Mobile Multimedia

This is too good to miss.....the Register has the scoop on the PR cover-up once it became clear that O2 throttles most 3G users to 2.5G speeds.

We were expecting a call from O2, so when it came it was no surprise. But when the caller didn't respond to our repeated greeting we had little choice but to sit back and listen to what was being discussed. This, happily, turned out to be the best way in which to backtrack and rescind statements previously made about the issue in hand, and how best to characterise the Reg's readership.

The discussion, between two in-house PRs, centred around how to paint anyone wanting more bandwidth than the 128Kb/sec O2 deems suitable as clearly being "a bunch of techie nerds".

Of course, these are communications professionals, so they wisely discuss how to avoid using that term, or as they put it, find "...a good way of saying they're all geeks".

Yes, O2's comms team was keen to avoid anything that might encourage subscribers to leave the telco. Indeed, in their eyes, anyone threatening to leave the network is clearly a "muppet", with the PRs asking each other incredulously "...and join who? 3?"

Oooops.

Can't attest to the voracity of El Reg's report of course, but.......................

Still, as the iPhone doesn't yet have 3G I suppose thats not an issue then

From TechCrunch:

Loopt, a mobile social network that can be used to see where your friends are currently located, has partnered with Verizon to put its software on that carrier’s phones. It’s a big win for Loopt since Verizon has more location-aware handsets than any other carrier.

If you don’t know anyone who uses Loopt yet, that’s because the company is still working on getting its technology into more phones across more carriers. Loopt’s primary capability, which the company prefers to call “location sharing” (not user tracking), requires the ability to run location detection software, preferably in the background of a phone so it works while in your pocket. Since location detection is a privileged feature for most carriers, Loopt has needed to work with them one-by-one to reach their users.

Sadly, Location based services have been the Next Big Thing in mobile for as long as "Next Year will be the Year of Mobile Internet" has been around. And every year it moves to next year....so, what might make it this time round? It needs GPS handsets, which are more common - but still fairly rare, and it needs a use case - tracking is still tracking, and the reason these services have failed in the past is that in much (most?) customer research to date anyway, many people just do not want other people to have an expectation of knowing where they are at all times. (recalls total failure a few years ago of child tracking device, when parents realised it could be used for spouse tracking )

Also, consider the "good enoughs" - is it really critical that I do this on my mobile, rather than on a laptop via all those free web apps around - especially as the plan is to charge $4 a month for this single service, rather than on a per-use basis

So - good luck, but I suspect its a few years and iterations away - still, with $17m of VC funding in pocket, they can wait a few cycles out I assume

Smart move by Verizon though, however I would expect that their overall strategy will be to add ever more such applications onto their mobile ecosystem - its hard to tell which will stick, but being a broker never hurts. But $4 pm per service in my opinion won't work, a better model is $5 / mo for a range of user self-provisioned services - in my opinion, of course

Update - In the comments, Phil Bradley said it better than me:

Location is an auxiliary piece of data, not the justification for YASN!

ie its something I'd expect the Verizon ecosystem to expose for all apps to include / mash up - and I'd expect it to be opt-in to work!

We noted in October 2007 that Ofcom was considering use of mobiles on planes, now its given the thumbs up, says the BBC:

The use of mobiles on planes flying in European airspace has been given approval by UK regulator Ofcom.
It has issued plans that will allow airlines to offer mobile services on UK-registered aircraft.

The decision means that mobiles could be used once a plane has reached an altitude of 3,000m or more.

But airlines keen to offer the services must still satisfy other regulators about how the hardware will be used.

Heck - I want to know how the hardware will be used - I am filled with dread at the thought of sitting next to some Bizplonker who yaks at full volume for 2 hours in the air. You can see on trains that when this happens people around get more and more cross and frustrated, and the railways eventually created "quiet coaches" due to all the complaints.

What, one wonders, will the airlines do - they clearly want the loot from a (no doubt very premium) service, but I suspect it will really p*ss off a lot of their customers.

It's now official - the iPhone is open for business, says Gartner.

Now we knew this at least two weeks ago, because of our diligent and perceptive research - we read Apple's public announcement on the 6th March

Anyway, sez Gartner:

The iPhone will soon be tailored for enterprises. Gartner recommends "appliance-level" support status once firmware 2.0 and improvements are released. iPhone will become a popular tool alongside BlackBerry and Microsoft devices.

Now this will shock you....some of our clients were actually thinking of avoiding crackberry and going on to iPhone, and they had the temerity to do this before Gartner officially announced it was OK! In fact, we ourselves had the audacity to actually ask the London Mobile Monday group for opinions on Crackberry vs iPhone for business use earlier this week.

Comments included:

- Just hope his users are happy with the virtual keyboard. I've not heard
any positive comments about this. The odd text message whilst sitting
down isn't too bad - but typing longer emails whilst moving/bumping on a
train etc is going to be more annoying.

- Why not go for HTC? Notably the tytn2 with full keyboard,blackberry support is available and html email support as well? And considerably less expensive!

- I have a Blackberry from my employer and an iPhone of my own. I actually struggle with the Blackberry now. The keyboard is feels so “pointy” and the buttons seem very small. I really miss the iPhone’s predictive text, which is brilliant, and don’t get me started on the rest of the Blackberry UI/OS which is utter rubbish in comparison.

- What the iPhone will enable with the enterprise announcements, is for
people to wear two hats, consumer and business, which with almost all
other devices today, it's just not possible in as graceful and elegant
way.

- Well, consider that in the similar period of time that the iPhone had
been out (just a couple of weeks longer), and Apple had sold 4 million
iPhones - HTC sold 2 million of their newly released iPhone like Touch
devices. Considering the publicity of the iPhone, and the hype Apple
commands and their marketing budget - I think that's a very good for
HTC. In total they shipped 12 million handsets over the year, up 12%.

- Could try looking at a Nokia E90 also. Can download free from Nokia
the Blackberry Connect or MS ActiveSync software clients and the
keyboard is quite ok. Has wifi, gps, 3mp camera, good battery life,
etc, etc. I'm using one to write this just now in fact, and regularly use it in
"on the move" situations. I'm very happy with it anyway!

I note the Gartner report that tells you this is 5 pages for $95, and 2 weeks after the fact - it's interesting in a way that there is still a market for this, as a quick scan on Techmeme or a few of the blogs on the day would have told you all you needed to know. I suspect its the cachet of a "trusted source" that allows in-corporate staff to put such notes forward as evidence in their business cases.

Deal for MoMo-ers - next time we'll print up a 5 page report of people's comments and some analysis and flog it for $95 a shot, and the proceeds can sponsor a booze up at the next MoMo meeting

Update - judging by the 100% karma to date I can only assume its the MoMo-ers voting for beer

Update 2 - Apple 2.0 reminded me - Forrester still has to change its mind after panning the iPhone at 2007 year-end

According to Erisson, the WiFi hotspot is an endangered species, says InfoWorld:

As mobile broadband takes off, Wi-Fi hotspots will become as irrelevant as telephone booths, Ericsson Chief Marketing Officer Johan Bergendahl said Monday.

Mobile broadband is growing faster than mobile or fixed telephony ever did, Bergendahl said.

"In Austria they are saying that mobile broadband will pass fixed broadband this year. It's already growing faster, and in Sweden, the most popular phone is a USB modem," said Bergendahl, who was the keynote speaker at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm.

As more people start using mobile broadband, hot spots will no longer be needed. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," said Bergendahl.

A couple of factors will accelerate the move to mobile broadband. In countries such as Austria, Denmark, and Sweden, the average price for a mobile broadband subscription is only €20 ($31) per month, Bergendahl said.

Now hold it right there!

He's right if you compare commercial hotspot prices and don't look too closely at how much bandwidth you can buy with a mobile deal, they are usually capped quite low, whereas fixed line tends to be far better "as much as you can eat" deals for similar prices.

He also ignores the growth of free wifi, that is increasingly common in Europe as non-Starbucks places cotton on to the near-zero marginal cost of providing it (the US has been increasingly well supplied for awhile) as a customer attraction. It's not great but its growing.

And at home, how many computers can you hook off a broadband WiFi router? And at what marginal price?

Don't get me wrong - I have 3G and WiFi as a mobile webworker, but I only use 3G when there is no WiFi signal as 3G works out to be far more expenive on a per bit level, espacially if you exceed quota (and 3G also seems to struggle to upload large files)....and 3G coverage - even in a place like the UK - is not that much to shout about either, believe me.

And don't even begin to talk about roaming, which is the closest thing to legal extortion we see in the modern 1st world

Computerworld has a nice summary of the state of play in the mobile / PC connection market area. For starters:

The handset market is already crowded with far too many phones. If the PC makers are really serious about entering the cell phone market with distinctive products people might actually want, why not improve cell phone "awareness" of computers, and vice versa?

The best thing the PC makers could do is enter with a common operating system and UI - the fragmentation here makes the economics of developing anything except the most rudimentary of applications extremely poor as you wind up with a total fragmentation of tiny markets to support.

...it can be such a pain in the neck for our phones to interact with our PCs. Synchronization, file transfer and backup and other functions between devices isn't ready for prime time on most platforms, so most people just don't bother.

We work on documents, then go home and work on them some more. Why don't phones automatically carry the latest version and upload it to whichever PC we're using?

As someone who has tried to work on mobile devices (I was an early iPaQ adopter, my proudest moment was signing off a major bid document on it) all I can say is that sucks. Email (ie "short form text") is about the highest level of thing you can do easily on a small screen. The iPhone is nearly at a size to make basic e-reading possible, but to interact with any useful documents imho needs something like an EEE 9"screen at a minimum.

PCs would benefit greatly from awareness about the location of the user. Is she sitting in front of me? Is she out of the building? Imagine if your PC performed routine maintenance, or kicked into security mode when it knew you weren't around. Since we take them wherever we go, cell phones are ideal devices to inform our PCs whether we're in the room or not.

I think there are a large number of applications in this space, but we are faced yet again with the plethora of devices. What we need is to know at the OS and UI levels that the apps built will work on a large proportion of the real estate, or else it's just really R&D. The only thing I'd bother to write these sort of apps for right now is the iPhone, as it is more coherent across different operators' stacks (ie the operators aren't fiddling with its intenals to "add value")

Many phones can, and all phones should, serve as mobile broadband modems for laptops. Yet most users don't take advantage.

Right but (i) some phones do and some phones don't and (ii) there is often a pricing difference between data to a phone and data to a 3G card, that makes it worth having the 3G card with even a fairly low usage.

PC makers: If you're going to enter the cell phone business, what do you have to offer? Can you make a better phone than RIM or Nokia?

The iPhone has already shown that...the question is can you make a better phone than Apple

Why not drive innovation and standards in the industry to make RFID readers standard equipment on PCs, and RFID chips standard equipment in cell phones? Why not drive better wireless cell phone connectivity, applications that sync with cell phones and secure, user-updatable "personalities."

Ahhhh...m2m...the great hockey stick in many a mobile business plan - it will come...in fact its here already (see here), it's just just unevenly distributed....

The issue is no party is sufficiently motivated to sort out the holistic solution - handset makers, PC makers, operators are required to be part of it, but Planet Mobile is notoriously unco-operative with itself (witness the inability to get a common UI in all this time - imagine if the motor or PC industry had faffed around for so long) and this means that any single solution - with the possible exception of the iPhone - is just too subscale to be worth doing the work. Google's Android may be part of the solution, but as yet there is little beef there so its a commercial risk to develop too early.

So....PC guys - if you want to get into this market its simple - collaborate on the UI/OS like you do in the PC market and don't let the operators f*c.....alter the device config. Link in to Android or whoever so we have a good end to end platform ecosystem, present the data and metadata thats in the network at API level, but leave the apps building to the innovation cloud at the edges.

Tony Rose announced today that the iPlayer went Mobile:

Today was a big day for BBC iPlayer: it's the day that it first became available on a portable device. BBCiPlayer is now available on iPhone and iPod touch.

It was quite interesting how they did it:

we're not using the new Apple SDK, nor are we using the much-rumoured Flash for iPhone (no - we haven't seen it, either). Instead, we're creating 516Kbps streams (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio) that show off BBC programmes brilliantly on an iPhone.

I hope this stifles some of the "Microsoft pwns us" criticism the Beeb got.....but to me the most interesting observation was this:

We started with iPhone because it is the device most optimised for high quality video currently available. It displays the BBC iPlayer site and BBC programmes nicely. But - go on, speculate! - we're working on making BBCiPlayer available on many more browser-enabled devices over the coming months: stay tuned for details...

My kids' Nintendo DS's run Opera - any chance of that next ?

This post caught my eye while looking at Techmeme this am:

Pedestrians repeatedly thumbing their cell phones could be playing the latest mobile game, but it's just as likely they're microblogging addicts updating their Twitter accounts. Twitter's short-form service makes it ideal for two-sentence contributions from mobile phones, IM services, browsers, and desktop apps. Here are a few ultra-convenient third-party Twitter-updating apps.

The article goes on to do a good service to readers and list all the 3rd party apps that Twitterers can use to get their fix in our converged world, but the pedan...I mean analytical part of me got very grumpy at the "just as likely" bit above.

The total number of Twitterers is about 1 million globally, of which a (significant?) minority are on mobile phones - say 500,000.

The number of people with mobile phones is far far greater - in the US and EU combined (let us assume ALL Twitterers are in those areas) there are about 500m phones knocking about. Even assuming only 10% are playing games etc, thats still 50m.

Doing the maths, 500,000 / 50m = 1%

So in fact, the correct statement is that its c 1% likely that they are microblogging addicts.......

I feel better now

Very interesting post by uber-blogger Dean Bubbley, referring to another interesting post from Mobile Opportunity about the changes in the mobile industry that the Internet is forcing.

Readers of this blog will know that our view is that the Future of Mobile is no longer in the hands of the mobile industry per se (see these posts here, here and here) and these two posts push these thoughts another big step forward

Firstly, why the Mobile market is in trouble - we've mentioned before that the problem with mobile is the proliferation of Operating Systems and no standard device middleware (the motor car and aircraft industries took less time to decide how to lay out control systems than Planet Mobile, never mind the PC industry). Mobile oppotunity quotes from this post by ex-Palm guru Elia Freedman

From the technical perspective, there are a couple of big issues. One is the proliferation of operating systems. Back in the late 1990s there were two platforms we had to worry about, Pocket PC and Palm OS. Symbian was there too, but it was in Europe and few people here were paying attention. Now there are at least ten platforms. Microsoft alone has several -- two versions of Windows Mobile, Tablet PC, and so on. [Elia didn't mention it, but the fragmentation of Java makes this situation even worse.]

I call it three million platforms with a hundred users each (link).

The second technical issue is certification. The walls are being formed around devices in ways they never were before. Now I have to certify with both the OS and with each carrier, and it costs me thousands of dollars. So my costs are through the roof. On top of that, the adoption rate of mobile applications has gone down. So I have to pay more to sell less.

Then there's marketing. Here too there are two issues. The first is vertical marketing. Few mobile devices align with verticals, which makes it hard for a vertical application developer like us to partner with any particular device. For example, Palm even at its height had no more than 20% of real estate agents. To cover our development costs on 20% of target customer base, I had to charge more than the customers could pay. So I was forced to make my application work on more platforms, which pushed me back into the million platforms problem.

The other marketing problem is the disappearance of horizontal distribution. You used to have some resellers and free software sites on the web that promoted mobile shareware and commercial products at low or no charge. You could also work through the hardware vendors to get to customers. We were masters of this; at one point we were bundled on 85% of mobile computing devices. We had retail distribution too.

The other issue is the amount of fiddling that the average Mobile play expects the user to do, on what is fundamentally a hard-to-use UI. The points Dean makes especially stand out to me, as they resonate with some work we are doing at the moment:

In particular, the following use cases remain for native (or virtual machine) device applications:

- Pre-installed applications at the factory.
- Pre-installed applications by the operator or other service-provider (eg RIM)
- Pre-installed applications by the retailer or distributor
- Certain markets are a bit more application-savvy (eg the US, with its history of PDA users), although other markets still view installing (or even thinking about) handset software as a geek-only activity.
- Applications installed by enterprises for their end users
- Applications like VoIP that need access to underlyig device APIs and capabilities like codecs.
- Applications (maybe IMS apps) for which carriers are able to design & enforce a complex over-the-air automated download & install process. Likely to only work in situations where the user has a deeply-customised phone, rather than a 'vanilla' device.
- Games, and even then only by certain demographics.
- End-to-end services coupled to specific devices or a limited range, rather than generic handsets (eg BlackBerry, Amazon Kindle)

Bottom line - I totally agree with Michael that web-based applications are becoming much more important relative to "installed" mobile apps.

We've said this before, but I'll Mobile Opportunity guys say it again:

.... there is now an alternative platform for mobile developers. It's horribly flawed technically, not at all optimized for mobile usage, and in fact was designed for a completely different form of computing. It would be hard to create a computing architecture more inappropriate for use over a cellular data network. But it has a business model that sweeps away all of the barriers in the mobile market. Mobile developers are starting to switch to it, a trickle that is soon going to grow. And this time I think the flash flood will last.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about the Web. I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model.

Think about it: If you're creating a website, you don't have to get permission from a carrier. You don't have to get anything certified by anyone. You don't have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don't have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won't even be aware that you exist. It'll just be you and the user, communicating directly.

Until recently, a couple of barriers prevented this from working. The first was the absence of flat-rate data plans. They have been around for a while in the US, but in Europe they are only now appearing. Before flat-rate, users were very fearful of exploring the mobile web because they risked ending up with a thousand-Euro mobile bill. That fear is now receding. The second barrier was the extremely bad quality of mobile browsers. Many of them still stink, but the high quality of Apple's iPhone browser, coupled with Nokia's licensing of WebKit, points to a future in which most mobile browsers will be reasonably feature-complete. The market will force this -- mobile companies how have to ship a full browser in order to keep up with Apple, and operators have to give full access to it.

QED, as they say

Proof that hope springs eternal in the human breast, this article on Twitter being a spam free zone is yet another example of touchingly naive optimism (thanks for link via Howard Lindzon - via Twitter of course).

Sez Russel Beattie:

Think about any other online community system ever created - from Usenet to The WELL, IRC to Slashdot to Digg. All of them have had to deal with the core problem of idiots on the Internet. Slashdot's extended karma system, or IRCs multiple moderation commands, Digg's diggs, etc. are all about filtering out the assholes. It's a fact - anytime a virtual group gets to a certain size, the morons come and start doing their best to disrupt, defraud or degrade the audience.

Twitter, however, has almost a million members, a thriving community, lots of discussions and yet doesn't have spam or troll issues. If you step back for a second and think about it, that's pretty amazing.

The fascinating thing is timing - last night a few people were starting to talk about the rise of spam on Twitter. Right now we can see 3 types:

(i) "A List" Spam - some influential bloggers use Twitter as a broadcast system to blog (blag?) about every post, activity etc they are involved in. Much of this is purely an attempt to sell (flog) their wares.

(ii) "Z List" Spam - people who have such a high post rate that you just have to turn them off

(iii) And now, the rise of Twitter Spambots - this was what we were discussing last night, ie a number of people are seeing spambots (or spampeople - on Twitter its hard to tell) who tend to follow huge numbers of people but have no following themselves, and are probably scraping data all the while, and (the topic of conversation last night) some people are starting to see the first Spam swallows of a Spam summer.

Sadly, PR/marketing spam kills most of the things we love once it they get big enough to be worth going after, and Twitter's privacy controls etc are still so rudimentary (You have to turn off all @ comms for example), that it is fairly easily spammable - it just hasn't been worth doing it until recently, but now its getting big, spam will most surely come.