[It takes time for your eyes to adjust when you’ve been blind-sighted for so long. Especially if you are an entire industry. Research Director Andreas Constantinou dissects the market of Application Analytics and discusses why it’s the most underhyped market sector in mobile] Application analytics has been one the surprises in the mobile industry radar. It’s a market sector that emerged almost out of the blue in 2009 and became mainstream in just a year, fuelled by the mobile app phenomenon. Why are analytics important? from a developer perspective analytics serve a very simple, practical purpose; that of an optimisation tool that helps increase app downloads and sales. From an OEM and carrier perspective, analytics are a double-edged sword; they offer unprecedented insights into consumer app usage, but they can also leak critical insights to third parties (see the Apple-Flurry dispute). Strategically, application analytics present one of the biggest disruptions on the mobile industry radar; the potential to extract more consumer insights and metrics than can be gleaned through TV, credit cards, loyalty cards and any other medium that has come before. But let’s take things one at a time. The spectrum of mobile analytics Application analytics is only one of the three sectors of mobile analytics. Each sector comes with a different set of participating vendors: – Application Analytics: usage and marketing analytics tools aimed at application developers (e.g. Flurry, Localytics, Motally) – Campaign analytics: usage and marketing analytics tools for mobile web or WAP sites plus campaign optimization tools aimed at media companies (e.g. Amethon, Coremetrics, Omniture, Bango) – Service analytics: platforms for mining network or device data to extract service intelligence aimed at network carriers (e.g. CarrierIQ, Neuralitic, Zokem). The three sectors of mobile analytics differ in terms of probing points, deployment route, sales route, applications and revenue models to name just a few. All in all, mobile analytics is a sector which we expect to see develop over the next 5 years; moreover, it’s probably the most underhyped sector in mobile, as no one can foresee how big analytics is going to get (but certainly many times bigger than TV, billing or other consumer analytics). Back to application analytics now. When researching the landscape of application analytics vendors we came up with an interesting analysis framework; vendors are positioned differently across the user journey, based on their probing points, therefore the metrics that they can gather, and the types of solutions (or ‘intelligence’) that the can deliver, as shown in the next chart. Billing/e-commerce analytics intercept the user journey at the discovery and purchasing touch-points (e.g. Bango, AT Internet). App Store analytics extract data directly from the App Stores (e.g. Distimo). Finally in-app analytics extract data during installation and the application runtime (e.g. Flurry, Localytics, Mobixy). We surveyed the landscape of application analytics vendors in July and August, speaking to Bango, Distimo, Flurry, Localytics, Mobixy and Ubikod. We ‘ve summarised the positioning of these vendors in the matrix below, providing the history, ownership/funding, positioning, products, revenue models and installed base for each vendor. Naturally, there’s lots of vendors that we didn’t have time to cover, namely Motally (now Nokia), Appclix (ex.Mobilytics), Apprupt, webtrends, Adfonic, Google, Medialets, Mobclix, Tapmetrics, Millennial Media, LoopAnalytics, ApSalar, Ivdopia, Mixpanel, appFigures and Eqatec. The comparative table below offers quite a bit of insight into how analytics products from these vendors differ in their background, positioning and revenue models. [click on image for full table] It’s only the beginning Despite the hockey-stick growth, the sector of application analytics is still in its infancy. Some key observations are worth highlighting here. Supply polarisation. There is a very polarized distribution in the installed base with Flurry grabbing more than 95% penetration into iOS and Android apps. At the same time we have negligible penetration for the mass-market of mobile platforms (incl. RIM, Java ME and Symbian). Solution packaging. App analytics solutions are packaged in two very different forms; firstly pure-play vendors offering analytics as a core product (e.g. Localytics, AT Internet, Motally), where first-party hosting, data ownership and tailored metrics are key issues for customers. Secondly, vendors offering analytics as part of an app recommendations, ad or campaign management solution (e.g. Flurry, Mobclix, Medialets), where targeting efficiency is the key issue for customers. Convergence with web analytics: Mobile analytics are converging with their web counterpart. This is happening on the supply side (web analytics firms coming to mobile), the buy side (brands deploying both web and mobile properties) and the user side (as the web and the mobile user journey have many intersecting points) Customer experience analytics is an untapped vertical for app analytics. Purchase decisions, app usage and device monitoring can be leveraged to add unprecedented, granular insight into traditional solutions. Disrupting consumer analytics. The app analytics value will explode as mobile apps penetrate more engagement channels. Set-top-boxes, media boxes, augmented reality apps and online payments will more and more leverage the phone as a remote control or as an experience delivery medium. App analytics will catalyse engagement monitoring in all these channels and in the process disrupting Nielsen’s TV audience measurement business. Snowball effect. App analytics is the “snowball” that will pave the way for all other analytics; for many years companies have seen the benefits of deep behavioural analytics, but never before has the route to market been so straight forward. By piggy backing on app analytics, OEMs and carriers can gain access to the richest customer metrics with the shortest distance to customer purchase decisions and the sales funnel. The “Nielsen” of mobile will be a company with application analytics at the core of its business. In this rapidly evolving market, it is verticals know-how, community-building skills (especially developer communities) and relationships that will determine the real winners and losers. One thing is for certain though; application analytics will bring much-needed transparency and visibility in an industry that has so far been blind-sighted. – Andreas you should follow me on twitter: @andreascon #loopanalytics #millennialmedia #tapmetrics #motally #distimo #bango #mixpanel #google #nokia #localytics #mobixyandubikod #flurry #apprupt #carriers #appfigures #eqatec #webtrends #handsetmanufacturers #Apsalar #appstores #ivdopia #mobclix #adfonic #medialets

[There are 30 tablets coming by Q4 2010, but who is going to buy them? Guest author Jonathan Goldberg, Research Analyst at Deutsche Bank breaks down the supply and demand equation behind the emerging tablet market, and discusses why the impending tablet wave might be a full train arriving at an empty station] This article is also available in Chinese. The key issues The tablet market is opening up, with at least 30 tablets coming by Q4. Here are a few key issues: There are indications of at least 30 tablets coming to market by Q4. And there are reports of at least 80 to be launched in the next six months. There is no hard data available about consumer usage of tablets. This might mean that most of the tablets will be undifferentiated and it is unclear who, if anyone, will buy them. The leading brands in the space this Q4 are Apple, Dell and Samsung. Other major brands are expected to enter the market in 1Q11, including HP Palm, Motorola and RIM Most of the tablets are using Android, but we hear that Google has been trying to discourage many of these projects. They do not support Android for use in tablets with the current Froyo V2.2 of the OS. This means some of the tablets coming this year may lack access to the Android marketplace, Google maps, etc. All of the tablets we have seen run on ARM-based processors. Major suppliers will be Qualcomm for the 3G baseband and integrated applications processors. We have seen tablets using applications processors from Marvell, Nvidia, Samsung and Texas Instruments. There are also a number of designs using silicon from Atheros, Broadcom, Skyworks and Triquint. In theory, this could be good for these vendors, but the looming glut of product may dampen enthusiasm for the category. Pricing will be a key determinant. Most reports peg low-end models at $300 or less. However, there are reports of prices ranging as high as $900. I believe there will be few takers for tablets priced above the iPad. Overall, everyone likes the idea of a tablet, but I think it will take a year or two before the market shapes up. There are just too many devices coming online amid very initial interest from consumers. Eventually, the tablet may become a preferred media consumption device for consumers, filling the gap left by underpowered netbooks. There is likely room for both netbooks and tablets in the market, but it is too early to gauge the size of the tablet market. What’s a tablet? Any discussion on tablets needs to start with a definition. For our purposes, we will define them broadly to include anything that is not a smartphone or a laptop. These devices have no hinge as laptops do, but cannot easily fit in a pocket. This covers considerable ground from e-readers to true tablet computers. Most of the tablets coming to the market today are less mobile than smartphones, but have essentially the same computing power. The iPad is the best example of this. The electronics of an iPad are identical to an iPhone – same processor, same memory. It does have longer battery life, but no one would argue that it is less portable than a phone, since it does not fit in a pocket. These facts seem somewhat incongruous, leading to several interpretations. The first is that with time tablets will see an increase in computing power. In fact, there might be a few of these more powerful tablets in the works for next year. Another interpretation is that Apple has just confused the market, which they can get away with because of the power of their brand. They positioned the iPad to fit into their own product line-up, not to meet industry expectations. It will be interesting to see if any of the tablets coming out later this year have noticeable performance deficiencies, in the form of hang time and slow app loading. A more gloomy interpretation is that this is a dead-end form factor. While I’m more optimistic than that, I believe the OEMs should seriously question what ‘need’ a tablet addresses for consumers. What is the Tablet Market? To better assess the potential for the market, we need to deconstruct it a little. First, it is worth considering who has bought a tablet so far. Then we should consider what they are doing with those devices, and finally compare that to what the devices are capable of. As with all such new products, there is very little hard data available, but here’s what we know so far. Who is buying tablets? So far, there are really two products that fit into this category – the Kindle and the iPad. Amazon has not released any data on Kindle sales, but they continue to roll out new models, so it must be doing well by some internal metric, and most reports indicate Kindle is helping to expand overall book sales by Amazon. Apple has sold over 3 million iPads since its launch last quarter, and Deutsche Bank estimates are at 12 million unit sales for this year. That’s an impressive number for a new product, but a small number relative to everyone else’s expectations for the category. It is still unclear who is buying these. By some estimates, a very large percentage of iPad buyers are already iPhone owners. There is a lot of synergy between the two with easy syncing of content and Apps via iTunes. There is also a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the iPad has broadened the demographic group of iPhone buyers. For instance, some people have bought the device for parents and grandparents, reaching a group who is uninterested in the Apple brand but like the ease of use of the device. What are people doing with tablets? While waiting for further hard data on iPad usage, we can look at iPad developer activity and app downloads as a decent proxy. Developers, for their part, seem very interested in the iPad. In the graph below you can see iPad apps versus iPhone apps, in terms of available apps in iTunes plotted against days since the release of each of the two products. iPad apps have outpaced iPhone apps in growth, although we should take into account that writing an iPad app today is much easier than writing an iPhone app when iOS first got a start, three years ago. According to Distimo, developers for the iPad also seem to be taking advantage of a wider variety of iOS features such as in-app purchases. The Distimo data also shows that as a percentage of apps, games are more prevalent on the iPad than the iPhone. Prices for iPad apps also tend to be higher than comparable (sometimes identical) iPhone apps. From this, we infer that developers see this as a worthwhile market, and possibly one with a superior demographic for paying for software. What it all boils down to is a lack of actual data. While there have been some consumer surveys done on the space by tablet vendors, this is really a virgin market. No one knows what consumers want from a tablet or whether they even want one at all. I am actually somewhat optimistic about the tablet as a concept, but I think the excitement will outpace demand in the near term. There is also a gap between laptops and smartphones, that gap will find interest from some consumers, as was the case with initial excitement for netbooks. Consumers want low-priced computing devices that have larger screens than a phone. This market was artificially capped by Intel and Microsoft who sought to stave off cannibalization of their laptop business. The end result was that consumers lost interest in underpowered netbooks, which struggled to multi-task or play high quality video. The first devices available run iOS and Android, but they will by no means be the only offerings. Google is likely to enter the fray soon with Chrome, an OS originally built for netbooks, but equally applicable for tablets. Google has even made comments that Chrome is the preferred OS for tablets. Beyond this, however, there will be other options. HP will likely have a Palm webOS tablet out soon. Blackberry has announced a new OS for their PlayBook device available early next year. And even MeeGo has to be considered a potential entrant. Although I’m skeptical about this OS’s prospects, many reports indicate that MeeGo is actually very well suited for a larger form factor like a netbook or tablet. Perhaps the only entrant I would not add to the list is Windows 7 (Big windows not Windows Phone), since conventional widom is that this OS is just not suitable to the touch-screen form factors that are quickly becoming standard for this class of device. There is a video making the rounds on the blogosphere that shows how clunky the Windows 7 interface is with touch-screen input. In this year’s race to launch tablets, it seems like few companies have given much thought to the software experience. Most of the companies launching tablets appear to be using Android. This is despite that company’s weak support for Android on this form factor. It appears that many of the Android tablets launching this year will NOT have links to the Android marketplace as the FroYo (2.2) release is not really designed for tablets starting from the screen resolution. I believe Google is encouraging hardware makers to hold of on Android tablets until the Honeycomb release due out next year. This implies that many of the Android-based tablets coming out this year will have very few apps and limited ability to download them. Effectively, these tablets will be large, expensive browsers. Competition The tablet field is expected to be very crowded, from as early as 4Q10. Below is a table compiled from a range of sources, including news reports and blogs. There might be some discrepancies, especially on pricing, but many of these devices have been officially announced. And this list is by no means complete. There is also this user-generated list of Android tablets coming for Christmas. At the time of writing there were 22 models listed. As if that were not enough, here is another list of all 73 tablets rumored or announced so far. In terms of official developments, Samsung has officially launched its Galaxy Tab, RIM has announced its tablet and, most recently, reports emerged on the web that Amazon was preparing its own Android tablet and Android marketplace. A key question will be pricing. There is no seen official word on this, but some press reports indicate the Galaxy Tab device will cost $900+ without a carrier subsidy. As PC World points out many of the tablets coming to the market are charging a premium to the iPad. Maybe Samsung can pull that off, but few other tablets will be able to command a premium to an Apple product. Conclusion: Who benefits from tablets? The answer to that is that there are too many tablets coming to market too soon. With no hard data about consumer usage, it’s likely that most of the products will have a hard time differentiating themselves. This will probably lead to a glut that will mean pricing pressure for most of these vendors. From the component level, the biggest beneficiaries are the screen vendors. Capacitive touch screens are not cheap, and are probably the most expensive component in the bill of materials. So far we have seen few tear-downs of any of these tablets. The iPad BOM is very similar to the iPhone and iPod touch, running an Infineon 3G baseband, Skyworks and Triquint’s front-end modules, and the internally developed Apple A4 processor. It is likely many of the Android tablets are using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or other MSMs for 3G connectivity. Also, there are reports that tablets makers are trying out Nvidia’s Tegra, TI’s OMAP and Marvell’s Armada for applications processors. Finally, investors will have a hard time tapping into this. On the one hand, price competition from a multitude of Android tablets would imply lots of volume. On the other hand, design wins are not free; they cost upfront engineering resources. A glut of product could lead to inventory back-ups and order declines in Q1. For the time being, my view is that tablet volumes (other than the iPad) are likely to remain small relative to PCs and handsets. Nonetheless, we should expect a shake-up next year as suppliers pick their battles carefully. – Jonathan [Jonathan has been a Research Analyst at Deutsche Bank for 8 years and focuses on wireless technologies and the Mobile Internet. He can be contacted at “jonathan.goldberg (at) db (dot) com”] #ios #nokia #Apple #lg #motorola #Android #windowsphone #hp #chromeos #Blackberry

[Windows Phone 7 has the potential to redraw the smartphone competitive landscape and accelerate the evolution of the mobile value-chain. With the arrival of WP7 just around the corner, VisionMobile Research Partner Michael Vakulenko explains what success of the platform can potentially mean for the industry and why Microsoft’s mobile comeback should be closely watched.] This article is also available in Chinese Just over a year ago I had written how Apple’s iPhone and Google Android will capture leadership positions in the smartphone race, leaving behind all the legacy smartphone operating systems. Indeed, one year later iPhone and Android are confidently cruising ahead on the tailwinds of consumer, operator and developer ecosystem support. Symbian continues to submerge into irrelevance distracted by its venture into open-source waters. The only two handset makers who are members of Symbian Foundation board recently jumped the ship. Both Samsung and Sony Ericsson lately said that they do not plan any new Symbian handsets. Worst yet, major chipset makers are scaling down their efforts to support Symbian. The direction is clear: Symbian is soon to become Nokia-only internal OS hidden behind Qt application framework. RIM is steadily drifting towards mid-, low-end of the smartphone market. Contrary to common perception, enterprise users are no longer the platform’s most important audience. Over half of the subscriber base and 80% of Blackberry growth comes from the consumer space. The reason is the viral effect of Blackberry Messenger application popular with teenage kids and college students. Contrary to Nokia and RIM, Microsoft took proactive approach. Instead of patching the leaking boat of Windows Mobile, the Redmond giant build ground-up a new smartphone platform carefully designed to address challenges presented by iOS and Android. Make no mistake, Microsoft’s primary motivation for Windows Phone aren’t its software licensing fees. The real motivation is the need to protect Microsoft core businesses of Windows and Office product lines. Mobile and smartphones became pervasive. Microsoft must have a convincing mobile story to prevent increasing numbers of users churning to Apple and Google product ecosystems. There are reports claiming that Apple sells just as many computers as Dell to college students. Naturally, a decision to buy a Mac is much more easier for a person already owning an iPhone. A person regularly using GMail or Google Apps on a PC and Android phone is much more prone to dropping Outloook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint in favor of cloud-based alternatives from Google. With absolute majority of Microsoft operating profits coming from licensing of Windows OS and Office applications, the software giant cannot afford losing users to Apple or Google. Both Windows and Office must be augmented by the ‘mobile screen’ to remain competitive. A comeback in the making? Based on pre-release information, Windows Phone 7 has all the necessary ingredients to become a powerful contender in the smartphone race. First, there is clear differentiation thanks to fresh user interface and deep integration with Microsoft on-line services and products. The UI and the interaction model are based on well-received Zune HD Player (funnily enough there is Zune Home app on Android Market, which replicates Zune HD look & feel on Android). Finally we see refreshing departure from icon-based navigation that became de-facto standard following iPhone introduction. The user experience is closely integrated with Windows Live, Xbox Live, Bing Maps cloud services, Zune content platform, together with pervasive Office and Exchange. Microsoft has impressive number of users registered for its on-line services – 360M Hotmail accounts, 299M Messenger accounts, 23M Xbox Live subscriptions. This will certainly help driving Windows Phone adoption. Second, when it comes to developers Microsoft is playing on its home ground leveraging established developer ecosystem and excellent development tools. Windows Phone 7 application development is based on Silverlight UI framework and XNA game runtime. Both are well-known to large number of PC and Xbox developers eager to apply their skills in mobile environment. Consider that Windows Phone 7 Beta SDK was downloaded 200,000 time in just 2 days since its general availability. Instead of wresting developers from iOS and Android platforms,  Microsoft can tap into large pool of loyal .NET and XNA programmers, converting them into an army of mobile developers. Developer monetization is high on Microsoft’s agenda. Windows Phone Marketplace avoids the pitfalls of the competing platforms promising predictable and transparent approval process, lack of handset fragmentation, localization, try-before-buy model, app beta testing program, and tools for active promotion of the content in the Windows Marketplace. Third, operator billing supported by Windows Phone Marketplace will be instrumental in winning operator subsidy and marketing budgets from iPhone and Android. These budgets are critically important for the platform success. Windows Marketplace already supports operator billing for older Windows Mobile platform. This experience will help Microsoft quickly introduce operator billing for growing number of operators. Sure enough, Microsoft can be flexible on splitting 30% of app sales revenue share with operators. Not surprisingly, all five major UK operators will be selling Windows Phone 7 handsets at launch. All these combined with familiar consumer brand and a huge $500M marketing budget (more than 5 times bigger than any previous Windows Mobile launch) makes Windows Phone 7 a convincing entry to the smartphone game. This entry is already supported by a lineup of handset makers from experienced mobile players like Samsung, HTC and LG, to PC specialists like Dell and Asus. So what’s the catch? Windows Phone success will ultimately depend on Microsoft’s ability to execute on the promise. Microsoft will need to deliver solid product experience, prove monetization potential for operators and developers, and keep the momentum by following up with subsequent platform versions. Without these, Windows Phone 7 will only remain a great promise. What will Windows Phone’s success mean for the mobile industry? The mobile industry has radically changed in the recent years. In an industry where the only constant is change, what impact will the success of Windows Phone have on the mobile industry? The hardware specs of leaked Windows Phone handsets from HTC, Samsung, LG, Dell, Asus and Toshiba reveal striking similarity between the models. All are based on QUALCOMM’s Snapdragon chipset. The variations are limited to industrial design, amount of memory, optional physical keyboard and FM radio. Are we entering PC-like era in smartphones, where industry will converge on a small number of hardware configurations? Will we see emergence of ‘Wincomm’ alliance in mobile similar to ‘Wintel’ in PC? Value-chain evolution theory says this is not question of ‘if’, but the question of ‘when’. Windows Phone 7 looks like a natural catalyst for this to happen much sooner than some companies would hope for. This will be great news for low-cost ‘assemblers’ like Dell, Acer and Asus, who lack significant software capabilities and experience. With Windows Phone software and QUALCOMM’s support these companies can readily replicate their PC business models, brands and experience, while thriving on single digit operating margins. To do so, they only need to focus on building hardware platforms for Microsoft software, while leveraging pre-integration with QUALCOMM chips for fast time to market. Microsoft definitely learned from mistakes made with Windows Mobile. This time the approach is closer to the PC model: ODMs are given exact specification of how the hardware platform should look like. From the screen size, to amount of memory, to number of navigation buttons on the device. For low-cost ‘assemblers’ Android proved to be too difficult to productize. Dell Aero is one example, which is four Android versions behind now. Using Windows Phone software will significantly lower barrier to entry on the software side. Paying software licensing fees to Microsoft may prove a better way forward than a crappy product that doesn’t sell. On the other side, these will be very bad news for high-margin branded OEMs like Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Such OEMs will have little chance to protect their business from increasing competition from low-margin assemblers. Adopting Windows Phone won’t help: Microsoft is determined to maintain tight control over the platform and limit OEM differentiation opportunities. Increasing smartphone commoditization accelerated by the entry of low-cost ‘assemblers’ will certainly put strain on today’s leaders, Apple and Google. Apple seems to be well-positioned to keep its positions in the mid-term. But will we see its vertical integration becoming a liability in the next phases of value-chain evolution? The phases where flexibility and customization of commodity products will favour modular solutions. For Google things can quickly get challenging. Android is yet to grow into a recognizable consumer brand being concealed by operator and handset maker brands (e.g. Droid and Sense). What if Android will get squeezed between style-conscious consumers opting for iPhone and masses of mainstream users opting for the comfort of familiar Windows brand? Will we see Android slowing down and struggle outside the group of tech-savvy users? What about mobile operators? Windows Phone success will increase the dominance of non-mobile players in the mobile ecosystem and their control over user experience. The distance between user and operator will inevitably increase, and we will see more and more mobile operators settling on the role of a ‘pipe’ satisfied by getting a share of app and content sale revenues. Tipping the scales of the smarpthone market If successful, Windows Phone 7 will catalyze further shifts in the mobile industry bringing PC-style commoditization and increasing distance between operators and their subscribers. Microsoft and low-cost, PC style ‘assemblers’ will be the main winners driving smartphone price declines. High-margin branded OEMs will have no choice but to look for new ways to create value to operators. This is to snatch critically important subsidy and marketing budgets from Apple and RIM. Apple and Google won’t wait long to make Microsoft’s life harder. Google can be exposed on multiple fronts and finally will have to pay closer attention to operator and developer interests. Things will continue to be interesting in mobile in the foreseeable future. How do you think things will shape up with Windows Phone? Who will be a winner and who will be a loser? – 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] #rim #google #nokia #Apple #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #windowsphone #microsoft #handsetmanufacturers #iphone

[In the debate of Flash vs HTML5, has the death of Flash been over exaggerated? Guest author Guilhem Ensuque peeks through thick layers of hype and facts to predict what the future holds for the mobile web]. The last year has seen a flurry of announcements and debate around the rise of HTML5 and the fall of Flash. Some have even gone as far as declaring a “war” between the two, and predicting the “death” of Flash as the outcome. However, as Mark Twain once famously said: “The rumor of my death is an exaggeration”. As we’ll see, the jury is still out as far as the fate of Flash and Adobe are concerned. A brief (abridged) history of the web “HTML5” is the new high-tech industry darling, and not just in the mobile space. It has become a catch-all phrase with little meaning when taken out of context. Before we dig into the debate, it’s worth looking at what is HTML5 and where has it come from. “HTML5” when used as a shorthand, covers of family of web technologies currently being standardised by the W3C and at various implementation stages by browser vendors. The “5” comes from the version increment in the W3C spec number: currently most of the content you read on the web conforms to the HTML specification version 4.01. To understand what has driven the creation of this new version of web standards, we need to look at the evolution of the web in past years. In the 2000s, the web evolved towards more interactivity with the advent of the “Web 2.0” (yet another buzzword) and user-generated content, especially videos uploaded and then streamed over faster ADSL connections. However, the HTML spec did not fundamentally change (apart from an attempt by the W3C to migrate to the stricter XHTML syntax which has seen mixed results in terms of adoption). To cope with HTML4‘s inefficiencies in allowing designers and developers to create interactive “experiences” (i.e. not just documents, but bi-directional “applications” living in your web browser) a number of innovations were introduced : JavaScript, Dynamic HTML and XML HTTP requests (a.k.a. AJAX) as a way to have thick-client app functionality in the browser, enabling users to interact with the web in a read-write fashion (not just read-only) clear separation of page structure in HTML (through heavy use of tags) as well as typoraphy and style in CSS (through an arcane and verbose syntax), leading to more pleasant user experience and richer page contents PHP-scripted and database-powered back-end logic bolted on top web server systems. This e.g. allowed template-driven content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to rise to prominence, fueling the blog revolution. These innovations brought the ability to present vast amounts of data in pretty-looking dynamic web pages which mash-in RSS feeds, emails, blogs, Facebook updates, and tweets, and bringing web pages a step closer to applications. In that era, Flash (or rather the Flash Player) rose to become a ubiquitous browser plug-in for animated graphics and video. At the same time, Flash evolved to provide an out-of-browser Rich Internet Application platform with the AIR runtime and the Flex framework, albeit at a much lower penetration level than the in-browser Flash Player. We are now at the dawn of the 2010s, and the overhaul of the HTML4 spec is long overdue. HTML5 aims to bring back into the core spec of the web the “side” developments of the previous era and improve on them with a heavy focus on web applications. It also aims to lay the foundations enabling the delivery of web content through a new medium: mobile devices, and ultimately the “Internet of Things”. That history is yet to be written, but we can now ponder about its beginnings and the future. So, What is HTML5 Really ? In the context of this new era, the “HTML5” shorthand refers to a family of web standards and browser technologies that span a range of topics: A modernized web markup language: the true-and-only HTMLv5 specification and matching evolution in web browser capabilities. The new syntax includes the tag allowing bitmap manipulation through JavaScript drawing APIs, better support for vector graphics authored in SVG, the tag allowing streamed media playback as simply as embedding images and the streamlining of tag usage. A richer styling language: the Cascaded Style Sheets v3 specifications. CSS3 is now famous for its ability to create rounded corners, but more importantly includes so-called “transforms” allowing graphical effects like moves, rotations, gradients, etc. as well as 3D graphical objects manipulations. Much effort as been put by browser vendor to support hardware acceleration for CSS3 rendering. However, the standard is not yet mature and today requires using prefixes specific to each browser. Application-oriented advancements in the browser, as well as matching JavaScript APIs: the Web Workers offering background and concurrent execution capabilities; a Web Storage allowing simple local data storage and manipulation in XML; and a Web SQL Database  providing the capability to perform SQL queries on large amounts of data stored locally and replicated from a server. Mobile-oriented advancements (not yet finalised in the specs) including JavaScript APIs for Geolocation, Device and File APIs Miscellaneous additions catering for the Semantic Web (microdata), security (cross-domain HTTP requests), and more. To the above set of technologies standardised by the W3C we should add a domain that has sprung out of both proprietary or open-source efforts: high-performance JavaScript runtimes within browsers and JavaScript Application Frameworks. The latter extend the capabilities of the web, turning it into a full-blown client-side application platform much in the same way that UI and application frameworks like Qt or Gtk extend the “bare” Linux OS framebuffer. Such application frameworks include complementary JavaScript APIs, and rely on CSS3 to provide extensive sets of UI controls. Some mobile-specific frameworks (like Phonegap or BONDI, an offspring of the mobile operator community) go as far as providing additional device APIs for smartphone features like messaging or camera, while others provide a rich set of UI controls mimicking the native platform look & feel (more on this later). Why the clash with Flash ? There’s no denying that the capabilities brought forward by the emergence of the HTML5 “family” bring browser runtimes on a par with core capabilities of the Flash Player, which if adopted widely could make Flash redundant. In the eyes of most mobile industry observers, the delays in bringing out a fully-featured Flash Player with acceptable performance on smartphones have played in favour of HTML5. Remember that, as of today, Flash Player v10.1 is only available for high-end smartphones that run the Android version 2.2 operating system. I would estimate that these represent only 1% of the overall smartphone shipments in Q2. This is a far shot from Adobe’s self proclaimed goal of having Flash shipping on 50% of smartphones by 2012 (see my previous article on this topic). Figure: Smartphone Operating Systems – Q2 2010 Shipments share (source: Gartner, Google)CompanyBrowser / OSHTML5 complianceNokiaSymbian S60 5th Ed.7%RIMBlackberry v50%RIMBlackberry v6 (Torch)*69%GoogleAndroid v2.1*50%GoogleAndroid v2.2*59%AppleSafari for iPhone (iOS 4.0)*62%MicrosoftIE Mobile (Winmob 6.5)0%OperaOpera Mini (on iPhone)9% Figure: HTML5 compliance of mobile browsers [some notes on the methodology: HTML5 compliance was carried out using html5test.com. (*) denotes a WebKit-based browser. The Nokia Symbian S60 browser, albeit based on an old version of WebKit, scores poorly in HTML5 compliance tests. I could not test Mozilla Fennec, Palm’s WebOS browser, nor Opera Mobile.Opera Mini is a special case due to server-side rendering.] Making things worse, Apple has stayed firm on its policy to not allow the Flash Player browser plugin on its iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), preferring to rely on its in-house video streaming capabilities developed within its HTML5-capable WebKit browser core and QuickTime player. And to make things even more complicated, Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” have played a key role in fanning the flames of the “Flash is dead, long live HTML5” fire. Moreover, Google’s Android, Palm’s WebOS and, more recently, RIM’s Blackberry also embed web browsers based on WebKit that score very high in terms of HTML5 compliance, as can be seen in the table above. Thanks to WebKit, half of the smartphones being shipped are poised to have the Flash-like capabilities brought by “HTML5” built into their browsers. However, let’s not rush in declaring Flash “dead” and Adobe a company in decline as a result. Does HTML5 matter to Adobe ? HTML5 is actually good for Adobe’s business. Indeed most of Adobe’s revenues do not come from Flash as can be seen by breaking down the Flash product portfolio:: The Flash Professional tool, is the authoring software for creating Flash content. It ships standalone or within the Creative Suite bundle. This is where Adobe makes its money as can be seen from the “Creative Solutions” BU share of the chart on the side (courtesy of Business Insider’s “Chart of the Day” series). Creative Suite also includes the massively popular Dreamweaver web design tool, and Illustrator, a vector graphics design tool, both of which which are now starting to incorporate HTML5/CSS3 design capabilities. Adobe has also hinted that Dreamweaver will be able to convert Flash timeline animations to Javascript/CSS3 code to render those animations in “HTML5” compliant browsers. This means that “HTML5” will not be a threat to Adobe’s main source of revenue. On the contrary, since there are few good commercial web design tools, the rise of “HTML5” will spur demand for Adobe products. The Flash Player: the plug-in is free and is therefore represents  an R&D cost for Adobe. No impact there. One might argue that, if HTML5 were to totally eliminate the need for the Flash Player, it would the positively impact Adobe’s bottom line in the unlikely event the company were to lay off the entire Flash Player team 🙂 The Flash “Platform”: “auxiliary” products that rely on the Flash Player include the Flash Media Server and Flash Access product ranges, licensed to organisations that use Flash to deliver streamed video content (e.g. Hulu, Influxis, Brightcove). The “Platform” also includes the commercial Flash Builder IDE allowing the development of Rich Internet Applications (and the associated free and open-source Flex framework). As can be seen in the chart, these represent a minute proportion of Adobe’s revenue. As we will see further down, these products are not going to disappear overnight due to the emergence of HTML5. However, HTML5 does put competitive pressure on the product management and engineering teams responsible for the Flash Player to out-innovate the evolutions in browser technology. Adobe points out that this is “business as usual for them” as –they say- it was never their intention to fully replace the browser altogether, but rather complement its capabilities with innovative features, and harmonise areas in which standards have been implemented in an inconsistent fashion across browser runtimes. As an engineering-driven company, Adobe aims for Flash to stay one step ahead of HTML5 technology implementations, as it already is today in numerous areas. Indeed, an agile R&D division within a single corporate entity will always be faster than a “snail driven by a committee” as the W3C HTML5 spec bodies have been dubbed by some. Some areas where Adobe is pushing the envelope for the Flash Player include 3D rendering with hardware acceleration, concurrency support, IP TVs and peer-to-peer media delivery. The latter is an interesting transposition of the file-sharing P2P concept; imagine tens of millions of users watching the same live video coverage of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. No server farm or CDN today is capable of sustaining such a peak demand. By allowing instances of the Flash Player across millions of peers to share chunks of the video stream at the edge of the network could be the answer to the problem. Beyond innovation, another aspect to factor in is that HTML5 is still in its early stages of implementation across browsers, with Microsoft’s uber-popular Internet Explorer browser today lacking any form of HTML5 support whilst representing close to 60% of the web user base (see chart below). Even with the IE9 beta improving HTML5 support and other browsers consistently gaining market share it will still take some years before HTML5-capable desktop browsers dominate the installed base. This will justify the existence of Flash in the desktop browser space for years to come and give some leeway to Adobe’s engineering teams in designing more innovative capabilities. Figure: Desktop web browsers users share and level of HTML5 compliance (sources: wikipedia and test conducted with https://www.html5test.com) Reality check: comparing Flash and HTML5 in key areas So how is Flash vs HTML5 faring today? For review purposes we can single-out a few key areas of Flash and HTML5 competition, specifically display advertising, video delivery, games and application development. Display Advertising: a slight advantage for Flash One of the main use cases for Flash (and big source of annoyance to web users) is display advertising. “Display” adverts are animated banners that appear at the top, side or overlaid in front of the web content you. As annoying as they may be, display ads are a necessary evil for the online world since they represent 40% of the revenues that the digital content and e-commerce ecosystems live on. Even Google uses Flash in its DoubleClick Studio rich advert SDK for advertisers. Indeed a point often overlooked is that today’s HTML5 graphical rendering capabilities are at the level of what Flash capabilities were some years ago and CSS3 transforms allowing to design good “eye-candy” are inconsistently supported across browsers. Therefore I would argue that advertisers will hold back from using “HTML5” for display ad creation in the medium term. The lack of proper HTML5/CSS design tools will also delay this technology adoption by design agencies and creative professionals especially within  industry circles where Flash is deeply entrenched. On mobile devices, the situation will be no different. The blue legos now seen on iPad and iPhones may soon be replaced by HTML5 counterparts; or even by iAds. However, as of today, Apple is the only company creating iAds (in the process levying a hefty ad tax) and is reported to be struggling with the demands of advertisers with its in-house HTML5-based ad creation tools and technologies. Video Delivery: advantage for Flash Another area in which “HTML5” has been touted a “Flash killer” is online video delivery. Let’s have a look. As far as basic video playback is concerned, Flash and HTML5’s tag provide the same capabilities, so why not ditch Flash and avoid to end users the (relatively minimal) hassle of installing a plugin? The situation is not as simple as it sounds as the various browser vendors do not yet all support the same video codecs. On one side, Apple and Microsoft are proponents of H.264; Google is pushing its opensource WebM codec (formerly the proprietary VP8 codec that it inherited through the acquisition of On2/Sorenson); and Mozilla and Opera by default supporting the free and opensource Ogg Theora. This poses a challenge to online video publishers like YouTube since they then have to re-encode their content multiple times to support each codec. To end users, this means that videos may not be available in the format supported by their browser. Flash on the other hand, even though it requires videos to be packaged in the FLV container format (not to be confused with encodings like H.264), is available across all desktop browsers and is used as a reliable fallback by “HTML5” web developers i.e. for the 50% or so of IE end-users whose browser can’t render the tag. Furthermore, the Flash Player supports advanced capabilities required by online publishers such as DRM protection (crucial for pay-per-view business models) and picture-in-picture overlay of multiple video sources with alpha-blending (e.g. for e-learning or overlay of contextual adverts). These capabilities may not be offered for years with the tag in HTML5 browsers. Casual Games and Visualizations Flash is the technology that powers some massively popular “casual games” (such as Zynga‘s Farmville or Mafia Wars) played by millions of Facebook users worldwide. It also powers numerous other Facebook applications. There was earlier this year a rumor that Zynga was converting its titles to HTML5 to be able to run on the iPhone and iPad. This turned out not to be true, as it announced at Apple’s WWDC that it had ported Farmville to the iPhone as a native app; which may be interpreted as a sign that “HTML5” was not up to the task. Other “HTML5” demos that have received a lot of media attention are Google’s “bubbles” doodle earlier this month, its experiment with Arcade Fire or a port of Quake to JavaScript using GWT. However, I do not yet see casual games developers or visualization artists migrating “en masse” away from Flash. This may be explained by the fact that those experiments in “HTML5” remain CPU-intensive and RAM-hungry (more than Flash in most cases), while designer-grade tools are lacking, and the fragmentation between browsers makes Flash a lot more dependable. Applications Development: a draw Web app development is another technology domain where the HTML5 family of technologies has been contending with Flash. We have seen earlier that “HTML5” provides most core capabilities needed to run local applications, including code execution, storage and access to the screen. These core capabilities are now complemented by a flurry of web application frameworks that rely on JavaScript / CSS: DoJo, JQuery, MooTools and Sproutcore, to name a few. Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT) represents a particular case since it is a framework + tools package that allows to code a web application in Java and convert it to JavaScript for execution in the browsers (note how Gmail, Buzzz and other Google apps are built with GWT). This abundance of JavaScript frameworks may be encouraging, but also represents a dizzying array of choices for the developer. This diversity limits the degree of industry-wide code reusability and fragments the pool of Javascript app developers into vertical niches. This diversity further plays in favour of Adobe’s own web applications platform AIR (a sibling to the Flash Player) and the associated Flex framework, which uses the Actionscript programming language and allows XML-driven UI design through its MXML language. In my own experience, seasoned developers find ActionScript and MXML a much better programming paradigm than Javascript frameworks in most developer aspects; code reuse, team productivity, tools support, debugging and ease of UI design. In conclusion, the momentum behind web applications thanks to “HTML5”’s core capabilities and associated frameworks may seem unstopable, especially as it is driven by technology behemoths like Google and a large enthusiastic community. However this optimism is mitigated by the lack of developer productivity and the rising popularity of Adobe’s application development technologies. What of the Future ? Based on the earlier analysis, Flash is far from dead today. There are many cases in which Flash will continue to offer a better alternative (worst case a very useful fallback) to “HTML5” technologies due to the fragmentation in new web standards browser support. To the question : “will HTML5 kill Flash?” there is no single answer. It all depends on which use case is considered and in what timescale. On the desktop front, it is the lack of HTML5 capabilities in IE8/9 and their immaturity in all other browsers, that will secure the future of Flash in the medium term. At the same time, Adobe is under pressure from Microsoft, Google and Apple who are betting huge R&D budgets in the development of HTML5-capable browsers and who should be able to out-innovate Adobe in the longer term. On mobile, the Flash Player is still in its infancy, while WebKit-based browsers are sharply rising towards ubiquity (250 million and counting as of end 2009). This gives the “HTML5 camp” an edge today, especially in the area of basic video playback and mobile web applications for which numerous JavaScript/CSS3 mobile frameworks are available. Looking forward however, Flash may still better HTML5 on mobile for use cases like casual games and animated graphics given its greater dependability and its widespread usage today in those communities. Where would you place *your* bet? – Guilhem [Guilhem Ensuque is Director of Product Marketing at OpenPlug. He has more than twelve years of experience in the areas of mobile software and mobile telecoms. Guilhem was a speaker at last year’s Adobe MAX conference. His favorite pastimes (beyond mobile software strategy!) include making his baby daughter smile and sailing his Hobie Cat with his girlfriend. You should follow Guilhem on twitter @gensuque_op] #mobileapps #flashlite #browser #mobiledevelopers #Adobe #developers #flash #mobileapplications

[Android is leading the smartphone revolution in Western Markets. But what about China, the country with the biggest mobile user base? Guest author Hong Wu analyses the state of Android in China – from chipset vendors to software developers – and how the dragon is waking up.] The article is also available in Chinese. HuaQiang Road, ShenZhen, GuangDong, China, an ordinary weekend. At 10 o’clock in the morning, there are few pedestrians around. Sanitation workers are cleaning up hundreds of deserted mobile phone packages and plastic bags near mobile phone supermarkets, along with bundles upon bundles of mobile phone manuals, and even a few dozens of broken CDs, with labels showing clearly the words “HTC” or “SonyEricsson”. Clerks in more than a dozen bank branches on HuaQiang Road and ZhenHua Road are busy refilling cash into their ATMs. In the next 5 hours or so, those bank clerks and ATMs will be responsible for hundreds of millions of Yuan in cash transactions. Yes, cash and stock products are the rules of transaction here. This commercial business district, often called as “HuaQiangBei” (or north of HuaQiang), is the strike-it-rich spot for many poor grassroots classes in ShenZhen. This neighbourhood has become the global hub for consumer electronics. Android has recently become the hot topic within HuaQiangBei district. Sales figures of Android phones have been climbing on a daily basis at YuanWang Digital City. Most of these Android phones use Qualcomm’s chipset, while only a few of them run a chipset that’s made in China. Nearby, at MingTong Digital City, one can find heaps of ShanZhai (山寨) mobile phones on sale (ShanZhai refers to Chinese imitation and pirated brands and goods, particularly electronics). There only a few Android phone models on display, but customers keep coming back asking for more. In the meantime, the software engine that powers ShanZhai smartphones has shifted from Windows Mobile to Android, and most of they are using chipsets that are made in China. A 15-minute drive from HuaQiangBei business district, at CheGongMiao business district, are the headquarters of dozens of mobile phone design companies, who are in the midst of the mobile food chain. On a daily basis, engineers here crank out some very exotic prototype phones using MediaTek’s chipset solutions. Since 2009 when Android caught fire, sales guys from MediaTek, HiSilicon, Rockchip, Actions-Semi, and other chipset vendors are arriving day after day, hoping to sell their solutions and get a piece of the pie from the Android revolution. Once an Android-based white label design is out, the phones will be manufactured in factories at Bao’An ShenZhen and LongGang districts. The plastics are then stamped with the right retail brand stickers, and put on the shelf at the consumer electronics crossroads that is HuaQiangBei. The MediaTek powerhouse MediaTek (MTK) sells between 300 to 400 million chipsets a year for 2G handsets, and is the predominant force behind low cost phones in China. MTK’s foray into the smartphone market began in February 2009 when they released the MT6516 design, at that time based on Windows Mobile 6.5 OS. MT6516 is a dual core solution; the application processor is an ARM 9 running at 416MHz, while the baseband processor is an ARM 7, running at 280MHz, supporting 2G (GSM/EDGE). This solution suffers somewhat in terms of performance when compared to the Qualcomm’s MSM7200, but its BOM is lower. One step up, the MT6516 deluxe version includes a 2.8” QVGA resistive touch screen, 2MP camera, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth silicon, with a quoted wholesale price of $90. The basic MT6516 version with no touch screen or camera is quoted at $60. Note that approximately $10 of that quote goes towards the Windows Mobile license fee. In other words, expect prices to go down considerable with an Android design. Despite its market mussle, MediaTek didn’t anticipate that the Android revolution would arrive so soon. For example, MediaTek didn’t join OHA until 2010 while the first MTK Android handsets are just making their first steps into the Chinese market (there is a rumour that a leading Android OEM had earlier veto’ed MTK’s entry into the OHA to avoid price competition). TongXinDa in ShenZhen has been the first ODM to release an Android phone based on MTK’s MT6516 solution, the “TongXinDa TOPS-A1”. The phone boasts unique features such as dual SIM cards (both GSM and CDMA, and both at active states), a dual boot system (Windows Mobile 6.5 and Android 1.6 both stored in ROM) with 256MB RAM and ROM, and a 400×240 screen resolution. The phone ad is shown below (note that the HTC logo is a fake). But these are just the first steps of Android as it awakes the Chinese dragon. The full MTK Android 2.1 solution won’t be out in mass production until the end of 2010. More competition at low-cost Android phones Rockchip, a design vendor based in FuZhou, China, showed its RK28 solution at HongKong Electronics Show in 2010, focusing on Android tablets and smartphones. Rockchip is a homegrown chipset design company which conquered the market of MP3 portable media players with its RK26 and RK27 series. In 2009 Rockchip announced its foray into smartphone business with the RK2808 Android solution, but was not widely adopted due to chip heating problems and performance issues. In a second effort at the smartphone market, Rockchip released its RK2816 solution in 2010, running on an ARM 9 application process at 600Mhz and an NXP baseband chip. The RK28 series is not as tightly integrated as MTK’s MT6516. MTK put both applications and baseband into one single chip, while RK28 used Infineon for their baseband. RK28 series’ advantage lies at its inheritance of multimedia technologies from Rockchip, with hardware decoding of 720p H.264 video. Rockchip’s RK28 design has been taken up by Ramos (Blue Devil) to power an smartphone device under the model name W7. The device runs Android 1.5, sports a 4.8” 800×480 resistive touch screen, and is intended as competitor to iPod Touch, with a focus on video media playback features. BuBuGao is another OEM planning to deliver cheap smartphones using the RK28 solution. In the tablet space, Actions-Semi has been designing a new chipset based on the mISP 74K kernel, running Android 2.1. Marketed under the EBOX moniker, the company aims to head-to-head competition with the iPad with support for H.264, MPEG-4, DivX and Xvid hardware decoding at up to 1080p resolution. Such specs are unheard of among current Android solutions. Around five years ago, phones based on MTK chipset shook up Chinese cellphone market that was dominated by Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and other local brands like Bird, TCL and XiaXin. MTK enabled phones to be sold at very low prices while still boasting advanced features, including exotic ones like eight stereo speakers or 365 days of standby battery life. Today, most local brands are gone, and the remaining few have reverted to using MTK chipsets for their phones. International OEM brands have to slash prices on their mid-end to low-end phones in order to compete in this fierce cellphone market. MTK’s entry into high end smartphones using Android may certainly repeat the history we witnessed five years ago. Android phones running FroYo selling for under $100? Maybe just a few months away. Android Developers in high demand With such a rapid growth of Android-related activities, Android developers are in hot demand today in China. A 2-year Android pro can command up to 20,000 Yuan (close to $3,000) per month; whereas a 10-year J2EE veteran makes probably the same salary if not less. Companies, big and small, are busy scouting for Android talent, but challenged due to the small pool of qualified engineers. At ifanr.com we recently conducted a survey, with the help of the China Android Dev group (over 1,400 members, 18,000 messages, the largest and most active discussion group for Chinese Android developers) to capture the demographics of Android developers in China. Our survey received over 500 valid responses with some revealing insights into the state of Android developers in China: In terms of demographics, over 80% of respondents are between 20 to 30 years old, while another 10% is between 31 to 35 years. These are pretty young and dynamic groups of developers. When asked about how many years of mobile development experience they have, close to 40% are just getting started. And another close to 50% of respondents are within 0-2 years of experience, which is to be expected, given that Android is a two-year-old platform. In terms of their role in Android development, 37% of survey respondents are part time developers, while over 40% are professional developers. Only 10% are students while about 15% are still holding out to see how Android progresses. It’s also worth pointing out that over 60% of respondents are individual developers, a.k.a. one-man teams, while over 90% work in teams made up of less than 50 developers. There are companies with more than 100 developers, mostly likely big telecoms like China Mobile, as well as handset manufacturers and design houses. Given that we targeted Android developers, almost 80% of respondents have developed on Android. We also see healthy shares of iOS, J2ME, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. Based on current trends, we can foresee Android and iOS commanding larger market share going forward, while J2ME, Windows Mobile and Symbian share will shrink further. Over 45% of respondents have not yet published apps on Google’s Android Market. This is mostly because Android Market and Google Checkout do not yet support Chinese regions. This is a well known issue; there is a large number of developers in China wanting to publish apps onto the Market who can’t; for example many of them have to set up an overseas bank account in order to register and pay for the Market registration fee. It’s a major hassle for individual developers, and where hopefully Google has a mitigation to offer in the near future (PayPal integration perhaps?). In terms of revenue models, about two thirds of paid apps are using ad banners, while the other one third are using pay-per-download according to the results of our survey. As for the types of ad networks used, Google AdSense comes out on top with nearly 50% of votes. AdMob comes in second with nearly 30% votes. Wooboo, Youmi, and Casee, ad networks from China, are also making strides here. The level of satisfaction from app revenues is evenly distributed, with 20% of respondents saying they are not doing well and losing money, and 18% saying they are extremely satisfied and doing well or optimistic about the future (the rest 60% is for people who do not make money from apps). In terms of go-to-market channels, Google’s Android Market tops with more than half of the share. China Mobile’s Mobile Market (MM) is also popular among developers. MOTO SHOP4APPS is surprisingly getting 5% (or 10% among the ones submitted). Overall, Android has seen explosive growth in China. More and more developers are joining the ranks daily. However, due to the limitations of Android Market and Google Checkout in China, many developers are turning to alternative markets and payment gateways. In the operator camp, China Mobile is making a big splash trying to woo developers onto its Android-variant, the OMS/OPhone platform. HTC and Motorola are also pushing their own app store agenda. The Android ecosystem in China is still a sleeping dragon, but is waking up day by day. There will be more ad networks, more app stores, and more payment gateways coming out in the foreseeable future before consolidation moves in. Android in China is probably at its most exciting stage right now. – Hong [Hong Wu is a seasoned mobile app developer based in Silicon Valley, US. He’s currently building an awesome product that hopes will make TVs enjoyable again. He’s also a core member of ifanr.com, the leading new media blog site in China that focuses on mobile Internet industry, smartphones, gadgets, and exciting startups in China. You can contact Hong at lordhong /at/ gmail.com or follow @lordhong on Twitter.] #ios #htc #qualcomm #javame #chipset #smartphones #smartphone #symbian #windowsmobile #sonyericsson #Android #windowsphone #mobilesoftware #handsetmanufacturers

[Most major companies have tried engaging their customers through their mobile phones, but not everyone has succeeded. Guest author Guillaume Arth talks mobile brand experience and identifies the steps towards developing a successful mobile strategy] ‘Get into their pockets and you’ll get into their minds’ could be the slogan soon underpinning any new marketing manifesto. Indeed, mobile commerce has become core to the strategy of mainstream brands as it empowers new forms of customer engagement. Mega brands like eBay have taken strides in mobile as an extension of their online presence through mobile websites and applications. eBay’s  iPhone app has already been downloaded 11 million times. The online auction giant expects to make $1.5 billion from mobile this year compared to $600 million in 2009. Retailer brands like Best Buy use apps to offer specific promotions or gifts in the process learning a lot more about customers. Interestingly, traditional media have been quicker to adopt a mobile strategy as many advertising budgets are moving online. Since this summer, the Wall Street Journal, The Times, and Wired magazine (to name a few) have all launched iPad apps signaling a shift in premium print media. Similarly, TV channels like MTV are also embracing interactive, social apps, either designed as companion apps or offline versions of TV content. As reported by Advertising Age recently, brands like MTV  “focus on two approaches to its iOS apps: first, co-viewing apps that capture the social-media chatter around TV and awards shows and second, apps for video on the go”. Moreover, borrowing lessons from Foursquare and Gowalla new types of apps allow you to ‘check in’ to TV shows and movies. A good example of that is the TV chatter app, which enables users to do their own programming and interact with Twitter live streams and post their own. However promising these developments might be we will have to wait another 12 to 18 months to see whether print and broadcast media can truly leverage on mobile. Getting your brand experience right Through their scale and prolonged web presence EBay and Best Buy have successfully faced the challenge of multi-channel integration as well as getting visibility and ‘placement’ of their mobile commerce apps on stores.  For these reasons they still remain exceptions. As a mobile gaming exec put it to me recently, ‘you have to be at least in the top 100 apps on iTunes if you want to make any kind of money. You have to market yourself in a way that can create actual retention, not just hype at the back of a free app’. Indeed, some free apps may enjoy good download stats but those don’t necessarily translate into good reviews and recurring users as the Gucci app recently showed. Some brand strategists argue that it is still ‘early days’ and that a ‘wait-n-see approach’ is more sensible; after all market penetration of higher-end devices like the iPhone and Android-based handsets is still only around 5% of devices sold worldwide in H1 2010. However this figure hides that we are in fact talking about high value, high ARPU customers with the biggest propensity to actually try out a branded mobile app. Additionally with more 150 million smartphones sold we have passed the point of only talking about early adopters. This is now a mass-market phenomenon, which has opened up new and more direct routes to consumers for brands. So how should a brand go about developing a mobile strategy? Before enlisting a highly paid musician to create a DJ-like app experience or hiring a top-notch programmer to start churning out software code, it is important to consider what factors make some apps successful and other mediocre: Firstly, understanding users. A successful app will capture the imagination by being relevant, useful and delightful. Indeed users are prone to quickly veer off to something else in disappointment so understanding what makes them tick is important. After all your brand is trying to take a piece of someone’s busy schedule. Hence pilot first and then scale appropriately. One can draw lessons from successful games that offer a basic, yet addictive experience which is then enhanced with a bigger feature set at a 2nd stage. Then it becomes easier to convince existing users to come back and possibly pay a small premium (a good example of that is ‘Hungry Shark’ part 1 and 2 by Future games of London.) Secondly, a deep understanding of mobile as a medium is essential. No matter how amazing your ideas may be, it is worth keeping in mind that mobile is a tactile, impulsive and intimate medium that doesn’t tolerate too much ‘fuzzing’:  basically users need ‘to get it’ in a matter of seconds and… it needs to work! Taking the brand’s website content and ‘over-specifying’ an app is likely to fail. One can think of the 2010 Roland Garros app whose flawed design, and overly complex feature set probably didn’t achieve much for the tennis brand. Here is a prime example of how a flawed approach to an app can possibly damage a great brand especially when competitors or peers (the other Grand Slam tournaments in this case) have done a much better job. Based on good design guidelines, a mobile app should aim at creating a brand narrative that will work in the mobile context rather than throwing ill-conceived ‘marketing junk’ as one can often read in app reviews. App marketing can be a double-edged sword and because of its immediacy and interactivity, brands must have their ears on the ground, learn and react quickly ensuring negative feedback doesn’t spiral out of control. Thirdly, having a longer-term app roadmap where the mobile brand extension evolves and engages with its customers. The mobile app roadmap should grow gradually and elegantly, adding features and customer engagement opportunities on the way. Brands can build more loyalty by letting their essence shine through the simplicity of its mobile incarnation. Last but not least: pricing. One million free downloads equals to zero direct revenue and too many apps are free making it difficult to solicit direct revenues through branded apps. But revenue shouldn’t be the only goal of a brand-extension strategy; the main goal should be engagement. After all, who would be willing pay for ‘walking into a shop’? One shouldn’t repeat the same mistake as mobile operators portals have done with charging users for just browsing. Providing a ‘free-entry’ experience is an important consideration which can then be followed by a premium (paid-for) experience. Sowing the seeds for deeper customer engagements With mobile, brands can equip themselves with a powerful and interactive marketing platform that forms a key pillar of a ‘multi-touch’, digital media presence. The entry of brands into the mobile domain is being encouraged by four recent developments: 1. A new breed of mobile natives who have greater access, understanding and trust in the mobile medium as a more personal and less ‘mediated’ experience for shopping or entertainment 2. Devices evolve at a very fast pace.  Thanks to the widespread support of XHML/HTML, Java script and CSS, (More than 250m devices now feature the open-source WebKit browser engine, as seen in the 100 Million Club) and greater set of APIs, devices offer richer media experiences: audio, picture, video, social, messaging, location…and the list goes on. 3. The greater availability and affordability of cloud-based technology open source APIs, as well as packaging and rendering solutions for mobile websites, allow new entrants – like brands – in the market (‘BK Render’, a mobile rendering solution from french start-up Backelite is a good example there) 4. The accelerated development of mobile transactions from operator billing to bar coding, I-Tunes, Google checkout, PayPal, NFC and others. ‘Convergence marketing’ is the new frontier At the core of the ‘new mobile economics’ brands and service providers are increasingly empowered to create new experiences and new business models. With the caveat that there is no current “write once, run anywhere”, I argue that brands are better positioned than ever to work around consumer and platform fragmentation through ‘convergent positioning and marketing’. Essentially rather than feeling daunted by technology, it is about looking at what the brand is trying to communicate and push a consistent message across to all users whatever digital medium they are using. Users. Where are they? They are everywhere and ‘ubiquity’ is their destination.  The user journey starts with a phone in each pocket, device connectivity and grows to digital ecosystems spanning across tablet computers, laptops desktops, TVs and many more places tomorrow. This creates a connected environment of opportunities for brands to express and market themselves in new ways, with social apps and blogging leading the way. Costs and barriers to entry to digital are lowering and marketing and retailing of digital goods is becoming mainstream. Further down this new crowded high street, Apple, Google, Samsung and to an extent LG and Sony are embroiled in the battle to conquer our living rooms with internet TV services, through VOD, apps and widgets.  At present, joint communications and Internet TV services are mostly ‘beta’ services on trial with operators including Verizon (US), Sonaecom (Portugal) or KT(South Korea). Orange recently signed a partnership with LG, where Orange provides billing and customer care while LG provides IPTV services. There are also handset apps that act as a remote control – Free.fr in France for example (Free.fr app) – signaling that mobile might take over as the ultimate ‘EPG’ (electronic Programming guide). Currently 10-20% of IPTVs are connected to a broadband going up to 50% with higher broadband penetration. Samsung expects to sell 35 million TVs globally in 2010. In comparison, it took Microsoft 3 years to sell as many Xbox units. As TV remains the most popular consumer electronics device in the home this presents significant opportunities for any IP-based service or a brand looking to market itself through digital. With an installed base of millions it is only a matter of time before mobile app stores users are migrated to the big screen. Apps and mobile services are good place to start for any brand but as we have discussed it is only the beginning. For instance, Nokia recently argued that ‘context devices, rather the apps, will be where the money is’. With the digital switch over completed in most developed markets by 2012, ‘Convergent marketing campaigns’ will soon become a reality. Of course being successful will require adjustments and some juggling with technology but I believe that within 18 months, brands, service providers and advertisers will be at the intersection of a bigger phenomenon than the app stores as digital grows exponentially. Now is the time for any brand to plan and leverage on those exciting developments and – through deeper customer engagement – turn new experiences into new revenue streams. Guillaume. [Guillaume Arth is a mobile media consultant based in London, UK. With more than 10 years of experience in this space, he currently specialises in service strategy, sales and marketing advising large and small organizations. You can contact Guillaume at: g /at/ cozmopolitanmedia.com or you can follow him on Twitter @cozmedia] #mobileapps #smartphones #smartphone #mobilestrategy #branded #pricing #mobileapplications

[With the adoption of SaaS applications, augmented reality, visual recognition and other next-gen phone apps, the smartphone processing model is looking for help from the Cloud. Guest author Vish Nandlall introduces the concept of the Cloud Phone and the technology advances that can make this happen] Are smartphones converging with laptops ? While smartphones enable a rich user experience, there exists an order of magnitude gap in memory, compute power, screen real-estate and battery life relative to the laptop or desktop environment (see table below). This disparity renders the whole question of smartphones vs laptops an apple vs oranges debate. It also begs the question: can the smartphone ever bridge the gap to the laptop?SmatphonesLaptopsApple iPhone 4HTC EVO 4G ASUS G73Jh-A2 Dell Precision M6500 CPUApple A4 @ ~800MHzQualcomm Scorpion @ 1GHzIntel Core i7-720QM @ 2.80GHzIntel Core i7-920XM @ 2.0GHzGPUPowerVR SGX 535Adreno 200N/AN/ARAM512MB LPDDR1 (?)512MB LPDDR14x2GB DDR3-13334x2GB DDR3-1600BatteryIntegrated 5.254WhrRemovable 5.5Whr75Whr90Wh Source: vendor websites As a matter of physics, the mobile and nomadic/tethered platform will always be separated along the silicon power curve – largely driven by physical dimensions. The laptop form factor will simply be able to cool a higher horsepower processor, host a larger screen real-estate and house a larger battery and memory system than a smartphone. Does a smartphone need to be laptop ? Yes it does…or, at least, it soon will. The low-power constraints of mobile devices have been the official Apple argument behind the recent Apple-Adobe feud – and Apple’s acquisition of PA Semi is a further testament to the importance of the hardware optimization in mobile devices. The processing envelope for mobile applications is becoming stretched by the demands of next-generation mobile applications; always-on synchronization of contacts, documents, activities and relationships bound to my time and space; the adoption of Augmented Reality applications by mainstream service providers that pushes AR into a primary ‘window’ of the phone; advanced gesture systems as MIT’s “sixth sense” that combine gesture based interfaces with pattern recognition and projection technology; voice recognition and visual recognition of faces or environments that makes mobile phones an even more intuitive and indispensible remote control of our daily lives.  All these applications require the combination of a smartphone “front-end” and a laptop “back-end” to realise – not to mention having to run multiple applications in parallel. The appearance of these next-gen applications will also create greater responsibilities for the mobile application platform: it is now important to monitor memory leaks and stray processes sucking up power, to detect, isolate and resolve malicious intrusions and private data disclosure, and to manage applications which require high-volume data. So we come back to the question, is there a way to “leapfrog” the compute and memory divide between tethered and mobile devices? The answer, it turns out, may lie in the clouds. Enter the Cloud Phone The concept of a Cloud Phone has been discussed oftentimes, most recently being the topic of research papers by Intel labs and NTT DoCoMo technical review. The concept behind the Cloud Phone is to seamlessly off-load execution from a smartphone to a “cloud” processing cluster. The trick is to avoid having to rewrite all the existing applications to provide this offload capability. This is achieved through creating a virtual instance of the smartphone in the cloud. The following diagram shows basic concept in a nutshell (source: NTT DoCoMo technical review) The Cloud Phone technology has been brought back in vogue is due to advancements in four key areas: Lower cost processing power; Compute resources today are abundant, and data centers have mainstreamed technologies for replicating and migrating execution between and within connected server clusters. Robust technologies for check-pointing and migrating applications; Technologies such as live virtual machine migration and incremental checkpointing have emerged from the classrooms and into production networks. Reduced over-the-air latency; the mobile radio interface presents a challenge in terms of transaction latency. Check-pointing and migration requires latencies on the order of 50-80ms – these round trip times can be achieved through current HSPA, but will become more realistic in next-generation LTE systems. Average latencies in a “flat” LTE network are approximately 50ms at the gateway, which suddenly makes the prospect of hosting the smartphone application on a carrier-operated “cloud” very much a reality. Note that past the gateway, or beyond the carrier network, latencies become much more unmanageable and will easily reach 120ms or more. Mobile Virtualization; this technology offers the ability to decouple the mobile OS and application from the processor and memory architecture, enabling applications and services to be run on “cloud” servers. This has become an area of intensive research in mobile device design, and was covered in an earlier article by OK Lab’s Steve Subar. A cloud execution engine could provide off-loading of smartphone tasks, such as visual recognition, voice recognition, Augmented Reality and pattern recognition applications, effectively overcoming the smartphone hardware and power limitations. This model would also allow key maintenance functions requiring CPU intensive scans to be executed on a virtual smartphone “mirror image” in the cloud. This would also facilitate taint checking and data leak prevention which have been long used in the PC domain to increase system robustness. Another consequence of the Cloud Phone model is that it provides a new “value-add point” for the carrier in the mobile application ecosystem. The low latency limitations will require optimizations at the radio-access network layer implying that the network carrier is best positioned to extract value from the Cloud Phone concept – plus operators can place data centres close to the wireless edge allowing very low latency applications to be realized. This doesn’t rule out a Google entering into the fray – indeed, their acquisition of Agnilux may well signal a strategy to build a proprietary server processor to host such Cloud Phone applications. The raw ingredients for the Cloud Phone are falling into place; more users are driven towards SaaS based phone applications, and HTML5 is being adopted by handset OEMs. There is no shortage of applications waiting to exploit a cloud phone platform: in July alone, 54 augmented reality apps were added to the Apple App Store. Google has also broken ground in the Cloud Phone space with Cloud to Device Messaging which helps developers channel data from the cloud to their applications on Android devices. What other Cloud Phone applications do you see on the horizon? When do you see Cloud Phones reaching the market? – Vish [Vish Nandlall is CTO in the North American market for Ericsson, and has been working in the telecoms  industry for the past 18 years. He was previously CTO for Nortel’s Carrier Networks division overseeing standards and architecture across mobile and wireline product lines. You can read his blog at www.theinvisibleinternet.net] #qualcomm #latency #cloudphone #intel #augmentedreality #virtualisation #docomo #lte #developers #ericsson #mobile

[Who can save Nokia from a tumbling market valuation, declining margins and product failures? Guest author Thucydides Sigs deconstructs Nokia’s culture and explains why an acquisition would be the best next step for Nokia] When CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo took control of Nokia in 2006, the stock was at $25 per share. In late July 2010, the stock was around $8, the same level as in the late nineties. Ouch. In just four years, two thirds of shareholder equity is gone. If  we go a step further, and compare market cap and sales by number of units, we observe an even more disturbing picture: Nokia’s valuation was at $33B on sales of 125M handsets last quarter; the same figures for Motorola were $17B on 12M handsets and for RIM $31B on 10.6M handsets. The math is pretty simple: Nokia is valued almost as much as RIM, but ships 10 times fewer MORE handsets. The trend is not looking good for Nokia. No wonder that we have seen news reports of the board finally looking for a new CEO. Is a CEO change what it takes to fix Nokia? Will it make a difference if a foreigner takes over the proud Finnish company? Is Nokia beyond fixing – a dinosaur who can’t survive the climate change – or is there something that can be done to transform the company? I don’t think Nokia is unfixable. Nokia has a huge potential: amazing global consumer brand, a very strong IP war chest and deep understanding of where the market is heading. Yes, Nokia does know where the market is going and it always has known. From launching the Nokia Communicator in 1996… and attempting to expand into services (Ovi is the latest strategic attempt), Nokia has known where it wanted and needed to go. But the problem has been and still is the execution. The Finnish giant just fails to move and adapt fast enough to the chaotic, rapidly evolving software and internet market. What is holding the execution back? More than anything, it’s the company’s culture. And before I dive into it the details, I have to preemptively apologize; like any discussion of a large corporation or a regional culture, one has to use generalizations. Yes, there are always exceptions, but if we want to analyze the culture we need to resort to generalizations. Some readers might find this offensive. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Nokia takes great pride in being “Smart, Cold Blooded Vikings.” Thoughtful and tough, strategic and careful, they don’t take chances. They calculate, analyze and think before they react. And “if it takes time, that’s fine”. This is an admirable approach. But as Google’s Shona Brown pointed out in “Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos“, if you try to analyze and manage chaos (or any environment which is rapidly changing in multiple dimensions), that might take a while. Plus, if your analysis takes longer than the rate of change, you are actually moving backward. In the age of fast moving internet and web, the best strategies are coming from the bottom up, and are best developed through experimentation rather than long analytical cycles. This is the antithesis to what the Nokia culture is all about. And to a large extent, the culture goes beyond Nokia; it is deeply rooted in the Finnish way of living. Nokia is a Finnish company and I would argue that you can’t take the Finnish out of Nokia. Yes, some Nokians – especially those who spent parts of their careers in the US – know how to, and often do, operate differently. And in the last re-org some good “Nokia 2.0” people have moved upward. But overall, Nokia is a reflection of the Finnish culture: “Smart, cold blooded”, strategic, cautious, Vikings. This should not reflect as a negative comment on Finns: Just like a camel can’t survive in the arctic and a polar bear will die in the desert, a culture makes a company best suited to a specific kind of environment. Nokia has a great tradition of excellence in manufacturing and mastering logistics through process. This DNA is different – and I argue that it is the anti-thesis – of the Internet & Services culture. The recent rumors about Nokia looking for an outsider, non Finnish CEO are interesting – and a move in the right direction. But will it be enough? I doubt it; either the strong existing culture will change the CEO, or the CEO will leave within a few years. So, is it possible to change Nokia’s culture and save the company? In my opinion, to change such a deeply ingrained culture, a shock treatment is needed. Three things need to happen. First, Nokia needs to be acquired by a foreign entity (Chinese? American?) or a private equity group. With a market cap of $33B, it is a bargain. Just turning it into another Motorola will double the value. And if whoever acquires Nokia succeeds in generating service revenues from those 500M handsets sold each year (and one interesting direction they should explore is mobile payments) the valuation will be in the hundreds of billions. If Nokia were to be acquired it would cause a shock wave throughout the organization, the kind of shockwave that can induce a rapid cultural change. Yes, there will be a lot of resentment among the old-guard Nokians, many of whom will leave, but these are exactly the people who should work in industries that are not as fast paced. And many of the newer Nokians – what we call the Nokia 2.0 execs – who suffer under the existing culture might actually appreciate and support such a move. Second, for Meego (Nokia’s live-or-die bet on a software platform) to become a viable alternative to Android, the Meego executive leadership must physically relocate to Silicon Valley. We hate to admit it, but when it comes to rapid development of software and services, this is where the right culture exists and right talent can be sourced. This physical change will lead to an attitude change that will impact every decision Nokia makes, and all else will follow.  By relocating to the Valley, MeeGo will become more independent from its Finnish roots and will be able to work more effectively with Intel. It would also give the Silicon Valley team something to rally around, and a clear ambitious goal they can focus on – which is how you build effective teams and why all of Nokia’s previous attempts to build high caliber teams in the Valley have failed. Yes, you can have satellite offices in other countries (just like Android does) but there is only one place where the software & services brains should be placed, and it is in Silicon Valley. Third, Nokia’s handset development efforts need to be transformed from a mammoth machine into small, fast moving (9-12 month development cycle) commando units of integrated software, hardware, mechanical and design specialists. The economics of the CE space have changed, and it is now possible to test and create prototypes much faster and cheaper than it used to be. Forget the 24-month planning cycle… let multiple teams come up with contrasting ideas, prototype those and then cherry pick the best ones for market testing and production. It will build a constructive competitive culture that will push everybody forward. Samsung does that today. The Taiwan ODMs do that today. Nokia can and should match up. Nokia is a great company with great assets and some great people working for it. It can be saved from becoming the cold-blooded 21st century dinosaur. For whoever saves Nokia – if they manage to change the culture – a big reward lies ahead. So who will buy Nokia? Comment with your best guess below… -TS [Thucydides Sigs – a pseudonym – has many years of experience juggling computing constraints, mobile software and consumers needs. With that said, imagine listening to a violin sonata not know who the artist is or who composed it. You end up having to listen more carefully in order to make a judgment. He can be reached at thucydides /dot/ sigs [at] gmail [dot] com] #meego #nokia #ollipekkakallasvuo #ovi

[In a race for profits, the mobile industry finds itself squeezed between vertically integrated players like Apple and horizontal players like Google. What is the fate of handset manufacturers? Guest author Vinay Kapoor takes a peek into the future landscape of the mobile industry] The top 5 mobile OEM list was recently shaken and stirred by the entry of RIM into the list of top 5 OEMs and the subsequent exit of Motorola. Previously, the top-5 OEM leaderboard had been stable for half a decade and so the most excitement you could get would be a change in the relative position of the incumbents. Looking today at the comparative handset sales of RIM, Apple and Motorola, it is clear that the exit of Motorola from this list of top 5 OEMs has been a long time coming. While Motorola’s decline in sales may be reversed, it is unclear if Android can help propel Motorola back into the top-5 list. So what does the future hold? If we look at the top 5 OEMs, Nokia, Samsung and LG are fairly spaced out to not expect a major change in their relative positions, assuming an absence of disruptive events. Yet, Apple and Sony Ericsson are much closer, just 1.5 million units apart. Sony Ericsson’s President, Bert Nordberg recently stated that Sony Ericsson is seeking to not be a volume player, but rather a value player and as such will focus on smart phones. Such high value products and the higher profit that they bring would clearly take preference over market share. This is not a bad thing at all; for example Apple and RIM command a meagre 3% of the mobile device volumes, but 55% of the profits according to a Deutsche Bank analysis. Left unchecked, an un-necessary race for volumes and growth can have disastrous consequences. Quality and profits are certainly more important than a blind race for meaningless volumes. This is a reason why the top 5 OEM list, is only part of the big picture. The strategic positioning of the manufacturers on and off that list is equally important and can often signal a rapid change in fortunes. What’ clear is that in early 2011 we should see Apple displace Sony Ericsson from 5th position, making the top-5 list the territory of a Finnish mass-producer, two South Korean workhorses and two North America challengers. Learning from the industry’s mistakes Taking inspiration from a certain eruption from a volcano in Iceland (whose name I cannot pronounce!), the industry is undergoing a change in landscape. Much like the results of a volcanic eruption, this landscape and the map we draw-off of it, will change for the foreseeable future. The two “eruptions” in our case have been the surge in emergence of new, vertically integrated product experiences, as a result of Apple and RIM’s success, and the open source phenomena, triggered by Google’s Android platform. The Evolution From the perspective of mobile software, we are in a new phase of evolution of this landscape. Up until the beginning of the century, OEMs built devices around vertically integrated systems. This included in-house ownership of the complete solution from hardware all the way up to the applications. The applications themselves were little more than enablers of the underlying technology; in other words software-enabled hardware. During 2002-2008, there was an emergence of several “horizontal” value players. A lot of the underlying technology was sourced from organizations who specialized in componentised software layers, selling middleware, browsers, application frameworks and operating systems. This has been especially prevalent in smartphones powered by the likes of windows mobile and Symbian. Since around 2009, OEMs have been building systems around open source software and open interfaces. This is not only true for software (Android, Symbian, LiMo, MeeGo), but also the hardware pieces are becoming more off–the-shelf and commoditized The success of Apple and RIM, both of which have vertically integrated offerings (to varying degrees) has polarized the industry; manufacturers are now stuck between a rock (vertically integrated offerings from Apple and RIM) and a hard place (open source software platforms). So, on one end are the players who are embracing and driving open source and commoditizing suppliers (Nokia, Motorola, LG) while on the other end are the players who believe in control and in-house vertical integration (Apple, RIM). Samsung, with its Bada programming layer is clearly looking to replicate Apple and RIM’s vertically integrated model. Sony Ericsson is leaning to the Open end with Android and Symbian (5 of 8 products in the core portfolio) So is the Apple and RIM vertical model a one-way street for everyone to embrace? Apple and RIM are essentially able to afford the luxury of a complete in-house solution because of the relative lack of variation required in their software, due to fairly narrow deviations in their products (it’s not just a case of affording.. they are also buying companies to effect this – e.g. chipset, ad networks in case of Apple, QNX and Dash in case of RIM). This is obvious for the iPhone where Apple is essentially upgrading a single product year after year. Even in the case of RIM, with seemingly several different variations on the Blackberry hardware, they deal with one main Blackberry vanilla design. Note that in that sense both Apple and RIM are both playing a fairly risky game, akin to putting your eggs in one basket. This risk is manageable as both Apple and RIM still sport unique selling points; best-in-class product design, services and user interface in case of Apple and proprietary messaging solution in case of RIM. In case of Apple, the iPhone’s hardware and software is designed to wow the user. A combination of Apple’s brand value, shrewd marketing and design-centred approach has resulted in a desirable product that goes to the extent to sacrificing seemingly important features to keep things simple for the user. However, the iPhone would not be this ‘desirable’ were it not for the massive amount of applications, both good and bad, available to the user. That much content means that users tend to not get bored with the limitations of the few built in applications on the device. Blackberry on the other hand has taken the approach of creating a messaging solution that is extremely simple to use and needs no complicated “setup”. The device is of course valuable to enterprises with it’s built in security mechanisms and fully integrated enterprise solutions. Once again, superior consumer experience and focus on the core group (enterprise users) has been achieved through vertical integration of the complete value chain. For the incumbent handset OEMs who need to reduce the total cost of ownership for software, going back to the days of 100% in-house software, does not sound appealing at all. The sheer amount of work required to adapt software to 10s of hardware SKUs is not very appetizing. For these OEMs open source is a real blessing that helps tap into innovation while at the same time cutting costs on the core software R&D. This is one reason, why Samsung’s Bada move is very bold indeed. It will be interesting to see how Samsung manages to competitively maintain Bada, without the R&D cost of managing that platform having an impact on the Korean manufacturer’s bottomline. So, it seems that a polarized universe is the only way forward with some players betting on open source and commoditized hardware, and others on vertical systems. The struggle for differentiation Once Sony Ericsson and Samsung have finally placed their bets with Bada and Android the ecosystem will settle down into this polarized state. The vertically integrated players will have the privilege of keeping a high barrier to entry for any new entrant. This assumed new entrant will have to replicate what Apple did with the iPhone, which is not something you see very often. The players in the open ecosystem will, however, have to guard against the king of cost Shanzai (fake phone) brands that have the possibility to challenge established OEMs. The assumption here is that a drive to open systems will lower the barrier to entry. When any tom-dick-and-harry can slap one of several open source software stacks on top of one of several chipsets readily support such software stacks, the need to differentiate will extend beyond hardware and software design. It is too risky to assume that the consumer will remain committed to a brand solely on the basis of these easy-to-replicate characteristics. So what is it that the OEMs can use to differentiate their offerings? One must remember that a consumers experience of product and a brand is an amalgamation of several points of contact with the brand and the product. The look and feel of the hardware, and the usability of the device are just two such contact points. A consumer interacts with both the device and the brand in many other ways, like using a cloud service provided with the device, or calling a call-centre for support. A differentiated offering will evolve, based on not just user interface but complete user experience (hardware, software, UI, cloud services, customer service). These will be necessary defences and barriers, which the incumbents will need, in order to protect against being reduced to commodities fighting on price. We may see OEMs positioning their products based on this complete package rather than simply advertising stunning hardware and user interface design. Those that build a robust defence (the Gorillas) will command the landscape through their sheer size and position. The super efficient king-of-cost players will present a challenge with their sheer agility and cunning (the foxes). Rest assured, anyone stuck in the middle (the jungle) will be stuck in a constant struggle for survival. What a great ending to the fairy tale! – Vinay [Vinay Kapoor is a Business development director at Tieto where he helps build new revenue streams and helps shape Tieto’s mobile devices strategy. Vinay has been a mobile industry insider for over a decade and has an avid interest in the events that shape this ever changing industry. You can follow him on Twitter (www.twitter.com/vinaykap) or on his blog (http://wirelessmantra.blogspot.com)] #rim #nokia #Apple #lg #motorola #sonyericsson #Android #Blackberry #handsetmanufacturers #samsung

[In the final part of our series on our latest research – Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond – Telefonica’s James Parton discusses the challenges facing mobile network operators in their quest to stay relevant to mobile application developers. Full research report available for free download or see part 1, part 2 and part 3 of the blog series on mobile developer economics] The article is also available in Chinese. Historically, operators have been one of the few options available to developers when bringing new applications and services to market. Typically this has been in the form of placing applications in the operator mobile web portal or via a handset preload agreement within the operator variant software build. However operator go-to-market channels have suffered from a lack of transparency, lengthy bureaucratic processes and the inevitable arrogance of a dominant gatekeeper.  The rapid rise of app stores has completely rewritten the rule book, and now provides independent developers with a more open and democratic way to get their product in front of potential consumers. The Developer Economics 2010 report graphically highlights this trend, with less than 5% of the 400 developer respondents persevering with the operator channel. Clearly app stores have delivered real economic benefits to developers, with time to shelf being reduced by two thirds, and time to payment being reduced by 22 days (see part 2 of our blog series) when compared to the Operator channel. There are some notable exceptions to the trend. Andrew Fisher, CEO of Shazam, frequently highlights the Operator channel as one of the reasons for Shazam’s wide spread success, and recommends companies to invest in developing operator partnerships. Christopher Kassulke, CEO at HandyGames confirms that major games developers also prefer to invest in selling games via operators, due to the higher per-download price points and the sustainable, predictable revenues that the operator channel offers. Opportunity lost? A key question for operators is “Has the app distribution opportunity been irreversibly lost?” An interesting insight from the Developer Economics report is that the app store phenomenon is perhaps not as widespread as portrayed. Beyond the iPhone and Android ecosystems dominated by native app stores, there is a significant gap in the market for operators to assist in the distribution of apps and services. This is especially significant in the growing mobile web app sector. Of course it goes without saying; unless operators fix the legacy issues with their lengthy bureaucratic processes and ‘ivory tower’ attitude then the distribution opportunity will remain untapped. One of the interesting friction points will be the open market model vs. selective editorial cherry picking of apps favoured by many Operators. Open market vs Cherry picking In an open market model, there is no editorial body deciding the catalogue of applications presented to consumers. A complaint often heard from developers is “Who do they think they are, deciding if my app is good enough?” The customer is presented with unfiltered choice made available by any and all developers. The downside of this approach is the “lost in the noise” issue increasingly voiced by developers, the reduction in quality or increase in copyright-infringing apps and the over reliance on your app appearing in the “recommended” or top 10 listing of the relevant content categories to drive downloads. Operators favouring the editorial selection model (‘cherry picking’) will argue less is more. Based on an understanding of their user base, operator content managers will work with developers to select the most appealing and appropriate apps. This directly addresses the “lost in the noise” issue as the catalogue will be much smaller vs. an open model app store. This approach should also deliver higher conversion rates if the apps are effectively matched to the needs of the audience. Cynics will argue that the operator content managers are not qualified to make the right selections, and this method heavily favours established brands like Facebook which are “safe” vs. lesser known independent developer offerings, thus stifling innovation. Now developers need to figure out how to make their apps stand out from the crowd. Giving your app away for free just won’t cut it in the long run, as there is no emotional or financial bond between your app and the user. Pinch Media research shows that the average shelf life of a free iPhone app is less than 30 days, with only 20% of users returning to the app after the first day of installation. You don’t want to be the app equivalent of the shortlived May Fly ? Key to ensuring your app will appeal to consumers is working directly with your intended audience at an early stage. Why waste time and effort if you don’t have an understanding of the following critical questions: Which features will make a difference to people? What is your addressable market? How much are people prepared to pay you for your trouble, if anything? This marketing insight gap was highlighted in “Developer Economics 2010”, showing that perhaps the app sector is not as mature as previously presumed. Worryingly the vast majority of developers do not invest in any formal market research or even user testing, outside of friends and colleagues. Recognising that many development companies may not have specialised marketing people or the resources to conduct formal research, the operator can help fill this gap by opening up access to their customer base to encourage co-creation and testing with real end users, free of charge. This model of match making developers with end users was championed in the UK in early 2009 when we launched O2 Litmus. This fresh approach quickly gained recognition for its innovative model. To date over 7,600 O2 UK customers have volunteered to participate in the development and testing of applications with developers. Typically engagement levels run at around 10% of the tester base actively working with developers at any one time. Approaching 100 individual apps have benefitted from customer co-creation in O2 Litmus, generating over 2,500 test installations to date. Programming the network I have previously written about the potential for Operator delivered network enablers (API’s). Developer Economics 2010 highlights the challenge that faces the operator community in effectively evangelising this message. Only 5% of respondents felt that it was the role of the Operator to expose network API’s. The pace of technological innovation is not being matched by business model innovation. Increasingly developers feel constrained by the business models on offer. Pay per download dominates (two thirds of respondents), with subscription and advertising following. This signals another significant opportunity for Operators, and an important angle to the exposure of operator network enablers. It is easy to limit the conversation around enablers to the technical feature set of each enabler. The untapped opportunity for both developers and operators alike is wrapping the exposure of enablers with new innovative business models, such as revenue share on the transactional traffic generated If developers can plug in additional revenue streams from the usage of operator enablers, this will address both the lack of commercial monetisation options available to developers, whilst introducing richer functionality to their app experience.  If executed correctly I believe this can effectively address the developer perception issues highlighted in the report. I will close the post with a developer quote from Developer Economics 2010 that perfectly sums up both the opportunity and challenge facing mobile Operators today: “The first mobile company to TRULY reach out to web developers will have an edge over the competition, but right now I don’t see any candidates, except for Google. If Google became an operator our problems would be solved” – James Head of Telefonica Developer Communities You should follow James on twitter at @jamesparton [James is a Chartered Marketer specialised in Mobile. With an award winning track record of product delivery including twenty five major launches, featuring twenty first to market achievements, including MMS, mobile video, mobile music downloads, the UK DVB-H Broadcast TV trial in 2005, and the ticketing and interactive services supporting The O2 Arena in London. Recognised by Revolution Magazine as one of the “Future 50”, James is a regular industry speaker, panellist, judge, blogger, and has lectured in Marketing and New Product Development at The University of Oxford Faculty of Continuing Education and Reading University.] Full report is available for free download, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Telefonica Developer Communities. You can follow Telefonica Developer Communities through their blog. Are you a mobile app developer? Want to be part of VisionMobile’s next developer research and voice your own opinions? Take a moment to fill out the registration form. #ios #flashlite #javame #rim #Apple #mobileweb #mobiledeveloper #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #flash #windowsphone #Blackberry

[In part 3 of the 4-part series on our latest research – Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond – guest author Tor Björn Minde takes a critical look at the developer sentiments on code development, debugging and support. Full research report available for free download or see part 1 and part 2 of the blog series on mobile developer economics]. The article is also available in Chinese. Do iOS and Android enjoy a large market penetration? VisionMobile’s research suggests that developers think so even if it is not case for iOS and Android per se; iOS and Android are available in a fraction of devices compared to Symbian and Java ME. Most probably, developers view addressable market in terms of ability to reach a large audience of ‘application consumers’ rather than just a large installed base of handsets. Developers also consider “quick to code and prototype” as a favourite platform aspect, second only in importance to making money on the platform. This reveals that the ‘fun’ aspect of mobile development co-exists with the realism of money-making in developers’ minds. The new report Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond, contains many new insights into mobile development. In this article, I ‘ll  comment on and highlight key take-aways from chapter 3 of the report titled “the building blocks of mobile applications”. Perceived market penetration should be interpreted as real app usage penetration There seems to be a contradiction in terms regarding the platform aspect considered ‘best’ by developers. Developers flock onto iOS and Android due to a “perceived” large market share but still there’s a discrepancy between the installed base of the platforms and the number of available apps for each platform. The platforms that have greatest installed base (j2ME, Symbian) have the fewest applications and vice versa. So, is there (only) a perceived market penetration by the different platforms or are there facts that support the choice? Looking at some related data points from an Ovum report,  iPhone has 69% of all downloads while Symbian has 9% of all downloads. The report further says that 57% of all downloads in 2009 originated from North America, indicating a high usage pattern among  iOS/Android device users. Users of iPhones and Android devices are more likely to download applications. Piecing together some more data points on  iOS and Android, specifically app stores’ ease of use, application discovery and the multi-touch experience, reveals an important point; for application developers the addressable market that matters is not just the installed base. While iOS and Android have limited deployments compared to the incumbent platforms, they are indeed ahead of the curve in terms of download share, usage share and ease of use – which explains the developer perception of large market share for iOS and Android. Hence, perceived market penetration should be interpreted as app usage and download share penetration. It is still fun to code, but money-making rules Looking at technical reasons that mobile developers consider important when selecting a platform, what sticks out as the favourite reason is “quick to code and prototype”. Moreover, Android, Mobile Web and Flash Lite seem to have the shortest learning curve while Android enjoys the shortest development time. Developers still consider fun and coding speed as important even if developer mindshare is turning towards the appeal of monetization and reaching a large audience. The technical reasons for selecting a platform seem to be gradually becoming a less important selection criterion. However, developer responses are blurred by ‘soft values’ which affect the answers to the question “What is important”. A study we did at Ericsson Labs argues that developers, these pioneers of mobile application development, can roughly be grouped into four categories. The answers to the question “What is most important” will be very different between these groups. One developer group has very strong opinions about open-source, another group are mainly focused on a good return on investment, a third group are attracted by the lowest possible barriers to entry and the last group try to keep one hand in every cookie jar. Future building blocks of mobile applications In general, mobile web development within an HTML5 browser or web runtime is promising when it comes to market penetration, ease-of-use and cross platform support. At the same time, the VisionMobile study shows several pain-points with mobile web technologies compared to native applications, namely issues with development environments, device API support and UI creation. We will probably see both environments (native and web) used by developers in the future, both served by app stores and other discovery mechanisms. One could assume that the web runtime will fare better than previous cross-platform initiatives (J2ME, Flash Lite) since there is a large community developing to the web runtime (as opposed to single companies). Untapped opportunities in developer support VisionMobile’s study hints at the market gaps in developer support offerings. Developers are most willing to pay for access to hidden APIs – clearly a monetisation opportunity for platform vendors. Premium access to APIs can be delivered by device vendors as a point of differentiation, but it will run counter to cross-device application support of the platform. To achieve both depth of API reach and breadth of cross-device support, we need standards – which interestingly enough are not so important for developers, as VisionMobile’s study reveals. Finally, VisionMobile suggests that developers use non-vendor sites and developer communities most often for tech support – examples being  Slashdot, Stackoverflow, Daniweb, anddev.org and the Chinese dev site csdn.net. At the same time, our study at Ericsson Labs also found that the main tool developers use for tech support is still regular search engines across tech support or developer communities. Concluding remarks All in all, the new VisionMobile report analyses most areas of interest for those who need to understand the developer experience. The knowledge of the developer experience using these ‘first wave’ platforms (what the report refers to as “the Renaissance period”) for mobile application development and marketing is crucial in order to guide the development of future platforms. –  Tor Björn follow me at @ericssonlabs. Full report is available for free download, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Telefonica Developer Communities. You can follow Telefonica Developer Communities through their blog. Are you a mobile app developer? Want to participate in the next mobile developer research and voice your own opinions on mobile development? Fill out the registration form & we’ll be in touch. [Tor Björn is head of Ericsson Labs with 25 years experience in mobile multimedia & applications] #ios #flashlite #javame #rim #Apple #mobileweb #mobiledeveloper #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #flash #windowsphone #Blackberry

[In part 2 of the 4-part series on our latest research – Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond – Andreas Constantinou looks at how effectively have app stores have reduced the time-to-market for applications and the five key challenges for mobile developers today in taking apps to market. Full research report available for free download or see part 1 of the blog series on the migration of developer mindshare]. The article is also available in Chinese. If there’s a single reason for the mass-entrance of developers into the mobile market, it is app stores. We view app stores as direct developer-to-consumer channels, i.e. commercial conduits that streamline the submission, pricing, distribution and retailing of applications to consumers. For a breakdown of key ingredients in the app store recipe, see our Mobile Megatrends 2010 report. App stores have streamlined the route to market for mobile applications, a route that was previously laden with obstacles, such as lack of information, complex submission and certification processes, low revenue shares and regional fragmentation. Despite the hype, there is sporadic use of app stores outside the Apple and Android platforms. Our survey of 400+ mobile developers found that only four percent of Java respondents used App Stores as their primary channel to market. Windows Phone and mobile web developers find app stores little more relevant, with fewer than 10 percent of such respondents using one as a primary channel for taking applications to market. This contrasts completely with platforms that have ‘native’ app stores. Over 95 percent of iPhone respondents use the Apple App Store as their primary channel, while the percentage of Android respondents using Android Market is just below 90. In terms of the incumbent mobile platforms, around 75 percent of Symbian respondents that use app stores, use the Nokia Ovi Store. The significant number (20-25 percent) of Symbian developers who also use iPhone and Android app stores reveals the brain-drain that is taking place towards these newer platforms. This is a particularly critical migration of developer mindshare, considering that the Symbian platform is the hardest to master. Thus, the size of developer investments on Symbian being written off is substantial. Besides the growth of apps, app stores are the cornerstone of another major transformation that has taken place in the mobile industry: the mass-market use of mobile as the next marketing channel beyond the Internet. We would argue that it was app stores that triggered the influx of apps – not the open source nature of Android, or the consumer sex appeal of the iPhone. App stores triggered the sheer growth in app numbers and diversity that led to the cliché, “there’s an app for that”. Another cliché, “the screen is the app,” tells the other half of the story. Combined, the app store and touchscreen were the two essential ingredients behind mobile apps as the next mass-market channel beyond the Internet. These two ingredients inspired just about every media and service company to commission companion or revenue-driven apps as extensions to their traditional online channels. In effect, this phenomenon fueled the app economy, even beyond what app store numbers alone suggest. Speeding up time to market App stores have revolutionised time to market for applications. To research exactly how radically the time to market for applications has changed since the introduction of app stores, we analysed two parameters: – the time to shelf, i.e. how long it takes from submitting an application to that application being available for purchase – the time to payment, i.e. the length of time between an application being sold and the proceeds reaching the developer’s bank account Our findings show that app stores have reduced the average time-to-shelf by two thirds: from 68 days across traditional channels, to 22 days via an app store. These traditional channels have been suffering from long, proprietary and fragmented processes of application certification, approval, targeting and pricing, all of which need to be established via one-to-one commercial agreements. Moreover, app stores have reduced the time-to-payment by more than half; from 82 days on average in the case of traditional channels, to 36 days on average with app stores. The bigger picture that emerges is that the developer’s choice of platform impacts the time-to-market for applications, i.e. the length of time from completing an application to getting the first revenues in. The iOS platform is fastest to go to market with, particularly thanks to Apple’s streamlined App Store process, while Java ME and Symbian are the slowest, due to the sluggishness of the traditional routes to market used by these developers (in particular via commissioned apps and own- website downloads). Challenges with taking applications to market Application distribution may be going through a renaissance period that began in 2008, with the direct-to-consumer model pioneered by Apple’s App Store. However, taking applications to market is still plagued with numerous teething problems, as is typical with nascent technology. There are four recurring issues reported by developers: app exposure, app submission (and certification), low revenue share and the challenges with app localisation. A fifth challenge (and untapped opportunity) is the efficient, crowd-sourced testing of mobile apps by real users. Challenge 1. Application exposure Our survey found the number one issue for mobile developers to be the lack of effective marketing channels to increase application exposure, discovery and therefore customer acquisition. This was an issue mostly for Flash and iPhone developers, followed by Symbian, Android and Java ME developers. Developers reported persistent challenges with getting traffic, customer visibility or in short “being seen”. One developer put it succinctly: “It’s like going to a record store with 200,000 CDs. You’ll only look at the top-10.” The exposure bottleneck is new in mobile, but an age-old problem in fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). With such large volumes of applications in stock, app stores are taking on the role of huge supermarkets or record stores. As in any FMCG market, app developers have to invest in promoting their products above the noise, because supermarkets won’t. Our research shows that in 2010, developers are relatively unsophisticated in marketing their applications. More than half of developers surveyed use free demos and a variety of social media, i.e. the ‘de facto’ techniques for application promotion. Other techniques cited were magazines and influencing analysts or journalists, while promotion through tradeshows was also deemed popular among a fifth of respondents. Less than 30 percent of respondents invest in traditional marketing media such as online advertising or professional PR services. When asked about what type of marketing support they would be willing to pay for, our survey found half of respondents willing to pay for premium app store placement. This willingness varies greatly by platform, however; developers whose platform features a ‘native’ app store (iPhone, Android and to a lesser extent Symbian) are almost twice as likely to pay for premium app store placement, compared with developers whose platforms do not (Java and mobile web) as well as Windows Phone. This finding indicates that direct-to- consumer distribution channels are necessarily crowded and therefore developers will be willing to pay a premium to be able to stand out from the crowd – much like how FMCG brands pay for premium shelf space in supermarkets. Yet with free applications being the norm, developers have to become more creative with promotion and advertising; free applications make up more than half of the Android Market catalogue and 25 percent of the Apple App Store catalogue, according to different reports by Distimo and AndroLib. There are two types of solutions emerging to cover the market gap of application promotional services. Firstly, there are app discovery and recommendation startups (e.g. Apppopular, Appolicious, Appsfire, Apprupt, Chorus, Mplayit and Yappler), which help users discover applications based on their past preferences or on explicit recommendations from the user’s social circle. Secondly, there are white label app store providers like Ericsson that are moving to app mall (shop-in-shop) infrastructure. App malls will allow the creation of 1,000s of application mini-stores, each targeted to niche sub-segments, much like Amazon mini-stores. However, the gap in application marketing services is widening in 2010 due to the rapid growth in application volume, which is outpacing the appearance of app discovery and recommendation solutions. We believe that application marketing and retailing services remain the biggest opportunity in mobile applications today. Challenge 2. Application submission and certification. Application submission and certification are two of the top four challenges for mobile developers, according to our survey. Overall, the most important issue related to certification that was raised by nearly 40 percent of respondents is its cost. In some cases, developers report that the certification cost rises to a few hundred dollars per app certification (not per app). Such economics do not work for low-cost apps, but only for mega-application productions. Java developers, for example, report that Java Signed is impractical; developers have to purchase separate certificates based on the certificate authority installed on the handset – and certificates are expensive. Challenge 3. Dubious long-tail economics The mobile app economy is nothing short of hyped from the successes that have come into the limelight – the $1m per month brought in by the Tap Tap Revenge social app, or the $125K in monthly ad revenues reported by BackFlip Studios on their Paper Toss app. Yet the economics for long-tail developers – i.e. the per-capita profit for the average developer – remain dubious at best. At least 25 percent of Symbian, Flash, Windows Phone and Java ME respondents reported low revenue share as one of the key go-to-market challenges. Most app stores are still playing catch-up to Apple in terms of the revenue share they are paying out to the developer. As one developer put it, “There has been a bastardisation of the 70/30 rule which has been mis-marketed by app stores; for example with Ovi Store, where operators often get 50 percent of the retail price, so developers gets 70 percent [of the remainder]”. Unsurprisingly, the revenue share was not a major challenge for iPhone or BlackBerry respondents. Moreover, less than 25 percent of respondents stated that revenue potential was one of the best factors of their platform; on average revenue potential ranked last among “best aspects” of each platform, showing how mobile software development is still plagued by poor monetisation in 2010. The dubious long-tail economics are reinforced by our findings on developer revenue expectations. Only five percent of the respondents reported very good revenues, above their expectations, while 24 percent said their revenues were poor. Note that we didn’t poll for absolute revenues, because of the discrepancies across regions, different revenue models and distance of developers from revenue reporting. At the same time, there is a general consensus of optimism; 27 percent of respondents said that their revenues were as projected, while another 36 percent said they should be reaching their revenue targets. There are two effects at play that make for poor long-tail economics. Firstly, the number of ‘garage developers’ who are creating apps for fun or peer recognition but not money; and secondly, the noise created by the ‘app crowd’ which prompts developers to drop prices in order to rise to the top of their pack. There are also platform-specific effects: the unpredictability of revenues, in the case of the Apple’s pick-and-choose culture for featured apps; and, the limitations of paid app support for Android, where paid applications are only available to users in 13 countries out of 46 countries where Android Market is available, as of June 2010. Android has also been jokingly called a “download, buy, and return business”, referring to how you can get a refund for any paid Android application without stating a reason within 24 hours of purchase – a policy that allows many users to exploit the system. In addition, the applications that are published on Android market are not curated by Google, resulting in 100s of applications that are low quality or are infringing copyright, thereby making it harder for quality, paid apps to make money. Even in economically healthier ecosystems like Apple’s App Store, a standalone developer can hope to sell in total an average of 1,000-2,000 copies of an application at an average price of $1.99, which is barely justifying the many man- months of effort that it takes to develop a mobile application by today’s standards. We maintain that the monetisation potential for the long tail of apps won’t be realised until effective policies are put in place to curtail the adoption of free apps – for example by enforcing a minimum $0.01 app price. Psychology experiments have proven time and time again how our perception of value is distorted when the price drops to zero. It is time for app store owners to borrow from cognitive psychology to help boost the long-tail developer economy, rather than compete on number of downloads. Challenge 4. Localisation. Another issue highlighted was the lack of localised apps. One developer said characteristically, “There is a big problem for developers in markets with low penetration of English as a second language. Since the platforms are poorly adjusted to localisation, the costs of development grow and thus profitability and attractiveness [drop]. It would be great to see platforms that take action towards easing the challenge of localisation.” The lack of localised apps for non-English markets is exacerbated for Android. A search on AndroLib reveals that out of the approximately 60,000 apps on Android Market, there are only about 1,400 apps localised in Spanish and only 1,800 localised in French, as of early June 2010. The lack of localised apps on Android presents the number one opportunity for alternative app stores like SlideMe, AndAppStore and Mobihand, i.e. to attract communities of regional app developers, or to facilitate localisation of apps to different languages – in other words, to reach where Android Market doesn’t reach. Challenge 5: Application planning and testing Application planning and testing is a core part of taking an application to market. Our research confirms that planning techniques are near-ubiquitous for application developers. Yet, small development firms have limited means today to beta test and peer review their applications with a cross- section of representative users. Given the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps, we believe that efficient (crowd-sourced) testing of apps in a global market of users is considerably under-utilized. This presents an opportunity for the few solution providers in this segment – Mob4Hire and uTest.com, for example – but also for network operators, who can generate a channel for testing applications with end users, and provide an open feedback support system back to developers. Overall though, the need of mobile developers to have their apps tested cost-effectively by real users around the world is very much under-served. Looking forward to your comments. Later this week, we’ll look at the next chapter in our research on the building blocks of mobile applications. Stay tuned or, better yet, subscribe to the blog. Full report is available for free download, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Telefonica Developer Communities. You can follow Telefonica Developer Communities through their blog. Are you a mobile app developer? Want to participate in the next mobile developer research and voice your own opinions on mobile development? Fill out the registration form & we’ll be in touch. – Andreas you should follow me on twitter: @andreascon #ios #flashlite #javame #rim #Apple #mobileweb #mobiledeveloper #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #flash #windowsphone #Blackberry

[In part 1 of the 4-part series on our latest research – Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond – Andreas Constantinou looks at the migration of developer mindshare that is taking place in mobile software and the drivers behind that. Full research report available for free download] The article is also available in Chinese. Software has played a critical role in transforming the mobile industry since the beginning of the century. Since 2008, mobile software and applications have moved from the sphere of cryptic engineering lingo to part of the essential marketing playbook for mobile industry vendors. In stock market terms, developer mindshare is one of the hottest “commodities” in the mobile business, one whose “stock price” has ballooned in the last two years. Platform vendors, handset OEMs, network operators, hardware vendors, and infrastructure providers all want to contribute to mobile apps innovation. Mobile players, from hardware vendors and handset OEMs to networks, are now vying to win software developer mindshare, in order to add value on top of their devices and networks. But how is the landscape of mobile developer mindshare looking today? Our new report Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond, offers many new insights into mobile developer mindshare, and analysis into every touch point of the developer journey, from platform selection to monetisation. The research is based on a set of benchmarks and a survey across 400+ developers globally, segmented into 8 major platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash Lite, and mobile web. In terms of developer mindshare, our research shows that Symbian and Java ME, which dominated the developer mindshare pool until 2008, have been superceded by the Android and iPhone platforms. Despite Symbian remaining in the pole position in terms of smartphone market penetration, ‘out-shipping’ iPhone 4 to 1 and Android many-times to 1, the signs of dissatisfaction with the way the Symbian platform has evolved have long been evident. Indeed Android stands out as the top platform according to developer experience, with close to 60 percent of developers having recently developed on Android, assuming an equal number of developers with experience on each of eight major platforms. iOS (iPhone) follows closely as the next most popular platform, outranking both Symbian and Java ME, which until 2008 were in pole position. In the last two years, a mindshare migration has taken place for mobile developers away from the incumbent platforms Symbian, Java ME and Windows Phone, while a substantial number of PC software developers have flocked to iPhone and Android. The large minority (20-25 percent) of Symbian respondents who sell their apps via iPhone and Android app stores reveals the brain-drain that is taking place towards these newer platforms. The vast majority of Java ME respondents have lost faith in the write-once-run-anywhere vision. Moreover, anecdotal developer testimonials suggest that half of Windows Phone MVP developers (valued for their commitment to the platform) carry an iPhone and would think twice before re-investing in Windows Phone. We should also point out the exodus of some influential developers from the Symbian camp, as is the case with the closing of Symbian-Guru.com, one of the leading community sites related to the platform, whose founder moved to adopt Android. The disparity between devices and applications One of the most telling clues about the speed of evolution of the new vs old platforms is the great disparity between the device installed base and the number of available apps for each platform. While Windows Phone, Symbian, Java and Flash have many times the market penetration of Android, iPhone and BlackBerry, the number of apps available tells a very different story. The two platforms that best illustrate the above point are Java ME and iOS (iPhone). Java ME boasts an installed base of a staggering 3 billion, while the actual number of apps is very low by comparison. The iOS platform on the other hand is available in just over 60 million devices (not including iPods/iPads) but its app store contains more than 250K apps at this time, a number that will climb even higher in the foreseeable future. The disparity is also pronounced in cross-platform runtimes i.e. Java ME and Flash Lite. This flies in the face the traditional common sense, i.e. that cross-platform runtimes are the way forward, when the number of apps available for those platforms are tiny in comparison. The recent Apple vs Adobe rift and the subsequent banning of Flash from all iProducts has only weakened Adobe’s position. In parallel Sun has launched half-hearted attempts at reducing fragmentation, the number one Java ME pain point, while the Oracle take over is only worsening the problem. Choosing a mobile platform – facts and perceptions Most developers work on multiple platforms, on average 2.8 platforms per developer, based on our sample of 400 respondents (although note that 60% of respondents had more than 3 years of experience). Moreover, one in five iPhone and Android respondents release apps in both the Apple App Store and Android Market. The question is: in a market crowded with software platforms, how do developers choose between iOS, Android, Symbian, Java ME, BlackBerry, Flash, Windows Phone, mobile web, WebOS or Samsung Bada? For today’s mobile developer, market penetration and revenue potential are hands down the two most important reasons for selecting a platform. Large market penetration was chosen by 75 percent of respondents across each of the eight major platforms we surveyed. Revenue potential was the second most important reason, chosen by over half of respondents. In fact, market penetration and revenue potential were more important than any single technical reason for selecting a platform, revealing how mobile developers today are savvy about the economic implications of mobile development. The preference of marketing over technical reasons signifies a turn in the developer mindset. Developers no longer see programming fun as a sufficient reward in itself, but consider monetisation opportunities as a primary priority. It seems that, mobile developers now have a sense of commercial pragmatism. As commented by one of our developer respondents, “Technical considerations are irrelevant. The choice of platform is always marketing-driven”. Looking forward to your comments. Next week, we’ll look at the next chapter in our research on taking apps to market. Stay tuned or ,better yet, subscribe to the blog. Full report is available for free download, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Telefonica Developer Communities. You can follow Telefonica Developer Communities through their blog. Are you a mobile app developer? Want to participate in the next mobile developer research and voice your own opinions on mobile development? Fill out the registration form & we’ll be in touch. – Andreas you should follow me on twitter: @andreascon #ios #flashlite #javame #rim #Apple #mobileweb #mobiledeveloper #symbian #windowsmobile #Android #flash #windowsphone #Blackberry

Back in March we released the 3rd edition of the Mobile Industry Atlas, the definitive who’s who of the mobile industry. Since its humble beginnings in 2008, the Atlas has grown to more than 1,100 companies across 69 industry sectors; including all key companies, from 20:20mobile to ZTE, and market sectors, from Active Idle Screen solutions to Service Delivery Platforms. To distill market noise into market sense, we have broken down the entire mobile ecosystem into four main categories:the core value chain, the suppliers to network operators, the suppliers to handset manufacturers and finally the services that run on top. Top-20 most connected companies in mobile We run some stats on our Atlas database and came up with an interesting analysis on the most ‘connected’ companies in mobile, i.e. the companies who have fingers (products) in most pies (market sectors). At the top of the list are Nokia, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm, which represent heavyweights from manufacturing, services, software and IP backgrounds respectively. Nokia appears in 17 market sectors including, the OS and Browser sectors, Developer Tools, Mobile Search, Barcode Services and Connected Addressbook sectors, to name a few. It’s also instructive to analyse which market sectors are most frequently encountered within these top-20 companies: it’s operating systems, browsers, application stores, as well as content management & delivery infrastructure. These sectors are either building blocks as part of a more integrated offering (as in the case of operating systems or browsers), or high growth opportunities (as in the case of app stores). How does this help me? The main function of the Atlas is to provide a clear view of the key players operating in each sector of the mobile ecosystem. For example, the Handset Manufacturer Supply Chain can give you an idea of the leading companies operating in this part of the ecosystem, from chipset manufacturers and RF component manufacturers all the way to operating systems and browsers. It’s all in there, from the much-hyped Android platform to the more obscure plastics manufacturers and vendors of input technologies. Most of the Atlas is being a paywall, but you can see a sample here. Under-the-radar sectors We ‘ve showcased several under-the-radar sectors into the Atlas, including Application Analytics, Campaign Analytics and Service Analytics. These three sectors comprise the leading providers of usage and marketing analytics tools to developers and mobile web (or WAP) sites, as well as platforms for mining network or service data to extract service intelligence. Naturally, you ‘ll also find your typical hyped sectors like Mobile Ad Networks & Mediation Engines, as well as Mobile Advertising Platforms and Agencies. The Connected Addressbook sector is yet another category that has attracted a lot of media attention and is part of our Atlas. The complete list of market sectors in the Atlas is below, broken down into the four main categories:Network operator supply chainHandset manufacturer supply chain– Billing platforms – Call completion, voice messaging & voicemail – Content Management & Delivery – Content retailing and billing mediation – Core network and radio infrastructure – Customer support services – Deep Packet Inspection – Mobile media publishing platforms – MVNEs – OSS / BSS – Service Analytics – Service delivery platforms & Network APIs – SMS/MMS gateways & aggregators – Traffic & content optimisation– Application environments – Audio middleware – Baseband and application processors – Browsers – Camera technology and subsystems – Imaging and video middleware – Input technology – Multimedia chipsets – Non-cellular connectivity components – Operating systems – Plastics & mechanics – RF components – Silicon – UI frameworksCore value chainContent and services– Industrial design – User interface design – Reference hardware designs – System integrators – ODMs and contract manufacturers – Handset OEMs – Luxury handset OEMs – Mobile network operators – MVNOs – SIM card OEMs – SIM application vendors & services – Distributors – Retailers– Active Idle Screen solutions – Application Analytics – Barcode Services – Campaign Analytics – Connected Address book – Content backup & synchronisation – Developer tools – Device capabilities databases – E-mail synchronization – Enterprise mobility – Games publishers – IVR Platforms – Mobile Ad Networks & Mediation Engines – Mobile Advertising Platforms & Agencies – Mobile banking and payments – Mobile content publishers – Mobile Device Management – Mobile instant messaging and chat – Mobile search – Mobile social networking – Mobile VoIP – Navigation, Mapping and Location platforms – On-Device Portal solutions – Recommendation services – Security solutions – Software integration services – White-label Application Stores – Widget Platforms The Mobile Industry Atlas is available in A1+ wallchart format or PDF, for carrying around in your iPad or sharing with colleagues. What do you think of the Atlas and what would you like to see next? – Matos #sybase #qualcomm #rimstericsson #sun #nokia #Apple #industryatlas #nokiasiemensnetworks #openwave #motorola #googlemicrosoft #ericsson #alcatellucent #microsystems #comviva #amdocs #samsung #access