broadstuff

So.....apparently us Eurogeeks will get the Apple iPhone on Monday, without the queues*, courtesy of a 3 way deal with Voda, Carphone WareHouse and T-Mobile.

This is all good news, but looking at the excitement one has to wonder what have the traditional mobile handset providers been doing, apart from sitting on their ars...I mean handsets

I mean the Apple iPhone is cool, but it ain't really rocket science - its just giving people a lot of what they have been asking for for years, and we always knew it could be built.

A salutary cull of multimedia pointyhead bosses at said legacy phonemakers may be required to focus concentration a bit there, methinks.......its not as if notice was not served...

Anyway, the mobile operators are falling over themselves in a bidding war not seen since 3G licences, as this is a one off chance to recruit a large tranche of new customers and maybe reset the game in the curiously equilateral UK market. Whether they can afford it what with the payments to Apple reputedly going round remains to be seen of course

And it looks like were getting the 3G version, not the naff 2G version them Yanks are queueing up for....

The iPhone requires a high speed Internet connection to function properly, both because of its excellent Internet browsing capacity, and also because of its requirement for high quality video, which limits the appeal of the US version.

Our advice..same as with any new IT product...wait a bit, let the bugs get ironed out first.

* and probably without the phones...seems like its more an announcement of future intentions

So...Nick Carr writes in the Grauniad:

In the past, software companies only had to concern themselves with writing code, copying their programs on to discs and selling them. It was up to the buyers of the software to maintain the computers, storage drives and all the other hardware needed to run the programs.

But the spread of the broadband internet, with its enormous capacity for transmitting data, is changing the way we think about and use software. We're not installing as many programs on our own computers as we used to. Instead, we're tapping into programs that are delivered through our web browsers. Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, Yahoo! Mail, Google Spreadsheets - those are just a few examples of the popular software programs that run mainly in distant data centres, on computers owned or leased by software companies.

Hmmmm...memories are short...anyone remember those Web 1.0 darlings Exodus Communications, or that Level 3, Qwest, UTC* and all were building datacentres, till there was a total glut of People Pimping Port, Power and Ping....and they all went bust.

But as we know, the 'Net never went away, even though a lot of the datacentres did....what would be interesting is to know if the total square feet running today is greater than the total square footage actually built out by 2002.

This trend, which started in the home, is now moving into businesses. Instead of installing pricey and finicky software on their own computers, companies are beginning to rent programs over the net for a monthly fee. Even sophisticated applications for maintaining customer accounts, tracking finances, managing workers and performing other complicated tasks are now being offered as web services. The burden of running software is shifting from the buyer to the seller.

With respect (I really enjoy reading Nick's stuff), but I think this is a slightly different issue to the datacentre argument...this is about what the datacentres are running today, which is more SOAS rather than a "Read/Write Web" as before, than it is about datacentres.

We tried to do this level of application hosting in the early 'noughties - anyone recall the ASP's - but it was damn hard then (we Had it Tough and the dial up connection made it largely a waste of time anyway.

Nick also writes:

Up till now, software businesses have had the luxury of not having to worry about the big investments in physical capital that have always characterised their industrial-age counterparts. But that's changing. The software business is coming down to earth.

Ummm...the whole point of the rise of the datacentre industry was to remove this problem from Web software companies. It is odd that Google etc still DiY this, I'd assume - now that the industry is coming back - that outsourcing ones' tins is going to become the standard again

So...in summary, I think Nick's hypothesis of a "big switch" tipping point - though more dramatic and no doubt great for book sales - is not quite correct...it's just that we had a little Data Business Dark Age so it looks like all this is new, but in fact its been quietly growing all the time.

*UTC = Uncle Tom Cobley and all....

Google is no longer the coolest place to work....

Hate to say "we predicted this" - but we did....last year in October after the GooTube Gambit - we wrote:

This is their Netscape Moment, when it becomes clear they are not really in the vanguard for the next wave.

Heres why:

(i) They clearly no longer “get it” - they have developed N new businesses in the past few years , few of which have really taken off, while all around them a new wave of creativity has started apace.

(ii) I don’t know how much was spent on Google Video, but even with all their king’s horses and men, they couldn’t get it together and a bunch of guys came from nowhere and stole the show.

(iii) They have already IPO’d and it is now (very) clear that the cool stuff (and increasingly the wealth) is being created elsewhere - how to retain the creative talent will be an increasing issue…

(iv) …especially as the thundering herd of the rest of VC community now tries to back every Bubble 2.0 company going. A million flowers will bloom, many will wither but some will flourish…

(v) …and Google can’t buy them all. Its share of mind and money must be diluted.

Hm.....probably a bit harsh re "not getting it"...thats not quite true, it becomes harder to "implement it" - its more that its just harder as previous Googletoes have to be stepped on to make new things happen

And actually Google probably could afford to buy all of them, but it seems they prefer to see a Darwinian competition in the moshpit, and the buy the survivors.

..Wonder if we will see not so much serial entrepreneurs as serial Google employees

And this is not about those a**holes who talk loudly in trains all trip (am I the only one who dreads mobiles being allowed on aircraft)? No, I was reading this in the Guardian this evening, as one does......

One of the many anomalies of the mobile music market is that, while a full track bought directly from a network will cost between £1 and £1.50, a 20- second snippet from the same original can be priced at up to three times as much. Globally, this has created a multi-billion-pound business.

Never mind that, the song you bought for £1.50 (twice the UK price of iTunes) will - if bought off portal - set you back a few more quid just for the pleasure of downloading at a speed 1/10th of most broadband internet connections, which are near-free. To continue with the Grauniad...

"With nobody able to explain convincingly just why consumers continue to pay a premium for a novelty product, the ringtone industry is something of a gravity-defying act anyway. One analyst goes so far as to describe ringtones as "digital jewellery", with most concluding that their value is a combination of personalisation and convenience."

I've struggled for years to understand how these markets ever started, never mind how they kept going for so long, so it comes as no great surprise that:

"I think the ringtone business is in peril now because the operators have allowed into the market mobile phones which can sideload MP3s and use them as ringtones," says Andrew Bud, executive chairman of mBlox and vice-chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum.

And yet....

But a BPI press release earlier this month quotes research by Informa Telecoms & Media that the western European realtone market is set to increase this year by 56%.

And there is the next conundrum - what makes normally sane and cynical hard maths quant jocks go all dewy eyed and mushy brained when it comes to mobile projections? As one person said at Essential Web 07 yesterday, every year it will be Mobile's Year - next year. (Or in the case of these guys, every year to 2015).

In fact the last session there got me thinking about all this (again).....in essence it was the obligatory "mobile internet" session that is always politely tacked on to internet events, except this time it was without the usual kicking of operators - not because they are now loved, you understand - but because a lot of the discussion, and quite a few of the startups, were about by-passing "Olde Mobile".

Prediction is hard of course, especially about the future, and even more about the mobile future...to quote:

Nobody within the mobile business anticipated the demand for either ringtones or text messages in the first place, indicating the market's unpredictability, says Music Ally's Steve Mayall. And since the industry is rife with unrealistic predictions and hype, that makes it incredibly difficult to assess.

Nope, its easy to assess...just divide by the first number you thought of

However, I was left for the first time with a grassroots feeling, an impression, that people can sense a new world is emerging (and in fact a large number are queueing up for it....).

Or are they just more of the idiots

The iPhone is a part of it..in that it signals serious players from other industries have spotted the gap in the mobile industry and are prepared to go for it. Its also partly because wifi et al has finally made it practical to grab the 2/3 of calls we make from fixed locations, partly because of the side loading capability (and just extra processing oomph of the newer phones) make it easier to get useful apps and content onto phones at reasonable rates...and partly because the pricing strategies of the operators have provided so many arbitrage - and in many cases otherwise unworkable (imho) - activities for mobile data startups worthwhile.

ps I hear you can buy 2 iPhones...anybody want to get me one

Was at the Libraries House Essential Web 07 event today, which is essentially a stand-up and sing routine for emerging European Web 2.0 companies (though with the number of South African accents there I wondered if London had become Jo'Burg North* for a while

Will comment in more detail on the presentations and companies in a later post, there was quite a lot of interesting stuff (both said and more often implied), but the day job now needs doing......still, it was good to put names to blog-faces not met before such as Nicole Simon and Paul Walsh

There were also some great soundbites, which I must note down before I forget 'em, such as:

- "The history of the (IT) industry is about the law of conservation of attractive profits" (showing that the money leaking out of one pocket arrived in another)

- "Get very scared when the companies are full of young MBA's" (I dutifully got scared a few times)

- "What would Google do if they were your mobile 'phone Company"

- "Don't patent it if you can't defend it" (I tried that one on one of the VC's I was chatting to, got one of those patient smiles

- "just build a better service than the pirates" (how to win in media)

- "The Year of the Mobile Internet is always Next Year"

Also, there was a screened interview with Tim O'Reilly done in snippets over the day, and even though it seemed fashionable among some of the participants to refer to him "ironically", damn me if the man didn't talk more sense than quite a bit of the stuff I heard today.

I noted down some goodies:

- Its not about content anymore, its about intelligence

- The future is mobile - but not yet

- Open has trumped closed networks every time so far

The other observation - from an old lag - is that there was definitely a 1997 feel, though the semantics have shifted - "traction" is the new "eyeballs" for example.

Sadly had to miss the session on funding the Euro Startup, as there was some stuff on SeedCamp - which seems like it resembles the BBC Innovation Lab format, a very necessary thing - though its only for young entrepreneurs apparently (hmmmm...isn't that potentially discriminatory practice these days ?)

A very interesting day - more anon......

* without the prawns.....

......is because Pandora is off air today in protest against the rise in US tariffs ....so, no music in da house. Its back to Radio 4 then......

Last.fm is not going silent, but is that because they, as they say on their website, do not want to burden us with their woes, or because, as some wags have suggested, they are now owned by CBS?

July 15th is the official Day the Music Dies

So bye, bye Miss American Pie......?

The report that Friendster's traffic has rocketed by 40% last month is interesting, but not half so interesting as why or where.

Growth has been predominantly in Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines etc where they have tie in deals with local players and advertise widely in-country. (No doubt at far lower cost of customer capture than in the west)

Why is this interesting?

Well, its where the people are.

The population of the USA/Canada is about 6% of global population, Western Europe + OECD bumps it up to around 15%....but there are a lot of people coming on to the internet in Asia especially - its not just China and India that have large populations.

And given that - currently - sustainable social network monetisation seems largely to be a chimera (apart from persuading large corporations to hand over the lolly that is), you may as well go for eyeballs (sorry, traction - eyeballs is too Web 1.0) until something turns up - quantity has a quality all of its own.

Now, many of those people in developing contries are also using the net heavily from mobile devices, so one imagines that the first major fixed/mobile - or even mobile only - social nets will really take root here...and mobile means ARPU.

Friendster have also learned - belatedly - to use the same tricks as the others to enhance traffic without actually having more users:

....Friendster is driving page views in other ways. Just as on Facebook, when your friends change their status, such as add a friend, that information gets updated on your profile. The system also defaults to sending you an email with those changes weekly — prompting you to click through to Friendster, and creating still more page views. It has added a classmate function, to track people you may have gone to school with. It has added a classifieds section. When you sign up with Friendster, it will prompt you to add your contacts from your address books, and tell you who is not already in Friendster and prompt you to invite them. This, of course, drives still more page views as those friends click into to see your invite. And yet, while many of these features drive up page views, and may seem artificial, they have become pretty standard at other sites.

(That "single network" thing in Facebook irks hugely by the way!)

Ah...the dark arts of Social Engine Optimisation ....

Caveat Investor !

(As an aside, mobile - because of the limited screen - tends to get more hits per content unit than fixed line, so there's another traffic enhancing trick to consider, apart from paying Chinese Social Miners that is)

You can't make this stuff up...not only do social networks have the dream dynamics of teens, sex and pervs, rock n roll - and sockpuppets of course - we now have...a class and a race issue too......

Danah Boyd has studied Facebook and MySpace over the last six months, and come to the astounding conclusion that Facebook is full of college kids and MySpace is....not.

Now who would have thought that; considering Facebook started off as a network for college kids and only really opened its doors to les autres not much more than 6 months ago, whereas MySpace was colonised at least 2 years ago by all those school kids who like music, friends and garish virtual bedroom walls - in other words, normal teens - in their thousands?

Apparently not any more, MySpace is now the haven for the "bad kids", the dispossessed, the underclass......to quote:

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Quite....

So, where have all the good teens gone? Gone to Facebook, every one apparently:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

And what of all those ordinary teens who are not preppies and not the underclass.....is there a virtual home for them - is Bebo their promised cyberland, or maybe even Friendster?

(Actually, from my empirical observation Facebook is mainly being colonised by the Linked In Meedja crowd anyways....)

Of course, there is a possible alternative explanation - ie that MySpace has allowed itself to become overcommercialised, bought by Big Meedja, is full of PR and marketing pervs, has had 2 years of Socnet bad rap in the mainstream media, and that its now soooo 2006 and all the people are going off to the new, bright, shiny one over yonder (with a design format that is the direct antithesis of MySpace - for now, anyway)....and you still see mainly college kids on Facebook 'cos it was all college kids a few months ago?

Read the article, it is thought provoking albeit it would be more interesting to see where they stand a year from now...drawing these conclusions from studying Facebook just after it opened its college doors is a bit too early methinks.

On the subject of design formats, AOL has redesigned its format to be cleaner, more in line with the simple lines of blogs - like broadstuff - and facebook. Could this move from MySpace thus be more something like a change in group taste than teen turbulence per se ?

So...six months after the last Flackstorm, another one erupts as A-List bloggers pimp product for filthy lucre without telling anyone...

Was quite disappointed that Om Malik and Paul Kedrosky got seduced by it, hopefully it remains a one night stand....

Fred Wilson, who last week accused all us Web 1.0 old farts of not getting the "NewNet", sees nothing wrong with it....

...could it be that's because the old farts "get" a few other things, like the longer term importance of integrity ?

Or is it just that old Green (sorry, blue) monster of jealousy 'cos no-ones's giving us any money?

Surely not

(Well, not for $559 - the alleged payola - anyway)

Apparently with this ...er....campaign we are witnessing the joyous birth of Conversational Marketing...

Welcome to the birth of conversational marketing.

It’s making people like you and me, who came from the world of traditional newspapers, have to learn about three-way conversations. We have already witnessed the evolution of the two-way conversation among authors and readers that is replacing old-fashioned one-way journalism. Even our old employers (yours at the Financial Times, mine at The New York Times) are now actively bringing their readers into two-way conversations.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Re figuring out how to do it...the only newborn kid on the block here seems to be the above author - apart from speaking to Edelman, a bit of historical research would not go amiss - the Acer Ferrari lesson of 6 months ago was...Disclose...but not everyone seems to like that part of The Conversation

Its just another example of Ecclesiastes Law.....

Postscript....in a follow up article there is a poll, asking "Should bloggers adhere to a strict line between advertising and editorial?". When I took it the results were:

Yes, it's vital 77.8%
No, it's a spurious distinction 14.3%
The gray area is where the action is 7.9%

...has yet again Frozen us out....no pings registered in 3 days, lost the new links we know are coming through, killing the old ones we have. What is up - or down - with Technorati these days? This is the third freeze in as many months, they usually last about 2 weeks.

It claims to know "all the known things in the universe" about us.

Hah!