Mobile Web 2.0 & Multimedia

Our first iPhone Application is demonstrated tomorrow at Mashup's "Apps- Whats your Strategy" Event.

Its an application that lets you photograph documents with an iPhone, then tag and store them and share them on Google Docs. Why? Well, this takes you down an App strategy. We think that SOHO/SME will pay far more for useful applications than consumers will, and will pay on an ongoing basis for useful additions. So, on to (ta-dah)

The Portable Paperless Office

Whatever Happened To The Paperless Office, we hear you ask? It hasn't happened - its too big a task, and too difficult to integrate, too inconvenient and for the most part - outside of some parts of the corporate arena - forgotten

But imagine if we used a few of today's technologies and shrank it all - and made it mobile? We believe that today there are all the elements required for the truly effective and ubiquitous mobile paperless office:

- Phone replaces the scanner
- 3G allows fast transmission to cloud storage
- Paperless Office app supports really fast scanning, OCR and filing of a document on the iPhone
- Captured documents are stored locally and mirrored remotely

So we built an end to end delivery chain system to do just this. Come and see it tomorrow.

As you know, we are a consultancy and system design house, but most of our systems are embedded deep in other companies' stuff so never seen. This is one off our own bat, and we would be keen to talk to others who want to add functionality to it, or embed it in their systems.

(And yes, we have the scars from building Apps on iPhones, and integrating to the Google cloud, Don't let anyone tell you its easy - most of what we blog about has some basis in our real network design experience, hence some healthy Cloud scepticism in Broadsight Towers)

And yes, we will integrate it to the iPad, when the hype dies down After all, it has no camera - yet....

Last night's Mashup Mixer Event on Augmented Reality was a refreshing change on so many AR events right now - it was realistic about the industry! Speakers Nick Brown (ex Sky CTO) and Andrew Elia of Crossplatform discussed AR today and in the near future from the point of view of (brace yourself) making money.

Now AR has been around for at least 20 years, and MIT has been playing with mobile AR for at least 10 years. The current AR hype is because of the emergence of the first smartphones that are vaguely powerful enough to handle it. However, as the Crossplatform guys pointed out, the smartphone market of today is:

- Small (ie the value to advertisers is still relatively low)
- Fragmented (ie what works on one phone is expensive to make work on another)
- Non-standardised (high costs of building a service)
- Smartphones are powerful, but not that powerful

Standard story for mobile applications over the last 10 years, then. To these analyses we would add the following points:

- on-phone real estate is just not big enough yet for the "location based mass billboard Ads" envisaged by all the apostles.
- because of this, services will be "pull" services of "thin data", not push of volumes of commercial data

In other words, valuable niche services and games are more likely to be the ones that succeed in the early days.

The Crossplatform team believe that in the short term, Ad driven AR will mainly be driven by interactive and digital TV markets as they have the volumes and reach.

The rest of the talk was about how to design AR proposals for overall campaigns, and how to justify its business case. They ended with a plea for AR developers to think about performance metrics from the get go, or it will be very hard to get the services taken up by commercial entities.

(The Broadsight report on The Future of Augmented Reality will be available mid February)

Fascinating report set on the Future of Mobile from Morgan Stanley (hat tip Streetwise). The report comes in 3 bits:

1) “The Mobile Internet Report Setup” – a 92-slide presentation that excerpts highlights of the key themes from the report.

2) “The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes” – a 659-slide presentation that drills down on thoughts covered in “The Mobile Internet Report.”

3) “The Mobile Internet Report” – a 424 page report which explores 8 major themes in depth and includes the two aforementioned slide presentations + related overview text.

I've read the highlights so far, and will be going through the others in the next few days. Morgan Stanley summarise their key findings as below, my comments are in italics:

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter. (Standard new wave pattern described, but the greater wealth creation/destruction argument is harder to justify)

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years. (Decent devices (thanks to iPhone), lower cost of access and understood benefits make faster rampup a no brainer now - but the point made above still holds - are they as high value?)

Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices. (Social Networking is a current flavourite of the month - the killer app is always comms, insofar as Social Networks facilitate this they will succeed or fail. Twitter and the like are superb unified comms systems so play well to this)

Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented.(Facebook raises the bar? I'd argue Twitter is pushing Facebook and all the others at the moment. Facebook has the users but its still very clunky on mobile)

Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization. (People have tried to reproduce DoCoMo elsewhere before and failed, we've been watching it for 10 years and I can't see anything that's changed that recently. Industry structure in the West is different - see below - and does not play to a DoCoMo model, Apple ran an over the top model which is in our view the one to watch in US and Europe)

Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers. (Yes, but carriers still have the main power in the value chain in US and Europe - which is why DoCoMo has failed in the past. Some countries eg Scandinavians, France have moved to a more Japanese-like model of state defined market structure so may be easier to ))

Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile. (Yes, but....the mobile pipes fill up fast, and have nowhere near teh carrying capacity of fixed line backbones. But at least a service can get off the ground and the fixed line infrastructure can come later)

A fascinating report, with much to study. But, I have a standard policy with all forecats from Planet Mobile, which is to halve the early predictions - its worked well for 10 years so I see no reason not to do so here, yet

In eWeek:

Ahh, I love my modern digital lifestyle, especially when it comes to being out, whether traveling or just moving around the city. It's great that I can walk around with a music collection that dwarfs my old college record collection, that I can have several books in my pocket ready to read whenever I want and that I can snap a picture or video of anything I see.

So what am I doing? Am I walking around with an MP3 player, an ebook reader, a digital camera and a digital camcorder?

Nope, just one device, my Blackberry smartphone, which lets me listen to music, read books, take pictures and video and, oh yeah, make calls, play games, manage contacts, etc.

Or an iPhone, or any other of the emerging smartphones, really. And not just these devices - don'tknow about you, but I used my laptop a lot less once I had a 3G iPhone.

What's very interesting is that for the longest time (ie in the Days Before iPhone) the view was that consumers didn't want one device as a phone/music player/pocket calculator/etc whereas the above implies they do now. In fact there is a counter trend towards very simple phones, but if you look at where the money is - and where people with the money are going - it's towards the smartphone.

And if you take it to its logical extension as an augmented reality, multimedia playing, health monitoring, life managing device, M2M interface, and book - and then hit it with 5 cycles of Moore's Law (1/32 of size and price for same power) and make it wearable.......... well, check out the TED video above for where this can all go.

Pity for Planet Mobile that it took a hardware company to show us the way....

So, today we get the "leaked" first cut edition of Rdio's screens on ReadWriteWeb:

We've been lucky enough to get our hands on leaked screenshots from one version of Rdio, the forthcoming music app from Skype, KaZaA and Joost creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Zennstrom and Friis were the original financiers behind peer-to-peer file sharing site KaZaA, but Rdio won't be following a free-for-all sharing model. Instead, Rdio will be a subscription music site similar to Spotify.

And, surprise surprise, it is being beta tested by a small and select coterie of alpha-users:

Currently being tested by a very small number of people, Rdio is an on-demand streaming service where users pay per month for unlimited music and connect to share playlists and music reviews. The company plans on creating an additional revenue stream via 99 cent song downloads and $10 album downloads.

Same old same old PR hype approach, but what I find really, really interesting is why these guys - who are very smart fellows - are going into music now. Its massively competitive, other players exist with assets across the value chain (Apple for example) and by all accounts there is very little money in the game in these days.

Its also not clear to me that recruiting an all-star cast from the VoIP world for the new startup is the right plan - that's what they essentially did for Joost, and it flopped, and in my view one key reason was because the people at Joost - though very competent - did not really come out of the "DNA" of the emerging WebTV world.

Yes, KazaA was bred in the music world, but that was early 'Noughties and its a very different game now. After a good shot with KazaA and a home run with Skype, the boyz can absorb a few also rans very easily, but if Rdio flops as well will it be one too far?

Ah, the Serial Innovator's Dilemma.....

Anyway, that's the downside risk. The upside is that the online music industry, like social networking, is still in very early days and is iterating massively - new service darlings seem to emerge every 2 years or so (anyone remember when Last.fm was No. 1?) so a new, well founded (and no doubt funded) entrant has as good a chance as any (and better than many)

And on past history they will no doubt attract lots of desperate (perish the thought it may be dumb) investor money, which may be the whole point after all

An Article in GigaOm arguing that the iPhone is the Next e-Reader:

Yesterday at the urging of a friend, I ordered “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock on my iPod touch via the Amazon Kindle app. In doing so, I became one of many people who are helping the iPhone become more than just a phone. It’s latest role: e-reader....

Apparently this is because "Book-related apps saw an upsurge in launches in September, according to a survey conducted by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile application analytics company. So much so, that book-related applications overtook games in the App Store as a percentage of all released apps. The trend isn’t an aberration. In October, one out of every five new applications launching on the iPhone was a book, Flurry said". Furthermore:

The sharp rise in e-book activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the media and entertainment space. Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition.

As with all pronouncement from Planet Mobile, it is best to divide by 2 and only then take a long, hard, sceptical look. I have an iPhone. I read webpages on it, and that does (it is true) replace time reading books on shorter train journeys.

Now maybe its just me, but I find the ergonomics of reading long text on a c 2" x 3" screen quite hard (and I have very good eyesight, still). Twitter is ok, email is ok, and I can even read Powerpoint slides - in fact slides work quite well because the writing is big and they have pictures. So I'd make a guess that the books that will read well on iPhones will be books with big letters and pictures on them, like cartoons (or Graphic Novels if you are an adult) and kids books (rolling them together, I have a - timely - cartoon above by Dr Seuss, who was also a fairly satrical cartoonist in his youth), and of course Manga, which is read on mobiles in Japan.

But War and Peace? No way, unless, of course, it is in pictures.....actually, this means there may be a space for Classics Illustrated, a feature of my not entirely mis-spent youth

But realistically? I suspect e-Reading will be for devices with screens of at least double the length and breadth, and this will be a "good enough" for short form text for a short time, as it is with video.

Two years ago we were asked to help define the content management strategy and then help in the high level specification of the end to end delivery system for a fascinating product, which is now now nearing market launch - Plastic Logic's Que e-Reader.

So, thats the disclosure out the way (and no one handed us a press release today for what its worth, nor has anyone given us a Que to play with recently, and most certainly no one has paid us to say this) but what follows I would say anyway - ie we would queue for the Que.

This is mainly because it is based on next-generation technology, and offers a step change in user experience to the current end-of-3rd generation products. What this means is that the size of page, weight of device, brightness and contrast are significantly better than current offerings and give a near "order of magnitude" better experience overall.

Now clearly success in a market is more than just the device, and current players will respond, but the arrival of such 4th generation systems guarantees a step change in the market. (And the obvious risk for all players is an Apple entrant, complete with content-to-device integrated but proprietary supply chain - iBook, anyone?)

Also, if we were hypothesising about the future market, powerful e-Readers will enter into the competition for "final mobile multimedia end device" with netbooks, smartphones and next generation Tablets.

2010 should be an interesting time.....

Article in The Economist today on the trends in Smartphones:

Prices are now on a downward spiral, says Ben Wood of CCS Insight, a research firm. Several other handset-makers are already offering cheap smart-phone-like devices. Android allows cut-price Chinese firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market, which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software. Last month T-Mobile, a mobile operator, gave a taste of things to come. Its British subsidiary started selling the Pulse, an Android-powered smart-phone made by Huawei, for only £180. (The cheapest iPhone model sells for £340 in Britain if bought without a contract.)

If you take this trend and extrapolate according to Moore's Law, in about 9-10 years time (depending on your inflation assumptions) you get a sub £10 device that is as powerful as today's iPhone. (See chart above) What happens globally then, when the poorest of people can afford comms and computing like this. And what does £300 buy then - a 30x more powerful device at the same size, a device as powerful as today's at 1/30th the size. What opportunities does this drive? What happens as RFID prices lso fall and we can integrate to penny-price "Internet of Things" devices.

Answers are unclear, but one thing is for certain - as The Economist notes:

All this reflects a broader trend in the industry, where value is migrating from firms that run networks and make hardware to those that make software and offer services (see article).

Interesting times are set to continue for another 10 years at least.

If you study the world's major mobile markets, you will see that all have 2 or 3 major providers*, with a cadenced decrease in market share (leader, No 2 etc) which is the sign of a stable, mature market. All except the UK, which has 4 (5 if you count 3.....) - a sign of heatlthy competition in early stages, but ruinous irrationality 10 years down the line. Cometh the recession, cometh rational behaviour however - France Telecom's Orange and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile are merging assets in the UK, as the WSJ reports:

The joint venture would create a clear leader with a combined 30 million customers and about 38% of the market.

O2 and Vodafone Group PLC are currently Nos. 1 and 2, with 27.1% and 23.6% market share by customers, respectively, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

The deal is likely to be looked over by the U.K. Office of Fair Trade, which considers all combinations that would control more than 25% of a market, and possibly the European Commission.

We doubt the OFT will intervene as it can be shown the resultant market is "industry standard". This also puts 3 UK into play - with 7% market share it either claws a No. 2 place for Vodafone or cements O2 into No 2 play, so Hutchison Whampoa can at last get rid of the turke - sorry, valuable strategic asset - without losing face (we have heard many a rumour that 3 is up for sale, even thought it had gone once ). Given todays' trading conditions, we predict a sale within a year at longest.

Whether this is the start of the Mobile Industry Web 2.0 in all its glory is moot. That honour went to the iPhone, which has forced a different sort of rationality onto Planet Mobile...............

* In any one region - some countries have more providers but they tend to have regional fiefdoms.

There has been a brouhaha going on today, with allegations that SpinVox has been a bit economical with the truth about how it converts speech into text, and its not so much an algorithm system as Mechanical Turk (or in this case, South African or Phillippino), as its using South African and Phillippines call centres to transcribe messages. The BBC story says "claims to the BBC suggest that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines"

Not so, says SpinVox, its all in the technology:

Claims have been made to the BBC, suggesting that the majority of messages have been heard and transcribed by call centre staff in South Africa and the Philippines. These are incorrect.

SpinVox has delivered world-leading breakthroughs in speech recognition and related technologies, developed by its Cambridge–based Advanced Speech Group - a highly qualified team of speech scientists working together with the world’s leading speech academics. This team is considered to be one of the largest commercial speech R&D teams world-wide.

In the past two years, the Cambridge ASG team has applied the latest research to create state-of-the-art techniques that today deliver a system that outperforms any equivalent speech technologies on accuracy, speed, scale, reliability and language range.

Now I must admit I don't use SpinVox, but I have watched the speech to text industry over-promise and under-deliver for 20 years so I would treat the above claims of technology superiority with just a bit of scepticism (I just always assumed they had human intervention on top of the speech to text algorithms). Accents and fast talking usually send these systems into a tailspin. But, if their technology can really do what they claim (ie, the majority of messages are not interpreted by call centre staff*) it is an order of magnitude better than anything else on the market today, so I would be very excited.

Commercially this will be essential, simply because a heavily human based system is far less scalable so the company's growth potential and economic envelope is far more limited. Also, the human method has implications on data protection and privacy for countries where it has no call centre presence .

Best thing for them to do is a public demonstration to clear this up.

* Their blog post is very carefully worded, which makes me wonder.....