User Devices

Planet Mobile's strategic response to Google's Android initiative - from ReadWriteWeb:

Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source.

They had to - ever since Google announced Android, and Apple entered with iPhone, the clock was ticking on closed operating systems in the Tower of Babel that is Mobile OS. The economics of the industry requires a small number of coherent OS to develop applications on if it is to be viable vs the miniaturising PC's.

Plus of course, Google and Apple are not point players, they run ened to end Ecosystems, which double trumps a massively fractured point solution which is what the Planet Mobile OS game now is. RWW nails it here:

But at the same time, this could also be driven by Nokia wanting to have more control over both the hardware and software side of its business, similar to how Apple has created its own operating system for the iPhone.

Google, Nokia, Apple's hats are in the ring now. I wonder what Microsoft will do in this game, given that they are also swooping down from above with the new generation of small PC's. Prediction is risky, especially about the future, but an Open Source OS would not be an impossible dream, especially if it interworked closely with one's PC.

O2 is offering free iPhones for the more valuable consumer and business tariffs, coming July 11th. Going onto the O2 website its not clear if the tariffs there are the 3G ones - I suspect not, as we are told the 3G phone will be £100.

What is interesting though is that Free! has been dangled this time round, as (i) it gets more attention than naked bodies and (ii) O2 clearly learned from the last release that upfront costs cost them upfront sales.

Current Tariffs are:

Consumer PrePay

- 8 Gb phone free for £45/month tariff, 1200 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data, 18 month contract
- 16Gb phone free for £75/month tariff, 3000 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data, 18 month contract


Consumer PAYG

No details as yet


SO/HO Businesses

- 8GB phone free on the £28pm tariff, 500 mins, 50 texts, 24 months contract
- 16Gb phone free on the £84pm tariff, 2000 mins, 200 texts, 24 months contract

Now, if I had the time and inclination I could run some linear algorithms to triangulate the approximate real costs of minutes, sms's and phone costs to give an approximation of which deal is under or over mean, but I don't - and besides, I want a 3G iPhone anyway and they are bound to change - upwards

(Nope - downwards!! - See the update below)

Update - looks like TechCrunch UK has some scoop on this (thanks Ian Betteridge for heads up). As well as a good writeup on his own blog, Ian has commented below that:

Basically, there will be four tariffs: £30, £35, £45, and £75, and the price of the iPhone will go from free to £159 depending on tariff and iPhone model. That basically means you can get a 16GB iPhone for half the price of an old 16GB one, on a contract that actually costs you £5 less a month. Aggressive isn't the word for pricing like that...

All those tariffs including unlimited 3G data, although there's no details on talk minutes or texts. What's really interesting, though, is that they're bundling free WiFi access with not only The Cloud, but also BT Openzone.

Its very interesting that its being priced at Free! and lower ongoing tariffs - some serious learning from the first time round then, plus (I suspect) a major effort to take as many potential switchers as they can early before les autres can come up with alternatives. This I suspect is because:

- It is our view that the pent up demand for the 3G iPhone is quite high in the UK, so I expect this will could be quite a gamechanger in the UK market,
- In the UK an irrationally hypercompetitive market is locked at roughly equal share for the 4 major players plus "give it away" offset deals from 3 UK, Blyk etc. A tip here could send the market dynamics towards the far more stable "3 big guys plus the noise" structure, which means that the "Big 1 and 2" win handsomely, the others all lose.

Note though that Free! is a way of captivating otherwise rational thought, so students of our FreeConomic papers (start here) will realise that something is being given away for a free phone - usually your money in monthly wodges, (but apparently not in this case - we shall see) - and with pre-registering "interest" here the opportunity to give O2 some data about yourself, all so you can learn when you can have one - now there's an offer I can refuse !

....why, build a supercomputer of course. Those clever IBM people have built a record breaking one for Los Alamos military labs, it does 1 quadrillion flops - as seen in the NYT.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

Interesting comment :

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

In all seriousness, if one looks at processing speeds etc, just chaining 8 or so PS3s together would give the average home hobbyist the processing power of a small supercomputer of 10 years ago.

What, one wonders, can the average home do with even such a mini-supercomputer? Its quite interesting just to sit back and think about that sort of power if it were taken for granted that every home had it. Who needs a Grid? Actually, speaking of Grids, another supercomputer is growing organically via Folding@Home project - the Folding@home supercomputer currently operates at 1048 teraFLOPs, 772 teraFLOPS comes from the PlayStation 3.

Hmmm...can I fit 13,000 of the little buggers in the cellar ?

Article in the NYT re the inexorable rise of the eBook, Kindle style. Its worth linking to for this quote alone:

Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.

Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money — although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud.

I suspect we will find that The New Economy 2.0 will have its own share of stars of fraud and flop.

However, I do take issue with some other thoughts in the article. Firstly, this:

In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.”

Except that it is not a "free" transfer from goods to relationships - as we explained in our articles in FreeConomics Part I and Part II, if your free lunch is usually being paid for by offset funding, and / or by your data being chained up, there is a price to pay. What is often forgotten in the "rush to free" discussion is that by and large, if another piper is paying, they will want to call the tune at some point. That bit of the bargain is too often neglected by the Freeconomists - but not by Ms Dyson, I note .

Also, making money from T shirts as a famous band (with all that Big Label spend gone in already) like the Grateful Dead is one thing - being further down the Long Tail means its a lot tougher, and this has become clearer in the interim as the network power law has just allowed the rich to get richer.

The scary thing is I find myself arguing these economics with the NYT author who is none other than Paul Krugman. Hmmmm. Second thing I'd take issue with is this thought:

According to a report in The Times, the buzz at this year’s BookExpo America was all about electronic books. Now, e-books have been the coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time. (There’s an old Brazilian joke: “Brazil is the country of the future — and always will be.” E-books have been like that.) But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink.

That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months’ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle.

Not the bit about eBooks being the perpetual next year's technology (along with the mobile internet), but the bit about the Kindle replacing books. I don't buy it (literally).

We've done a lot of work on e-Readers in the last two years or so, and there are 2 things that they are still struggling with:

(i) The kindle generation is still too small creen and not natural light enough for most people to find reading an easy pleasure. A few road warriors reading papers they'd otherwise have to read on laptops yes, the mass market - unlikely yet according to our analysis. We need to await the next generation of displays

(ii) Price point - not just of the Kindle, but of total (legal) ownership. Despite the price cut, its still $359.00. And the reduction in price of the average books in eBook form is - according to the Amazon Kindle site for say Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" - a whopping great reduction apparently from S25.95 to $15.42 - except that elsewhere on the Amazon site the actual book is only $17.43 Hardcover. Somehow a $2.00 reduction for a zero dead tree edition does not seem to be that great a deal. I need a lot of those to (c 180 in fact) to justify the $360 outlay!

Unless you were thinking of going to BitTorrent for Clay's book, which we could not condone as that, after all, is Piracy. Or the inevitable future, as Esther Dyson would have it ?

Better get started printing those T Shirts, Clay