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[Haptics, sensors, gesture tracking, intelligent texting and pico projectors; a taste of the technology soup headed our way. Guest author Peter Crocker discusses how sensor technologies offer handset differentiation, and the challenges ahead for OEMs.] Innovation is the name of the game for handset manufacturers. Not just for Apple who keeps expanding the envelope of hardware and UI capabilities, but all major OEMs who are looking to differentiate beyond software. Android and Windows Phone are now providing an end-to-end device recipe for device makers, from hardware to a developer ecosystem. As such, handset OEMs (Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson) are finding themselves on the same playing field as PC assemblers (Acer, Dell, plus the likes of Huawei, ZTE and Visio). In the post-Android era, not only is the playing field leveling, but it’s also becoming more crowded. More importantly, unless handset OEMs can find ways to differentiate they’ll have to default to competing on price, which is exactly what they want to avoid; the OEM cost structure is not designed to withstand razor-thin margins. [poll id=”11″] One way to differentiate is with phone features – not GHz figures, but the type that would have a major impact to the user experience. Many OEMs would crave to break into the market with innovations such as what the Palm Graffiti handwriting recognition was at its time. Feature innovation comes today in many forms, as manufacturers try to evolve smartphones into smarter phones; haptics, predictive texting, gesture recognition technology, inertia sensors, digital compasses, and the emergence of pico projectors to name a few. A taste of feature innovation – Next Generation Haptics: Haptics, or the process of using motion or vibrations to create tactile feedback on a users hand or finger, has been around for quite a while, with solutions available from Immersion and Synaptics. As an alternative to using touch-sensitive screens, companies like eyeSight and GestureTek are using the built-in phone camera to analyse hand motions and recognize gestures. – Inertia and direction sensors: handset makers are following Apple’s lead with the integration of accelerometers, digital compasses and gyroscopes into the phone. These sensors can be leveraged to support for example improved location through dead reckoning and gesture recognition. Gyroscopes and compasses are also providing precise data on the location of a device in the three dimensional plane opening the door to augmented reality applications. Companies such as Layar and Wikitude are helping developers walk through that door with AR software platforms. – Predictive Text & Gesture Tracking: Predictive texting has seen limited innovation beyond plain-old T9; as such a range of vendors have emerged to provide significant improvements in prediction and correction accuracy, namely Keypoint, EXB, TouchType, Cootek, Keisense (now Nuance) and BlindType (acquired by Google). New forms of predictive texting combined with gesture recognition technology such as as Swype and ShapeWriter (acquired by Nuance) is enabling quicker text input on a touchscreen – for example tracking the movement of a finger on a touch screen, a phone moving in space with inertia sensors, or tracking hand movements with infrared technology hand gestures. – Pico Projectors: While the integration of pico projectors, or mini video projectors, into mainstream phones is still a ways off, the technology from the likes of TI and Micorvision claims to overcome one of the biggest UI challenges of mobile device, small screens. What’s more, combining such features can yield more than the sum of the parts. For example, gesture recognition technology combined with haptics could allow users to effectively navigate applications. Similarly, the combination of pico projectors, gesture recognition and image tracking technology could eventually enable interfaces that will resemble Sci-Fi movies. Integration challenges As easy as it may sound, innovative features are not just about shopping components off the shelf. Cost is an important consideration, especially for technologies that require specialized components that do not enjoy economies of scale. For example, the green laser required in a pico projector represents one third of the cost of the entire system due to the fact that the part has no use beyond a pico projector. Integrating new technologies into handsets is a further challenge for handset designers. Digital compasses are sensitive to electronic interference and need to be carefully positioned within the phone to avoid interacting with neighboring electronics. The design of haptics mechanisms also presents many problems. In a typical haptics system design, touch screens float in their frames and are held in place by flexible materials that allow the screen to vibrate creating haptics effects. These designs can fail letting dust inside the device or the screen can separate from the frame if the device is dropped. OEM’s are still learning how to effectively incorporate such features into their designs. A number of start-ups are working on overcoming these barriers in addition to creating new capabilities. Senseg in Helsinki is eliminating the need for moving parts in haptics systems and has created a system that it claims can pinpoint tactile feedback. InvenSense has brought to market a motions sensing MEMS chip that integrates a gyroscope and accelerometer in one chip, making it easier for OEMs to integrate and reduce cost. Light Blue Optics has developed a pico projector that creates a holographic image and infrared sensors to turn any surface into a virtual touch screen. The company also just raised $13 million to shrink the technology. Innovation of course requires risk-taking. OEMs are finding themselves in a chicken and egg scenario; design cutting edge features first, or wait for the apps to leverage the features? Samsung and HTC seem to be comfortable taking such risks. Samsung was the first to introduce a phone with an integrated pico projector in 2009 and the Galaxy S sports a gyroscope, Swipe technology and an Augmented Reality browser. HTC is also pushing the envelope having developed and launched devices with home grown haptics. Undoubtedly users will be the biggest winners as OEMs battle to wow new customers. A close second will be application developers who will stretch their imagination to build new applications and businesses around emerging features.  While these opportunities are compelling, progress will not happen overnight. Gyroscopes are still only available in high end smartphones and next generation haptics will only appear in niche devices next year. If you’re interested in building an app for a pico projector, you may be waiting a few more years. The question is: is this new roster of sensor technologies going to allow OEMs for once to out innovate Apple? -Peter [Peter Crocker is the founder and principal analyst at Smith’s Point Analytics (www.smithspointanalytics.com), a full service market research company helping innovators in the mobile and wireless market better understand emerging opportunities. Peter has been in the mobile and wireless industry since 2003 and holds an MBA from the College of William and Mary. Peter can be reached at peter@smithspointanalytics.com] #handsetmanufacturers #hardwaretrends #mobiledevices

[Developer Economics 2011 is here! As we launch our new survey on all things developer-related, Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis looks back at the 2010 report and examines the major events that have shaped mobile development in the past 6 months] The evolution of Developer Economics Last July we published the definitive mobile developer research report: Developer Economics 2010, dubbed by TechCruch as “one of the most profound…to date”. Our report delved into all aspects of mobile application development, across a sample of 400+ developers segmented into eight major platforms. We’ve just launched the follow-up to this research report: Developer Economics 2011, once again made possible thanks to BlueVia, the global developer platform from Telefonica that helps developers take apps, web services and ideas to market. Our goal is to see how the dynamics of the developer world have changed since early 2010 and to provide more insights into app marketing, monetization and many other factors. Join the survey or help spread the word! This year we ‘ve also secured a prize for each of the first 400 developers; 10 hours free testing time on DeviceAnywhere’s 2000+ handsets. UPDATE: Thanks to overwhelming support, all 400 free testing time prizes have been awarded by DeviceAnywhere. Of course, the $1,500 Amazon voucher is still up for grabs! Major shakeups of the mobile industry for H2 2010 So, what’s changed since our 2010 research? The mobile industry is an ever-evolving landcape. In the past 6 months we have seen the Symbian Foundation close shop, with Nokia hoping that the as-yet untested MeeGo project will carry their smartphone banner. We have also seen the stellar rise of Android, zooming past Apple’s iOS and BlackBerry and becoming the no2 smartphone platform behind Symbian. In the handset OEM arena, we have seen more shakeups in 2010 alone than in the 10 years preceding it. Apple and RIM have overtaken some of the traditional handset OEM powers (Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG) and claimed a spot in the top 5. According to some estimates, ZTE could join them soon. Moving forward, Developer Economics 2011 is looking at how the key metrics of mobile development have changed in the last year. The migration of developer mindshare One of the major findings of our 2010 report was the migration of developer mindshare away from the ‘old guard’, i.e. Symbian, BlackBerry and Java, towards the new powers of the realm – iOS and Android. According to our research, nearly 60% of the 400+ respondents had developed apps on Android. Apple’s iOS took second place, with more than 50% of respondents having a go at it, with Java ME following third. In our Developer Economics 2011 research, we’ll be asking participants which platforms they’re currently targeting, which ones they plan on targeting and which ones they’re abandoning. So, what’s changed since then? Well, if anything, the gap between Android and iOS and the rest of the platforms has grown even larger. The Apple App Store carries more than 300 thousand apps, while recent estimates place the number of apps in Android Market at around 130 thousand. While Nokia has been spending considerable effort on the Ovi Store and increased its popularity with consumers and developers alike, they still have a long way to go to catch up with the two app-dispensing behemoths. Why do developers head towards iOS and Android? Our Developer Economics 2010 analysis showed that Apple offers a platform that is relatively easy to master and using which a developer can design great UIs. They also have the largest app store and although the certification problem is an issue for some,  porting and fragmentation are not a challenge;. Android, on the other hand, has been gaining momentum across all fields, storming its competitors’ key market – the US. Of course, Android’s many fragmentation issues are often overlooked in the face of many handset OEMs’ dependency on the platform. The disparity between handset sales and available apps Our Developer Economics 2010 research uncovered a disparity between the number of devices sold for each platform and the number of available apps. One would expect the platforms with the highest market penetration to dominate in terms of apps, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Taking 3Q10 as a reference, it’s easy to see that the two platforms with the lowest penetration, iOS and Android, have the highest number of available apps. On the opposite side of the spectrum, while Java ME and Flash Lite have the greatest market penetration by far, they can scarcely measure up to the newer platforms when it comes to app volumes. In Q4, the contrast is even sharper. Both Android and iOS stores have grown by almost 100 thousand apps apiece. Windows Phone has shown an admirable growth, reaching 4 thousand apps in just two months, although it still has a long way to go before becoming truly a threat to incumbents. Monetization and revenue expectations In Developer Economics 2010, we asked developers how they felt about the revenues they’re receiving from selling their apps. Almost one in four respondents reported poor revenues, while only 5% reported revenues exceeding their expectations. While there has been a boom of app stores, that’s not necessarily a blessing for developers. Most developers face a discoverability issues, having their apps buried under thousands of other apps. Like one developer said in our previous research “It’s like going to a record store with 200,000 CDs. You ‘ll only look at the top-10″. What options are there for developers? One option is to adopt a multiple storefront strategy, as well as to tailor your monetization model to specific app stores. As the CEO of Rovio, creator of the prodigious Angry Birds app, noted: “Free is the way to go with Android. Nobody has been successful selling content on Android”. Developing apps in 2011 Care to see how the apps world has changed in the last year? Stay tuned for Developer Economics 2011, where we delve into app development, monetization, distribution, retailing, porting and fragmentation issues among many others. Mobile developer? Join the survey and have your say. #meego #ios #flashlite #javame #mobiledevelopers #mobiledeveloper #wac #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #windowsphone #Blackberry #flashdevelopers

[RIM’s acquisition of UI firm TAT marked the largest mobile software M&A of 2010. Research Director Andreas Constantinou explains why the acquisition places RIM a leap ahead of the top-10 OEMs in terms of UI capabilities and asks – can RIM execute on the promise?] In December, RIM surprised industry observers by buying TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), a 200-strong UI technology and design firm based out of Malmö, Sweden. At nearly $130 million, RIM’s move marked the largest mobile software M&A transaction of 2010 globally and an impressive 5.5x multiplier over TAT’s 2009 revenues of 170 million SEK. It follows a string of RIM acquisitions since 2009, namely QNX (operating system), Cellmania (content billing and distribution), Dash (two-way navigation), DataViz (document viewer), Torch Mobile (WebKit experts) and Viigo (software house). More importantly, TAT’s acquisition places RIM a leap ahead in the league of top-10 handset manufacturers in terms of own UI capabilities. Here’s why. A leap ahead of the competition TAT was founded in 2002 by 6 games engineers and designers out of university (here’s their story) but has come a very long way. TAT is not just another technology company. It has seen its Kastor 2D/3D graphics framework deployed in over 500 million phones across 5 out of the top-7 OEMs. More important to the RIM story is TAT’s Cascades product, a UI framework that allows OEMs to design their phones not in terms of applications, but in terms of screens, allowing what can be termed ‘rapid variant management’ (more about that later). TAT has also been clearly ahead of the UI technology vendor pack – vendors like Ikivo, Digital Aria, Acrodea, Bluestreak, YouILabs and Scalado – thanks to its design skills. When other vendors have banked on technology marketing, standards implementation or operator deals, TAT has used its design skills to get into the door of both OEMs and operators/carriers (check out this video on the ‘future of screens’). The marriage of design skills and technology licensing allowed TAT to build momentum and cash-flow when OEMs were cutting budgets post-2005. These same skills were what got TAT the deal to design Google’s Android 1.0 UI. TAT’s strength lies in the combination of UI framework technology and the first-class design skills – both of which are now with RIM. So what does RIM get? TAT’s acquisition is far more encompassing than many would have thought – it puts RIM a leap ahead of the pack in the league of top-10 handset manufacturers in six ways: 1. Match the iPhone With the Cascades technology, RIM can now match and even exceed the sophistication of the iPhone UI (see this and this video demos). Long term this means RIM has a chance to contain the exodues of enterprise customers opting for replacing their RIM with iPhones due to the outdated UI and usability on the Blackberry OS 6. Heck, it would be even easy for RIM to offer ‘deep skins’ for BlackBerry handsets where the navigation and core apps closely resemble the iPhone apps. 2. Rapid variant management TAT’s Cascades is a departure from how OEMs build handsets today, by allowing the UI to be designed in terms of screens and not applications. The downside is that Cascades-enabling an existing software stack means that legacy ‘spaghetti’ applications have to be ported one by one on top of TAT’s framework, which takes 9-12 months for the complete UI (it’s 10s of millions of lines of code that have to be ported). This is what has historically limited Cascades to only tactical wins for specific applications on Motorola, Samsung and Asus handsets. The upside is that with Cascades RIM gets rapid variant management; creating 100+ operator variants from a single vanilla UI is just a button (and an XML file) away. Designing in screens rather than apps means that RIM can keep its investment into messaging, graphics and enterprise middleware but radically change the UI look and feel. This allows RIM’s carrier customers more differentiation and exclusivity opportunities, all without delaying the time to market – and therefore securing the carrier multi-million subsidy and marketing carrier budgets. Rapid variant management is today one of the few domains where Android suffers and Nokia’s Symbian still excels, so a very important differentiator for RIM once the integration work is out of the way. 3. Consumer and enterprise personas We covered earlier how RIM needs to escape its dual personality disorder by designing separate consumer and enterprise product lines. However, designing a different set of apps for enterprise and consumers is complex – not to mention managing many more device models and variants in the field.  With TAT, RIM buys the ability to have enterprise AND consumer UI personas ship in the same phone – not only that, but in a way that can be easily switched by the user at the flick of a button. Switching between enterprise and consumer personas is also much cheaper to do at the UI level rather than the bare metal level with what’s called ‘mobile virtualization‘. This implies that with TAT’s technology, RIM can allow users to switch between consumer and enterprise UI personas; a consumer UI when you want to browse on Facebook and check out Flickr and an enterprise UI when you want to check the email attachment for your next meeting. Note that Nokia and HTC Sense have also implemented basic switching between work and personal skins. 4. Enterprise UI customization Besides the runtime technology, TAT develops Motion Lab, a tool that a designer can use to define UI screens and UI flows through a drag-n-drop environment. For RIM, this means that enterprises can customize the phone’s navigation to focus on the few key applications that are used most of the time. It also offers RIM a level of enterprise customization beyond what other OEMs can achieve out of the box. 5. UI personalities With the erosion of the market of downloadable ringtones and wallpapers, the industry has turned to apps as the next premium content market. Yet, there are still new revenue opportunities in downloadable content. In Japan, DoCoMo has led the market of downloadable UIs in the form of “standby screens” (programmable home screens), and which Acrodea has extended to the dialer and menu apps.  This has created a small market of downloadable UIs for both DoCoMo and KDDI. With TAT, RIM can extend that market to the world, and across more embedded applications – creating what can be called the market of downloadable UI personalities. Whether RIM can turn this capability into a new ‘market’ is questionable, but it certainly presents a unique point of differentiation and an opportunity for a new revenue stream for RIM. 6. Connected experiences With the acquisition of Dash, a 2-way car navigation company, RIM has its sights set beyond phones and tablets into the automotive segment. To deliver a consistent UI across these varied form factors a new OS (QNX) is far from adequate. It needs a portable UI technology that allows RIM to reuse its UI assets with minimum maintenance overhead across different form factors, from phones to cars. TAT’s Cascades is exactly this technology and as TAT has shown, it can be extended to connected screens in the living room, in the street, in the car, and in the hands. Filling in the gaps that TAT left With TAT out of the picture, how can other OEMs catch up to the level of UI technology sophistication and design skills? There’s a variety of UI technology vendors out there (see below for an extract from our Mobile Industry Atlas), but none really combine the UI ‘screens’ framework or the design skills of TAT. Many companies claim to have “UI frameworks”, but they all invariably mean a combination of SVG engines, 2D and 3D graphics toolkits or compositing engines – which address UI development as an application, not a screen paradigm. Historically there have only been three companies who have developed screen-based UI frameworks; TAT, Digital Airways and Next Device. Digital Airways was behind the UI of the Vodafone Simply series of five handsets launched between 2005 and 2007 and the Porsche P9522 handset introduced by Sagem in late 2008; the company has since transitioned into UI services in mobile, embedded, automotive and aerospace – however the company ceased trading sometime in 2010. Next Device was acquired by Mentor Graphics (makers of the Nucleus RTOS), who didn’t manage to leverage the technology asset as the licensing model was markedly different to Nucleus’ site-licensing. The gap that TAT left creates an opportunity for other UI middleware vendors (e.g. Ikivo, Acrodea, Digital Aria, Sasken,) to maneuver into this technology space. Another way to deliver ‘screen-based’ phone design and variant management is via development tools; much like how OpenPlug (now Alcatel Lucent) uses the Adobe Flash IDE to create mobile apps. However this is still virgin territory and we ‘re not aware of any sufficiently advanced UI tools vendors in the mobile domain. Can RIM execute? All in all, TAT can deliver Apple-class user experience that offers RIM a strategic advantage compared to OEMs leveraging 3rd party Windows Phone and Android platforms.  This all sounds great on paper of course, but it’s all a question of execution. Can RIM’s corporate monoculture adapt to the creative minds of TAT? Will the TATers get the mandate and budgets to innovate deep into RIM’s product lines? How long will RIM take to integrate the TAT technology on top of the QNX platform and where will the competition be at that point? Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets. – Andreas you should following me on Twitter: @andreascon [Andreas Constantinou is Research Director at VisionMobile, and oversees the research, strategy and industry mapping projects at VisionMobile. Andreas also served on TAT’s advisory board during 2008-9] #acquisition #qnx #rim #userinterface #tat #torchmobile #dash #userexperience #iphone

[Everyone – from carriers to OEMs – is busy building developer communities. But many have failed and more have seen disappointing results. Guest author Dave Neary looks at what lessons history can teach us on community building and the key DO’s and DON’Ts.] Community development in open source software is not just for geeks in sandals nor for niche Linux companies any more. It’s mainstream and it’s here to stay. The recent analysis of companies contributing code to the Linux kernel shows that large companies including Novell, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Texas Instruments are getting serious about engaging in community development. Organisations such as the LiMo Foundation are encouraging their members to work with community projects “upstream”, that is, with the community rather than in isolation,  to avoid missing out on millions of dollars worth of “unleveraged potential” (PDF link). A diverse developer community is critically important to the long term viability of free and open source projects. And yet companies often have difficulty growing communities around their projects, or have trouble influencing the direction of the maintainers of community projects like the Linux kernel or GNOME. Sun Microsystems and AOL are prominent examples of companies which went full speed into community development, but were challenged (to say the least) in cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship with community developers. There are many more examples – but often we never even hear about companies who tentatively engage in community development, and retreat with their tail between their legs, writing off substantial investments in community development. Xara, for example, released part of their flagship software Xara Xtreme for Linux as open source in 2005, before silently dropping all investment in the community project in late 2006. What can go wrong? What are the most common, and the most deadly errors which companies make in their community engagement strategies? And how can you avoid them? Avoiding these does not guarantee success, but failing to avoid them may be sufficient to guarantee failure. Where to begin? The easiest and gravest error that companies make is to sprint headlong into free/open source development with unrealistic expectations. The history of free & open source software development is filled with stories of companies who are disappointed with their first experiences in community development. The technical director who does not understand why community projects do not accept features his team has spent months developing, or the management team that expects substantial contributions from outside the company to arrive overnight when they release software they’ve developed. Chris Grams once described the Tom Sawyer model of community engagement – companies who expect other people to do their job for them. Make sure you don’t fall into that trap. Doing community software development well takes time, even when you get everything right. And there are a lot of things you can get wrong. So where to begin? Before you start community development, you should have thought about what you want to get out of it. Is Open Source a way to grow the brand and broaden distribution of your product, with the goal of generating leads? Do you need to grow an ecosystem of developers building on top of your platform? Do you want to include an existing project into your product to reduce costs, but customise it to fit your needs? Each of these goals, and any of the other reasons people develop software in the open, require specific strategies and tools tailored to the situation to succeed. Indeed, how you measure success will change depending on your goals. The two common situations company find themselves in are collaborating with an existing open source community, or growing a community around a piece of software that you are releasing. Joining a community When joining an existing community, building trust and reputation takes time. The first step to working productively with a community is to understand the structure of that community. Who are its leaders, what are its priorities? If the culture of a project does not align with your business objectives, that may affect your decision to engage with it in the first place. If you find that you can work with the project, and that the general goals are aligned (or at least, not misaligned) with yours, then the hard work can start. For example, Hewlett-Packard backed Linux early, at the expense of promoting its own proprietary Unix, HPUX. Ten years on, HP now ships close to 40% of all Linux servers. In contrast, Sun Microsystems decided to create an independent community around Solaris in 2005, releasing OpenSolaris under an Open Source approved licence which is incompatible with the GPL (the licence of the Linux kernel). The Sun sponsored project failed to create a substantial independent developer community from its launch until the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and subsequent closing of the OpenSolaris project in 2010. Once you make the decision to collaborate, and you have chosen the project you want to work with, the first and most important decision is who will work on the project. This consideration often does not get the attention it requires from top management. The engineers who will be working on the project on your behalf will be representing your company. It will be their job to build trust with project maintainers, navigate the project’s roadmap process to ensure that their work is accepted upstream, and ensure your business objectives are met. The choice of the people who will work with the community is particularly important; as Stormy Peters, former Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, once wrote, companies are not people. In other words, companies can never be members of a software development community, although their employees may. Companies can be valuable institutional partners for projects, but to quote the Beatles and Karl Fogel, money can’t buy you love (or community support). So now you have some engineers working with the community. What next? Havoc Pennington wrote some excellent advice in 1999 for engineers working with community projects. The one-line summary might be: “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”. Often communities will have documented their norms – many projects, including the Linux kernel and modules in the GNOME project, have “HACKING” files under source control documenting expectations for contributions, and mailing list policies. For most communities, these can be summarised as “go with the flow, don’t rock the boat”. Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project and vice president of developer platforms at Novell, has written an article explaining the reasoning behind these policies. One temptation which you should avoid at all costs is to leverage the trust which one contributor has gained to channel contributions from others into the project. This will only promote Shy Developer Syndrome in your team. By all means, have your senior community guy mentor others in the team and help them through the process, but avoid making that mentor a gatekeeper, shielding the rest of your team from the community. Attempting this will always backfire when your gatekeeper moves on or when the community finds out that he’s committing the work of others and circumventing community norms. Growing a community Looking at the second scenario; growing a community. If you do decide to release software under a free software OSI approved licence, your first choice will be whether to set the project up as a community project or not, and to what level. Simon Phipps has written about the different types of communities which can grow around a free software project. He describes communities of core codevelopers, non-core developers who work on add-ons, integrators who distribute and configure the software, but don’t necessarily modify it, and finally users of the software. Each of these communities have different needs, and require different approaches. If you want to grow a community around your project, there are a few best practices you should follow: – Control: If you opt for rules ensuring that you decide what code will be added to your product’s core, you will lose many of the benefits of community projects. Some examples of rules which come from a desire to maintain control are a requirement to assign copyright for all contributions to the core product to you, or ensuring that only employees can commit directly to the main branch of your core product. There are many good reasons to maintain ownership of the core, but this decision will severely handicap community contributions. This does not prevent you from developing other types of community, however, such as a community of add-on developers or integrators. – Barriers to entry: Barriers that contributors have to overcome can come in different shapes: using unusual tools, requiring convoluted processes for bug reporting, feature requests  or patch acceptation, or legal forms you may ask people to sign before contributing. – Tools and infrastructure: Ensure that you provide your users with the opportunity to distribute their work and connect with other users – whether this be through a forge for modules, or through the use of Gitorious of Bazaar for source control. Contributing in your project should be seen as a social experience. – Community processes: Create a just environment – no-one likes to be considered a second class citizen. Document processes for gaining access to key resources like bug moderator permissions, commit access to the master branch, or editor access for the project website. – Budget appropriately: Commit the appropriate resources – building a community takes time and effort, and that means investment – primarily of human resources. Having one guy who is the community manager dealing with the community and a team of 10 developers behind the corporate walls isn’t going to cut it. As Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL said in his “How to Kill your community” presentation, if your nascent community feels neglected, it will just go away. Launching a new project is like launching a new product – except that acquiring a new community developer takes much longer, and is much more difficult and costly than acquiring a new user. In the same way that companies track SAC for new product launches, tracking the Developer Acquisition Cost (DAC) for your project is a key metric in evaluating whether you are doing the right things to grow your community. Developers have lots of projects to choose from, and they tend to gravitate towards projects where co-development is the norm. So you have to be thinking about the contributor experience, and the value proposition to external contributors, all the time. A clear and compelling vision, with lots of opportunities to contribute, and low barriers to collaboration, can help reduce the acquisition cost of community contributors, and similarly reduce the cost of acquiring new users and paying customers. Avoid common anti-patterns If Best Practices are behaviours that should be adopted, community anti-patterns are best practices gone wrong. If the reasons behind a “best practice” are misunderstood, you can end up imitating behaviour without getting the desired result, much like the Pacific cargo cults, building airstrips and hoping that planes land. Like seasoning, adding too much can ruin the dish. In general: when you see the following patterns happening, you should work to counter-act them, both in the communities you participate in, and in your corporate citizen behaviour within those projects. Each of these patterns are common and tempting, because they represent best practices applied in inappropriate circumstances. And each of them results in a net reduction of community health. Some common anti-patterns you should avoid are: 1. Command & Control – communities are partnerships. Companies are used to controlling the products they work on. Attempting to transfer this control to a project when you want to grow a developer community will result in a lukewarm response from people who don’t want to be second class citizens. Similarly, engaging with a community project where you will have no control over decisions is challenging. Exchange control for influence. 2. Water cooler – when your team gets too much work done in private, your community will not understand your motives and priorities. By working on mailing lists or other publicly readable and archived forums, you allow people outside your company to get up to speed on how you work. 3. Bikeshed – A “bikeshed” discussion is a very long discussion to make a relatively minor decision. When you feel like the community is dragging you down, know when to move from talking to doing. 4. Black hole – It can be tempting to hire developers who have already gained reputation and skills in projects you build on. Beware when hiring developers from the community – it may be that the community will be worse off. Ensure that working in the community is part of the job description. 5. Cookie licker – Picture a child who has had enough cookies, but wants to save the last one for later. So they take it off the plate and lick it, to ensure no-one else will eat it. The same phenomenon exists for community projects – prominent community members reserve key features on the roadmap for themselves, potentially depriving others of good opportunities to contribute. Beware of over-committing, and leave space for community contributions in project roadmaps. Be clear on what you will and will not do. Happy Community Gardening Community software development can be a powerful accelerator of adoption and development for your products, and can be a hugely rewarding experience. Working with existing community projects can save you time and money, allowing you to get to market faster, with a better product, than is otherwise possible. The old dilemma of “build or buy” has definitively changed, to “build, buy or share”. Whether you’re developing for Android, MeeGo , Linaro or Qt, understanding community development is important. After embracing open development practices, investing resources wisely, and growing your reputation over time, you can cultivate healthy give-and-take relationships, where everyone ends up a winner. The key to success is considering communities as partners in your product development. By avoiding the common pitfalls, and making the appropriate investment of time and effort, you will reap the rewards. Like the gardener tending his plants, with the right raw materials, tools and resources, a thousand flowers will bloom. – Dave [Dave Neary is the docmaster at maemo.org and a long-standing member of the GNOME Foundation. He has worked in the IT industry for more than 10 years, leading software projects and organising open source communities. He’s passionate about technology and free software in particular.] #ibm #intel #nokia #opensource

[As 2010 draws to a close, Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis reveals the 10 most influential articles in the VisionMobile blog for 2010, plus best quotes and reader comments. We also showcase our very best blog article for 2010, “Is Android Evil”, discussing Google’s control points and dispersing the illusion of the platform’s much vaunted openness]. During 2010, we have seen our blog reach new heights, having quadrupled our reader base over 2009, with more than 220 thousand unique visits, 4.4 thousand Tweets and 660 likes on Facebook. Moreover, our readers joined the conversation with over 550 comments across the 49 articles published this year. Another interesting factoid is that Twitter became the no 1 referring site for our blog during the past 12 months. So, a big thank you to our readers and all of you who helped spread the word! [poll id=”10″] Also, a big thanks to all 23 of our guest authors, whose contribution to the blog was paramount to its success. Some of our most successful articles this year, including “The Android UI dilemma: Unify or Differentiate”, “The Flash vs. HTML5 endgame” or “Waking the Dragon: The Rise of Android in China” were contributed by guest authors. The guest authors whose articles made it to the top 10 are Ben Hookway, Guilhem Ensuque, Dave Neary, Hong Wu and Thucydides Sigs. Trends Our blog hosted articles across a vast range of topics, from virtualization to app development and from the Cloud phone to Android. However, our readers’ interest was piqued by articles on Android and everything app-related. The Top 10+1: Best articles and quotes Here they are; this year’s 10 best articles, plus the undisputed champion. Apart from a brief description of each article, we’ve included the best quote by the author, but also one comment from the readers. In most cases, we’ve chosen to quote those readers whose viewpoints differed from our own, providing a more neutral perspective. Although our blog had over 20 thousand visits, a sizable chunk of these went to a single article; our clear winner for 2010, “Is Android Evil?” Our article on Android and the debate on its openness, was read by more than 45 thousand people, tweeted almost 950 times and generated an intense debate, with over 55 comments. This article sparked a heated debate, with readers’ reactions ranging from vehement agreement to zealous flaming and even name-calling. Is Android Evil? by Andreas Constantinou What we said “Android is the best example of how a company can use open source to build up interest and community participation, while running a very tight commercial model.” What you said “…Android may not be fully open like Linux. But it is dramatically more open than any other major cell phone OS…” (comment by Jim Philips) So, without further ado, here are our top 10 articles for 2010. No 10 – The many faces of Android fragmentation by Andreas Constantinou (5 thousand views, 105+ tweets) It’s common knowledge that Google and Android users alike have suffered from the platform’s version fragmentation. But did you know about the codebase and profile fragmentation? Andreas breaks down the three major fragmentation dimensions and discusses their impact on the platform’s success. What we said “For Google’s Android team, fragmentation is what keeps them up at night. Fragmentation reduces the addressable market of applications, increases the cost of development and could ultimately break the developer story around Android as we ‘ll see.” What you said “…Unless an OEM puts their hands around Android and creates their own software platform structured and controlled the way Apple controls iOS, the Android world will look exactly like the J2ME world in two years time…” (comment by Mike Grant) No 9 – How to save Nokia (from itself) by Thucydides Sigs (5 thousand views, 85+ tweets) For many years now, Nokia has been sitting comfortably in the no1 position of both the feature and smart phone markets. But times are changing and Nokia’s share is shrinking. Thucydides examines Nokia’s position and raises the issue of business culture. Also, don’t miss our readers’ weeklong debate on Nokia’s future, in the article’s comment section. What we said “Nokia has known where it wanted and needed to go. But the problem has been and still is the execution. The Finnish giant just fails to move and adapt fast enough to the chaotic, rapidly evolving software and internet market.What is holding the execution back? More than anything, it’s the company’s culture” What you said “…The new key to market share is the couple Platform-Ecosystem, not the handset portfolio diversity, the design or the platform quality by itself (WebOs is here to demonstrate). The Nokia mobile application/developer ecosystem is suffering (on one hand is too tricky to develop on Symbian, and the OVI store is not as good and commercially mature as Android and IPhone Markets)…” (comment by Simone Cicero) No 8 – Apps is the new Web: sowing the seeds for Web 3.0 by Andreas Constantinou (6 thousand views, 280 tweets) With the phenomenal success of mobile apps, the world of content is migrating from web 2.0 to apps as the new format for creating, packaging, discovering, paying and interacting with information. Andreas analyses how apps are the evolution of Web 2.0 and where this phenomenon will lead us next. What we said “Once web technologies are consistently adopted in 3-5 years we should see web move from today’s lowest common denominator to powering the next-generation of apps across connected devices, from toys to TVs and from web pages to apps – and the browsing (exploratory, lowest-common-denominator) experience moving to resemble an app (getting things done, immersive) experience.” What you said “..The web is accessible from any internet-connected device, regardless of brand of the device, of opinion the app-store owner has of you and your app, and of the device and (mostly) location of the device. The web would never be what is is today if it was controlled by one company or government (like apps are in the apple app store)…” (comment by Yves) No 7 – Windows Phone 7: Tipping the Scales of the Smartphone Market by Michael Vakulenko (6.5 thousand views, 130 tweets) Although Symbian still has the biggest market share in the smartphone market, it’s being pressed hard by Android and iPhone. Windows Mobile had all but faded into irrelevance, but it’s back with an all-new platform. Is it enough to tip the scales and claim its piece of the pie? What we said “If successful, Windows Phone 7 will catalyze further shifts in the mobile industry bringing PC-style commoditization and increasing distance between operators and their subscribers. Microsoft and low-cost, PC style ‘assemblers’ will be the main winners driving smartphone price declines.” What you said “…This is a chicken-and-egg scenario, since the success of WP7 actually depends on being able to commoditize the market. Microsoft’s strength really lies in coming from behind and comoditizing somebody else’s innovation…” (comment by Jay) No 6 – Waking the Dragon: The Rise of Android in China by Hong Wu (8 thousand views, 155+ tweets) There’s no question that Android has a stellar rise in shipments and developer mindshare. But what about China, the country with the biggest mobile user base? What we said “The Android ecosystem in China is still a sleeping dragon, but is waking up day by day. There will be more ad networks, more app stores, and more payment gateways coming out in the foreseeable future before consolidation moves in.” What you said “…I do believe strongly that if you’re right in terms of the way Android is picking up in China, there would be no reason for them to expand out to other markets at all, even India and other developing countries…” (comment by Krshna) No 5 – [Infographic] The Mobile Developer Journey by Matos Kapetanakis (9 thousand views, 260 tweets) Although not an article, we’ve included our infographic, as it’s become a reader favorite. The “Mobile Developer Journey” infographic is based on our Developer Economics report, tracking the developer experience, from app design and platform selection to market delivery and monetization. What you said “Nice representation of some of the key points for mobile dev>” Tweet by @DavidBod “Awesome infografic on mobile platforms & development” Tweet by @Marcovena “If you want to see what it takes to build a mobile app” Tweet by @MarksPhone “Great new infographic from VisionMobile for mobile app development” Tweet by @AppsArabia No 4 – The MeeGo Progress Report: A+ or D-? by Dave Neary (9.5 thousand views, 85+ tweets) MeeGo has been in the pipeline for quite some time now, but we’ve yet to see any devices. Dave takes a look at the project’s progress and reports on MeeGo’s chances against smartphone OS giants, like iPhone and Android. What we said “…to succeed as a platform, the application developer story and the user experience are vital. There is a lot of work to be done in these areas for MeeGo to gain serious traction outside of the small community of Finnish handset designers. Nokia still has a long way to go” What you said “…MeeGo looks like a fig leaf for failed software strategy of two hardware giants – Nokia and Intel. Moreover, it was conceived to solve yesterday problems. By the time it will reach consumers, the market will advance two phases and pose very different challenges…” (comment by Michael Vakulenko) No 3 – The Flash vs. HTML5 endgame by Guilhem Ensuque (11 thousand views, 170+ tweets) Adobe’s Flash platform is feeling the pressure, as more vendors choose HTML5 over it. But is there really a war going on? Guilhem makes an in-depth analysis into the history of each contender to the throne and looks at the pros and cons of each. What we said “Flash is far from dead today. There are many cases in which Flash will continue to offer a better alternative (worst case a very useful fallback) to “HTML5” technologies due to the fragmentation in new web standards browser support.” What you said “…I think both technologies can coexist. And more than that, they should join, mix. Why not integrate Flash into the HTML5 specification? I’ve always thought that the best way is to add a tag called ‘flash’ or ‘ria’ where there is SWF content. It would be like the canvas tag, but would also be able to resize…” (comment by Manuel Ignacio López Quintero) No 2 – The Android UI dilemma: Unify or Differentiate? by Ben Hookway (12 thousand views, 230+ tweets) Android’s fast becoming a handset manufacturer and operator/carrier favorite, largely due to its custom ROMs and customised UI. But Google is sure to pay a price, as user experience becomes more and more fragmented. What should Google do? What we said “The economic model of handset OEMs necessitates UI differentiation and Google is taking that away. For Google to expect Apple-like control on a fundamentally different business model is just unrealistic” What you said “…I think Android should remain open, let OEM customize whatever they want, as long as there is a Vanilla Home Replacement available for free in the Google Marketplace, all users should easily be able to remove the custom UI on any Gingerbread phone and “reset” it exactly to the default Android UI designs.” (comment by Charbax) No 1 – Developer Economics 2010: The migration of developer mindshare by Andreas Constantinou (19 thousand views, 320+ Tweets) This article is the first of a 4-part series, analyzing the findings of our global research report, Developer Economics 2010 (free copy here), on all aspects of mobile development. The article examines the recent migration of developer mindshare from the ‘old guard’ platforms (Java and Symbian) to the ‘new guard’ (iPhone and Android. What we said “In terms of developer mindshare, our research shows that Symbian and Java ME, which dominated the developer mindshare pool until 2008, have been superceded by the Android and iPhone platforms.” What you said “…I don’t think any more proprietary platforms will be successful. Apple has taken that mantle. I think only open platforms have any chance of competing. MeeGo, for example, is starting to get a good amount of momentum…” (comment by Francis Sepparton) Happy Holiday Season! There you have it, these were the top articles in the VisionMobile blog for 2010, as determined by our readers. I hope you enjoyed this collection of articles. Is there an article you particularly enjoyed and feel should have been included? What would you like to see next? Leave a comment and let us know. You can also follow us on Twitter (@visionmobile) or send me an email directly (matos at visionmobile.com). Happy Holidays to all! Don’t forget to tune in on January 3, for the first article of 2011.

[As mobile operators compete with the over the top players (Skype, Google and Facebook), many question whether operators have a real value to add besides a pipe. This is the playbook of Martin Geddes, a recognized thought leader who has held positions at companies including U.S. mobile operator Sprint and UK incumbent operator BT. As Strategy Director at BT Innovate & Design Martin was influential in shaping the carrier’s view on Cloud Computing. Peggy Anne Salz caught up with Martin to discuss how mobile operators can prepare themselves to compete in this new world.] Philosopher and poet George Santayana tells us that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The history of telecommunications shows us that the evolution of communications systems is inextricably linked with the needs of commerce and enterprise. As requirements change, systems evolve. They ultimately disappear altogether when they cease to be useful. The telefax and the telegram, which triggered a revolution in communications, have long been replaced by email and text messages. Now new players and approaches – such as Skype, Facebook and FourSquare – have stepped up to take their place. As telecoms providers prepare to do battle against these over-the-top (OTT) players, Martin argues that the real power lies in neither scale nor scope. In his view the answer is innovation that allows telcos to solve ordinary, everyday interaction problems between businesses and their customers. “The money is in the space between the enterprise and the consumer – a space I call the ‘conversation gap.’” Martin explains. “Take a company that delivers white goods like fridges. You make outbound calls to your consumer customers to schedule deliveries as part of your service. If that customer happens to be roaming abroad in an inappropriate time zone, then you certainly won’t get the result you want.  Same is true if the customer is on the middle of an important call. Or if the customer is on a smartphone, they might just want the company to send them a link to a web page where they can set up an appointment for the delivery on their terms.” Martin’s point: no service provider does a good job of thinking about the needs of the enterprise and ways to help them connect, interact and transact with their customers. “There is a void and we’re starting to see companies like Facebook rise up to take that space – or at least try.” As he sees it: “The fear that the Facebooks of the world are displacing the telecom industry’s core products — is real. But we shouldn’t overestimate it since Facebook are showing they are pretty inept at business model design.” Connect, Interact, Transact After thinking this through carefully – and for nearly a decade — Martin has developed a new business model for telecom service providers determined to defend their turf from OTT players. He calls this approach, aimed squarely at enabling commerce and connecting enterprises with their customers, Connect, Interact, Transact. So where will the Connect, Interact, Transact companies come from? Don’t limit your view to developed countries. To the contrary, Martin is convinced this new breed of company will rise from the emerging markets. A good bet is Africa. “That’s where we’ll see clever cloud communications companies that build products that target what’s known as ‘bottom of the pyramid’ consumers,” Martin says. “Not those living at subsistence level, but those who have a small disposable income. New business models evolve fastest where enterprises, NGOs and governments want to interact with these people – who are tomorrow’s consumers.” Whether from developed or emerging markets, companies determined to compete against the likes of Google and Amazon should integrate with platforms these companies already provide. After all, Google and Amazon have correctly focused their strategies on enabling commerce (Google dominates advertising and Amazon’s sphere of influence covers ecommerce and order fulfilment), and it makes little sense to reinvent the wheel. “If you are a small company, then you have to rethink your business to integrate with these companies and platforms to make communications with customers better and improve commerce. Put simply, you have to think about how to either use their APIs to improve business, or connect with those capabilities in some way to make your business more efficient and effective.” Communications gap Martin also urges companies to open up to business models and focus their efforts on bridging ‘gaps’ – places where there is a disconnect or mismatch between how people and enterprises communicate and how processes function. So who stands to win in this new world where it’s all about closing gaps in communication? Martin in convinced that having the connection to the customer is more important than owning the billing relationship. “It’s whoever holds the final interface to the user that has the power. That’s where we’re seeing a massive battle because the operating system, the browser, the unified communications app — all of these have real estate on your smartphone. So now owning the container in which the final experience is being presented to the customer is where the power is.” Where does the mobile operator fit in? While many industry observers staunchly believe telecoms operators are doomed to be dumb-pipes, Martin vehemently disagrees with this blanket assumption. “It’s a gross mistake to underestimate the telcos. There are a lot of dead companies and business models that tried a direct full-on assault against the telecom industry and lost. Telcos also have an extraordinary range of customer data and relationship assets that, in principle, position them well to launch new ubiquitous communication products.” However, operators also need to understand that competitive advantage does not lie in the offer; it lies in the size and breadth of the audience they can reach. “Telcos need to understand that they need to be able to have relationships with people whether or not they are customers,” Martin explains. “That’s particularly true in cases where telcos are trying to monetise services by offering business process efficiency effectiveness and security to third parties.  You don’t necessarily have to be able to bill the consumer at all; you want to just have millions of consumers who have relationship with you.” Put another way, operators have a central position – one they can cement if they build an over-the-top experience that serves customers that aren’t necessarily their customers. One operator that understands this model is France Telecom with its ‘On’ product. As Martin points out: “I can download On for my Android phone the Android marketplace and the mobile operator is in the middle of this experience, trying to capture that container experience for my address book dialler and other functions on my phone.” Futureshock Clearly, the operator has the capabilities to compete and win against OTT players. But winning may require them to transform more than their business model. In fact, Martin believes that the words ‘mobile operator’ might not have any meaning by 2015.  “It might be that there is a marketing organisation, that has a relationship with the customer and potentially controls various storefronts. But there will also be an infrastructure company. So, you might buy the Apple iDevice in 2015 and it’s a device that comes with content and connectivity bundled in. You don’t need to go and buy a separate service from somebody else; you just pay your service money to Apple. But, of course, Apple’s buying wholesale data from telcos in vast quantities.” So where will Apple – today’s OEM role model – be in 2015? “The Apple business has a nasty flaw in it. It targets the top 15 percent of the market to get 50 percent of the profits. Yet in a communications market, the revenues are in selling to the new consumers in emerging markets.” If Apple’s model isn’t about achieving volume, then can it survive in a market where the winners will likely be a mix of communications giants and companies that make commerce more effective? It’s a tough one to call but Martin believes Apple’s model has some mileage left. “Let’s say that there is enough life in the model to last until 2015, so Apple does have five years left.  Looking further out, the grand growth opportunities around machine to machine, communications as a service and communication-enabled business processes – everything we’ve been speaking about – are not where Apple is.” So is the future for mobile operators bright? “Telcos simply got sidetracked by the media business and mobile advertising, areas outside their main focus, forgetting they’re in the business of communications and making communications simple and effective,” Martin observes. “The first thing telcos have to do is undergo corporate psychotherapy. They have to look at themselves in the mirror and accept that they are a phone company. They sell conveniently packaged communications.  If they do this, then they have a good answer to Facebook and Google.  If they stray from that path, then they deserve the awful fate that will become them.” – Peggy Martin Geddes is a thought leader sharply focused on what is right (and wrong) with business models in the telecommunications industry. His most recent white paper, Connect, Interact, Transact: A paradigm shift in the business model of communication service providers (www.martingeddes.com/papers), warns service providers of developments that could potentially wreck their current model and suggests new offerings that could secure them a new and even more lucrative position in the value chain. Peggy Anne Salz is chief analyst and publisher of MSearchGroove, a top 50 influential technology site providing analysis and commentary on all things mobile. #carriers #mobileoperators #networkoperators

[Mobile services have long been a carefully guarded commodity, kept within the ‘walled gardens’ of network operators. But as innovation moves to the software and social era, operators need to adapt. Guest author Avner Mor discusses how networks are inherently social and why they should open their walled gardens to developers] A ‘walled garden’ is the term aptly applied to the last decade of mobile operator services. And Facebook is the generic name aptly applied to the social network revolution of our times. Wikipedia defines ‘walled gardens’ as referring “to a carrier’s or service provider’s control over applications, content, and media on platforms … and restriction of convenient access to non-approved applications or content”. This has been the common sense approach to operator strategies; build high walls to protect your revenues – which by now we know is becoming irrelevant. Mobile operators are facing market saturation, declining ARPU, higher subscriber acquisition costs (see iPhone), fierce regional competition and viable threats of being replaced by the over-the-top players. In 2009 alone, global operator ARPU fell by 7.3% year-on-year and is forecasted to further decline around 10% y-o-y  according to Strategy Analytics. How come operators – having a ‘social’ network at their very core – have been steadily declining, whereas Facebook has risen to a 600 million user, $35B valuation business in just 7 years? Let’s take a step back. [poll id=”9″] 2010 will probably be known as the year where mobile service innovation has moved squarely to the software domain. Think about the 100,000s of applications against the 10s of operator services launched in the last 2 years. To compete in this software world, operators/carriers need to leverage their network capabilities to compete with the over-the-top players. For example, think of a voice application that automatically switches to taking a text or voicemail if it knows the other user is busy. Or a service provider in the travel business that can target their Java app and SMS campaign to users who travel abroad frequently. Or web pages that feature a 1-click-buy based on keying in your mobile phone number. Or a “where are my friends” service, where you opt-in to a friends location request no matter what phone you ‘re using. Or travel recommendations where a virtual concierge suggests places to visit in your holiday based on where your friends have been. Such innovation has shunned the mobile world because network operators have adopted the walled garden business model of building a supermarket with their own branded goods – rather than a shelf (a platform) for third party goods that leverages on the social aspects of the platform. To compete in a world where innovation is defined in software and social, operators need to become a platform – and compete over the top, not in the network. A platform business model is about leveraging operators’ underutilised, walled network assets, taking a cut from the delivery of innovative services, in the same way that Apple takes a cut from the delivery of mobile apps or Facebook takes a cut out of ad delivery. It’s not just operators that are playing in this developer game – it’s handset vendors investing in developer programs and app stores, online brands opening their assets to developers (from the BBC to Facebook) and Digital TV operators exploring methods to open STB, EPG and DVR channels to developers. Yet operators are the most ubiquitous and most social players of them all. Leveraging the social side of the network Networks hold lucrative assets within their walls including voice, messaging, location, presence, user authentication, billing – plus social graph, user profile and preferences. Take location for example; despite wide penetration of GPS receivers in handsets, network-based location covers any device, works indoors, and is particularly suited to emerging markets. More importantly, mobile networks hole a treasure trove of information about its users; based a few key information like age bracket, ARPU bracket, address region, roaming characteristics and device model which are provided in an opt-in model, one can deliver better search results, ads or campaign targeting. Think about how restaurant recommendations can automagically cater to your spending habits, taste for international cuisines and social lifestyle – an app that knows you from day one. There are tons more of examples where network APIs can enable unique applications. Yet, when developers try to connect their app to an operator network they experience barriers and restrictions, such as technology fragmentation, long and expensive technical integration, tedious commercial engagements, long time to payment, plus distribution challenges. What’s worse, developers need to engage and integrate separately with each operator. All of these factors hinder the vast majority of developer innovation and essentially diminish the operator ability to be the center of innovation gravity. Many infrastructure vendors have jumped into the opportunity to connect operator networks to developers: – Alcatel Lucent – A dominant SDP provider, extended a hosted ‘OpenAPI’ service for developers, providing Consent Management and  ‘LBS API’ – Ericsson – through their ‘Ericsson Labs’ initiative, the SDP provider offers a broad ‘Maps & Positioning’ API set: web & mobile maps, 3D maps, Cell-id look-up (with its own worldwide cell-id database) , operator based  cell-id and  consent management . Ericsson is currently working with operators in Sweden and Norway. – Amdocs –  an OSS/BSS leader moving into positioning as an open mobile service providers network to 3rd parties: “service providers have the opportunity to drive new revenues by monetizing their unique assets – networks, customer information, charging, billing and customer care…” – Huawei – An emerging market player builds its position by partnering America Movil and Telefonica in LATAM. Telefonica has completed in 2009 the deployment of Huawei’s openness platform across 13 Latin American countries Social cloud APIs Yet such efforts are limited to single-operator deployments. In addition, they have limited developer outreach potential as many these infrastructure vendors stem from the network, not the software world. The logical next step is a single, cloud-based network API platform across multiple operators, spanning not just regions and multiple screens, but the entire application lifecycle: develop – deploy – discover – monetize. This network API cloud paradigm is essentially a 4-sided platform connecting users (who discover and consume services), developers (who innovate and create services), the applications themselves and the developer program partners (with the tools and technology, go-to-market, support and community assets). Naturally, a multi-operator paradigm needs to support variable access policies for operator assets, including access to network assets, charging subscribers and accessing user info. Such a developer-friendly cross-operator pilot program was announced recently in the form of WAC, the Wholesale Applications Community, a joint effort to create a standards based apps platform that operators can leverage to build their storefronts. Network API’s are also part of WAC, based on OneAPI, a Commercial pilot project aiming to establish a unified, developer-friendly API environment across operators. Aepona is the technology provider for the GSM Association’s “OneAPI” initiative. So is WAC the answer? Operator alliances are essential to achieve this goal. Yet, historically we have seen internal complexity and operator competing agendas hinder effectiveness of these pilots. The missing piece is an infrastructure player that understands software innovation, developer programs and running telco-grade cloud infrastructure. A Facebook-like (software) player that can bring the Facebook out of the operator walled garden. – Avner [This article is dedicated with appreciation to the Telecom team at Microsoft Israel R&D center Avner Mor has over 25 years of experience in senior management positions with leading Israeli hi-tech telecom companies and start-ups. In his last role, Mor served as the General Manager of Telecom Products at the Microsoft Israel R&D center.] #networkapis #mobileoperators #facebook #wac #ericsson #alcatellucent #huawei #amdocs #networkoperators

[With the phenomenal success of mobile apps, the world of content is migrating from web 2.0 to apps as the new format for creating, packaging, discovering, paying and interacting with information. Andreas Constantinou analyses how apps are the evolution of Web 2.0 and where this phenomenon will lead us next] Billions of downloads. That’s how the success of software platforms is measured today. And while downloads is not a currency (it does not necessarily translate into revenues), it does create plenty of free buzz for software platforms. This is the world of apps. But what is an app really? It’s not just a bunch of code and a fancy UI. Apps are the new channel for delivering services and experiences in mobile devices, taking over from the old world of web pages, texting, ringtones, wallpapers, MMS, Mobile TV – and some would argue voice, too. What’s interesting all these technologies were agreed over 1,000s of meetings and years of standardisation work taking place across (mostly) network operators in the 80s and 90s. In the case of apps, none of this had to be ‘standardised’, just adopted by a critical mass of software developers and in turn a critical mass of users. Today the billions of downloads are indeed that success metric of de-facto standards like iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Java – even if the vast majority of downloads take place on a small fraction (5%) of the devices sold. [poll id=8] Despite the fragmented nature of the app economy, we ‘re reaching a milestone at the end of 2010: more than 500,000 mobile apps will become available for Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Java ME, BREW, Symbian and Windows Phone devices in total. The number is only a fraction of the big picture; what apps have accomplished is an unprecedented speed of innovation and a diversity of use cases. Think about it; traditional mobile services cater mostly to communication needs. Apps cater to the entire spectrum of consumer needs: entertainment, travel, health, food, sports, finance, education. Network operators have for years been trying to increase service ARPU, i.e. revenues stemming not from voice, texting or data traffic (which are consistently declining due to regulation and competition), but revenues stemming from additional services. Operators (aka carriers) have taken a technology centric-view which is that new revenue can come from the introduction of new technology – MMS, Mobile TV and 3G. Instead apps have taken the view that new revenue can come from addressing new consumer needs. And that’s how apps have allowed mobile to tap into a far more segments of the user spending pie. Apps as the Web 3.0 Such is the allure of apps that every brand and every service provider is looking to create their own apps, whether as part of their brand identity, as a lead generator, a traffic driver or even a direct revenue source. Soon every enterprise will want their own set of apps, essentially creating a more intelligent mobile intranet, for example with apps for guiding you to your next meeting, for inventory tracking or on-the-spot videoconferencing. We can easily imagine a world where there will be an app for every brand, every service provider and every corporate intranet. Apps have grown out of the roots of the web; in a sense an evolution of Web 2.0, adding not only new forms of interaction, but also new forms of discovery, monetisation and deeper user context, as summarised in the next table.AppsWebDiscoveryapp storetext results or URLUser contextlocation, contactsexplicit info onlyAccess modeonline/offlineonlineMonetisationmicropaymentsadsUI design focustailored experiencecompatibilityInteraction modeltouch, sensors, keysmouse, keysUsability focusget things doneexploreEconomydownload economyattention economy Some aspects are worth highlighting: Discovery is critical to the take-up of mobile apps. Webpages are discovered through Google search or a memorable address. The results you get back from Google take a lot of second-guessing as there is no information semantics describing a webpage or its relationship to other pages. On the contrary apps are published with semantic information as part of the submission process; genre, description, price and screenshots, while downloads, ratings and recommendations are added in-life. This makes discovering apps much more straightforward and intuitive. User context. Apps have access to location and contacts (subject to certification/approval in some cases) whereas web pages only have access to explicitly provided user info. Monetisation should also not be underestimated. The freemium business model and the ubiquity of freely available news on the internet arose from the lack of effective micro-payment mechanisms; it is too cumbersome to take out a credit card and pay 10 cents for reading a newspaper online and no payment provider has managed to simplify this (although Paypal and Google Checkout are trying). On the contrary, many app stores have included micro-payments (pay per download) from day one. Apps are now going beyond mobile. Not only to tablets (see iPad and the tablets coming with Android 3.0) but also to the web (Chrome Web Store), the desktop (Mac App Store) and the billions of connected devices out there from TVs to cars. Apps are also changing the rules of the game for Google. The search giant rose due to three factors: the open (crawlable) web, the lack of information semantics (necessitating a pagerank-type taxonomy) and the lack of a micro-payments (thereby increasing the demand for ads). Now the world of apps is coming to threaten the foundations of Google’s success: the web is becoming segregated into walled information gardens (exemplified by Facebook and Apple’s App Store), apps carry information semantics (thereby greatly reducing the search space), and micro-payments are the primary revenue model for apps (thereby decreasing the need for ads as a monetisation medium). Google is of course preparing for the world where apps become a mainstream means of accessing the world’s information by launching is own walled gardens (Orkut and Buzz), its own app store (Android Market and Chrome Web Store) and now integrating a payments technology (NFC) within Android handsets. So where are we going next? The web as the new app Not to be left behind, web technologies (HTML, JavaScript and CSS) are being driven forward by the world’s web benefactors. Google actively invests in ‘web development’ with the aim to advance the state and adoption of web technologies so that it can supplant the otherwise proprietary technologies (Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM and its own Android) which today power the world of apps. This is part of Google’s strategy to level the playing field where it doesn’t compete directly and Chrome is a big part of Google’s web development efforts, incl. WebKit and v8. HTML5 standardisation (and initiatives like Webinos) are trying to make the web a primary app platform with offline access plus access into contacts and other user information. In parallel the WebKit engine is being consistently adopted in mobile handsets by just about every manufacturer with over 350M deployments up to the end of June 2010. More than anything, web technologies are being adopted by mobile platform vendors looking to renew their platform and developer strategy. In order to be competitive, a platform today needs to have three elements: – mature technology and tools – hype/buzz – an active developer community While you can buy technology, buzz and developer communities are very expensive to build. Like a deus ex machina, web technologies come out of the box hype-ready and with an established developer community. As a result, Nokia, Palm (now HP) and RIM all chose web technologies in WRT, WebOS and WebWorks respectively, as the technology basis of their platform. I believe players who need to refresh their platforms (like Qualcomm’s BREW MP, Samsung and LG) would opt for web technologies. Web technologies also allow mobile platform providers to tap into new developer segments (designers, scripters, back-end developers, CMS developers and more). More importantly, web technologies reduce the development costs for cross-domain development across mobile, tablets, desktop, car, and consumer electronics from toys to TVs. Once web technologies are consistently adopted in 3-5 years we should see web move from today’s lowest common denominator to powering the next-generation of apps across connected devices, from toys to TVs and from web pages to apps – and the browsing (exploratory, lowest-common-denominator) experience moving to resemble an app (getting things done, immersive) experience. Perhaps this is the Web 3.0 we ‘ve all be waiting for. The question is: are apps a ‘blip’ on the radar before the web takes over again? No – apps represent the evolution of creating, packaging, discovering, paying and interacting with information – and while today’s apps are based on mostly proprietary technologies (Apple, Android, BlackBerry, BREW, Symbian, Windows Phone) tomorrow’s apps will be mostly based on web technologies. As to the open web vs closed web silos debate (analysed eloquently by Wired magazine) history teaches us that closed silos are faster at innovating that the open web – and that the web governance will oscillate between the yin and yang for the years to come. – Andreas You should follow me on Twitter @andreascon #browser #mobileapplications #mobileapps

[RIM is torn between two very different market segments: Enterprise mobile messaging and text-addicted consumers. Amidst troubling signs for RIM’s future, the company needs to reconcile its dual personality. VisionMobile Research Partner Michael Vakulenko explains why RIM needs to create separate product experiences for business users and consumers and analyses the possibilities.] It’s hardly news today that RIM is at the verge of losing its smartphone leadership. Analysts dog-pile on the company downgrading the stock amidst declining smartphone market share, increasing subscriber acquisition costs, increasing competition from Apple and a slew of Android handsets from tens of OEMs. [poll id=7] A lot has changed since RIM earned its success on providing mobile push-email to enterprises. Today RIM serves two distinct market segments: enterprise users and text-addicted consumers. Contrary to common perception, enterprise market is no longer RIM’s largest market. Back in June 2009 the company reported in that 80% of the growth came from consumers. Today in fact more than half of BlackBerry active users are consumers. Who are these people? BlackBerry was conceived as a messaging device with optimized user interface and physical keyboard being its primary advantages. These advantages found warm reception in the hands of text-addicted youth, who according to Nielsen are sending on average 3,339 texts (SMS) a month in the US. SMS is not the only way to socialize using BlackBerry. BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is a proprietary instant messaging application running on BlackBerry smartphones. BBM uses BlackBerry PIN programed in the device to identify BBM users. The application supports avatars, groups, photo sharing, voice notes and reading the PIN using bar code. Because of the device-specific BlackBerry PIN, BBM has strong viral effect. A person must have a BlackBerry device to participate in the social network formed around BBM. As of May 2010, BBM had about 22.5 million users, representing close to 50% penetration across a total subscription base of 46 million subscribers. In countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, about 90% of BlackBerry owners use the BBM service – a figure which concerned government authorities, which weren’t able to intercept BBM communications. In the UK and France BBM is one of the main drivers for BlackBerry device sales. In Netherlands, Venezuela, Indonesia and Thailand users put the bar code of their BlackBerry PIN on their business cards, t-shirts or even swimwear. A Personality Dilemma Consumer success is great news for RIM. It is however increasingly difficult for RIM to maneuver between its established high-margin enterprise market, and the less familiar lower-margin consumer market. RIM will risk loosing both markets to competition, if it continues to serve them with the same brand and product portfolio. Enterprise users have very different and often conflicting expectations compared to the enthusiasts of message-based socializing: – Cost is important factor for many text-addicts. Many of them are young or live in developing counties. A BlackBerry price tag in the pre-paid range has significant allure for this segment. For example, Carphone Warehouse sells BlackBerry Curve 8520 for £129.95 (more than $200) with a Pay-as-You-Go plan. On the enterprise side, the last thing that a high-flying executive wants is to use a smartphone associated with a cheapy, “smartphone-for-the-rest-of-us” brand (for example see this T-Mobile commercial) – Many text-addicts buy BlackBerry because they don’t like touch screen. If they would, many of them would be buying iPhone or Android phones. Instead they prefer a device with physical keyboard and optimized for one-handed operation. On the enterprise side, touch screen is important to compete against high-end iPhone, iPad and Android devices. – Text-addicts need texting, instant messaging and integration with popular social networks.  Enterprise users need emphasis on email, PDA functions, synchronization, MS Office compatibility and device management. – Security is a big issue in the enterprise, while many consumers don’t know how to spell it – as demonstrated by the wide adoption of Facebook, despite privacy issues. Is RIM putting its R&D cycles and money in the right places? No – RIM seems to be gravitating towards the convenient and familiar enterprise segment playing catchup with Apple. RIM acquired DataWiz, maker of MS Office compatibility software, in September 2010; Introduced high-end touch screen model, BlackBerry Torch, in August 2010; and recently announced PlayBook tablet squarely aimed at the enterprise market. There is very little in the recent RIM product announcements to bolster confidence in the company’s historical smartphone leadership. New developments are mostly about catching up with Apple, without introducing anything significantly new and relevant for RIM’s devoted user base. A Gordian Solution Instead of chasing Apple, RIM shall build on its advantages and focus on unique needs of its devoted user base. The first step would be separating its product portfolio into enterprise and consumer product lines. This will free consumer products of unnecessary burden and complexity, while keeping enterprise products focused on productivity and security. The second step would be enhancing the BlackBerry Product Experience (PX) by building up the social features of BBM on the consumer side and beefing up on the proven push-infrastructure, security and team collaboration features on the enterprise side. Today, competition in the mobile industry shapes around Experience Ecosystems comprising of connected devices, applications, services and communities. New Product Experiences based on connected services should be the focus for RIM’s innovation. Here’s how RIM could create service-based product differentiation for future versions of BlackBerry devices. Location-based games have proved to be very popular, especially with RIM’s consumer demographics. Foursquare, a company developing a smartphone check-in service, reached a valuation of $125M having just 1.8 Million users and 27 Employees. Compare this with RIM who has over 20 Million users in their BBM network. Why can’t RIM build its own checkin service on top of BBM, exclusive to BlackBerry devices? Adding location context to BBM messaging will greatly enhance social interaction of the platform’s users. Moreover, check-in apps show strong advertising potential. With 20 Million BBM users RIM could create new revenue streams for itself and mobile operators. Even compulsive texters use the phone once in a while, but for them voice call is often a part of a longer conversation taking place using multiple means of communication. RIM could integrate voice calling with BBM making voice part of a wider social context. Users would enjoy better communication experience, while operators would be happy to see users consuming more voice minutes. Business users use their devices in rather different context from consumers. Many of them are mobile and depend on collaborating with their colleagues remotely. BlackBerry-based team collaboration could become a killer app and differentiator for such users. Real-time activity updates, multiparty discussions, wikis, collaborative task lists have all enjoyed success on the Internet as shown by Teambox, Yammer, 37 signals and long list of other Internet collaboration startups. Why not integrate information sharing tools and video calling into the operating system making BlackBerry indispensable not only for email, but for team collaboration? The Clock is Ticking In order to keep its position in the smartphone market RIM needs to create separate Product Experiences for consumer and business users, and focus on innovation in connected services. RIM doesn’t have much time for experiments with the PlayBook tablet, or on internal debates about replacing the vintage BlackBerry OS with the more capable QNX OS. The mobile market continues to evolve rapidly: Apple is making steady progress in improving enterprise readiness of its products, prompting mass defections of enterprise users to more appealing iPhone and iPad devices. At the same time, Android is spreading into low-cost smartphones threatening to displace BBM with Internet-based alternatives. What do you think RIM should do to keep its smartphone leadership position? – Michael [Michael Vakulenko is a Research Partner at VisionMobile. He has been working in the mobile industry for over 16 years starting his career in wireless in Qualcomm. Michael has experience across many aspects of mobile technologies including handset software, mobile services, network infrastructure and wireless system engineering. He can be reached at michael [/at/] visionmobile.com] #Blackberry #rim #smartphone #smartphones

[With proprietary software such as Adobe’s Flash Lite or Qualcomm’s BREW having shipped on more than 500 million devices, and with the emergence of promises for successful ecosystems from giants such as Google’s Android or Apple’s App Store – there is a growing question about whether “proprietary” may be the way forward. “Is it indeed?”, asks guest blogger Elad Granot] I have always been an early adopter of innovative services, from cellular to VoIP and advanced messaging. But more often than not, the advanced services that I want to use are restricted to a small community that uses the same type of device or shares the same network provider. Most of my contacts are not necessarily in that group, so even if I have access to these services, I have no one else to use them with. In many cases, the reason for the lack of interoperability is that these services are based on proprietary solutions, owned by only a few vendors or service providers, and this prevents mass-market reach. Contrast this with SMS, a standard service that generates a fortune for mobile operators and is nowadays considered a basic and mandatory service (would anyone today buy or sell a mobile device that doesn’t support SMS?). It Needs Wings to Fly What is the magic recipe that allows a service to become so widely adopted that its market reaches an audience of millions? While I can’t prescribe a full recipe, I can identify at least three of its key ingredients. It is a mix of business vision, business models and open technical standards that creates a widely adopted offering in the communications market. Take out any one of these ingredients, and your market is technically crippled — it may be perfectly sound, but commercially it can’t fly. Business Vision: The first ingredient may seem pretty obvious, but not every company has a long-term vision. Not all companies can develop a long-term plan for conquering the market, non-conformist enough to try shaping the existing industry landscape or willing to invest resources for conquering the market. But even among the businesses with ambitious strategic plans, very few enjoy the execution power that can change the market. Even a compelling offering like the iPhone coming from a giant like Apple who enjoys a herd of religious followers and a glory of buzz eventually remains a niche offering, such as the (perhaps overly) hyped iPhone, which has a 4% share in the global handset market, Open Technical Standards: The second key factor is having a strong technical solution that offers usability, scalability, security, manageability and most importantly, interoperability. When it comes to interoperability, relying on open standards is a highly effective way to achieve mass-market support. I ‘ll discuss this factor in depth later on. Business Model: The third ingredient, which sometimes comes late into the mix, is business models that sufficiently reward all the players for their role within the value chain. If the business model is not well balanced to compensate all the parties involved, then stakeholders who don’t benefit sufficiently may become barriers to adoption. The mobile industry has seen the rise and fall of great initiatives that offered compelling use-cases leveraging feasible technology on paper. However, when it came to realisation, no one found the right formula to either generate or share the generated revenues from the offering. Finding the winning model could be a trial-and-error evolutionary process, in which a compelling offering starts without a proper business model or with a bad one and only gradually finds the golden path that allows it to prosper. The freemium-based Web 2.0 has been criticized and named “Bubble 2.0” due to a lack of compelling business models. Some emerging market sectors, such as mobile advertising, have yet to prove that they can scale. In the case of mobile content pre-app stores, the developer only got 20-30% of revenues and most went to the middlemen. The lack of proper compensation for the developer led to poor diversity of content and therefore poor adoption. This model has therefore evolved to App Stores that offer 70% rev share to developers, which in turn gave birth to ‘there is an app for that’. Joining Forces Makes the Difference In this article, I’ll focus on the second factor mentioned above: the importance of technical standards to the success of a large-scale mobile service. With proprietary elements such as Adobe’s Flash Lite and Qualcomm’s BREW embedded on more than 500 million devices each, and with the emergence of promises for successful ecosystems from giants such as Google’s Android and Apple’s App Store, there is a shift in thinking away from standards-driven technology towards services that are based on proprietary solutions. Yet, BREW is still having a hard time penetrating non-CDMA markets. Adobe has backtracked on Flash Lite and is now trying to re-seed the mobile market with Flash (the desktop cousin of Flash Lite). Without ignoring their signs of growth, one should keep in mind that some of these promising services were only recently born and have yet to prove their long-term success and sustainability. Moreover, success stories can be classified as rare exceptions where giants exert their mighty market-force or cash flows to steer the whole industry (e.g. ARM has built up the ARM Connected Community around its own technology; Sun Microsystems sponsored the development and adoption of Java). But how many such giants exist? The average company is far from having such forces and so the odds for dominating the market using proprietary technology are daunting, if not impossible. By creating an open standard, on the other hand, companies can join forces with other players across the value chain to achieve the critical mass required for leading an industry. Standards as the Meeting Point Standards are published by various types of organizations, typically not-for-profit, which exist purely for standardization (e.g. ISO) or other associations and consortia motivated by business, engineering, governmental and similar interests (e.g. WiMax Forum, IEEE, ITU-T). Each of these entities has membership classes, IPR and other legal policies, governing rules and membership costs that must be borne by the joining members. Depending on the organization, members could be commercial companies, research, government agencies, educational institutions, or in some cases, like the IETF, anyone interested regardless of whether he or she represents any legal entity. The scope addressed by the organization varies. For example, while the OMA develops service enablers independent of the underlying network technology, the NFC Forum is focused on Near-Field-Communication technology, the OMTP develops mainly use-cases and requirements (as opposed to detailed specifications), and the IMTC targets the testing and deployment phase of rich media communication standards by organizing test events. Finally, there are also organizations, such as the GCF, that test and certify products for compliance with standards. Some of the organizations are global (like the IEC), some are regional (e.g. ETSI in Europe), and some local (such as KWISF, which developed the WIPI platform in Korea). The collaborative development of technical documents is usually done in topic-oriented Working Groups or technical committees that are chartered to discuss proposed contributions and make decisions regarding the standard. Predefined decision-making rules, such as consensus, public or secret vote vary according to the working procedures of the committee. Once completed, the resulting standard specifications are published for free or offered for purchase. Cross-organization collaboration and exchange of information between different bodies is possible through liaison relationships, which establish the legal rapport and the scope of joint work between the liaised parties. Develop It in the Right Way Just because the industry invents a new standard does not mean success is guaranteed. There are different ways to measure the success of communication standards: market penetration, timing, quality, interoperability, costs and affordability, deployment simplicity, ease of use, scalability, etc. So sometimes “success” of a standard is relative to the way one defines what success means. A standard could be successful in one aspect but a failure in another. Standards have many disadvantages, perhaps too-well known, that may lead to failure. However what’s interesting is to also look at how these drawbacks can be mitigated. Time to market. Many argue that standards take too long to hit the market and prefer to go proprietary instead of waiting years for the standard to be ratified by the industry. But it’s like comparing a monarchy to a republic. In a monarchy the king makes a decision that everyone else follows. On the contrary, in a Republic, decision making is more complicated and lengthy. A group-decision process has advantages; more alternatives are typically considered for the solution, more critics validate the selected approach and more evaluation criteria are taken into consideration. The market pays expensive development time in order to reach a solution after any debates have already been resolved. This promotes quicker adoption of the final deliverables. Nevertheless, in order to reduce the risks of losing the market, timing should be seriously considered when developing the standard. Publishing incremental version releases, limiting scope and managing priorities are useful tools to improve time to market. They also make it hard for internal opponents to attempt to delay the standard in order to give their proprietary solutions a chance to grow market share and defeat the standard in its infancy. The lowest common denominator. Some argue that standards end up being a poor lowest-common-denominator solution, lacking sophisticated features. While this is true in some cases, successful standards are designed with extensibility in mind. Extension can be provided by proprietary differentiating offerings, and successful ones can be considered for future versions of the standard. Complexity and advanced features can (and do) exist in standards, but standards should have them only where extremely necessary. The novelist Gustave Flaubert said that “perfection is the enemy of the good”. In general, to promote their quick and wide adoption, standards should strive to follow the Keep It Simple Stupid principle wherever possible, sometimes at the expense of engineering or feature perfection. Design by committee. To avoid challenges notoriously known as ‘design by committee‘, attention should be given to those who officially lead the work of the committee, such as those taking chairman role. Quality of leadership can be improved by internal training on how to resolve lengthy debates, overcome cross-cultural gaps and increase the amount and quality of contributions from members. The dark side of politics is yet another challenge to manage. When self-centered agendas and exchanges of favors overcome community considerations, an internal threat is posed to the standards from within. In these cases the decision patterns start to resemble those of independent market players, who try to steer the market for their own benefit. Policies and procedures that promote transparency can help reduce this threat, but the downside of politics is inherent in any community-based institution. Fragmentation. Fragmentation in standardization is another well known weakness of standards – consider for example CDMA vs. GSM. While competition brings survival of the fittest, it also leads to market confusion and fragmentation, which defeat the purpose of standardization. To minimize these risks it is imperative for standards organizations to liaise with each other and agree on a clear scope of work that avoids duplication and redundancy, hence eliminating the need to compete. Considering that different parties and interest groups (including competing ones) drive different standards, it would be too naive to assume that this would kill fragmentation, but it can help reduce it significantly. If all stake holders can be convinced that there is a compelling need for a single standard, and show willingness to cooperate (i.e. not block), then fragmentation due to a competing standard is not likely to happen. Marcoms. Too often standards don’t focus in marketing; i.e. communicating with the industry about their existence, features and advantages in a language that targets decision makers who lack the engineering background. This is a challenge for many standards organizations that focus on technical work and may lack the skills and huge resources required for extensively marketing their outputs. I believe that marketing activities should not be led by standards organizations, to avoid blurring their focus on the technical work; nevertheless, they do enjoy the critical mass that can draw media and analyst attention that will drive industry interest. Therefore they should leverage it and proactively inspire their members to engage in joint marketing and education efforts. I must admit, however, that this is easier said than done. Another challenge is one of resources. At the end of the day, the work is driven by contributions of the delegates, and they are usually employed by their companies and not by the standards organization. These companies are focused on their balance sheet, but measuring the contribution of standards activity to its bottom line is extremely hard, so unless the company’s management believes in the standardization and understands its strategic impact on their business, it may be difficult to approve budgets for this activity, especially at times of economic uncertainty. Having been involved with standards for the last 6 years, I do not know (and believe no one does) how to predict the success or failure of an emerging standard. The same standard can succeed in one time or market and fail in another. Success is dependent on business motivations, the regulatory environment, combined with personal leadership, market demand, timing and technical maturity to name a few factors. No single player can simultaneously control all of these factors. When It Is Ready to Go (and hopefully fly) The single most significant element of standards that makes them so important in the telecommunication domain is interoperability, which can be proven to exist through practical testing of products implementing the standard specifications. After developing these specifications, standards organizations (e.g. ETSI) and industry associations (e.g. the IMTC) typically organize and promote test events, which help identify bugs and issues like missing or unclear parts in the spec as well as broken implementations). Vendors also use their own labs to test their products for bilateral interoperability with other standards-compliant products made by their partners, and sometimes even by competitors. For some standards there are also authorities (such as the WiFi Alliance) that run thorough tests and certify products for standards compliance. A vendor may be able to create a marvelous state-of-the-art handset, but if there are no other vendors that can produce inter-operable network equipment, more types of inter-operable terminals, add-on features and services, etc., then the addressable market is limited and can’t scale beyond a certain point determined by the reach of the company and its partners. Interoperability defines the limits of ecosystem reach and an ecosystem is a necessity for addressing the mass market. When explaining my work to non-techies I often point out how surrounded we are by standards on a daily basis; even a technophobe can understand the pain of fragmentation when experiencing the frustration of looking for power adapters in a different country, or when realizing that everyone around you drive on the wrong side of the road. There is strong link between interoperability and market growth in any domain, especially in telecommunication where end point terminals and network equipment must interwork to achieve conversation; just consider the growth of SMS or the slow adoption of MMS. In the early days of the MMS market you never knew whether the message you sent to your friend could be received by their handset, because not all handsets supported MMS. But even when both handsets support MMS, they might support different multimedia formats (e.g. mpeg4 vs. AVI). To work around these issues, operators added transcoding servers that transparently adapt the multimedia formats sent back and forth. Lower costs and lock-in. Cost is another major factor that drives standards for the mass market. Everyone hates lock-ins to proprietary technologies, as it increases the exit cost. With standard solutions, competition increases and prices go down. Not just because of the fact that standards put a pressure to commoditize products, but also because patent issues are of less concern. Even if royalties or patents are included in the standard, these should comply with “reasonable and non-discriminatory” policies (also known as RAND) that are typically required by the bylaws of standards organizations. From service providers that buy back-end equipment, through integrators who build a system from multiple standard parts to the end-user (a consumer or enterprise), they all enjoy lower prices. If standards didn’t exist, there would be far fewer options to choose from and they would probably be more expensive – perhaps even too expensive to afford by the majority of potential customers. Benefits for Vendors There are also considerable internal benefits that companies can gain from embracing the standards. Thought Leadership. Vendors can use standards to coin new concepts that promote their business agenda; for example over-the-air software update, which has been backed by standards like OMA Device Management, FUMO and SCOMO. Topics can be raised for discussion, debate and development in the standards community, where teams of major stake-holders are present. This fosters an environment where thought leadership can be demonstrated and pushed forward. If done successfully, a concept can be accepted as a standard solution, which fast-forwards the long process of convincing an industry to realize the concept and make it happen. The PR aura. Being associated with standards often is an affordable way to build buzz, and get analyst coverage that endorses and goes side-by-side with the marketing activities of the company. Ease the creation of ecosystem. Standards promote the creation of ecosystems. Most single-vendor companies cannot offer an end-to-end solution on their own. It is the ecosystem (including their competition) upon which these companies rely to contribute the other pieces that complement their offering to create the end-to-end solution. “The Same – but Different” Standards don’t exist in a vacuum. There are plenty of proprietary excellent solutions that comprise the puzzle of the ecosystem, and it is imperative that standards leave room for those to exist. These proprietary extras enhance, innovate and leverage the standard while allowing vendors to differentiate themselves. Only few companies will be able to make sustainable profit by producing just the plain-vanilla implementation of a standard. If everyone produced exactly the same solution then they could only compete by criteria like pricing and service, which would make it hard for everybody to survive. Successful standards should therefore be designed with proprietary extensibility in mind. Mobile software, OS, UI and the like are in the focus of these business-driven industry forums that complement the work of official standards organizations. But whether an industry forum (such as the OMTP) or an established standards body (such as the OMA), or even a partnership of such organizations (such as the 3GPP) leads the unification is not important. Even when led by a single company, if it is done in a fair (including legally) and pluralistic manner and gets to the critical point where it becomes a real joint effort with large participation across the industry, then we get a similar effect. So even if the origin begins with proprietary roots, the essence of these associations becomes similar to those of standards, and the outcome can be categorized as such. It is the endorsement of the participants that makes the standard and not merely the signature of the organization that published it. The Symbian Foundation or the Open Handset Alliance could serve as good examples for proprietary commercial platforms being ‘donated’ to the community for joint development. Where to standardise Looking at the OSI model, the lower we are in the protocol stack (i.e. towards physical, media access such as IEEE‘s Ethernet), the stricter role the standards play and the less room there is for differentiation. For example, physical components and radio protocols are more streamlined and offer less differentiation than the applications built on top. This is partly because the higher layers typically need to communicate with fewer peers, while further down in the stack there are more ‘hops’ to traverse, and each of them could be using different equipment. For this reason, a greater variety of vendors that handle the traffic at the lower layers. This could explain why we see much more consortia-driven initiatives at the higher layers, where standards organizations sometimes do not provide enough or any unification. Too many options are allowed and the result is fragmentation. Bottom Line Android, Symbian and Flash are examples of market growth that builds upon wide-scale proprietary solutions; yet these examples are glamorous exceptions of cash-rich companies and their partners in conspiracy. More commonly, community-owned standards (like those from the GSMA, IETF, etc.) are a key ingredient for the mass market adoption of a new technology. Despite its overheads and drawbacks, the process of standardisation is critical for services to reach mass market. The higher we are in the protocol stack, the more room there is for differentiation (and fragmentation), and that is where the bulk of consortia activity is. If you’re fairly convinced of the importance of technical standards to the success of telecom offerings and they will not be replaced by proprietary solutions, then the next question is which standards to embrace and follow, since competition is not a realm limited to companies and products – it is sometimes the fate of standard initiatives as well (e.g. the rivalry between WiMax and LTE). Perhaps this could be a topic for a future post. – Elad [Elad Granot, a Technology Strategist, has actively participated in several standards committees and industry consortia (e.g. within the OMA and the LiMo Foundation) for the past 6 years. Some of the standards he worked on have already been successfully deployed in the mobile communications market. He became involved with standardization at Vocaltec Communications, who led the first VoIP standards in the mid 90’s. Today Elad serves as Director of Technology Strategy at Comverse.]

[We ‘ve all come to expect ‘people who bought this also bought that’ from online retailers. But the technology is increasingly being adopted in mobile, whether it’s App Stores, media storefronts or operator CRM programmes. Research Director Andreas Constantinou analyses the market of recommendation solutions, the key vendors and casts an eye on the future of recommendations in mobile.] The market of recommendations solutions is one of the most underhyped in the mobile industry. What started as ‘people who bought this also bought that’ has found its way into 10s of operator portals, not to mention 1,000s of mobile websites – but has seen very little analysis in mainstream media. Recommendations are also the differentiator (the cherry on the cake) for today’s App Stores – see earlier analysis of the App Store 2-year future. This has prompted several mobile operators (including Vodafone, O2 Telefonica and T-Mobile) to issue RFIs/RFQs in 2009. In parallel to the rising commercial adoption, the research interest has also surged, with the Recommender Systems 09 conference gathering 50% more paper submissions than last year from 35 countries – making this a rare case of synchronicity between commercial and academic worlds. The recommendations market is just emerging into the mainstream industry radar while so much vendor and operator activity has been going on behind the scenes. Recommendation solutions are appearing in a number of different forms: – Mobile Portal Personalization: adaptation of navigational elements, content listed, ads served and personalised search results (e.g. Changing Worlds, Choice Stream, Media Unbound and Leiki) – Content Discovery and Recommendations: pure content discovery and recommendations across content types (e.g. Xiam, FAST) – Subscriber segment targeting: user profiling and segmentation as part of an online marketing campaign (e.g. Coremetrics and Pontis) – Influencer targeting: profiling and identification of influential subscribers (e.g. Xtract and Strands) – Mobile advertising solutions: inventory targeting (e.g. Jumptap, Aggregate Knowledge, Velti/Ad Infuse, Medio and Wunderloop) – Web (non-mobile) Product/Content Personalization: cross-channel product and content recommendations optimised for retailers, web and media (e.g. ChoiceStream, Loomia, Aggregate Knowledge) – Business analytics: product/offer bundle recommendations based on user segmentation and real-time behaviour analysis (e.g. Olista, Oracle, ThinkAnalytics and Coremetrics) We ‘ve spoken to several vendors of recommendation solutions, focusing on those closer to the mobile industry. What’s most interesting in comparing and contrasting solutions is the target customer, use cases addressed and unique selling points and how these differ across vendors. The next table summarises our findings from researching eight key vendors in the recommendations market: Xiam, Changing Worlds, Ericsson, Loomia, Pontis, July Systems, Olista and Choice Stream. This is only a subset of the circa 40 vendors who offer some form of recommendation solution, whether pre-integrated into a vertical form (e.g. App Store) towards operators or offered horizontally across multiple touch points (e.g. mobile, broadband, web, retail) towards media brands. (click to enlarge) So what’s next? In the mobile domain operators are integrating recommendations into App Stores, but will be moving to business analytics, advanced CRM and product/service recommendations during 2010-11. We don’t see recommendations as applicable to multiple touch points (e.g. mobile AND broadband) just yet, as recommendation engines need to be highly optimised and continuously tuned to the channel and content type in question. The sophistication of recommendation engines needed firstly for live clickstream processing and secondly for content-specificity implies that the incumbent value-added service and SDP vendors will need to buy in (rather than build) technology. We expect this will lead to M&As thanks to the abundant technology startups out there. Clearly an interesting space to watch in 2010. Comments welcome as always. – Andreas follow me on twitter: @andreascon

[Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis, discusses the latest update to VisionMobile’s 100 million club, and the complex world of mobile software] The finalists: 30 products from 24 companies The latest update to the 100 million club watchlist comprises of 30 software products that have been shipped on more that 100 million handsets up to the first half of 2009. These products range from text input engines and middleware all the way to Java platforms and application suites. It’s quite interesting to note that 80% of the companies that have made it into the 100 million club companies come from the US, the Nordics and Japan. The newcomers One of latest additions to the club is the Mobile Office software by Quickoffice, which marks the first time that a mobile application has made it into the 100 million watchlist. Another newcomer to our 1H09 update is WebKit, the Apple-led browser core, shipped on 170 million devices through S60, S40, iPhone and Android devices, which makes it perhaps the most widely penetrated open source software in mobile handsets. Another up-n-coming company to note is Rococo’s Impronto TLK is a Java-to-bluetooth middleware bridge that has been shipped on more than 150M devices. Most popular software products by category The 100 million club spans several categories: – Applications: the one entrant here is Mobile Office Suite from QuickOffice – Application environments, dominated by Flash Lite which has been embedded on over one billion devices (including Flash)  – Browsers, where Myriad’s (ex Openwave) Browser is by far the most popular web browser, having shipped in a staggering 2+ billion devices. – Middleware is dominated by two products: Beatnik’s Mobile BAE audio codecs, with more than 1.2 billion shipments, followed by Myriad’s Messaging client (inherited through the Openwave and Magic4 mergers) – The most popular operating systems remain OSE by ENEA and Nucleus by Mentor Graphics with more than 1.5B shipments each, although S40 is not too far behind. – Finally, the input engines category contains two products, both developed by Nuance, with EziText being inherited from Zi Corp acquisition. Quite understandably, the T9 component is by far the most widely deployed in the 100 million club, having been shipped in more than 60% of mobile phones by the end of the first half of 2009. Moreover, T9 is one of the very few products in our 100 million club (and the wider arena of mobile software) with significant consumer brand recognition. Market ups and downs On the whole, the 100 million club members have seen a very small increase in software shipments, despite the worldwide decline of mobile sales. The most notable increases in sales include Adobe’s Flash Lite (now including Flash shipments), ACCESS’ Netfront browser and Scalado’s CAPS imaging engine. Nuance’s T9 also shows a healthy increase in shipments. On the down side, SVG players in general seem to suffer a decline in shipments. Twenty two billion You could be holding a phone powered by S60, using the Quick Office application for viewing text documents, navigating through the Flash Lite -based menus, surfing the net with Myriad’s Browser and texting with the aid of T9. In fact, there are phones with three (yes, three) separate instances of Flash Lite, used as engines for user interfaces, for applications and a third instance exposed to developers. So what’s 22 Billion? This is the number you can arrive at if you sum the shipments of all 100 million club products. But more often than not, these software products will co-exist – with an average of 3+ instances in a single handset on average. Yet another testament of how complex the mobile software world is. Drop us a line Do you have any insights of your own to share? Send us a nice Christmas card with your thoughts or at the very least add a comment! And don’t forget to check out the full 100 million club report. – Matos #100millionclub

[A strong service ecosystem has become the key to protecting smartphone profit margins and controlling post-sale revenues. Palm’s WebOS has little to offer in this environment and Palm is approaching dead-end for its software strategy. Which companies may gain from taking over Palm? Guest blogger Michael Vakulenko has the answer] This article is also available in Chinese. Competition of Ecosystems Recent developments indicate emergence of three fast-growing smartphone platforms that will shape the market in the near future: Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry and Google’s Android. All three are very different in their roots, market strategy and technology approaches. Yet, it’s becoming more and more apparent that the competition shapes around service ecosystems built around these platforms. Despite high hopes, Palm and its WebOS software has barely made a difference in the growing smartphone market. According  to Canalys, Palm shares 3 percent of smartphone market with Linux and proprietary platforms in the “Other” category. Clearly, it is not enough today to make an excellent device powered by modern operating system based on Linux and Web technologies. In contrast, all best-selling devices today are parts of service ecosystems blending Internet services, applications and digital content. Both RIM and Apple build their service ecosystems around proprietary, vertically-integrated smartphone platforms. RIM’s Blackberry ecosystem is anchored in the enterprise messaging market and enjoys strong distribution network comprising large number of mobile operators. On the other side, Apple’s iPhone ecosystem is rooted in the consumer market, leveraging Apple’s leading iTunes content distribution platform. Compared to RIM and Apple, Google takes very different approach with its Android platform. Instead of building proprietary devices, Google is arming legions of eager device makers with free-to-use smartphone software. Quite obviously, Android is strongly linked to Google’s ad-based service ecosystem.  Having no interest in device revenues, Google pushes for wide adoption of smartphones driven by its open source Android platform. This is to make sure that ever-increasing number of users have instant access to Google Mobile Search, Maps, Android Market and other Google services. Palm’s technology can only make a difference if it will become part of a strong, larger service ecosystem. RIM will benefit the most from acquiring Palm and making WebOS part of its product strategy. Consumer potential of WebOS can take Blackberry user experience to a new level making it truly competitive with consumer-oriented iPhone and Android platforms. Palm and its WebOS Platform Palm’s beautifully engineered WebOS was conceived to become an iPhone killer. To be more precise, iPhone-as-a-device killer. In the words of Palm’s investor Robert McNamee “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later” [the Palm Pre launch]. The miracle didn’t happen. New Palm Pre devices based on slick WebOS failed to make a dent on iPhone sales supported by iTunes and explosion of available applications. Designed by a veteran smartphone device maker, WebOS leverages modern Web-based software technologies, but is weak on the service ecosystem side. Without such ecosystem, WebOS selling points are quickly loosing relevance: – Background application capabilities are matched by Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian; – Use of Web technologies for application development is overshadowed by monetization potential offered by higher-volume platforms; – Integration of social networking into the device UI is quickly becoming a standard feature of almost of all new smartphones. In addition, Palm’s options are significantly constrained by weak financials and continued quarterly losses, making it dependent on cash injections by its controlling investors. Unless acquired, it’s difficult to see how Palm, at best, can escape its niche role on the sidelines of a battle between Apple, RIM, Google, Nokia and Microsoft. Who Can Take-Over Palm? Clearly,the WebOS software is Palm’s the most important asset. Which companies can gain from taking over WebOS? Neither Apple nor Google will gain much from making WebOS part of their strategy. In fact, the demise of WebOS can be another boost for Android as the most viable next-generation smartphone platform able to compete with iPhone. On paper, WebOS could help Microsoft modernize its ailing Windows Mobile platform, which is vital for success of Windows Live services. However, WebOS conflicts in its almost every aspect with Microsoft interests: being it Linux vs. Windows, Javascript vs. .NET, Webkit vs. Internet Explorer and more. How about Nokia, the driving force behind Symbian? Very unlikely. Nokia is already spread over Symbian, Maemo and Qt open source software efforts. It struggles to piece together its own service ecosystem under the Ovi brand. Adding WebOS to the already confusing mix won’t help much. It seems it is RIM who can gain the most from making WebOS part of its Blackberry ecosystem. With 80% of its growth driven by consumer subscriptions, RIM’s Blackberry faces intensifying competition and pressure on its margins from consumer-oriented iPhone and Android devices. WebOS can take Blackberry aging mobile software to a new level making it truly competitive with iPhone and Android. All that without compromising traditional Blackberry strengths, including enterprise-grade security, efficient push-messaging, integration with enterprise collaboration systems, optimized radio firmware and reliable hardware. Palm’s acquisition by RIM may seem logical, especially in view of market capitalisation; $1.7 Billion for Palm and $38.5 Billion for RIM at the time of writing. However, so far the acquisition is no more than a hypothetical possibility. RIM is attempting to reverse a steep drop in its stock price by planning to spend up to $1.2 billion to buy back shares – not that far from Palm’s market cap. RIM’s stock has fallen about a third since September on concerns about competition from iPhone and Android-based smartphones. Will RIM Save Palm? Lacking its own ecosystem and constrained by weak financials, Palm can only hope for a niche role in the smartphone market. Palm’s technology can only escape this role if WebOS software will become part of a strong, larger service ecosystem. One possibility is acquisition by RIM. Consumer potential of WebOS can take Blackberry user experience to a new level, including a slick UI optimized for multitasking apps, web-based application framework leveraging standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies, advanced web browser with HTML5 support and deep integration of social networking into device’s UI. Without significant improvement in user experience, Blackberry will struggle with increasing competition from consumer-oriented iPhone and Android-based smartphones. Of course, RIM can independently develop next-generation mobile software competitive with iPhone and Android. The question is whether RIM has enough time to do this in view of steady progress made by the competing platforms. What do you think future holds for Palm and RIM? Your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated. – Michael [Michael Vakulenko has been working in the mobile industry for over 15 years starting his career in wireless in Qualcomm. Throughout his career he gained broad experience in many aspects of mobile technologies including handset software, mobile services, network infrastructure and wireless system engineering. Today Michael consults and provides expert training to established and start-up companies, and can be reached at michaelv [/at/] WaveCompass.com]

[Customer journeys, such as finding new music or communicating with friends, no longer take place within the confines of a single device or service. Users may combine several devices or applications to achieve their objectives, creating a new set of challenges when designing user experiences which excel in this multi-platform environment. This essay brings together 5 of the leading thinkers in digital industry to explore the concept of multi-platform mobile user experience ahead of a new MEX conference (2nd/3rd December 2009, London) on this same theme] This article is also available in Chinese. By Marek Pawlowski (PMN), Thibaut Rouffineau (Wireless Industry Partnership), Lisa Whelan (SocializeMobilize.com), Andreas Constantinou (VisionMobile) and Matt Lewis (ARCChart). There is an old cliche rolled out time and again at mobile industry conferences: “You never leave your house without your wallet, keys…and mobile phone.” It is, of course, meant to remind us how indispensable handsets have become to our daily lives (and, perhaps, by extension, reassure all those in the mobile industry that, not only are their jobs secure, but they are meaningfully engaged in providing a significant service to humanity!). A recent BBC documentary about the lifecycle of mobiles (‘The Life and Death of a Mobile Phone‘, BBC4, 5th October 2009) provided an insight into just how attached users have become to their phones, with many of the people interviewed confessing to never turning off their handset – even when they were asleep – and never letting it leave their sight. The level of attachment exhibited by the interview subjects was quite remarkable. This places the mobile phone in an interesting position. By virtue of its ubiquity, it is the digital device we spend the most time with every day and the one we are most likely to trust and respond to. What then will be the role of the mobile phone in tying together the myriad digital platforms which fill our lives? The number of digital assets and devices owned by the average human is growing daily. The volume of emails, texts, videos, photos and music files to which each individual can lay claim is exploding. So too is the number of places we store this information. If we look just at one type of data – say, photos – we find that an average individual may have a collection of photos on their camera phone, as well as several albums downloaded to their PC from their digital camera. If they’re truly at the cutting edge, they may even have some images stored on a network-attached storage (NAS) device and beamed wirelessly to digital photo frames around their house. The same scenario of multiple storage locations and multiple access devices is also true of other data types, from email messages to videos. This model is both unsustainable and undesirable for the human mind. The complexity of keeping track of where we have stored what and how best we can access it will lead to an apathy induced by our natural fear of cognitive effort. We are already starting to see the first signs of this as digital pioneers, those who have led the charge into a world of multiple social networking accounts, PCs, MP3 players, consoles and phones, start to kick-back against the information overload they have brought upon themselves. When we undertook research with more than 700 people in digital industry during the planning stages for our next MEX Conference (2nd/3rd December 2009), it was eye-opening to hear how many people working in the technology business feel overwhelmed by the very devices they have themselves created. As an industry which has developed the phone – the most widespread computing and communications device in this multi-platform future – the mobile business has a responsibility to sit in the driving seat of delivering great user experience across all of the digital platforms in our lives. Crucially, the industry faces the challenge of combining the diverse range of devices in users’ lives – from PC to phone to interactive TV – into an experience genuinely greater than the sum of its parts. The rush of the mobile industry towards ‘services’ rather than devices is a clear indicator of the solution most feel will become the glue between the devices, hoping for a good old style horizontal integration to solve the fragmentation. Based on previous examples, the type of services to be offered are pretty obvious: single identity and single sign-on valid across all devices, universal storage to synch-up all devices and storage media, billing platform for universal one click payment, universal recommendation and preference engine. Unfortunately the mobile industry has rather poor track records when it comes to reducing fragmentation, whether horizontally or vertically. It basically knows 2 models: ‘king making’ and the operator association King making is quite simple, the number one player in the space acquires or adopts a technology and sways the balance in the ‘right’ direction; for example, cameras, GPS and navigation. Simple but more and more difficult as the industry becomes more and more competitive, furthermore there is no killer technology to be adopted today that would solve the problem. The operator association approach (e.g. UMTS Forum or GSMA) is pretty good at getting all to walk in the ‘correct and unified direction’, but the time involved, the size of the issue, the number of solutions to explore and the club approach would make such an association impossible. And thus it’s no surprise to any observer of things mobile that most disruptions (or chasm crossings) in the past few years have come from outside the mobile world: Apple for touchscreen and application purchase, Google for open source & mobile cloud services. It thus appears, based on past analysis, that the only credible way forward is the arrival of a new player in the market to solve this issue. So what kind of new player could this be… A vertical player moving out its niche… The name Apple obviously jumps to mind as a company which will solve this fragmentation challenge for you if you can pay the price to buy the entire Jobsfolio of ‘i-catching’ products. Can Apple now go mainstream with more than the iPod and the iPhone? Let’s not doubt it. A horizontal web service player extending into mobile… This sounds like a familiar reality called Google. In an industry known for its ability to constantly fragment and micro-segment, doubts are possible but isn’t Google too big to fail? A new universal remote control provider using a phone-type device… Previous attempts in TV / VCR / PDAs have shown the limits of this model relying on massive testing by the supplier, long set-up by the user and the general failure to encompass the variety of environment one interacts with. A neuro-controlled headset controlling standard interfaces on various devices… Hardware is now available from Emotiv for those willing to try…definitely promising. An identity service provider able to aggregate little by little all individual preferences, behaviors and automate activities such as payment, authentication etc in a secure way. An option sought after by many. A new digital ad agency specializing in multi-screen media buy. Once again, a sought after option… However the past is not always a good adviser for the future…another famous saying at conferences!. In a time of personalisation and increased multi-tasking, vertical or horizontal integration might not be the best way to deal with fragmentation anymore. Rather we could look to a world of standards, where defragmentation or user experience creation is a personal matter rather than an industry matter; where each individual is both in charge and empowered to make their own choices around what matters and what doesn’t; what they want to explore in its complexity and what they only want to deal with at a superficial level. From this perspective the industry winners will be those who can embed in their products standards, co-creation, a notion of variable complexity and the necessary need for multi-platform. At the crux of this challenge for the mobile industry is finding a way to proactively address consumers’ needs, without overwhelming consumers with choice. Different people have different needs. And, yet presenting users with too much choice isn’t necessarily a good thing, nor is it even particularly advantageous to mobile companies. From a user’s perspective, choice often means complication, and in the eyes of the consumer, simple often wins out over complex – even when it means fewer features. As humans, we like the ‘idea’ of choice, but we often find it difficult to make decisions when were offered too much choice (a state known as ‘analysis paralysis’). In theory, more choice should be a good thing for consumers, but when it comes to mobile technology, I believe users buy a phone to reduce the complication in their life – not add to it. When it comes to mobile phones, as long as our basic needs are addressed, most of us are happy – even if we aren’t offered a huge amount of choice about how that happens. By ‘basic’, I mean being able to communicate and share, be it through voice calls, emails, or social networks, organize (calendar), and to a lesser extent, be entertained, on the go, for an adequate period of time (i.e. long battery life). The rest is gravy. Take for example the Palm, Inc. (at the time, PalmOne) vs. RIM battle of the early to mid 2000s. The Palm Treo could run thousands of applications – including a handful of 3rd party push email clients (Good, Seven, Visto and more). In contrast, RIM offered fewer mobile applications for the Blackberry and one push email client – it’s own, pre-loaded client. Which company ultimately saw better uptake of push email and remains one of the leading OEMs? RIM. In retrospect, it seems that Palm may have offered its users too many choices, rather than recommending a single push email app that executed well. The result was consumer ‘analysis paralysis’ and increased market fragmentation. Take as another example the iPhone. Unconfirmed reports estimate the total number of applications on the Apple App Store at 100,000, but how many of those 100,000 applications are being downloaded more than 6 weeks after their initial release? Most of the developers I know are saying that the average app life cycle is just 4 to 6 weeks without a product refresh. Only a few apps continue to be popular after their initial launch, leading me to believe there are only a few apps that people consistently find they ‘need’. According to research conducted by mobile analytics vendor Flurry, over a 90 day period, the apps used most frequently and for the longest period of time immediately after download fell into one of four categories – from lowest to highest – health and fitness, weather, reference and news. In contrast, entertainment, social networking, travel and sports apps were used the least frequently and were rarely used past 45 days. So, what then will be the role of the mobile phone in tying together the myriad digital platforms that fill our lives? It all depends on which digital platforms become the most essential to consumers over time. If a large enough group of consumers decide that they need access to a specific group of digital mediums from their mobile phone, the growing eco-system of software developers will respond organically. As app store owners continue to improve merchandising, discovery, and behavioral targeting, more and more, consumers will be shown the apps and services that most effectively address their specific needs, rather than being burdened with too many choices. At the heart of any strategy to improve the user experience in a multi-device paradigm sits the mobile cloud. While the term ‘cloud’ is a relatively new addition to the industry vernacular, it’s easy to understand the concept it references. The range of devices and services with which users now engage often store information remotely, off-device. In essence, the cloud simply refers to the off-device storage of this information on a remotely located server, which can be tapped into with a variety of front-end applications – a browser, widget, dedicated app, picture frame or any client providing a window into the information and allowing data to be added, edited and removed. Photos provide a simple example of the mobile cloud. Several digital cameras on the market now have the capability to automatically upload photographs directly to photo sharing sites like Flickr, using the camera’s embedded Wi-Fi capability. The user may then access these photos on their PC through a browser; or on their phone through a dedicated application (which may offer rich photo editing features); or their laptop screensaver maybe be configured to run a slideshow of the images held in their photo sharing account. All these devices and applications are accessing content by simply tapping into the cloud. The cloud has grown organically and the approach to storing and accessing the data is more or less specific to each content/service provider. However, it is conceivable that as cloud services become more engrained, and consumers demand the ability to export and share files and media between different providers, the industry will move towards a more structured approach, defining specific storage, access and synchronisation standards. SyncML is one standard which already exists and which may evolve to address the entire cloud. SyncML is commonly viewed as a method to synchronise contact and calendar information and the migration of the phonebook off the phone and into the cloud will perhaps be one of the most important user experience boosts in the multi-platform world – this is the advent of the Phonebook 2.0. User are gradually becoming overwhelmed by the number of disparate lists of contacts, or phonebooks, they are now managing. A quick count of my own phonebooks shows the tally is eight: Mobile phone (on-device) Corporate phonebook Email address book Facebook LinkedIn Windows Messenger Skype Twitter Throw in a couple more social networks or IM communities and it’s easy to see how some users are juggling in excess of ten separate phonebooks, and the number is expected to grow as more services promote the sharing of content within and across communities. Often, individual contacts are repeated across several phonebooks – for example, a close friend is likely to appear in the contact list on the phone, Facebook, LinkedIn, Messenger, Skype and Twitter. The same person is repeated in all phonebooks as if each instance is a unique contact. All these services already exist in the cloud, in that they are accessible remotely from different devices and applications and can be updated and edited from each. The problem is that each phonebook exist as a separate silo. The objective of the phonebook 2.0 is to aggregate all these disparate contact lists within the cloud, providing a single window into a user’s entire phonebook portfolio. The phonebook 2.0 identifies repeated individuals and amalgamates their credentials from each service into a single phonebook entry, providing a one-stop view. It is easy to see how such an approach not only enriches the user experience by greatly simplifying contact management, but the aggregated information is of far greater value than in its disparate format Take, for example, presence. Many social and IM networks provide an indication of presence, showing the real-time status of an individual in terms of their usage of the service (online, offline, away etc.). Aggregated in phonebook 2.0, presence supplies more granular information, identifying the services on which someone can, or cannot, be reached. Add to that a location facility, and the value of phonebook 2.0 ratchets up another notch. As social networks roll-out location tracking features to their users, the aggregated phonebook will become a vital tool for engaging with professional and social communities based on geography. The question now becomes: who will become the phonebook gatekeeper, provisioning the aggregated phonebook service to end users? Will it be carriers, the handset makers or OS providers; or will it be the social networks or portal players like Google and Yahoo? Or will an independent third-party spot the opportunity? Information overload will necessitate more than filtering or search; intelligent, contextually relevant recommendations that take into account our long term habits and our short term topics of interest, to suggest information, music, events or activities which are relevant. Beyond recommendation, new forms of communication will allow us to interact with many more people in the same space of time – forms of communication that are today unimaginable, in the same way that Twitter and Google Wave were unimaginable 5 years ago. What do you think? We’d love to hear your views on this essay and you can help to advance the debate on multi-platform user experience by contributing a comment to the blog.