Archive for January, 2008
by Paul Ruppert
January 30, 2008 at 10:21 pm · Filed under iPhone
As is usually the case with prognostications, it is more than likely that you’ll get something wrong. But rare is the case that within a few days, your glaring lack of vision or apparent knowledge and judgement becomes so apparent as it has with my predictions for 2008.
Item 5 from my 2008 predictons January 8 post was “Apple will launch the iPhone with China Mobile in China by June 2008 in anticipation of the Beijing Olympics. By the EO 2008, they will sell over 500,000 units in China alone.”
Well early last week reports leaked out that China Mobile had walked away from talks with Apple over a revenue scheme Apple was demanding of CMCC–as they did with ATT–for a piece of the airtime revenue from calls.
Thus submarining Item 5 from my 08 predictions.
But, Apple’s stumbling with China Mobile provides BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) the opening to crack the Chinese market at the expense of the iPhone! Reports in Chinese newspapers suggest that the BlackBerry will go on sale in the region before the end of February. This follows years of effort by RIM to launch into the only Asian market it has yet to crack. RIM hinted at a deal with the Chinese firm as far back in July 2007.
However, the BlackBerry debut does not guarantee success for RIM, as China Unicom’s rival RedBerry handset sells for less in China. Perhaps I should have inserted Blackberry for iPhone.
If you’re interested in more on the China Mobile Apple iPhone drama, my friend Christine Li at the China Business Network has an excellent podcast (click here) with China FMCG market expert, Shaun Rein, illuminating the perils of working with Chinese companies, in particular Apple’s efforts with China mobile over the iPhone.
Ah well, can’t get them all right. I’ll keep track on the rest and will hope for the best.
by Russell Shaw
January 29, 2008 at 7:35 pm · Filed under SMS
In what has got to be one of the more clever undertakings I have heard about in quite the long while, blogger “Sam” of the website a gthing science project has figured out the actual cost of an SMS text message.
Although I have a hunch Sam had about two too many cups of coffee and too much time on his hands when he jumped into this undertaking,
Sam writes in part that:
A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data - this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message. This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values instead of the normal 256. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.
So our total message length is about a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the iPod generation would understand - if you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th of a song on it. I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1 song = 4 Megabytes.
If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20 (the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7 bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the 1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte.
Then Sam adds that if the cost of transferring a song to your iPod using the SMS transfer rates he figured out were actually in practice, it would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer a single song via SMS.
Oh, and… don’t forget the cost of buying the track.
by Imran Ali
January 29, 2008 at 11:31 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, MMS, Voicemail, Twitter, Voice, Photomessaging
Pinger’s been around a little while now, but just rolled out across the UK in recent days. The service enables users to send up to a five-minute voicemail for the price of a local call to other mobile numbers in around twenty countries.
Such a voicemail, or ‘pinger’ is created using IVR voice prompts for usernames, number entry and the message itself; the notion of a completely voice operated mobile messaging service is an appealing one and coupled with the immediacy and asynchronism of a ‘Twitter for voice’, Pinger is theoretically very appealing. It’s probably best explained by the brief How It Works video on the Pinger site.
Between Seesmic, Twitter and now Pinger - video, text and voice now collectively provide the collective capability for micro-blogging and status messaging in most of the formats that people would wnat to use (photos are missing of course and I don’t believe Seesmic is really mobile yet).
I’m not convinced that this type of asynchronous voice messaging is something that text-mad Brits will embrace or indeed whether the ethnographics of Twitter can apply to other media.
I do however find the use of voice UIs as appealing and a strong precedent. Unfortunately, the user experience of Pinger is appalling - three attempts to recognise the five letters of my name failed followed by the IVR’s inability to correctly identify the DTMF tones of the number I was trying to send to!
As such I was unable to test a service which shows promise and highlights what may come to be some emerging trends in user behaviour.
by Imran Ali
January 29, 2008 at 10:18 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Games, Crowdsensing
Back in October 2006, I started to track stories and developments in an emerging field I termed Crowdsensing; the use of mobile devices and networks to create adhoc sensor networks for applications such as weather forecasting, air quality and road traffic services.
Indeed, developments such as the Participatory Urbanism project and Intel’s Ergo underline how mobile sensor networks are manifesting themselves in useful, real world services.
Philippe Kahn’s Fullpower Technologies promises to equip handsets with multiple sensors that may enable a groundswell of crowdsensing innovation. Though, Kahn’s namechecks sensors such as accelerometers and cameras, it’s unclear whether Fullpower is working with handset manufacturers, networks, looking at developing software stacks, UI innovations or creating reference hardware designs.
However, Fullpower’s site does allude to an ‘inference engine’ capable of ingesting motion, imaging, proximity, light, pressure and GPS data alongside very specific medical data such as heart rate and blood glucose; implying some intriguing mobile medical applications.
Curiously, the company is hiring a games development team, so perhaps the first Fullpower deployment will perhaps be some form of an alternative reality game…
Nevertheless, this is an area and a company that may have some profound implications for the nature of messaging and hence an emerging technology worth tracking.
by Imran Ali
January 28, 2008 at 11:03 am · Filed under News, Google, Nokia, Open Source, Greenphone, Android, Linux
A few hours ago, Nokia announced its proposed $153m acquisition of TrollTech…a curious and surprising development. So what does this mean?
- What will happen to Trolltech’s famously open source handset, the GreenPhone (that predates even the OpenMoko platform)…will we see some Linux-based Nokia handset in 2008?
- Nokia’s press release focusses on TrollTech’s cross-platform development technology - will the adoption of Qt be Nokia’s defence against Google’s Android?
I have my fingers crossed that this acquisition is Nokia’s ‘openness moment’ 
by Ewan Spence
January 28, 2008 at 9:24 am · Filed under SMS, Communication, Acquisitions/Mergers, Crowdsourcing
How do you tell an influential group of people that something really important is happening? Well the traditional way of getting your message out is the press release – and there’s a certain amount of legal requirements for trading companies that mean the press release will always be with us in the future – but as Web 2.0 and technology continues to become entwined with grass roots marketing and news, the landscape ois going to thorw up some interesting ways to look at communication.
One f those was last week’s announcement by English Football team Newcastle United. They’ve been looking for a new manager for some time, and announced their signing last week. The normal way would be the press release from above. Not this time. What were the main stages to the announcement? Well the press conference/press release was third. Before that, news went up on the website.
But before all of that, the first official news was blasted out to all the Fan Club members by an SMS text message.
I love the fact that the people that care most about the club were the first to be told; and that anyone who got that text message was very likely to jump up and tell everyone else close by that Kevin Keegan was coming back to the club. Not only have you continued to develop a superb relationship with the fans (Newcastle United are probably second in terms of rabid supporters in England, just behind Manchester United), but you’ve created a little viral message bomb all on your own.
Being able to harness people power to get your message out is going to become ever more relevant in the Web 2.0 world of tomorrow. Companies are going to be looking to make their users into evangelists – which in turn not only drives up the user base of the project, but also reduces the money spent on traditional advertising. The recent Le Web conference in Paris is a prime example of this. Everyone in the tech.conference circles was aware the event was happening – and over 1500 delegates proved the marketing worked. Total amount spent on advertising and marketing the event? $0.00.
Mobile Messaging 2.0 is not just about how the message is delivered, but how people react to that message. With a bit of planning and fore-thought, web 2.0 can not only complement the traditional methods of B2C communication, but enhance and increase the effectiveness of the message. There’s going to be a lot of innovation in this space as well, watch out for it!
by Imran Ali
January 27, 2008 at 8:02 pm · Filed under SMS, News, Communication
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the portability and mobility of messages - for archiving and longevity when changing handsets, applications or devices.
As I wrote about The Mobility of Messages last month, I’d largely considered scenarios which were quite personal and largely about personal archiving. However, Wired’s recently published Most Text Messages Are Saved Only Briefly explores the flipside of this issue - legality, retention and privacy. The story describes how pager messages between Detroit’s Mayor and his Chief of Staff revealed infidelity and potential perjury.
Beatty: “And, did you miss me, sexually?”
Kilpatrick: “Hell yeah! You couldn’t tell. I want some more. ”
Though the parties in this scenario were largely incriminated by the use of an arcane paging infrastructure, national security legislation around issues of data retention means most of need to consider mobile messaging as less ephemeral than we thought.
As usage of email fragments in favour of more immediate and synchronous media such as SMS, there will be increasing pressure on mobile network operators to retain communications for legal discovery, forensics and as potential evidence in criminal and civil cases.
RELATED POSTS
-No related posts
by Imran Ali
January 26, 2008 at 5:43 pm · Filed under SMS, User Interface, News, Content
The New York Times has just launched an SMS news service, driven by increasing traffic to their mobile site. However the user experience strikes me as kinda weird…
- Text a keyword to a shortcode (698698 - ‘Pogue‘)…keywords include the NYT’s columnists and sections.
- Receive a text message containing URLs for the latest three stories in the selected category.
- Click on the URL to view the site in your mobile browser.
I guess its a roundabout way of further increasing usage of the mobile site…but, um why not just bookmark the URLs in question and save yourself the cost of sending or receiving a text message?
by Ewan Spence
January 22, 2008 at 7:42 pm · Filed under predictions
Since the start of the year, the team at Mobile Messaging 2.0 has been dropping in their predictions for the year ahead in the mobile smart phone world. And while everyone has zeroed in on their own specialties, it’s interesting to see the common threads that have popped up again and again in our minds.
If you want the quick one liner takeaway from all our predictions, here it is.
Follow… The… Money…
The impact of mobile advertising was picked up by most of us. Now that our smartphones are becoming connected to the internet more frequently, it feels a natural avenue for advertisers to deliver a highly personalized message to users, with up to 8% of advertising budget being ring-fenced for mobile advertising in some US companies.
But I think it is wrong to think that the mobile internet is going to develop in the same way that the PC based internet did. While ‘all you can eat’ data-plans are starting to become more readily available, they are not the norm. When users are paying for every bit coming down their pipe, there is going to be a big resistance to all but the most subtle of advertising messages. When you’re paying for it, you’re not going to want pop ups, flash banners and audio messages kicking in while looking up times for an airline flight.
The best time, at least on the PC based internet, to give someone a nudge to a site is in search – that’s where Google’s AdSense makes a significant portion of their revenue. But mobile search is radically different to regular search. Where people are happy to get hundreds of answers on a Google PC search, they’re only going to want one or two when they’re on a smaller screen. If one of those slots is a paid for slot that other result better both be super accurate, and ready for a small screened browser to display accurately.
Nobody’s cracked mobile search yet, not even Google. As they say, past performance is not a guide to future earnings.
And, like any good blogger, this post brings in yet another term when discussing the future of the internet on phones – the PC Based Internet. The terminology is bad enough for us technology commentators, so who knows what the consumer thinks. Mobile Web, Mobile 2.0, Web 2.0, Mobile Internet, Web on the Go… until terminology is agreed on, we’re not going to be able to join the dots in the minds of consumers.
The mobile world is still a huge number of islands, connected by rickety rope bridges. While it’s a given that there will be consolidation in a number of areas (and one key area might be in the adoption of MMS (multi media messaging service) to the same level of inter-operability we expect of SMS. This would open up new features on the phones, from high quality megapixel images, video messages and packaging up bundles of data for whatever the social networks websites think will be usable.
The key is going to be the cost to the user. Flat rate data opens up access to the internet, and either megabundles or flat rates for texting (SMS and MMS) will be needed to open the floodgates. The competitive nature in al the markets should see this happen, my guess is in late Q3, in time for a marketing push for the festive period.
Consolidation in the products and services associated with mobile is a given, especially if the hints of a recession this month continue in the markets (can we all say Silicon Valley Bubble 2.0?). The chatter behind Twitter always wonders who is going to buy the service – one suggestion is AOL – but I think we’re going to see Twitter used as a vector to deliver those advertising messages before it gets swallowed up. Other services are going to look for the tie-up. Expect some of the more switched on network providers (I’m thinking T-Mobile and Vodafone in Europe) to buy these services, both to push themselves as content providers and to act as incentives to switch to their networks.
The underlying predictions though are simple. More money coming into the ecosystem, with a combination of even more users, advertising spend, and the idea of mobile payments, probably driven by Europe and Asia. But in terms of the global markets, the USA will make some big leaps to get much closer to the other major territories, both in terms of handsets but in contracts and network services.
In manager speak, the mobile space has been through the forming, and while there’s a lot of [brain] storming still going on, 2008 looks to be the year we settle down, start norming, and use the tools we have for change to their maximum effect.
Our Predictions in Full…
Russell Shaw, Debi Jones, Ewan Spence, Paul Ruppert
by Imran Ali
January 18, 2008 at 10:47 am · Filed under Politics, Crowdsourcing
I last visited Pakistan in April 2006, to spend a couple weeks visiting family in Karachi and Lahore. Even as a British-born Pakistani, I’m constantly amazed by the generosity and warmth of the Pakistani people…
One of my strongest impressions during my last visit was the proliferation of mobile phones - most people I met under 30 had at least two handsets, and invariably a third. Upon further investigation, Pakistani users - like many others - utilise multiple handsets and SIM cards as a form of presence management and a means to mediate their various social relationships - whether friend, family, or coworker.
It comes as no surprise that the proliferation of mobile technology in Pakistan is increasingly playing a part in directing the country’s civil and political life. America’s hapless War On Terror has intersected twice with this proliferation, once with the capture of Al Qaeda’s ‘20th hijacker’ Ramzi Binalshibh as he boasted over a satellite phone that he’d indefinitely evade capture….one for the Darwin Awards!
Secondly, and more acutely, with the assasination of former PM and kleptocrat Benazir Bhutto last month, Pakistan’s military government didn’t understand how rapidly SMS, mobile video, voice calls and photomessaging would undermine their barely plausible explanation of the assassination. See this blog for a useful photo+video account of events. Collectively, Pakistanis had unwittingly shot a multi-dimensional Zapruder film,
As the nation’s 75m mobile subscribers overwhelmed Pakistan’s mobile infrastructure, the Interior Ministry began to concoct a narrative based on TV coverage. (I based this on some specious commentary from Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on the Daily Show!).
As the accidentally crowdsourced evidence - snippets of photo messages and mobile phone footage - emerged, the government was forced to backtrack and eventually agree to re-open investigations with the assistance of detectives from Britain’s Scotland Yard.
Though the focus of coverage has been on delayed elections, nuclear security, geopolitics and extremism in Pakistan. I believe something more subtle and fundamental has been overlooked - the empowerment of Pakistani citizens with democratising technologies. As successive civilian, and military governments have failed Pakistanis, perhaps this is the beginnings of a bootstrapped civic culture, carefully asserting influence over the country’s future.
It’s hard to silence 75m cameraphones.
Next entries �
