that’s assuming they’ve got a compatible handset, are aware of the application, and install it successfully.
Then there’s the little sticking point that they’ve got to be in range of an accessible Wi-Fi hotspot. That’s a lot of hurdles to overcome, despite the savings on offer, which means that only the most dedicated users will bother to use it. For most people, the transaction costs are too high, or put another way, it’s too much effort for too little savings.
But there’s a decent market niche who love this sort of thing, and for which time is no object when it comes to saving money. People in the UK in that niche are likely already using a dirt-cheap, no-frills MVNO, like Tesco Mobile, or using its cut-rate fixed VoIP, or other telecom services, giving the grocery giant a built-in and receptive audience at which to aim this service. For that reason, it’s easier for me to see something like Tesco’s mobile VoIP service take off, rather than one of the standalone players.
Truphone made an interesting acquisition a while back when they picked up Sim4Travel, an MVNO aimed at frequent international travelers looking to get around onerous roaming charges. The common thinking was that they’d eventually be able to integrate Truphone with the MVNO, offering a more seamless experience that routes every call over the cheapest route without user intervention. One would have to imagine this is on Tesco’s radar, too, and again, it’s already got a good-sized base of cost-conscious consumers to show this off to — and, of course, a huge brand and marketing reach with which to do so.
But to start making good on any of this promise, Tesco’s got to expand the availability of the service to more (and cheaper) handsets. For now, it’s only available on four Nokia S60 devices, the cheapest of which it sells for about £160.
I’ve been helping out Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership with its latest project, The WIP Wiki. It is, as you’d guess, a wiki site, that’s aimed at helping new mobile developers get started, and helping existing ones succeed in the market. It’s got company listings, useful for finding partners and vendors, listings of operator, handset vendor and other developer programs. It’s also got a section for user-contributed tips, where developers can share their knowledge and experience with each other.
If you’re just getting started in mobile development, or if you’re looking to connect with new partners and tools, be sure to check it out.
One of the myths about mobile is that people don’t like to download applications. So much so that many VCs have been turning away business plans for some time if they start with “We’re going to build a downloadable app…”
In fairness, these plans often then add “…and then all we need to do is get Nokia to install it on all their phones and we’ll all be rich.” This is Underpant Gnome* thinking and understandably gets dismissed pretty quickly.
However, things are not quite so black and white as this - they rarely are. Plenty of companies have been managing to persuade consumers to download applications - if the user clearly understood why they should be interested. So, games have enjoyed success and mobile IM has also been a big beneficiary for companies like Reporo, BluePulse and Mxit. Ringtones have worked pretty well too, although they’re not normally described as an app per se.
However, companies with less clear USPs have suffered, especially ones where you really have to experience it to understand that it’s great.
The success of Grand Master Jobs’s Apple Store has highlighted that there’s gold in those thar apps after all and suddenly apps businesses are credible and stand a very good chance of getting funding. This is only the beginning though, with apps store variants being launched by Google’s Android, as well as yesterday’s backdoor leakage ofMicrosoft’s Skymarket via a job spec.
Actually, considering Redmond’s experience in the PC environment and the fact they’ve been doing Windows Mobile for 8 years now, it’s quite surprising that they hadn’t done this before. But I guess if the Apple way was obvious, Symbian, Brew and JME would all have been long riding this bandwagon and supporting their developers with a better way to market.
That’s not all though. Even carriers are trying to get in on the act, with Sprint announcing in July that they were going down the same route. Expect to see similar announcements from others in due course.
And then there’s the dark horse in the race with GetJar, which is the incredibly popular independent download site for the mobile geek community and which quietly got funded by Accel Partners a few months back (Accel are also investors in AdMob, by the way). MocoNews had a very comprehensive interview with these guys last week, but they’ve had 300 million downloads since 2004 and are averaging out at 13 million a month. OK, unlike some other players in the market, GetJar’s downloads are free, but these are still big numbers, albeit tiny in comparison to the mobile web. Expect some of those new carrier portals to be powered by GetJar, according to MocoNews.
So now we can see the bandwagon, is it too late to jump on it, to paraphrase Lord Hanson?
Again, this isn’t a binary outcome and certainly for the developer community, they’ve never had it so good - up to a point. Getting your product to market looks easier for sure, but then as more developers come into the market, getting visibility is still going to be really hard. Fortunately, mobile web advertising can give great visibility, so it’s not all doom and gloom on this front, especially for AdMob
And while it’s true that the Apple apps store does sell applications (they sold $30 million in the first month) this is still a market that’s dominated by the F-word - FREE. Which probably means relying on an advertising model in some shape or form. And if you’re going down that route, I’d still suggest it’s better to look at a mobile web-based solution, as a generalisation. The mobile web has far greater numbers, is easier to develop for and iterate and consumers can figure out your proposition without the hassle of downloading something first.
Of course, I’d always advise players in this space to do both. Launch with a mobile web version, learn and iterate - and then launch via an application, or perhaps a series of applications, which will appeal to your power users, who will relish the additional functionality you can give them in an app.
I’m not suggesting that you can’t make money selling apps - the Apple stats show that it’s possible - but this is not the easy market that the current Gold Rush mentality might indicate. And let’s not forget, most people don’t ever make money in a Gold Rush apart from the companies that sell the miners the equipment in the first place.
* If you didn’t get the Underpant reference, or just want to enjoy the classic South Park scene, here you go
I’ve been helping out Caroline Lewko of the Wireless Industry Partnership with its latest project, 
