Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

Jan Chipchase on: Smart People, Dumb People

Posted on by charlie

Jan is an amazingly observant guy. Nokia is lucky to have him.

You just have to read his website, where he regularly posts about his many trips and user studies all around the world. Lately, he has been focusing a lot on developing markets, which suits me just fine.

In this article, he brings up the concept of ‘utility maximization’ in relation to the cell phone world – that fixed-line infrastructure still has relevance where it is significantly cheaper than mobile phone service.

Link: Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect: Smart People, Dumb People.

Whilst the mobile phone offers the key benefits of personal, convenient, synchronous and asynchronous communication people often opt to use and will go out of their way to use public infrastructure because its simply cheaper.

Reflections

Places I’ve been in 2005

Posted on by charlie

Inspired by David (link below), here’s my list.

Places I’ve slept in* that I can remember or publicly admit to. These are not in chronological order. And I’ve marked the places I have jogged in, too:

  • Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (yeah! and we hardly slept that night)
  • Espoo, Finland (jogged, marathoned, half-marathoned) – this is where I live
  • São Paulo, Brasil
  • New York City, NY
  • San Francisco, CA (jogged)
  • San José, CA (jogged)
  • White Plains, NY
  • West Hartford, CT (jogged)
  • Cambridge/Boston, MA – slept in, ugh, Burlington
  • Paris, France (jogged)
  • Berlin, Germany (jogged)
  • Munich, Germany (jogged)
  • Madrid, Spain
  • London, England (jogged)
  • Wolfsburg, Germany (jogged)
  • Hannover, Germany
  • Stockholm, Sweden (actually slept on the cruise ship in transit)
  • Euro Disney, France
  • Bäsholm (an island off of Porvoo), Finland

I have no idea if I got them all, but that’s a lot of traveling. And you shoulda seen last year.

*As opposed to visiting for the day or passing through

Link: hello, typepad: Places I Went in 2005.

Strategy

This is Mobility on: Google Personal Mobile – Close the Loop Already!

Posted on by charlie

MoMo Mike points out one deficiency in another interesting Google mobile service – poor integration to existing mobile services.

To me, that’s the piece I see missing in the things Yahoo and Google have been releasing. The products still seem to be point solutions for existing properties, not integrated extensions of multiple properties. For example, the Yahoo!Go mobile client doesn’t link with Flickr. Or, as Mike points out, the Google Personal mobile interface or the Google Local Mobile doesn’t integrate with Dodgeball.

I have no doubt that integration will come,. But how and when? Also, why aren’t these new things already coming integrated?

Integration can be messy, but if done right, can be the much better than the various services individually.

Link: This is Mobility – Close the Loop Already!.

A lot of folks have been talking about the mobile version of the Google personalized homepage recently, and of course I’ve given it a try. But just like the Google Local for Mobile release before it, it’s missing the one set of data that would really drive me to put some use behind it: Dodgeball.

Announcements/The Narrative

TechCrunch on: A New Blog is Born – MobileCrunch

Posted on by charlie

I had been on the look out for this. A new mobile blog has been announced (thanks Tommi).

Mike Arrington of Techcrunch has extended his brand (maybe with my goading?) to the new Mobilecrunch. Does that make Mike Captain Crunch? Had to say it.

The lead mobilecruncher is Oliver Starr who recently left his gig at Mobile Weblog and, in addition to Mobilecrunch, has popped up at MobHappy. Doin’ fine, Oliver.

Link: TechCrunch – A New Blog is Born – MobileCrunch.

I am very pleased to announce a new TechCrunch Network blog – MobileCrunch. MobileCrunch is being written by long-time “mobile” blogger and entrepreneur, Oliver Starr. Oliver just left his current blog, the very popular The Mobile Technology Weblog, to join me.

Strategy/The Narrative

Russ on: Browsing as the mobile data killer app

Posted on by charlie

In ‘Browsing: The Mobile Data Killer App’, Russ reports on a presentation from Nokia on smartphone usage data.

The key takeaway for me was that browsing is the number one (by far)
mobile application that uses data, and interestingly, carrier decks
only account for 50% of the traffic. That’s great! That means people
are actually going outside the gardens and hitting other sites.

I have been following Nokia’s studies of smartphone users since the study started (I was on the Series 60 team back then). There was a lot of interesting usage patterns coming out of it, most of it positive, such as this browsing data point (BTW, correct me if I’m wrong, the packet based messaging in the figure does not include SMS, which is not packet, right?). Basically, smartphone users use a lot of stuff in addition to voice.*

Russ says also:

I think this trend is only going to continue as mobile browsers get
better, screens get higher resolution, and network speeds get faster. … Lots of people have even used their mobile browser to
access their email via a webmail account. That’s very cool – and points
to the idea that people continue to fall into similar patterns. They
*could* set up their phone to access email directly, but they’re most
likely used to getting their mail via a web interface.

This smartphone data is indeed a suggestion of where this is all heading. I think smartphones will eventually be the basic phones of the future and I do think we will see an upsurge in data usage just due to that alone (I don’t think it’s just a power user thing).

On the flip side, I think we already have enough capability in the phones to have compelling browsing-based services on regular phones. I am one of those who has stopped using my phone’s email client. I use Gmail for personal mail and we use Nokia one for our internal browser-based email interface.

And further:

I personally think there is a massive vacuum right now in mobile-focused web sites. The numbers are clearly showing there’s a growing trend for people to access sites remotely, sites need to really get up to speed in making their existing content more mobile friendly, and to do something innovative and compelling for those mobile browser users who may have different use cases for the information they’re trying to retrieve.

Oy! Oy! A bunch of us have been saying this for some time now, including Russ. The market is ripe for the picking and those of us who know how to integrate the Web with mobiles will be having a fun year. Oy! Oy!

*Incidentally, I have also seen complementary data suggesting that data service users in general are high users of all data services, so this smartphone thing could get even bigger than these results suggest.

Strategy

How to evangelize a product

Posted on by charlie

From my favorite marketing guru.

Link: Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: Guy’s Golden Touch.

Bookmark this: The key to evangelism is a great product. It is easy, almost unavoidable, to catalyze evangelism for a great product. It is hard, almost impossible, to catalyze evangelism for crap. (Evangelism, after all, comes from the Greek word for “bringing the good news,” not “the crappy news.”)

I must believe in what I do. Otherwise, it’s not genuine enthusiasm. And to really believe, the product must be insanely great.

Innovation/Long Now/Strategy/The Narrative

Third thought for the day (way off topic): Are electronics a passing fad?

Posted on by charlie

I was listening to Danny Hillis’ talk for the Long Now Foundation, a foundation he created along with Stewart Brand and Brian Eno and other really interesting people.

If you don’t know anything about the Long Now Foundation, then go now, then come back (listen to all the seminars!). In brief (ugh, won’t they hate that), the Long Now Foundation is trying to get folks to think long term, not 10 years or 100 years, but 10,000 years.

Back to Danny.

Danny is building a clock to keep time for 10,000 years and, in wondering how to build it, thought that there might be a chance that electronics might be a passing fad and that in 10,000 years, there might not be any more electronics.

Kinda funny thought. It got me thinking about non-electronics and how electronics have affected what we have created in the last 250 years (mind you electronics did not exist 250 years ago, and weren’t ubiquitous until the last 100). Of course, being the biologist geek that I used to be, I started envisioning bio-based tools of the 31-century.

Fun stuff.

Richard (whom I mentioned previously) and I were joined at lunch yesterday by Janne and, since Richard and Janne and I were having great brain waves, out of the blue I mentioned what Danny thought. We had a good run with that thought.

Janne then pointed out something that just might bring down electronics – the production of electronics has a heavy impact on the environment.

Whoa.

Think of that. We are so on a trend of proliferation of electronic devices and nano-gizmos (Can you say Ubiquitous Computing? No, didn’t think so.). Think of all that solder, precious metals, plastic, energy, chemicals, and so on that will be need to make all that stuff.

Whoa.

Might that bring about the end of electronics as we know it? Might that liberate us to think of new types of tools that are not constrained as electronic devices are?*

*Hmm, so. Not necessarily the third business thought of the day, since this is way long-term. But, I have dabbled with writing a book** based on these ideas (long now trends, non-electronics, long now clock), most likely fiction. The Long Now seminars are very inspiring. Any publishers interested? Anyone? Anyone?

**BTW, I am a published author and have a book and an anthology I have never published. I ain’t no newbie to writing. Ja?

Strategy

Another thought for the day: MVNOs for aging Boomers

Posted on by charlie

There’s a new guy here, Richard, who has a telecoms background (incidentally, heavy on the SMS side, so I picked his brain there, too – thanks Richard!). We had a wonderful day yesterday talking for hours on various things related to what we are working on and other tangential and parallel and absolutely unrelated things, such that the ideas will be spilling over into here over the next few weeks.

One things were were talking about was MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operators). I was lamenting that everyone, including the MVNOs, were targeting teens and young adults. We then were discussing how baby boomers are joining the seniors, how they have a ton more money to blow than teens, and how they are more into spending the money now than save for very old age.

Hullo! Isn’t that a market waiting to be exploited?

But, instead, device manufacturers want to make stupid devices for stupid people and label it ‘senior’ and service providers are chasing teen booty.

Richard then pointed out Saga, which is this big service provider for the over 50 crowd. They have a magazine, deal with insurance and travel, radio stations, and other neat things.

D’oh. Perfect brand to have an MVNO for seniors.

Think of it: Good devices (I have ideas here). Customer support to help get over the initial technological hump (boy do I have anecdotes there). Simple plans for humans to understand and that fit the senior lifestyle. Access to relevant mobile content and communities.*

Ah, that’s something.

Maybe the AARP could also get into it.

*Hmm, second business idea of the day. Interested? Anyone? Anyone?

Strategy

Thought for today: Ads inside an SMS

Posted on by charlie

I had a nice lunch with two friends who are really into SMS – both have built or run services using SMS, one in marketing and one as a corporate messaging tool.

Our discussion wandered over to the thought of subsidizing SMS sending by attaching little ads to the SMS, kinda like what a lot of the free email accounts do.

How would recipients feel receiving an ad that they didn’t ask for? And in the US, how would they feel paying to receive one? Are there legal issue, as well?

OK, we’ve been trained by the free email accounts, but those ads are not hogging space, the PC screen is large. On a mobile, it’s a bit different.

Also, the person sending the message is not seeing the ad and the person receiving it didn’t ask for it.

Oh, I could see this working within a community, such as a Web-based community, or within an operator – ‘Join and send free SMSs to other members’. I think that works, but requires a mass of folks.*

Does anyone know of services that tag on an advertisement to an SMS such that the recipient is the one who sees it?

Inquiring minds want to know (and I think Pondering Primates might know the answer).

*Hmm, is that a business? Any one want to send me money to start it up? I have target markets here just waiting to do this. 🙂

The Narrative

The Shostek Group on: The Personal Internet Will Subsume Mobile Internet Assumptions

Posted on by charlie

Stephen Johnston pointed me to this interesting summary of a report we are all now trying to get our hands on.

It starts off with a redefinition of the mobile Internet as the ‘Personal Internet’.

The Mobile Internet is becoming a misnomer — a thing of the past —
according to a new study by The Shosteck Group. The telecom analysts
are predicting the emergence of the Personal Internet, which they say
represents a new paradigm, a new opportunity and a new competitive
playing field. The Personal Internet will require a fundamental shift
in the attitudes of mobile operators and in key technologies.

Do you think ‘Personal Internet’ will stick? I would rather drop ‘Mobile Internet’ and just call it the Internet. Maybe they mean that the Personal Internet is just the Internet in the Web 2.0 (2.x, 5.x, cough) way – available from any device, mobile or fixed.

But there are other gems in the summary:

In this new paradigm, users will have greater control over their
ability to access, store and interact with content, devices and
services. This will be facilitated by the availability of new service
capabilities, including the Personal Service Portal. The Personal
Service Portal will provide a variety of services which have three key
attributes:

  • On-demand: combination of storage on local device or the network as well as broadcast capability
  • Relevant: right time, right place, right price
  • Interactive: a more engaging and immersive experience

Personal Service Portal? Hah! I’ve been jonesing to do stuff around personal mobile portals. The space is pretty much wide open. The only real Personal Portal I like is WINKsite. Google has parts of it, but it’s not integrated. Yahoo has had something along these lines for ever (including Yahoo!Go for Series 60 as sort of Service Portal), so see them as a major leader in this space. Microsoft (tip from Mike) is rapidly doing stuff in this space (it’s one of my blind spots). Others just have one piece or the other of the whole concept.

And I personally think that the barriers to entry in this space are actually small, the problem being just getting to it, since this will be driven from the Web side, not the telco side, and Web-heads have enough on their plate already. The Web heads have the user base and the content.

And here’s a good one:


Shosteck analysts say that operators must accept that the premium for
mobility is significantly lower than they believe it is today even
though few alternatives will compete on a like for like basis with
mobile networks for many years, if at all. The mobility premium is not
yet dead, but it will come under increasingly heavy attack. It will
come under attack in both the voice and data worlds.

And then later:


The Shosteck Group 140-page study, "The Portal Wars: Where Next for the
Mobile Internet? The Emergence of the Personal Internet.", raises and
answers two key overriding questions: In this “War of the Worlds,” will
players outside of the mobile industry offer such fierce competition
that the mobile industry will be reduced to, at best, marginal
profitability? Alternatively, is the market so large that these new
entrants offer opportunities for partnerships and alliances that will
increase profits for all?

Basically, the operators have much to gain here if they would just let go of outmoded 20th century telco thinking and foster growth and competition of services on their networks. The past few years are proof that they can’t do it alone, nor that their model is better than the openness of the Internet. Heck, I want the operators to win and stay healthy. But, it requires new thinking.

Here’s the link to the report review again.

Link: The Personal Internet Will Subsume Mobile Internet Assumptions, Says Shosteck Group | Tekrati Research News.