Author Archive
by Ewan Spence
August 3, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Communication, Voice
I’m currently at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, doing a daily podcast, and it’s amazing just how much I rely on my mobile (and in some circumstances not relying on it because no matter the software it’s simply not up to the task). Organising shows to see, interviews to happen, and scheduling work around that, there’s a lot of communication going on between journalists, the media, PR agents, promoters and venue managers. And it all happens on the mobile.
Not the Blackberries, IM or email. Neither does twitter or the various alert services even begin to figure with people. This world runs on Filofaxes and diaries, scraps of papers holding someone’s new mobile number, and a mobile phone…
It’s constantly there! Not on stage or in the audiences – there are enough pre-show warnings to turn off mobile phones – but the whole event has thousands of people no longer in their office, but in a rented bed-sit around the University campus that makes up a lot of the venues. And every one of them is on the phone, constantly. Deals being arranged, bookings to make and change, hustling for more shows, or appearances in showcases, the list goes on.
So no matter the great new technologies that are in mobiles, or the third party services. The only vital ingredient is call quality and signal strength. And that’s a good thing to reflect on in this time of smartphones constantly striving to do one more impossible thing before breakfast. For all that we think the communication potential of our smartphones have changed the world, it’s still only a very small percentage of the global market for mobile phones. I don;t see how the people at the fringe would be convinced to switch away to even using an email or IM system to stay in touch as their primary means (because there are Blackberries out here, but you send a mail, and you get a reply by a phone call – it’s easier).
On the move, lots to do, and the social network of the address book is king. No Facebook here – it’s face to face, or call to arrange the face to face. Simple as that.
Oh and one final thought. Number of iPhones I’ve seen with the high powered agents? None. Number of crappy basic phones that Silicon Valley would turn up their noses, yet have massive battery life and hold calls well? Thousands.
by Ewan Spence
July 21, 2008 at 6:56 am · Filed under Google, Convergence, Advertising, Hardware
I’ve just updated my Sony Playstation Portable (PSP). It’s one of the smoothest upgrade processes I’ve seen for any electronic device. You just selected the ‘Network Update’ option on the menu bar, the PSP scurries off onto the internet (via Wifi) and checks for the latest Firmware. If it’s newer than the machine, it’ll download the file, and you can choose to install it then, or later. And it doesn’t wipe out any setting or preferences on the PSP.
One day, all mobile phones will be like this.
But that’s an aside. Rather than talk about basic infrastructure, I wanted to look at Sony’s approach to the PSP, and a rather tantalizing addition to the PSP’s internet menu – Google Search.
Windin back a PSP to v1.00 and you’ll find a machine that is significantly less feature rich than the current v4.05. It could play games (which is a good thing) and play music, albeit only in Sony’s own proprietary ATRAC format (essentially the compression format used for minidiscs). But as firmware versions kept coming, improvements and additions were made. MP3 support was added, Windows Media (unencrypted first, then encrypted), a web browser was bundled in, a streaming MP3 client for podcasts (which saved to disk for offline usage in the subsequent firmware). In short even though there were tens of millions of PSP’s out there Sony continued to develop the device capabilities. Interestingly, all these new features never cost the users anything extra. Perhaps the lawyers behind the iPod Touch should get in touch with Sony and ask how they made that work?
Anyway, on to the addition of Google Search under the network tab – labeled Internet Search, but powered by Google, from a programmers point of view this allows you to enter a search term in the PSP user interface, which is passed cleanly to the web browser and presents you the results. It also keeps a history of your search terms so you can
Google again whenever the need takes you.
Why do I think this is a good sign of things to come? Two reasons, the first is the continued improving of a product after it leaves the factory. Apple may get the plaudits for the iPhone, Nokai may be doing the donkey work on millions of Symbian handsets, but it’s Sony and the PSP that have made a workable, user friendly updater and are seriously using it to help the product.
The second is Google wants to be everywhere, and are making sure that if a device gets on the internet, then the user will be handed a search page that belongs to Google. Given that Google’s affiliate program passes a tiny fraction of a dollar to its partners for each search term they pass them, be it through a PSP icon, or the search bar in Firefox, there is an inducement to companies to add Google. Tiny fractions add up when you have the software installed on millions of devices. And of course there is still a ‘market choice’ in providing search to devices, and Sony could have went to anyone. Honestly.
So the device owners get a recurring income stream, the users get easy access to search, and Google continues to get a nice big percentage of the new search avenues before they become truly profitable. Which might prove contentious down the line, especially to other search providers and online advertising companies.
by Ewan Spence
July 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Mobile Applications, Apple, Long Tail, Design, Development, SDK
Ah yes, the much vaunted Apple Store, chick full of applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch, providing the user with a simple one click access to everything on offer. Is this the long sought for nirvana of mobile app distribution? Perhaps it is for Apple, but not for the developer community.
There’s no simple way of putting this, but the screen of the Apple iPhone will only show a fixed number of applications in the store. There is going to need to be some sort of filtering in place, to provide the top picks, the recommended applications, and those that get a burst of activity. Yes, simply having an application in the store will generate some sales (anecdotal evidence shows the mere act of registering a podcast for iTunes generates around 400 subscribers without actually doing anything), but that’s not going to be enough. These digital paths are paved with gold, remember?
Developers will still have to get people’s attention; they will still need to fight online to get their ‘Super Clock’ application noticed more than ‘Wonder Clock’ and ‘Time Flight.’ They’ll still need a website, they’ll still need to capture eyeballs, and that’s not something that Apple will have clear guidelines on – I’m sure we’ll have rotating weekly picks of apps (much as we do with podcasts) but the process of how these are chosen is going to be murky at best.
How long until we hear developer ‘A’ claim that Apple is favouring developer ‘B’ and giving them help, promoting them in the ratings, just because ‘A’ is in the Valley and ‘B’ is in Poland? Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s going to take very careful management of expectations and customer handling to navigate choppy waters – and the price drop on the iPhone rises up like the rocks of a Siren as to what can happen when it goes awry.
The more Apple become a services company with day to ay contact with the paranoid world, the less they become a distant faraway godlike visionary hardware company. This is going to be a very interesting period for the Cupertino company, and it’s interesting to me that they’re holding onto as much of the delivery chain as possible.
Developers write the app, submit the app, and then relaise that their influence becomes much more limited. They need to spend their marketing effort pushing Apple’s Store as well as their product – smart move on Apple’s part, having every developer shill their Store to their users (for which they’ll only take a small percentage of any software purchase fee).
What it does do is leave Apple as the sole distributor of pretty much every application that’s going to be written for the iPhone. Unlike Windows Mobile, where a .cab file can be hosted anywhere and downloaded from any URL to the phone; unlike a .sisx file in Symbian OS which again can be downloaded from anywhere; unlike .jar and .jad packages that are pretty much universal. Competition is a good thing, and having options at every part of the delivery chain is key. If Walmart doesn’t like a trucking company, they get another one.
Yet Apple has control of the last mile – from their server to the hardware. They’ve bypassed the network carriers. They’ve bypassed the traditional third party application stores like Handango. To a certain extent they’ve neutered the free (as in choice) route to market that developers have traditionally had to reach their customers.
The bottom line is Apple’s bottom line. They’re not giving up an inch more than they have to. So yes, the Apple App Store may look like a silver lined cloud, but the cloud may rain on some people’s perceptions of the company.
by Ewan Spence
July 3, 2008 at 7:06 am · Filed under Nokia, Open Source, Symbian, UIQ, Sony Ericsson
With hindsight, if the Symbian partners had made the move to open source the base OS, the triumvirate of user interfaces, and place all the developer tools and knowledge in a single place a year ago, it would have been seen as leading the way in the mobile. And while the pragmatist knows that this move will have been months in the planning, it looks a touch more defensive than it actually is.
Make no bones about it, this is a big deal. Imagine if Microsoft suddenly decided to make Vista open source. To commit to putting out every line of code under an open source licence such as the Eclipse Public Licence)
Nokia had made the move to buy out the remaining partners in Symbian, thus gaining control and ownership of the company; it’s IP – primarily the Symbian OS; and the staff. The staff would become Nokia employees, and the operating system would be placed into the Symbian Foundation, and over a two year period it would be made fully open source, alongside the S60, UIQ and MOAP user interfaces (which eventually would be integrated into a single UI, the unified platform of Symbian OS, due in 2010).
In the short term, not much is going to change. The manufacturers have their product line-ups sorted for the festive season and into 2009. The Symbian OS has a strong roadmap, with updates roughly every six months to the base code will remain. Long term the per handset fee (of roughly $5 a unit) will be removed, all the code will be visible, and a unified UI will help the developer base focus on making more programs, rather than make one program run on more than one UI.
It’s the medium term where it gets interesting; the point where Symbain does the switch over, and could (if not managed correctly) take their eye off the ball with all the management meetings and staff re-orientation. There’s also the fact that the UIQ interface is now effectively dead – the unified UI will be based on S60 and take elements of UIQ and MOAP. UIQ have laid off a little more than half their staff, and I wouldn’t expect to see another major iteration of UIQ now – which leaves Sony Ericsson with a phone OS that could now be at a dead end.
It’s certainly interesting times, and a bit of a gamble on Nokia’s part, but tat the very least they’re only gambling the same amount of money they would pay Symbian in licence fees over a year or so. So financially it’s worth taking.
And if they can establish Symbian OS as the default OS (just as MS-Dos did) then it will pay off in spades.
by Ewan Spence
July 3, 2008 at 5:41 am · Filed under Twitter, Open Source
My old Warrant Officer always used to say (in that low voice of menace) that you should never just state a problem, but state a problem followed promoptly by “here’s what I think we should do.” So if Twitter is Fail-Whaling, then we need another service. Lots of people have said it needs to be de-centralised, that it needs to be replicabla,e it needs to e open-source, using as many standards as possible,
Evan Prodromou has done just that. Welcome to Indenti.ca.And yes that does point to my account there, and not the top, because the site is still in it’s early days, so there’s no direct friend import via your address book (or the Twitter api, heh-he).
That early days is worth pointing out - Identica’s big problem is people may be expecting a full range of Twitter services (heck we expect the full range of Twitter services from Twitter) but I suspect that with an Open Source code base they’re going to get a lot of eyes looking over problems and tweaks - it appears for example Dave Winer is already nudging the code that generates the RSS feeds.
If I was Twitter, I’d hope the big section in their VC pitch addresses an Open Source, Distributed system as a threat, and how they would counter it. If their defence is “we’re the biggest” and “it’s hard to move away from Twitter with your friends” then Identica might be a game changer, if not in the form of the final site, but in the final code-base.
(Cross posted from www.ewanspence.com)
by Ewan Spence
June 16, 2008 at 6:15 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Devices, Carriers, Communication, emergency services, Android, Civic
want to look into the future of disasters - the so called ‘big ones,’ because while mobile phones are useful in ‘personal emergencies,’ it’s going to be in the large scale disasters that your smartphone could make the difference. At least, with some forward planning.
To a certain extent, mobile phones are already “emergency aware.” By that I don’t mean they’re constantly on the lookout for danger, like some sort of Finnish Knight Rider, but that they have systems in place that become useful in an emergency. The primary one for me, is that no matter what model of phone, even if the key-lock is on, then the emergency number (be it 911, 112, or 911) should still work - there’s no need to try to work out what the key-lock release is. They won’t even care what network they can find; you’re not network locked for an emergency call - if the signal can get through, through it goes.
The problem as I see it, is the reliance of the mobile phone on one thing. The network. Because in a major disaster (let’s pick the “it’s going to happen at some point” earthquake on the San Andreas fault as an example), there’s going to be a lack of power, and a lot of infrastructure damage. Do you think that the network cell towers are going to be around to carry the mobile signals from the handset?
Yet a mobile handset is both a receiver and a transmitter - and there are going to be times when that’s all you have in the disaster area. Traditionally, mobile phones are going to be useless (beyond the ability to take some pretty gruesome pictures). which is a shame, because communication is vital in these situations. If phones could literally piggyback on each other, chaining calls together like some demented Arpanet of mobile voice calls, then these little computers suddenly become a lot more useful in our scenario.
With the inclusion of Wi-Fi on many models perhaps that medium, rather than the GSM frequencies will act as the common carrier - although the range is far more limited than the radio circuitry for cellular calls.
I doubt we’d ever see anything like this on a regular mass market phone, but if Google Android takes off, and you get a bundle of handsets with re-write able firmware, I wouldn’t be surprised if (a) we see a Mesh Network using a mix of cellular and wifi hotspots spring up, and (b) it won’t really be noticed outside geek circles until something horribly big in the Bay Area. So if you start hearing of a strange underground phone network early next year, with no contract, no ties, but not quite 99.99% reliability, you know what’s happening.
by Ewan Spence
June 9, 2008 at 6:37 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, ARPU, iPhone, ATT, Apple
Everyone (including Darla) has latched on to the upfront cost - the big headline… the new iPhone is only $199!!! Isn’t that fantastic, amazing, a third of the launch price of the now on the scrap-heap 2G model… Wait a minute though…
3G iphone, 8gb… $199
Plus…
Data plan: $30/month (up from $10 a month)
Voice plan: $39/month
…and that’s every month…
($30 + $39) x 24 = $1656
Total 3G iPhone price: $1855
So the long term commitment is almost as much as the MacBook Air’s $1899. What I find interesting is the price, and the extra dollars that AT&T are going to get. First up, the revenue sharing of the monthly bill that Apple attempted to pioneer with the mk1 has been dropped. Quite frankly that’s not a surprise, the rest of the networks worldwide didn’t want it, and AT&T are going to make more money now that it’s gone. I wonder if the ‘must make 10 million sales’ promise left Apple in a weaker position. And then there’s the data plan. It has went up from the first iPhone as well by $10 a month.
While everyone is used to paying a monthly bill, it’s worth pointing out that the small print is always the killer, and that the mobile market, certainly in terms of selling hardware, hasn’t been reinvented by Apple; which is a shame, last year they were in a position to do so if they had truly thought different - now shareholders won’t have it any other way than the norm.
So AT&T have the increase in data plan, and get 100% of the pie. Yet the hardware cost has dropped and Apple have lost their network Rev share. Where’s their increased profit coming from?
The app store.
With a 30% cut of every application sale going straight to them, no middle man (plus interest on the accumulated sales each month before cutting cheques) and I suspect they’ll be making more from the 3G iPhone than the 2G. After all, network rev share is just one fixed stream. Rev share on every application on the planet is potentially tens of thousands of long tail streams, constantly evolving and changing.
Not a case of thinking different, more a case of traditional sales and commission dressed up as only a Steve Jobs keynote can do it.
by Ewan Spence
June 2, 2008 at 9:13 am · Filed under Devices, Apple, Nokia, Design, Development
Don’t you just love it when you have to companies start moving in completely opposite directions? Especially when those two companies are rather important in the smartphone and messaging space, and they end up in the same place?
I’m talking about Nokia and Apple, which definitely aren’t N/A to the mobile space. Last week Nokia invited me to attend their S60 Summit, which was an opportunity for the Finnish company to talk about their future plans and thoughts on the space – and there was a lot of focus on their move into the widget space. Using their ‘web runtime,’ a framework devised fro the webkit root of their mobile browser, they are making development of web 2.0 enabling widgets as simple as putting together a page of html, some javascript, and a touch of CSS for the layout. This doesn’t leave behind the Symbian C++ or J2ME programmers, but opens up a huge number of new developers.
Time to change the names.
The SDK for Apple’s iPhone, along with the ability to use the iTunes store to distribute and sell native C++ applications that run on the phone is due to make a big impact this summer. People are itching to get access to the device, the extra onboard features, and to run “outside the browser.” Previously developers only had access to iPhone users by web based widgets, that ran on basic html, with a touch of javascript and CSS, in the browser. (Jailbreaking doesn’t count, just as running iPhone widgets on an N95 didn’t count either, m’kay).
The true balance point isn’t at the extremes of ‘all widgets’ pr ‘all native code,’ but somewhere in-between. The manufacturers have come around to that thinking, and are now going to be able to be compared on a like for like basis; both by developers looking at coding environments, and end-users looking at the respective software catalogues. Now the hardware on each side is pretty much defined for the next eighteen months beyond incremental steps (such as stepping up to 3G), the true battle of the hearts and minds is going to be in software.
Gentlemen, start your dev-kits!
by Ewan Spence
May 30, 2008 at 4:21 pm · Filed under Twitter, Jaiku, Email, 2008
Last weekend saw The Eurovision Song Contest, where 43 countries choose a representative song, perform it live in a telecast that goes out to upwards of 100 million viewers around Europe (and upwards of 300 million worldwide). I sat down last Saturday to watch the contest, in a room full of Eurovision enthusiasts, lovers, and critics all throwing out their opinions, drinks in hand.
Of course we weren’t all really together – we were logged on to Twitter, throwing out bards about the camp costumes, the immensely tribal nature of pop music, and the incredibly… err… artistic graphics between the songs. Three hours of music and politics (don’t ask, please, simply put all war in Europe stops on the night of the contest and we fight using votes). As one participant said at the end of the gig, “Thank you Twitter, you all kept me sane.”
But the point here isn’t to celebrate the Song Contest (much as I do) As more international events pop up on the horizon, the luster of modern communication tools, especially those with a real time component such as Twitter, Jaiku, IM clients and of course the rather old but still functions even if everything else seems to go down IRC are going to be the place to chat and converse about both international events. The upcoming Summer Olympics are going to be a major stress test of the public’s use of these tools (as opposed to say an Apple keynote). On the evidence of Eurovision, Twitter’s not quite ready yet – the database went down as the event started and it switched to a ‘limited’ service to stay up, but resource management in instant communication can’t afford to be 99.99% up if the one time that everyone wants to talk is when it goes down (because that’s when it’s popular).
One reason why IRC stays up is it is effectively distributed around multiple computers. Twitter, for all the latest bells and whistles, relies on a central point. Modern messaging is going to have to cope with messages of greater bandwidth, with much lower latency, and that leaves very little room for failure. I think it’s a fair bet that any new globally adopted messaging system is going to have a distributed element to it, and dare I say it heavily biased around peer to peer.
Oh and if you want my opinion, Norway was robbed, Ireland should at least have made the finals, and the UK sent a Bin-Man, came last, and were surprised they didn’t do any better…
by Ewan Spence
May 20, 2008 at 10:53 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, MMS
Imran’s already highlighted the relative cost of SMS bandwidth last week, but I do want to touch on it again. The summary - that the raw cost of sending 160 characters is completely at odds with the cost that the customer actually pays - shouldn’t be that surprising. The first rule of business is to get as much money as the market can take, and the current SMS pricing is clearly something the market is happy to pay, in ever increasing numbers. But as for a higher per text price? Not going to happen.
Many years ago, the introduction of multimedia messaging (MMS) in the UK saw the priced fixed at 40p per message, four times that of an SMS. The rationale, that sending a picture or a sound clip was a lot more information dense and convenient and special than the 160 characters of a text made sense in that context, but put into the real world, the cost of an MMS, coupled with poor cross platform and cross network capability, killed it in the minds of many.
In the struggle to find a new form of messaging (and the implicit goal of being able to create another cash cow just like SMS), the networks seem to be avoiding one thing. The majority of their users are probably completely happy with the messaging options they have. The amount of education the networks would have to do is huge. Trying to spring a new system for profit is not going to happen. Any new system has to be wanted, and I don’t see an appetitive at the moment for anything new.
We have SMS for phone to phone, the business users have their push email and blackberries, and the geeks have whatever XML tools they can put together. Is there seriously space for anything that’s not based on current tech to make a showing? Or is it all about the presentation – after all Twitter is nothing more than SMS with slick presentation.
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