[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.

[In this state-of-the-nation article, Research Director Andreas Constantinou analyses the App Store status quo, the key building blocks and the dime-a-dozen future for App Stores] In the last 12 months Mobile Application Stores have evolved from hype to mass-adoption and even to currency; building an App Store marketing story can increase your valuation, even if no-one agrees what an App Store is. The mobile industry, from CEOs to developers, is engulfed in an app store hysteria such that everyone (operators, OEMs, and platform wannabees) wants to build one. Yet the long-term reality will be very different; App Stores will become a dime-a-dozen and smart players will need to seek out where they can add and extract the most value, not what app store recipe they can photocopy the fastest. In this article we ‘ll review the present state of the market, the key App Store building blocks and where will the market be heading in two years. What’s in a name? What IS an App Store after all? Is it a developer channel, an on-device apps storefront, a way to deploy applications, or an attempt to copy Apple’s model to the last detail? To understand what App Stores mean we need to trace back into mobile history; BREW, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm have long opened APIs to their software platforms, since 2001-2 in fact.. And while technical openness was established 7 years ago, what was lacking all these years was commercial openness; the funnel between external developers and in-market handsets was so thin that very few software players could pass through. It took Symbian six years to reach 10,000 applications, while it took Apple only 6 months (see our earlier analysis). In the first year of operation, Apple’s App Store brought in 65,000+ apps, 100,000 registered developers, 1.5Billion application downloads and availability to consumers across 77 countries through 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold. What Apple figured is that streamlining the commercial route to market was more important than opening up APIs in a friendly language – and as part of that taking out the middlemen (operators, content aggregators and content retailers) who were eating 60% or more of the retail price. BREW and GetJar have been following along, too, although somewhat limited in terms of operator certification hurdles (in the case of BREW) and lack of on-device integration (in the case of GetJar). In this historical context, it is easy to see that App Stores are a developer-to-consumer merchandising channel; a go-to-market vehicle for allowing developers to distribute and retail their applications directly to the end-consumers, while taking out the middlemen from distribution and retailing. In this sense, mobile app stores are the equivalent of JVC (or any other audio equipment manufacturer) allowing musicians to sell direct to consumers, bypassing labels, distributors and online retailers altogether. Sadly, the music business is more complex that mobile. State of the market – supply and demand Most of the hype today is focused on the short head of the most successful app stores. Below we have profiled the five most prominent app stores today and analysed them in terms of distribution model, installed base, downloads, applications and revenues, which makes for an interesting comparative reading. Note that our Apple app store revenue estimates are at $700M/year, in-between the conservative estimates from Bernstein and the optimistic (statistically-skewed) Admob estimates. [updated: we understand that Handango effectively gives only 30-40% revenue share developers, a figure which has dwindle from the 60-70% that was 3 years ago]. (click to enlarge) The long tail of app store launches is even more interesting. There is no self-respecting mobile player that hasn’t announced their plans to build an app store, across operators/carriers, OEMs, platform and chipset vendors. – operators/carriers: Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica/O2, TIM, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, China Telecom, China Mobile, SK Telecom, KT. – handset OEMs: Apple, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, RIM, Palm – platform vendors: Android, Windows Mobile, S60 (Ovi Store) – chipset vendors: Qualcomm, Intel, Mediatek For a slightly deeper dive into the details behind these deployments, Distimo maintains the most extensive comparative table of App Store launches. Naturally, a diverse range of white label app store providers have emerged to cover the demand. We track 19 App Store vendors so far as part of our industry Atlas: Amdocs, Cellmania, Comverse, Ericsson, Everypoint, GetJar, Handango, Handmark, Ideaworks 3D, Javaground, Mobango, PocketGear, Ondeego, OnMobile, Qualcomm, SlideME, Sun Microsystems and Tanla. Specialised vendors are already emerging with Ondeego offering an App Store for enterprise IT and Tanla offering application license management. One of the most integrated offering is from Mediatek – a chipset vendor powering more than 300 million (!) phones shipped each year – which has launched its own App Store powered by Vogins and SkyMobi. This is a white label app store offered as part of the chipset package and where the revenue is shared among the OEM (30-40%), Mediatek, developers and the operator, according to our sources. In a sense this copies the Qualcomm BREW model (chipset + software + services), but in a very different market where the one-stop-shop hardware+software+app has allowed 10-person OEMs to fill the market with knock-off (‘shanzhai’) phones, selling for 1/5th of Nokia prices. Key building blocks To understand the future of app stores one must look not only in their historical evolution, but also in their genetic make-up. We first analysed the key ingredients for building an app store a year ago – and the receipe still stands. In the next diagram we analyse the five key elements of an App Store and their evolution to the next two years. (click to enlarge) As we mentioned, an App store is a developer-to-consumer merchandising channel. As such an App Store is made up of five key building blocks: 1. Developer Market: a process for submission, certification, targeting and pricing of applications. Pre- App Stores, developers had to deal with complex, undocumented & fragmented approaches for app certification and pricing. The developer market, was one of the most important elements introduced with the iTunes Store and the BREW Mobile Shop, in the form of a single website where developers could go for submission, certification, targeting and pricing of their applications. What’s next: we see 10s of developer markets emerge in the next two years. Not only one app store for each OEM, platform and operator consortium (Android, LiMo, OHA, JIL), but App Stores for different consumer segments (enterprise, fashion, kids, elderly, sports, etc). As such we expect the emergence of App Store aggregators, ie entities which will undertake submission and testing of an app against multiple App Store marketplaces. 2. Billing and Settlement: a mechanism for billing, settlement and reporting of application sales. Pre- App Stores, developers had to set up their own billing or use premium SMS with only 10%-50% of the retail price going to developer. Settlement of application revenues used to take weeks or months. App Stores introduced credit-card billing, fast time-to-settlement and a 70% revenue share as the norm. What’s next: we see operator revenue shares harmonizing to the 70% norm towards the developer, and a multitude of revenue models emerging like subscription, gifting/begging and cross-app billing (where the credit paid through one app is valid for use in another app). The harmonization of operator billing will be critical to the adoption of app stores, removing the last consumer hurdle for mass app adoption. 3. Distribution surface: the size of the addressable market for an App Store across handset OEMs, operators/carriers and geographical regions. Pre-App Stores, developers had to distribute apps on region-by-region AND on a handset-by-handset basis – a true fragmentation nightmare. iTunes Store, Ovi Store and the RIM App Center introduced global distribution on a per-platform and per-OEM basis, offering plenty of room for continual growth of app downloads (and second-order growth in the case of Apple). Already the Ovi Store sees traffic from 180+ countries on a daily basis, and this is via user downloads of the Ovi Store with pre-loads on S60 and selected S40 models coming in 4Q09. What’s next: With operator consortia like JIL muscling into to claim App Store territory, we will see global distribution across operators as well as across platforms and OEMs. 4. Delivery & in-life management: the mechanism for app download, silent install, in-place access, app licensing and in-life app management. App delivery is one of the most underestimated building blocks for an App Store, as it’s all about the ‘magic’ happening in the background. Pre-App Stores, users had to download a ringtone or an app, then figure out under which menu this was saved on the handset. Naturally, there was no ability to update the application or apply any rights management to it, leading to rampant side-loading and gradual decline of content value. What’s next: we see application delivery extend beyond B2C towards B2B apps and middleware that can be background- downloaded & installed. This presents opportunities for App Store owners who can monetise on a per-activation/per-unit basis for remote installing of apps, features or bug fixes on behalf of operators, OEMs or enterprise customers. 5. Retailing & Merchandising: application discovery, promotion, as well as premium placement, search and recommendations for applications. Pre- App Stores, developers had to buy and market complex shortcodes or scattered website ads. iTunes et al introduced in-store app discovery, 1-click purchase, in-store promotions and automated recommendations. What’s next: as with all fast moving consumer goods (from detergent to mobile phones), retailing and merchandising is the most important segment of the product lifecycle. As applications become ubiquitous, we see specialized app stores with segment-specific retailing of apps, inventory leasing for app promotions (CPC or per week rental as already seen in the Ovi Store and RIM App Center), social recommendations (your friends bought this app, so you should buy it too) and developer back-channels (allowing the developer to reach out to their customers via App Store facilities). Outlook for App Stores: What the next two years hold We spoke to George Linardos, Nokia’s VP of Product Development for Media and Games who sees the App Store market evolving to the state of the US television networks; i.e. the emergence of a few major cross-regional App Stores followed by 10s or 100s of localized and specialized stores. This a natural evolution in a crowded, commoditizing market and addresses a very important challenge. “Today’s app stores throw the high value apps together with the low value ones into the same pool. The top-10 listings are based on number of downloads in most cases. There needs to be better segmentation, so that high-quality applications can be seen as quality applications”, notes Sebastian-Justus Schmidt, CEO of SPB Software, a software house which makes 6 of the top-10 best selling applications in the Windows Mobile space and has the best selling product across all platforms according to Handango. Indeed, the iTunes Store practice of dividing and conquering among application developers does not create, but destroys value – as can be seen from the continual decline in average app price. Schmitt continues “If you expect to get apps for 1 dollar you will get the quality of 1 dollar”. This observation confirms the necessary emergence of specialized stores; from the cheap & cheerful everything-you-buy-is-1-dollar Store, to the premium Store with perpetual updates and 24 hour customer support for each and every app. Beyond specialized app stores, recommendations will also play a crucial role in merchandising. ‘People who bought this also bought that’ (aka collaborative filtering) and social endorsement (aka social graph mining) will become key to App Store performance, which is why Nokia has hired some of the brightest minds to work on Ovi Store recommendations. Linardos expects to see major new merchandising and recommendation features appear on the Ovi Store in the next 6 months (perhaps in time for MWC 2010?) and sees Nokia’s global marketing machine as one of the key differentiators in Ovi Store. Beyond specialisation in App Stores, we expect to also see co-existence of multiple App Stores within the same handset. This is not just a hypothesis. Already LG and Samsung phones shipping in 4Q09 come with four (!) App Stores co-existing within the same handset; one from the OEM, one from the platform provider (Windows Mobile) and two from the operator (SKT – who has their own device- and web- application stores). In this dime-a-dozen picture of the future App Store market, retailing and merchandising becomes an even more strategic element; where the value is in selecting the ‘best’ apps from each application store and auctioning promotion space (paid-for widget real estate) for these apps on the idle screen. This is where JIL and operators should be focusing, rather than trying to photocopy the Apple recipe. [update:] In response to the many comments, here’s a list of companies who are offering merchandising and recommendations platforms for apps: Apppopular, Appolicious, Appsfire, Chorus, I use this, Mplayit and Yappler. Comments welcome as always. – Andreas follow me on Twitter: @andreascon

And? The survey brought out some very interesting findings – some quite flattering and some honest critique and suggestions to take on board. And as promised, we ‘re announcing 10 participants at the end of this post who have been drawn to each win an Atlas wallchart 🙂 What did you think of VisionMobile? Over 75% of participants found our blog insightful, analytical, thought provoking, original and innovative – which was rewarding to hear. Fortunately no one went for boring, overhyped or outdated being the other options 🙂 Furthermore, we were very happy to hear that over 91% of participants would recommend our blog to others. Thanks everyone! We are hoping that after turning the feedback constructively into action, we will be able to convince even the almost 9% group of Maybe. No pressure though 🙂 Out of the 56 readers who took part in the survey, the majority (over 90%) work within the Mobile Industry with mobile software vendors being the biggest community (almost 45%). In terms of job profiles, most participants work as Product Managers (around 28%), Engineers/Developers (around 26%), as well as in Business Consulting, Business Development and R&D positions (16%). 10% work in the Top Management positions like CTOs/Strategists, CEOs/VPs. In terms of employer profiles, over 25% of participants are in small start-ups; middle sized companies and over 16% in blue-chip organizations. Most importantly, you shared your feedback with us about our articles and gave us plenty of inspiring suggestions… You suggested we write about “how to make money in the mobile software”, identify the “Trendsetters, Thought Leaders and Thinkers” and introduce the “new kids on the block of the Mobile Industry – exciting new Mobile Tech Start Ups”. Exploring the emerging mobile markets in developing countries is another popular request. All points taken on board, and we hope to be launching at least one of these shortly. In terms of mobile technology and innovation, we received some interesting suggestions on topics such as network technologies, Chrome OS, Palm OS, Digital Content Market and Content Transcoding as well as innovation in the low-end handset segment, to name but a few. There is definitely a lot of exciting articles to look forward to! 🙂 And finally! The 10 winners drawn out of the survey participants are JS, Colin P., Igal P., Tom S., Sven K., Carsten S., J Helmig, Andrew G., Jarmo P., Alexandre B. You will receive a separate email from us regarding further steps to arrange the delivery of the Atlas wallcharts. All the best and keep the thoughts coming! – Jana and the VisionMobile team follow us on twitter: @visionmobile

[Mobile payments hold great potential far beyond what we have seen today. Research Director, Andreas Constantinou, looks at why has the Internet lost its value historically and argues that mobile payments stand to bring this lost value back to the Internet] The debate over reversing the loss of value in Internet-based media is long standing. Most observers argue that the Internet has disintermediated the traditional distribution channels, including music labels, news publishers and books. In other words, the Internet bulldozed what was previously the long and bumpy silk road between content publishers and content consumers – and at the same time allowed everyone to become a content producer in what Wired aptly called nanopublishing. At the same time, a more fundamental change has occured. The tsunami of nano and mega content has arrived via the Internet (ie the PC screen), not via the traditional channels like retail stores, music megastores, bookstores, news kiosks or the 7-Eleven across the street. This has had a fundamental impact to the value of the Internet, due to the fact that there is no convenient, ubiquitous payment mechanism to use on the Internet. Let me explain why. To pay for goods like news, information, music or books you go to a retail store, hand over the cash, get your change back, and presto in the equivalent of two clicks you re’ done. Same with a credit card; hand out your VISA, sign here and walk away. All it takes is two clicks. On the contrary, to pay for content arriving via the Internet you need 10s of clicks. Take your credit card, type your name, address (30+ clicks), now enter the 16 (s-i-x-t-e-e-n) digits of your card, don’t forget your expiry date (another f-o-u-r digits), oh and your CVC2 number (another t-h-r-e-e digits). Now let me check all this. And oops by the way your password provided doesn’t match so you have to enter all this again. Not to mention: do I trust this website with my credit card details? The sad truth is, that for any small amount, or as much as you ‘d pay for a newspaper, a magazine or a music CD,  60+ clicks are not worth the bother. In the attention economy of today, each click churns customers. I would argue that its the lack of 1-click, convenient micropayment mechanisms that the Internet lost its value, not ‘pirated’ music, neither the democratisation of publishing. The poor adoption rates of paid-for content incentivised content producers (both the nano- and the mega-) to reduce their price to zero and thus establish a perception that everything accessed on the Internet is free. Yet people are willing to pay for perceived value, not matter how small. Value can be created through convenience, choice, flexibility or customisation, as long as payment mechanism does not stand in the way.  iTunes, Spotify, and the array of paid-for music sites have combined convenience and choice with effortless payment; Spotify brings in around 35% of the digital music sales in Sweden, while 80% of Spotify users said they stopped filesharing. So what does mobile have to do with all this? Here’s the paradox. When applications are freeware or shareware on the Internet, why are people willing to pay $2.5 on average per iPhone application by the bucket-loads bringing Apple’s an estimated $2.4 Billion a year? Why are ringtones costing upwards of $1 when you can Google the same song for free? Why are people willing to pay over 1Euro for texting their vote to the Eurovision song contest or fork out $0.80 for virtual ice cubes on Flirtomatic? Value exists in mobile, but not because mobile operators still run the game; walled gardens have fallen long ago. It’s because mobile phones offer a 1-click convenient way to pay for goods delivered over the mobile channel; applications, ringtones, competitions and social networking services included. And it’s all charged to your mobile phone bill. How more convenient could that be? That’s the part where operators proudly claim that they own the downstream billing relationship to the user. But what they seem to ignore, is that they do NOT own the upstream billing relationship to the millions of content providers, nor the millions of goods providers that operator through non-mobile channels (retail, mail-order, web, etc). This is because mobile operators, sitting comfortably in their ivory castles have imposed extortionate revenue shares (typically 30%-60% of total revenues) with upstream content providers that can be justified not in terms of the value they add, but of the near-monopolistic exclusivity on payments charged to the users’ phone bill. Compare this 30-60% commission with the 2%-4% rates that credit cards charge. Mobile operators have so far failed to seize the upstream billing relationship as they only understand the value of the short head (as opposed to the long tail). How mobile can bring back the value to the Internet Mobile payments are making a big buzz in the industry, especially in developing countries like many parts of the African continent, where traditional banking infrastructure does not exist and mobiles offer an extremely fast and convenient way to exchange money between individuals in rural areas. But mobile payments have an equally important potential in the developed world, in extending upstream billing to content distributed over the Internet. The most visible efforts to extend mobile payments to the Internet are those from iTunes, Google Checkout and Paypal (for purchases through an on-device storefront), and recently Amazon Mobile Payments (for purchases via a web page). All of these efforts are quite limited in terms of both their downstream addressable market and their upstream range of content publishers they have so far integrated with. Mobile operators have a unique and unexploited potential in this game. Think of Internet payments which are authorised by entering your mobile number below the ‘buy now’ button. You get an SMS confirming the amount and the seller, you reply and bingo – in 3-4 ‘clicks’ you ‘re done. Such a payment mechanism is both trusted and ubiquitous. The only element missing from the recipe is reasonable commission rates of the order of 2%-4% charged by credit cards. Indeed, operators can reach where VISA cannot. Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao recently remarked how “mobile accounts are a fantastic payment platform for all digital goods”. There’s a second, slightly more exotic scenario. Consider that Nokia with near-40% handset market share decides to equip all of its mobile phones with NFC capabiliies (NFC chipsets cost $2-$2.5 today and are expected to drop to $1 in 2013 according to this report). If Nokia decides to invest in deploying PC NFC readers under subsidy to Nokia phone buyers, then it has a chance to become a trusted provider of Internet micropayments. Or as Stefan Constantinescu (a Nokia connoisseur) argues in an open letter, Nokia should invest in creating a wireless payment infrastructure in retail stores starting with western and northern Europe, much like DoCoMo did in Japan. Whatever the next 2-3 years hold, mobile payments have great potential for bringing back the lost value to the Internet. Comments welcome as always, – Andreas follow me on twitter

[Android is moving too fast with software releases – too fast for the smartphone ecosystem to follow. At the same time, Android is moving too slow, as CE vendors are taking it outside of its mobile comfort zone with the introduction of form factors from tablets to in-car terminals. Guest author Tsahi Levent-Levi outlines the market forces straining the Android ecosystem and Google, as it moves away from smartphones to additional devices.] Android is all the rage these days. In my meetings and correspondences with consumer electronic vendors around the world it is as if they have totally forgot about the “old“ “embedded operating systems” – pSOS, VxWorks, MontaVista, Nucleus, OSE, or any of the Linux and Unix variants that people have been using for years now. While there are a few Meego strongholds and some Embedded Linux developers, most of the market has shifted to using Android. And it’s not just about mobile phones. It’s televisions. And tablets. And media phones. And set-top-boxes. And DECT phones. And DVRs. And Digital Picture Frames. And In Car navigation and entertainment systems. Every device that has a screen is now a prime suspect for migrating to Android. [poll id=4] Chipset vendors have taken notice of Android. Chipset vendors who aren’t catering for mobile devices had no Android in their near future for plans for early 2011. That was 3 months ago. Today, these chipset vendors are joining the bandwagon and are updating their roadmaps and strategy by embracing Android – they have figured that it is better to join the club than to fight the tide. The Hare: Moving too fast While this is happening, Google is shifting gears. In 2010 they have shortened the release cycles for many of their products and are raising a new challenge to companies who wish to stay ahead of the game and compete in the market. With 5 or 6 releases of their operating system in a single year, it may seem that Google is moving too fast with Android. While that is definitely true, Google and Android are also moving too slow at the same time. If you look at the mobile handset arena, Google is definitely not waiting for anyone. The sheer amount of releases places handset vendors in an uncomfortable position of being unable to follow suit. Sony Ericsson released their Xperia X10 with Android 1.6 on August 2010. Dell out-did them with Dell Aero running Android 1.5 on August 2010. Older devices were launching with Android 2.1: Motorola Droid X released on July 2010 and HTC EVO released on June 2010 are such examples. At the same time, Google has had to cope with different implementations of their API set for developers by the different handset vendors through their CTS (Compatibility Test Suite) program. These changes between Android versions are not only additions – some of them are infrastructure changes that affect developers and break compatibility across versions. Take for example the addition of Stagefright – a new media framework released alongside OpenCore in Android 2.2 – will Google be keeping OpenCore moving forward or will they deprecate it in future releases? Andy Rubin, VP of Mobile Platforms at Google said in an interview that their launch cycle “will probably end up being once a year when things start settling down”. Is that going to happen any time soon with iOS innovations and the introduction of Windows Phone 7? Unlikely. The Tortoise: Moving too slow On the other hand, Google hasn’t been able to address the hockey-stick market demand for the Android platform. Back in 2007, Google created the OHA (Open Handset Alliance) consortium as a governance framework where Google could establish handset compliance requirements and thereby run the show (see their CTS and CDD requirements recently published. Following the same philosophy, they set up Google TV for Android-powered televisions. The next product category that Google will focus on will be tablets. But what about in-car systems, set-top boxes or media phones? Enter the OESF. The OESF (Open Embedded Software Foundation) is an open alliance formed in Japan and active throughout Asia Pacific. It is the first non-Google consortium initiative for Android. Its charter is to define new API sets that cover the products that Google doesn’t. In that regard, the OESF has already introduced its own Market Place SDK and is making strides in areas related to home networking, VoIP communication, security stacks, automotive and more. Google have decided in the past that tablets should be running their Chrome OS – a networked based operating system – and not Android. They also stated that vendors should wait for Honeycomb Android release and not use FroYo or Gingerbread for tablets. Vendors have not been convinced, preferring to use Android instead, with its currently available version. In September 2010, during IFA Berlin , a slew of new Android-based tablets have been introduced: Toshiba Folio 100, E-Noa’s InterPad Android tablet, Elonex eTouch tablet, ViewSonic’s ViewPad 7, Archos’ tablets and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Deutsche Bank’s Jonathan Goldberg has compiled a list of 30 tablets planned to launch by the end of this year alone. The Samsung Galaxy Tab released to the market with much fanfare last month is the first Android tablet that comes from a large vendor and backed by Google through its Android Market. This clearly shows Google’s new stance with tablets. The application layout issues that are expected with this tablet due to different resolutions than those available on mobile phones are going to cause headaches to both users and developers in the short term. Factor into it the growing hype in China around Android and we are bound to see innovation happening out of Google’s campuses around Android. Will these issues be solved in Android’s next release – Gingerbread, or only in the one after that – Honeycomb? Will Google try pushing vendors to Chrome OS instead for tablets? These open ended questions show how slow Google is in addressing non-smartphone markets. This issue of form factors is the second dimension of Android’s fragmentation. There are three more dimensions: implementation fragmentation, user experience fragmentation and codebase fragmentation. If Google wants to retain their control over the Android platform, they will need to solve all of these five dimensions of Android fragmentation. The crystal ball Google is moving fast with Android and at the same time are trying to solve fragmentation issues of their platforms: they are working hard on reducing the amount of handsets running older versions of Android, they are trying to solve implementation fragmentation with their CTS suite and they are now focusing on user experience issues. It is not going to be enough. The Android platform has captured CE vendors of all types. Any device requiring a user interface to operate is either moving to Android or will move to Android soon. By ignoring these devices, Google is leaving a wide door open for other vendors and organizations to cater for their needs: the OESF are doing that on the standardization front, while new entrants to this market such as Amazon may become the ones providing the application stores for such devices. At the end of the day, Google will be able to focus and control a relatively small number of form factors: smartphones, televisions and maybe tablets. The rest of the market will be using the Android platform without Google’s direct assistance and control; we should see other application stores enter this market, which is a genuine opportunity for the likes of the Amazon app store (Android-based, white label Kindles, anyone?) and all the other service providers out there to compete with Google’s services on Google’s own home turf. – Tsahi [Tsahi Levent-Levi is Director of Technology and Solution at Radvision. He has been involved with the mobile video telephony market for 8 years, dealing with design, development, standardization, interoperability and marketing of such technologies. You can follow him on twitter or through his personal blog at http://blog.radvision.com/voipsurvivor/.] #Android #chipset #google

[Is Symbian coming to the end of its shelf life? Research Director Andreas Constantinou dissects the motivations behind Nokia’s strategy and why Symbian is getting a new lease of life] Only two short years and four months since it was announced, the Symbian Foundation is shutting down. With it dies Nokia’s second effort at creating a licensable application platform for mobile phones (the first one was S60) and to compete against Android. While Nokia is shunning to make the closure official, the last OEM supporters – Samsung and Sony Ericsson – have officially killed plans for Symbian products (see here and here) and Symbian staff are being given redundancy notices and making career moves on LinkedIn. [update: On November 8, it was announced that Nokia will regain control of the Symbian governance process and that the Symbian Foundation will be reduced to a licensing team] The writing has been on the wall since early 2010, when Nokia took out a €500 million loan to (among other things) help sustain funding into the Symbian Foundation, whose membership fees were due to be renewed in April 2010. Symbian Foundation relied on OEMs shipping handsets to take on the operational costs at the tune of 5 million GBP per OEM. The final blow came with the departure of SyFo’s CEO and co-architect, Lee Williams. The death of Symbian Symbian Ltd., the OEM-backed consortium that funded Symbian development between 1999-2008 had long been suffering from an imbalance of power and poor strategic decision-making. There were three things wrong with Symbian Ltd. Firstly, with Nokia owning 48% of Symbian Ltd. shares, the Finnish OEM had been driving the agenda at Symbian to the detriment of its OEM partners, Secondly, since the UI was severed from the base OS in 2001, Nokia had been squeezing the value out of the Symbian operating system and into its own S60 UI, middleware and applications suite platform. This meant that other OEMs had to spend considerable effort integrating Symbian with their own UIQ or MOAP layers and filling the gaps that Nokia left – effectively leading to handsets which were expensive to build. Thirdly, with the decision to have Symbian baseporting owned by the OEM and not Symbian Ltd, each manufacturer had to spend millions to get Symbian ported onto the hardware platform, in essence reinventing the wheel. While this naturally gave Nokia the edge in producing more Symbian models more often, it meant that for other OEMs most of the budget was spent in baseporting (i.e. getting the phone to work), rather than in differentiation. In 2007 Symbian Ltd. was desperately in need of a major governance re-engineering operation. The coup de grace arrived with the launch of Google’s OHA in November 2007, signaling two major changes in the phone industry: firstly, that open-source development (inspired by mobile Linux) was now supported by a major cash-rich backer, and not an operator consortium (LiMo) or a loose congregation of Linux system integrators and design houses (Azingo, Purple Labs, WindRiver and Montavista). Secondly, that zero royalties were now the norm and operating system development was turning from a revenue generator to a loss leader. With Android changing the rules of the game, Nokia knew that for Symbian to compete in this new world, it had to be both open source and zero royalty. Seven months on from the Android disclosure, Nokia announced that it would be buying the remaining Symbian shares outright, paying up the equivalent of 2.5 years of royalties or 2x the revenues of Symbian Ltd – a paltry evaluation for the top smartphone OS. For Nokia it was a financial and strategic move; it made financial sense because Nokia would slash its Symbian maintenance costs (from 100 million GBP of annual license fees to 5 million GBP of annual membership fees) by sharing the SyFo costs with other OEMs on the board. It made strategic sense because with the ownership change, Nokia convinced Sony Ericsson and DoCoMo to abandon UIQ and MOAP respectively and marginalised Windows Mobile which was still royalty-based. Meanwhile, Nokia could still exert the majority influence into the Symbian roadmap by employing most engineers and most package owners (effectively well into 2010). In retrospect, Nokia failed with both S60 and Symbian Foundation by insisting on a winner-takes-all mentality, i.e. taking roadmap control away from its OEM development partners which long-term destroyed the value in the partnerships. This winner-takes-all-mentality is nothing new; it was already harming Symbian as we had argued back in 2005. The full open sourcing of the Symbian platform in February 2010 or the cute playful new brand did not succeed in stopping neither the developer defection (see our Developed Economics report) or the OEM defection from Symbian. With Nokia shares performing miserably over the last four years, the Finn-led board took the bold decision to oust Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and bring in a Canadian, Stephen Elop to turn the boat around. 41 days into the job, Elop announced the cutting of 1,800 jobs at Nokia and the adoption of Qt as the main development environment on top of Symbian handsets. For Nokia, Qt presents both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand it’s the most capable cross-platform application environment today boasting reach across mobile, PC and STB – plus depth with Qt providing a complete API wrapper on top of the native OS (and much wider API coverage than GTK to which it’s often unfairly compared). On the other hand Nokia has notoriously mismanaged the Trolltech acquisition of January 2008, with the troll CEO, CTO and key engineers abandoning ship. Meanwhile, Nokia has created a Qt break across Symbian and MeeGo UIs and not managed to fully deploy Qt on Symbian 2.5 years after the acquisition (note how Qt Mobility APIs are still way incomplete). Long live Symbian With Symbian Foundation soon to be diagnosed dead, the rumours about Nokia replacing Symbian are rampant. Many industry pundits are prognosticating that Nokia will adopt Android – which in 2010 is going stronger than ever – or Windows Phone 7, which comes with the freshest UI since the widget based paradigm popularised by the Jesus phone. Despite the prophecies, Symbian will live on for many years to come. As the French expression goes, Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi. There are two reasons why Nokia won’t be abandoning Symbian anytime soon. Firstly, Symbian is tightly integrated with Nokia’s variant management process. Nokia is the only OEM that has mastered variant management, i.e. being able to generate 100s of variants (SKUs) at the press of a button. That’s how Nokia can deliver 100s of customised smartphones to operators and retailers around the world. This variant management process is ‘hardcoded’ to Symbian, which means that replacing Symbian would seriously compromise Nokia’s ability to cater to operator requirements around the world and it would seriously hurt its market share. Secondly, Nokia’s economies of scale rely on in-house control of core components, and the operating systems is one of them. If Nokia were to license Windows Phone it would reduce its differentiation to industrial design and Ovi alone. In the case of Android, Nokia would have to branch Android (and to sustain the cost of Android development), port Qt on Android which means another 12+ months for a stable implementation. While this remains a long-term possibility, it is still a gamble when Nokia’s priority should be to focus on killer devices and not a killer OS. Qualcomm’s BREW MP is another candidate but only when Qualcomm has a good developer platform story and that means waiting for BREW MP to launch a web-based platform akin to RIM’s WebWorks. Symbian may no longer be a symbiotic system, but will live within Nokia for many years to come as the workhorse under the hood of Nokia smartphones. The King is dead, long live the King. – Andreas You should follow me on twitter: @andreascon #symbianfoundation #trolltech #google #nokia #qt #lg #motorola #symbian #sonyericsson #Android #samsung

[Smartphones get all the media attention, but it’s feature phones that are still driving the mobile industry. Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis examines this unbalanced equation and makes sense of the numbers published in the latest 100 Million Club] Welcome back to the 100 Million Club. This 6th edition of our watchlist tracking successful mobile software companies debunks the smartphone myth and paints a detailed picture behind the 34 software products – from BREW to Webkit  – which have shipped in more than 100 million handsets as of the end of H1 2010. Click here to download the watchlist. Key insights – Despite the hype, smartphone platforms account for less than 20 percent of the 620+ million handsets shipped globally in Q1 and Q2 of 2010. More than 80 percent of total shipments are driven by feature phones, the majority of which use proprietary software platforms. – BlackBerry is now the second smartphone platform, after Symbian, to break the 100M handset barrier. As of the end of June 2010, RIM has sold more than 100 million BlackBerry devices. – A total of 350M handsets have shipped with a WebKit-powered mobile browser up to the end of 2Q10. The biggest contributors to shipments of the open source browser engine are the Series 40 and Symbian OSs, while the steep rise of Android will play a bigger role in WebKit going forward. – Only a handful of mobile software products were shipped in more than 100 million devices during the first half of 2010. Among them are the T9/XT9 text input engines by Nuance, the vRapid Mobile software update engine by Red Bend and the Nucleus real-time OS by Mentor Graphics. – Symbian alone has more shipments in H1 2010 than iOS and Android combined. Moreover, when combined, the Google and Apple mobile operating systems make up less than 20% of Series 40 shipments in Q1 and Q2 2010. What’s new in the Club? In this 6th edition of the 100 Million Club we ‘ve introduced a dedicated watchlist tracking mobile platform shipments. The watchlist comprises of 10 application environment software products, OSs and RTOSs with more than 100 million installations. Our latest members in these categories are the BlackBerry OS by Research in Motion and ThreadX by Express Logic. We have also added media favourites Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7, for comparative purposes, since they are well below the 100 million mark. The Embedded Software Shipments watchlist features 24 products that have been pre-installed in more than 100 million handsets. This latestedition of the club sees the addition of the Media EXP, an audio/video codec and frameworks suite by Aricent and MSIP, a mobile analytics software agent, by Carrier IQ. Click on the image to download the full pdf The smart vs. ‘dumb’ phone equation The impact of smartphones to the industry is way overrated. It’s a little-told secret that smartphones account for only 20% of worldwide handset shipments, a fact we tend to forget in the face of the one-sided media storm that surrounds smartphones. A key observation from the 100 Million Club is that the ‘proprietary’ Nokia’s Series 40 and Qualcomm BREW are shipped in many times more handsets than Android, iOS, BlackBerry even the older Windows Mobile and Symbian OSs. In fact, with 638 million cumulative shipments by the end of Q2 2010, BREW is the most widely deployed licensable mobile operating system. If one considers real-time OSes for application and baseband processors, then the shipments scale to the billions of phones. Click on the image to download the full watchlist So, is Nokia’s Series 40 the most successful OS ever? Not exactly; the handset market is very much dependent on internal OEM platforms, which power more than 45% of total handset shipments for H1 2010. Samsung and LG, ranking 2nd and 3rd in the top-five handset OEM leaderboard, are largely responsible for proprietary platform shipments. Samsung has heavily ramped up smartphone shipments starting in Q2 2010 (which should become visible in H2 results) and is investing in its home-grown Bada platform, a C++ layer on top of its proprietary SHP operating system. LG also hopes to get a larger piece of the smartphone pie, by releasing 20 new smartphone models in 2H10. The 20% share of smartphone shipments is set to grow rapidly driven by two phenomena; firstly the growth of Internet-borne platforms, namely iOS and Android. Secondly, the carrier drive to commission and subsidise smartphone handsets as a differentiating strategy, which is driving the carrier-happy tier-1 OEMs (Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG) to bend over backwards and ramp-up smartphone production. This is unprecedented growth in share of smartphone sales, which was neighbouring at 10 percent back in 2007. The shift of attention of traditional handset OEMs towards smartphones, coupled with the rise of smartphone-only vendors, seems to indicate a balance shift in the smartphone vs. feature phone balance. It might seem a foregone conclusion that that pretty soon we’ll have a majority of smartphones flooding the global market. However, that is not going to happen overnight, i.e. not in the next 3-4 years. Smartphone shipments of traditional OEMs are but a fraction of their overall shipments, while Apple, RIM, HTC and ZTE cannot yet hope to meet the demand of huge, feature phone-dependant, price-sensitive markets, like India and China. Clash of the platform titans In the clash between the more familiar platforms, Symbian and BlackBerry rule over newcomers Android and iPhone’s iOS, in terms of cumulative shipments. But the picture is quite different in terms of growth, where Android has been the clear winner, growing by leaps and bounds (from 100K activations a day in May 2010, to 160K a month later and 200K in August – activations are not the same as sales, but the growth is still impressive). RIM and Apple have seen a healthy increase in their handset sales, while Symbian has suffered a small (~3-4%) decrease in market share between H2 2009 and H1 2010, despite Nokia’s growth in the handset market. However, Symbian’s market share is bound to drop even more, considering the recent decision by Samsung and Sony Ericsson to drop Symbian altogether, as well as Nokia’s choice of MeeGo over Symbian^3 for their latest N-series. Symbian is fast becoming a Nokia-only OS so we should expect the end of the line for the Symbian Foundation within the next few months as well. Where are MeeGo, Chrome OS and webOS in this picture? The short answer is that they are nowhere to be found in mobile devices in the first half of 2010. MeeGo is rumoured to be appearing in Q2 2010 in the market, with Nokia targeting to make first impressions last while facing delays in Qt integration and the departure of key personnel. Chrome OS will most likely be shipped solely in tablets and netbooks, while HP aims at delivering new webOS devices in early 2011. Last but certainly not least, we should not ignore Microsoft’s latest bid for dominance in the mobile industry: Windows Phone 7. The newly released OS has been completely redesigned to offer iPhone-style margins with an Android-style business model, while targeting untapped pockets of Xbox and PC developers instead of making up with Windows Mobile developers who were left with a bitter aftertaste (see our Developer Economics research). Windows Phone 7 already seems to be building momentum, with 9 new models coming to the market in Q4, $500 million in marketing budgets and a tightly integrated hardware and software platform (see our earlier article on Windows Phone for a detailed strategic analysis). Not museum material…yet In summary, smartphones captivate our minds, but it’s still ‘dumb’ phones that we carry around with us. Someday in the foreseeable future, non-touch screen phones will take their place in a telecoms museum (right next to the old, ‘brick’ mobile phones), but that day is not as close as mainstream media have us think. – Matos #meego #ios #qualcomm #openkernellabs #100millionclub #smartphones #nuance #mentorgraphics #lg #motorola #symbian #sonyericsson #Android #windowsphone #Blackberry #handsetmanufacturers #myriad #samsung