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[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

[mobile virtualisation is an underhyped yet far-reaching technology. Guest author Steve Subar looks at virtualisation and how the technology will be elemental in enabling mass-market smartphones] Imagine one phone with two personalities – one to fit your personal life, the other for business.  Instead of carrying around two or more devices, you’d be able to access multiple virtual phones on a single handset. This article introduces mobile virtualization and the range of its use cases, with implications that span from silicon to smartphones to shrink-wrapped software to operator services.  It also expands upon two key applications: building mass-market smartphones, and enabling secure mobile services. What is Mobile Virtualization? Virtualization is new to mobile, but established in the data center, fundamental in cloud computing and increasingly popular on the desktop. Mobile Virtualization lets handset OEMs, operators/carriers and end-users get more out of mobile hardware.  It decouples mobile OSes and applications from the hardware they run on, enabling secure applications and services on less expensive devices today and deployment on advanced hardware tomorrow. Virtualization provides a secure, isolated environment for operating systems that is indistinguishable from “bare” hardware. This environment is called a virtual machine (VM), and acts as a container for guest software. A software layer called a hypervisor provides the virtual machine environment and manages virtual machine resources. Resources and performance of mobile devices differ markedly from data center blades and desktops. So do business requirements. Mobile virtualization is different from virtualization used in enterprise and personal computing in several ways: – Hardware Support: mobile virtualization focuses on silicon deployed in mobile handsets, primarily ARM architecture CPUs.  By contrast, most enterprise and desktop-hosted virtualization targets versions of the Intel Architecture.  Moreover, Intel and AMD augment server and desktop CPUs with virtualization support functions, in contrast to silicon in phones that does not (yet) include these capabilities – Guest Software: Data center and Cloud virtualization usually hosts multiple instances of a single guest OS:  thousands of Windows or Linux VMs.  Desktop-hosted virtualization usually invokes just one.  Mobile virtualization involves running multiple, diverse guest platforms: applications OSes (Android, Linux or Symbian), low-level RTOSes for baseband processing and other system chores, and also lightweight environments for specialized processing (shared device drivers, security code, etc.). – Performance: enterprise virtualization strives for maximum throughput for guest software loads.  Mobile virtualization must also enable real-time response for latency-sensitive baseband and multimedia processing on resource-constrained mobile silicon. – Suppliers: enterprise virtualization is dominated by offerings from VMware, Microsoft, IBM and Citrix and supported by open source projects like Xen and KVM.  VMware and Parallels supply the desktop-hosted market.  While several vendors field embedded virtualization technology (Wind River, Greenhills) only a few focus on mobile virtualization – VirtualLogix, Trango (now part of VMware) and Open Kernel Labs. Use Cases Mobile virtualization is a flexible technology with a range of use cases: – BYOD: lets you Bring Your Own Device to work, and switch among multiple virtualized environments, isolating personal and corporate applications and data. – Chipset Consolidation: merging multiple CPUs into a single processor running application and baseband stacks, to reduce BOM costs and simplify design. Lower BOM costs could enable a new wave of mass-market smartphones, shipping in greater numbers and driving growth in data traffic and ARPUs. – Legacy Software Support: in a new handset design, running unmodified, previous-generation software (e.g., a pre-certified baseband stack) in its own virtual machine – Security: using multiple VMs to isolate software stacks from one another, e.g., securing mobile payments or protecting programs used to access business-critical enterprise assets from untrusted open OSes and software – Multicore Support: managing available processor cores and mapping physical CPU resources onto “virtual CPUs” running actual software loads – Energy Management: shutting down CPU cores when they are not needed and migrating running guests to remaining core(s) – MNO Branded Services – using secured VMs to host operator-branded services – Mobile-to-Enterprise Virtualization (M2E): – using secured VMs to host enterprise applications and provide access to business-critical corporate assets, e.g., hosting the Citrix Connector to access a virtual enterprise desktop – Rapid Deployment: let OEMs and operators/carriers launch new versions of existing devices and rollout new services offerings on existing mobile hardware Most mobile OEMs and operators/carriers look to mobile virtualization to address a combination of use cases.  Let’s examine two of particular interest:  mass-market smartphones and secure services: Mass-Market Smartphones Smartphones increasingly drive the global mobile ecosystem. According to Gartner, total mobile phone shipments in 2009 surpassed 1.2 billion, of which 172.4 million units were smartphones, an uptick of 23.8% over 2008. Smartphones are critical to the fortunes of mobile OEMS, MNOs, chipset suppliers, and providers of applications and services – they drive data traffic, improve hardware margins, expand silicon design-wins, and drive software sales through app stores to increase post-load revenues.  However, broader adoption of smartphones has been slowed by retail pricing of smart handsets and cost of accompanying data plans. A mass-market smartphone offers smartphone capabilities at a feature-phone price point. To deliver such a high-functioning yet low-cost device, OEMs must deploy a full-featured open OS and applications on more modest mobile hardware. Current smartphones utilize high-end chipsets with dedicated CPUs for application and baseband processing. This approach contrasts with featurephones, where both stacks run on a single CPU and simpler embedded OS (Real-time operating system – RTOS). Virtualization enables OEMs to build smartphones with less expensive single-core chipsets (see figure).  Such chipsets can also enable using lower-cost components for other functions (display, battery, etc.) not compatible with high-end mobile silicon. The mass-market smartphone is more than just a concept touted by visionaries. Real devices have been delivered, such the Motorola Evoke QA4, with more to come. Secure Services Mobile virtualization also facilitates a range secure services, enabling enterprise-grade security on standard handsets. Virtualization can help secure mobile platforms, applications, and services by keeping trusted software to a bare minimum – the hypervisor itself and carefully chosen additional components – and then isolating them from threats arising from vulnerabilities and faults existing in today’s complex software stacks. Virtual machines, containing a bare minimum of essential software, can be dedicated to secure services. A single phone could contain a virtual machine optimized for execution of secure services, deployed side-by-side with other mobile software, with practically no incremental BOM costs. Secure service examples include: – Isolating software for mobile payments and banking – Hosting secure access to private medical records – Providing a platform for secure access to business-critical corporate data (as in BYOD and M2E above) – Enabling secure voice calling by isolating VoIP stacks from open OSes Building mass-market smartphones and deploying secure services with virtualization are complementary use cases and emphasize doing more with less:  virtualization enables deployment of smartphone capabilities on lower-cost hardware; it also makes possible the introduction of new secure services on currently-available mobile devices. Overcoming Challenges to Adoption As illustrated above, mobile virtualization offers a flexible solution to many design and deployment issues for devices and services on them.  Despite its many use cases and successful deployment in products shipping in volume, mobile virtualization faces systemic challenges to even broader use: – Perception of the technology as a viable alternative to legacy solutions, e.g,. a software solution to delivering lower BOM costs or to providing security – Concerns about performance overhead – The need to integrate mobile hypervisor as pre-load software, on a per-device basis (as opposed to post-load, application-style deployment) These challenges are gradually being overcome;  mobile OEMs and operators/carriers are increasingly attracted to the use of virtualization to bring down the cost of Android devices, while recent performance benchmarks at key OEMs have tempered concerns about the performance overheads. Mobile virtualization has been shipping in mobile phones since 2009. Despite challenges to adoption, the mobile/wireless ecosystem is turning its attention to this flexible technology, especially to bring down the cost of building and buying smartphones.  Coupled with emerging needs to provide secure services on mobile devices, mobile virtualization should play a key role in the deployment of the next 500 million phones. – Steve [Steve Subar is the President and CEO of Open Kernel Labs, a mobile virtualization firm] #meego #chipsets #vmware #smartphones #citrix #trango #symbian #okl #Android #ibm #microsoft #mobilevirtualisation

[Apple has been trumpeting their ‘new’ iPhone 4 FaceTime service, but where’s the novelty? Mobile video telephony has been around for at least 8 years now. Guest author Tsahi Levent-Levi reviews the state of the mobile video telephony market, the barriers to its adoption and what the next 8 years hold] The article is also available in Chinese. Mobile video telephony has already been in the market for over 8 years, in most 3G phones, but have you ever used it? Do you even know if your phone supports it? If your phone has a front facing camera, chances are it supports mobile video telephony. And if you live in Europe and Asia, chances are you have a front facing camera. With millions of users around the world equipped with mobile handsets capable of video calling, we should have seen more wide use of this technology. Why hasn’t this happened and where exactly is this industry going? The 8-year history of mobile video telephony Mobile video telephony started almost a decade ago. Sometime during 2002 I also joined the effort. It started by taking the consumer ISDN video telephony solution (that didn’t catch up), based on an ITU-T standard called H.324, repurposing it for mobile handsets and renaming it 3G-324M for no apparent reason. At that time, three organizations were involved: the ITU-T, the 3GPP (which focused on standardization) and the IMTC (dealing with interoperability between devices). In 2002, the companies involved with interoperability were Ericsson, Dilithium Networks, Packet Video, Radvision, Sharp, and Siemens. What handsets were on the market? There was one from Sharp and a couple of others from the Japanese market, only available in Japan. By 2004 there were 14, including Motorola, Nokia, Qualcomm Samsung and Vodafone. It took about 4 years until you could safely say that each handset could connect to another and get bidirectional video. Throughout the years, the main stakeholders of the standardization and interoperability were the vendors providing the protocol stack implementations such as Radvision and some select handset and chipset vendors – namely Qualcomm, Nokia and Ericsson.  The rest took a more passive approach, either by making sure that their handsets interoperate or by relying on others to provide those capabilities. When it came to certification and validation of the handsets, the main stakeholders were usually the service providers themselves. Mobile video telephony today Fast forward to today, and you will notice a few important improvements to the initial standards: 3G-324M (a 3GPP specification), along with a GCF validation process, ensures that any handset coming to the market with video telephony can interoperate with any other handset out there. Putting the GCF test cases in place was a process of over a year, discussing the various tests that should be included and the creation of the ecosystem around it – mainly test labs and testing tools. Operators have mandated the inclusion of 3G-324M support in all 3G handsets that they sell to their customer base. Or at least that was the case up until the iPhone came along. Roaming agreements between operators in Europe and Asia have been put in place so that you can now dial an international mobile video call to others. With a few exceptions (dialing from Israel to Japan, for example) this service works flawlessly. Call setup time has reduced from 7-15 seconds to below 1 second using additions to the standard. This was pointed as a barrier for consumer acceptance of the service, and operators have worked to successfully remove the barrier. These days, standardization and interoperability efforts on mobile video telephony are limited. For the past 2 years it has been quiet in both fronts. The main reason? The standards have matured and interoperability is usually a solved problem. But still – consumer adoption is lacking. So what went wrong? We’ve got enough phones supporting video telephony, interoperability is as seamless as in voice calls, and connection times are shorter. Where’s the usage we’re all waiting for? Well, have you ever made a video call? Or received one? As someone who developed and then licensed 3G-324M technology to other vendors I did my share of video calls. Most of them work related. Very few were personal. The sticking points of mobile video telephony adoption Operators have been trying for years to get people on board their mobile telephony solutions, alas with little or no success. Several reasons have been offered to explain the lack of adoption. Yet none of these stand up to scrutiny. Pricing: some argued that the high prices of video calls (60 cents a minute in some countries but the same as normal voice calls in others) is the reason why people don’t use it. I think it is irrelevant, especially when people don’t really know how much they pay for the service. People didn’t use it a lot even when operators provided it at the cost of regular voice calls, and at the same time people are using the SMS service which usually has ridiculously high pricing. Video is unnatural: people like to see others but don’t like to be seen. Great, but how do you deal with the fact that for Skype, 36% of Skype to Skype calls are video calls? It can only mean that with the right implementation, people are quite happy to adopt video calling. The missing video button. People take huge amounts of images on their iPhones without having a dedicated camera button. Most use SMS all the time – teenagers use it as their primary method of connection with their friends, and there’s no SMS button either. On most handsets, doing a video call requires the same effort as sending an SMS (minus the typing the message part). While it would be nice to have a video button for video calling, it probably isn’t the reason why people don’t use it. While the reasons above have some truth in them, I think they are limited in their importance. There are other, more crucial barriers of adoption: Video Quality:  mobile video telephony today uses very little bandwidth. 64 kilobits per second. Compare it to a high definition video channel of 2-4 megabits per second and you have a truly low grade video in hand. While handsets had low resolution displays that was just fine, but today, when VGA is the norm and higher resolutions are coming to smartphones, there will be need for more bandwidth. Once more bandwidth is available, there will need to be better processors capable of compressing video – but that’s just a matter of time according to Moore’s Law. Coverage: in most countries, 3G coverage is partial, i.e. doesn’t cover the entire population covered by 2G. It means that if you want to call someone using video, you need to know where he/she is – your call might fail simply because the other party has no 3G coverage. Usability: when you interact with a mobile device today, you don’t hold it at head height – you hold it a lot lower than that. Video telephony requires holding the phone higher. It is for the same reason I surmised that the iPad won’t have a front facing camera – mobile devices don’t provide the experience you get by having a video call in a conference room or from your laptop. Camera positioning is key here: on mobile handsets, the front facing camera forces the user to hold his hand in front of his face in an uncomfortable position – especially taking into consideration that today’s video calls are usually long ones. Add to that the fact that you need to deal with the phone’s speakers or connect a headset, add the noisy surroundings, and you have a recipe for bad experience. Once the iPhone came along, operators changed their focus. From trying to get video telephony to be adopted and finding additional multimedia services, they went to putting their hands on shiny smartphones with touch capabilities. Apple has changed the attitude from “killer application” to the long tail of an application store. And now that the slew of Android devices are expected to come out, the resurgence of mobile video telephony requirements from handset vendors is being seen. While bandwidth and processing power will be solved naturally with faster, better and more efficient processors and networks, usability requires real innovation. It makes it the most critical component of all. The one to solve this problem will open up the mobile video telephony market for the masses. Where is mobile video telephony used? While we have no real mass adoption of mobile video telephony, there have been some notable trials that have been going on for the past several years around the world. The concept of mobile video telephony as a killer application was a wrong one, but the use of it as a building block by various applications can be found: Video Mail: video mail support has been deployed by multiple operators worldwide. It allows people to leave video messages from one to another and retrieve them later. In the same way that voice mail services suffered from the rise of SMS, so does video mail, which was already disadvantaged by the limited use of video calling services. Mobile TV and video on demand (VOD): while there are other options for mobile TV, mobile video telephony provides a solution that is standardized and available across most handsets on the market. Where mobile TV is fragmented between standards, video telephony can come to play. In Israel, for example, you can hook up to news channels from the phone in this way. Entertainment TV: Mobile TV is nice, but adding interactivity was thought to be a killer application, especially for sports programs and reality shows. Trials of connecting video calling with sporting events and big brother have been done, but none have caught up. PC-to-mobile: video calling over the desktop is used a lot more than over 3G. That being the case, the ability to bridge the two has been tried by a number of operators around the world. Banking: banks have warmed up to video communications. They use it to enable access to specialists in remote branches or to allow people to contact a bank clerk remotely. They offer some of these services from mobile handsets as well – using mobile video telephony. Another interesting use of video communication in banking is accessing ATM services through video calling instead of voice calling. Visual call centers: this is an easy one. Wherever there is a voice call center, a video one that allows mobile phones to call by video makes sense. Healthcare: Mobile video telephony is used today around the world by doctors to communicate between peers and consult with specialists. An example of such a use is an Israeli hospital where doctors use mobile phones during their daily rounds and surgery procedures. Hard of Hearing (VRS): Video Relay Services enable deaf and hard of hearing people to communicate with the world by way of a mediator who communicates with them through the use of sign language using video communications. The ability to do that on the go adds an important mobility aspect to the service. What becomes apparent from these use cases is that video is not used as a bidirectional conversation, but rather as a one-way real-time video communication for the consumer who wants to see the person they are talking to. The healthcare example really is a key one here. Mobile video telephony is used today and can be used even more when expert advice is needed from people who are on the go. It is where this system excels. What’s next? We do have mobile video telephony, with all of its benefits and faults. But where are we going with it? The next step will be a migration of the service from circuit switching to packet switching – to become all-IP. This will require two major changes: Migration from WCDMA/HSPA to LTE, where an all-IP network will be the norm and network capacities and bandwidths allocated for each phone will increase. Replacement of 3G-324M with a different standard that runs over an IP network. Probably as part of IMS (IP Muiltimedia Subsystem). While Apple just came out with their front facing camera and FaceTime service on the iPhone, it is still quite limited: it runs over WiFi, only between iPhone 4 devices and uses a protocol that Apple plans to open. For mobile video telephony to become a valid solution it needs to use an open standard, run everywhere and be interoperable across devices. When will that happen? At the very least 8 years from now it will require the creation of the necessary ecosystem of companies who care. The problem is that these companies are currently focused on providing the basics of the LTE infrastructure. This requires them to rethink their voice and SMS technologies in initiatives such as VoLTE (Voice over LTE). Once they will have the attention span to deal with mobile video telephony over IP networks, they will have a lot of work to do. Standardization takes time and patience. The winner though won’t be the one who brings better bandwidth or improved video quality to his mobile device. It will be the one who will solve the usability issue. Why? Because it is the hardest of the problems, and it is the toughest problem to solve. Bandwidth and processing power will be solved for all competitors – solving usability will be an innovation that can provide real added value. The moment that happens, you can be sure that mass adoption of mobile video telephony will become a reality. – Tsahi [Tsahi Levent-Levi is Director of Technology and Solution at Radvision. He has been involved with the mobile video telephony market for 8 years, dealing with design, development, standardization, interoperability and marketing of such technologies. You can follow his personal blog at http://blog.radvision.com/voipsurvivor/.] #mobilevideo #facetime #telephony #h324 #iphone4

[Android has triggered more changes to the mobile industry than anyone had imagined. Research Director, Andreas Constantinou looks at the profound changes taking place and how the handset OEM market is shaping up]. Mobile industry connoisseurs used to smirk at the notion that the mobile industry was any similar to the PC world. How can the two industries be any similar when the software, services, channels to market, operator control, regional economics, and range of experiences were all so different. This is so last decade. The march of software has irreversibly changed the economics of value in the mobile industry. Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone have caused disruptions that threw all analyst predictions off the chart. Industry pundits used to project a linear growth for ‘open’ operating systems (Symbian, Windows Mobile et al) that saw them take over an increasingly large share of mobile handsets sold. But the evolution of software has been anything but linear in the last two years; Google’s Android, an operating system that was greeted with skepticism in 2008 become a launchpad for just about everyone working within the mobile industry. Network operators/carriers saw Android as an opportunity to reduce their dependency on two players, Apple and RIM whose stellar sales were depriving operators from any negotiating power. Operators have always tried to divide and conquer amongst their suppliers, for example working in 2002 with HTC and Windows Mobile to reduce their dependency on Nokia, or in 2007 using a three-pronged OS strategy (WinMo, Symbian, Linux) to reduce their dependency on Microsoft. Android allows operators to deliver iPhone or BlackBerry –like devices at much higher levels of customisation and at much lower subsidies. Handset OEMs saw in Android the opportunity to develop iPhone clones at less-than-iPhone prices for operator customers. In 2008-9 most Android projects were kicked off by operators, while in 2010 OEMs are investing in Android big-time. LG and Samsung, who used legacy real-time OSes for 90% of their high-end phones in 2009 have now 10s of Android projects in the pipeline for 2010-11. Software developers saw the opportunity to enter the mobile ecosystem of downloadable apps – in the role model set by Apple’s App Store – in the most approachable and developer-friendly platform ever created for mobile. But the biggest changes are yet to appear. Android has triggered a mass arrival of 10s of ODMs from China and Taiwan eager to create me-too touch-screen handsets. Qualcomm and Mediatek, the chipset vendors powering the majority of feature phones today have launched or preparing to introduce out-of-the-box Android designs that reduce the time to market for Android handsets to 6-9 months (or circa 3 months once Mediatek’s design hits the market). Platform development for Android has dropped to the $300 per engineer-day mark, while big outsourced development centers are being set up in Asia dedicated to Android handset development. All these developments will allow Android touch-screen handsets to hit the €150 mark retail price. The new world order: Lead, innovate or assemble. The developments triggered by Android have made it possible to replicate the economics of the PC industry, leaving mobile industry insiders dumbfounded. Last decade’s rules and role models no longer apply. Instead there are three role models emerging for handset manufacturers in the world of commoditised software: leaders, innovators and assemblers. Assemblers. Dozens of contract manufacturers can now take Android and deliver fully-featured, high-end handsets at made-to-measure requirements, but at price points and wow-factors only enjoyed previously by top-5 manufacturers. Think iPhone me-too experience at €150 retail price. Innovators. The price pressure from assemblers will force the top-5 OEMs to innovate-or-die. With the innovation moving out of the pure user interface domain, widgets or touch innovations or no longer the ‘wow’ factor. To claim higher prices at €300 (and a respectable margin above the BOM) the top-10 OEMs will have to innovate. Handset innovation lies in three elements: firstly, novel industrial design (think Nokia’s ‘listick’ or sports handsets of 2006) that will break the boring mould of today’s form factors and plastics. Secondly, novel use of sensors that will enable user interactions only imagined so far. Thirdly, use of shelf space within the commonly used applications (idle screen, menus, browser chrome, app store) to promote and monetise from third party content. Yet innovation will have to be balanced with application compatibility. Already we ‘ve seen how Android implementations have created fragmentation headaches for developers. Leaders. To reach the top-tier of handset pricing (circa €500) handset manufacturers have to deliver new product experiences. This is the privilege enjoyed by Apple, RIM (and Amazon Kindle to an extent) who have integrated hardware, software and services under the same roof. You can buy Mediatek-powered iPhone clones in China (Shanzai in local speak) for $75, but the experience is laughable to an iPhone user. Only by controlling and integrating hardware, software and services under the same roof can a manufacturer deliver new product experiences that can command top-tier retail prices. Mass producers. Naturally, emerging markets where retail prices are at circa €50 make up the majority of the mobile handset market – at least revenue wise. And while assemblers can produce low-cost devices, they won’t have the economies of scale to make a profit at €50 retail price. Mass producers, i.e. companies with the supply chain sophistication and negotiating power of Nokia and Mediatek can do that. The picture that emerges for the mobile handset market in 2015 (the predictable future) is surprising in many ways. We estimate that the top 5% of the market will command as much revenue as the bottom 50%, but with a higher profit – for example Apple and RIM today bring in around 55% of the industry’s profits. The middle two segments (what some observers call mass-market smartphones) will generate much higher revenues. The mobile industry is starting to look scarily close to the PC industry, both in terms of business models and profit vs revenue patterns. What do readers think? Is the PC future for mobile inescapable? – Andreas you should follow me on twitter: @andreascon #revenues #operatingsystems #profit #mobilephone #rim #margins #google #valuechain #nokia #Apple #lg #windowsmobile #Android #handsetmanufacturers #samsung

[Android fragmentation is only getting started. Research Director Andreas Constantinou breaks down the 3 dimensions of Android fragmentation and argues how Android will become a victim of its own success] The article is also available in Chinese. There’s been plenty of talk of Android fragmentation, but little analysis of its meaning and impacts. As far as definitions go, the best way to look at fragmentation is not from an API viewpoint, but from an application viewpoint; if you take the top-10,000  (free and paid) apps on Android, how many of these run on all the Android-powered phones? For Google’s Android team, fragmentation is what keeps them up at night. Fragmentation reduces the addressable market of applications, increases the cost of development and could ultimately break the developer story around Android as we ‘ll see. Google’s CTS (compatibility test spec) is predicated on ensuring that Market apps run on every Android phone. Android handsets have to pass CTS in order to get access to private codelines, the Market or the Android trademark as we covered in our earlier analysis of Google’s 8 control points – and yes, Google controls what partners do with Android, contrary to the Engadget story. The 3 dimensions of Android fragmentation Many observers would point to fragmentation arising as a result of the open source (APL2) license attached to the Android public source code. Reality however is much more complex. There are 3 dimensions of Android fragmentation: 1. Codebase fragmentation. Very few companies have taken the approach of forking the public Android codebase, as permitted under the APL2 license; Google innovates so fast (5 major versions in 12 months) that once you fork, the costs of keeping up-to-date with Google’s tip-of-tree are increasing prohibitively over time (Nokia found out the hard way by forking WebKit and then regretting it). The main fork of the Android codebase is by China Mobile (the world’s biggest operator with over 500M subscribers) who has outsourced Android development to software company Borqs. China Mobile cares less about keeping up-to-date with the latest Android features as the China market operates as an island where cheap, fake (Shanzai) handsets are predominant. Mediatek, a leading vendor of chipsets shipping in 200-300 million handsets per year plans to make Android available, which could mean another major fork. Cyanogen and GeeksPhone also fork the Android public codeline, but they are designed for a niche of tech-savvy Android fans. 2. Release fragmentation. Google has released 5 major updates to Android in 12 months (1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and recently 2.2), all of which introduce major features and often API breaks. You may notice how accessing the Android Market from a 1.6 versus a 2.1 handset gives you a different set of apps. So much for forward compatibility. AndroidFragmentation.com (a community project) has documented several cases of release fragmentation arising from releases which break APIs (e.g. 2.0 SDK breaks older contact apps) or from inconsistent OEM implementations (e.g. receiving multicast messages over WiFi is disabled for most HTC devices). Release fragmentation is the victim of Google’s own speed of innovation – and Andy Rubin has hinted there’s more major releases coming out in the next 6 months. It’s clearly a sign of how young, agile Internet companies know how to develop software much better that companies with a mobile legacy; major Symbian versions take 12-18 months to release. Release fragmentation is particularly acute due to the lack limited availability of an automatic update mechanism much like that found on the iPhone. We call the phenomenon ‘runtime aging’ and it is directly responsible for increasing the cost of developing applications. Tier-1 network operators see handsets in their installed base with browsers which are 1-6 years old – that’s how hairy it can get for mobile content (and software) development companies. [update: we understand that certain Android handsets come with a firmware update (FOTA) solution available from Google and other FOTA vendors, but it is installed reactively (i.e. to avoid handset recalls) rather than proactively (i.e. to update all handsets to the latest OS flavour)]. Google itself reports that the Android installed base is split between devices running 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1 versions (or at least for those devices accessing the Android Market). The detailed breakdown as of mid May 2010 is as follows: Release fragmentation is also arises out of Google’s elitist treatment of its OEM partners. Google will pick and choose which private codeline is available to which OEM based on commercial criteria (contrary to Michael Gartenberg’s story). Take for example how Sony Ericsson’s X10 (running on Android 1.6) came to market after the Nexus One (running on Android 2.1). Ironically, both handsets were made by HTC. [correction: the X10 was developed by Sony Ericsson Japan] 3. Profile fragmentation. Android was designed for volume smartphones. But it arrived at an opportune time – just after the iPhone launch and just as consumer electronics manufacturers were looking at how to develop connected devices. This resulted in two effects that Google hadn’t planned for: – Android was taken up by all tier-1 (and many tier-2) operators/carriers hoping to develop iPhone-like devices at cheaper prices (i.e. lower subsidies) and greater differentiation. That meant that while operators funded Android’s adolescent years (2008-2010), they niched Android handsets to high-end features and smartphone price points. – Android is now being taken up by 10s of consumer electronics manufacturers, from car displays and set-top boxes to tablets, DECT phones and picture frames. The Archos internet tablet was just the beginning. Each of these devices has very different requirements and therefore results in different platform profiles. The timing of Android’s entry into the market has therefore resulted in two implications related to fragmentation. Firstly, Android’s official codebase isn’t suited for mass-market handsets (think ARM9 or ARM11, 200-500MHz). To get to really large volumes (100M+ annually), Google will need to sanction a second Android profile for mass-market devices. This is a Catch-22, as a second profile is needed to hit large volumes, but it would also break the Android developer story. Secondly, every new platform profile designed for different form factors (in-car, set-top box, tablet, etc) will create API variations that will be hard to manage. That’s one of the key reasons behind the Google TV initiative and the Open Embedded Software Foundation. However even Google can’t move fast enough to coordinate (manage?) the 10s of use cases and form factors emerging for Android. All in all, Android fragmentation is going to get far worse, as Android becomes a victim of its own success.But hey, would you expect to have a single app (and a single codebase) that runs on your TV, phone and car? And there the opportunity lies for tools vendors to provide app porting tools, compatibility test tools and SDKs to help bridge the gap across the eventual jungle of Android fragmentation. And for those looking to better understand the Android commercials we offer a half-day training course on the commercial dynamics behind Android. What do readers think? Do you have any fragmentation stories to share? – Andreas you should follow me on twitter: @andreascon #cyanogen #fragmentation #htc #operatingsystems #forking #borqs #google #nokia #motorola #sonyericsson #Android #mobilesoftware #mobile #geeksphone

[Sales of mobile phones remain healthy, but can the same be said of the software designed for them? Guest author Morten Grauballe offers a biological metaphor to check the pulse and visualise the evolution of the mobile software business.] The app store “Long Tail” has recently dominated strategy discussions in the mobile industry. The Long Tail is a captivating and inspiring notion that challenges companies to think beyond mass production and mass retailing. The mobile software market is, however, far from mass production and mass retailing. Tight coupling of software and hardware, combined with platform fragmentation, have created a mass market for mobile phones, but not for mobile software. Hence, the tail is wagging the dog (and its organs) in the mobile software strategy discussion. I ‘d like to use a biological metaphor – the notion of the 11-Organ System – to represent the core value-adding elements in mobile software and discuss how Apple, China Mobile, DoCoMo, Google, Nokia and RIM have utilised these core organs to their benefit. The 11 Organs interact to create the mobile software. The Long Tail App Store The Long Tail concept was coined in a 2004 article by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson to describe the notion that a large share of consumer needs rest within the tail of a statistical normal distribution. From a marketer’s perspective, this means you need to sell large quantities of unique items – each in small quantities – often combined with large quantities of a few very popular items. The idea was coined to describe phenomena in online retailing where companies such as Amazon for books and eBay for auctions were able to cater – profitably – to very small, unique segments of the market. The digital economy allows these retailers to decouple stock from purchase. Later, the notion was proven to apply to some of the most successful business models today, namely Apple’s iTunes music store and Google’s search advertising model. Lately, the Long Tail has been used to describe and propagate one of the biggest hype waves in the mobile market, namely the app store. Apple recently passed 200,000 applications in its store; fanning the enthusiasm for all major players to develop their own app store strategy. Whereas books, auctions, music, and to some extent search are well-understood businesses with relatively straight-forward Long Tail effects, the essence of the mobile software business is generally not well understood and analyzed. So, before we pin the app store Long Tail on Eeyore, it is worth taking off the blindfold in an attempt to understand the essence of mobile software. The Organ Systems of Mobile Software Like biological systems, the software on mobile phones has value-creating subsystems. The Long Tail app store is like the tail on mammals. It does not have a function without being attached to a healthy body full of strong and interconnected value-creating systems. Apple knows this. Google knows this. Nokia knows this. DoCoMo knows this. They all have strategies in place for these value-creating systems. Mammals generally have 11 organ systems (see note at the end of the article for a biology refresh). To stay true to my metaphor, I break down the most advanced smartphones into 11 organ systems – five core infrastructure systems and six application level systems. There are of course many more ways these systems can be broken down (see VisionMobile’s Industry Atlas for examples). The five infrastructure core systems are: Operating system: On a high level, the key value of an operating system is to be found in the abstraction of the hardware into a set of APIs against which applications can be written. More fundamentally, this process of abstraction has a significant impact on the characteristics of the system, including usability, battery life and privacy. There is a long discussion taking place within the industry as to whether the OS is a commodity or not – I believe not, but I ‘ll leave that debate is for future article. Let’s instead list the current choices available in the mobile market: Android, Bada, Blackberry OS, Brew Mobile Platform (BMP), iPhone OS, LiMo, Maemo, MediaTek OS, Nucleus, Series 40, STE OS, Symbian, Web OS and Windows Phone OS. Application Execution Environments (AEEs): Most phones have one or more AEEs that attract developers and hence enhance the ability to “wag the tail”. The list of AEEs is long, but should include Java, Flash, widget and and web runtimes. AEEs and operating systems are generally complementary, but as the recent spat between Adobe and Apple has shown, these value-creating systems do not always coexist peacefully. Software Management System: From a strategy analysis perspective, this is probably one of the fastest developing value-creating subsystems. Software management addresses two ‘bodily functions’: The in-the-hands user experience. Apple has made 22 versions available for its phones since June 29, 2007. That is one release every 6 weeks. Most of the features released have addressed the user experience by enhancing features or the usage of features. In the end, this generates revenue and builds an ongoing relationship with the user. Repair and correction. The ability to protect the phone depends on the strength of the security system (see below), but also on the system’s ability to respond to issues in the system, whether malware or not. Software Management allows us to respond with new pieces of software when needed. Security System: The security system is very similar to the integumentary and lymphatic systems in humans. It protects the system from external threats. Parts of the security system should be built into the operating system, but other parts are application-level components, such as lock and wipe of the device. Business Intelligence System: Similar to the nervous system, the business intelligence system allows you to understand what is going on in the entire organism. This ranges from understanding usability issues over performance problems to actual defects in the system. You want to know what works and what does not work for the particular user, which apps are used the most, which services work and which not, how does service usage vary across devices, etc. The six core application systems are: Peer-to-Peer Communication: Voice communication is often overlooked in strategy discussions of mobile software, but it is one of the most used applications on any mobile phone. It might be a baseline feature, but it needs to be done well. Integration with other value-adding subsystems is quite important too. Peer-to-Peer Messaging: This includes everything from SMS over instant messaging to push e-mail applications. Similar to peer-to-peer communication, it is generally not considered sexy at this stage of the market. It is however the second largest revenue generator after voice communication and thus should not be disregarded. Search: Most phones already have Web search functions. However, the future of search is in the location-based services (LBS) area, where digital search is combined with the physical presence of the user. Advertising is a part of this subsystem as it connects sellers with buyers of products and services. Content Creation: The biggest craze in the market is social networking. Every new phone has social networking capabilities galore closely integrated into the contact manager. Content creation, however, also includes pictures, video and other types of media produced by the consumer. Most of the data produced by the consumer needs to be shared somehow. That is where the key value creation of the mobile phone comes in.. sharing! Content Consumption: Compared to creation, content consumption is so yesterday. The consumer expects easy access to a catalogue of games, music, video, etc. Browsing: This is such a crucial application that I have classified it as a system of its own. The browser is used as the basis of many of the other systems. Actually, most of the other applications can run via the browser and hence it is even possible to classify the browsing subsystem as an infrastructure subsystem. Choose your Organs before Pinning on the Long Tail There is no need to have the perfect business model for each of the mobile software organ systems above, but you need to have considered all of them and, if possible, have three or four strong organs to support an independent software strategy that can then carry a Long Tail app store. Let’s consider a few examples: Apple has been the most aggressive on the OS side, publishing native APIs to developers and building a large developer community. Apple’s software management strategy is well-synced with its OS development and is a real strength. With iTunes Apple also is very well placed in media consumption. Apple’s weaknesses are in the areas of AEEs and search. China Mobile has recently put its weight behind the OPhone, which is running a completely customized branch of Android. The OPhone version of Android is managed by a company called Borqs. At launch, handsets were available from Dell, HTC and Lenovo with plans for further handset models from Samsung, ZTE, Phillips, Motorola and LG. By having Borqs in between Google and themselves, CMCC achieves greater ownership of the operating system and its APIs. This is, of course, expensive as Borqs need to track new versions of Android and migrate China Mobile-specific changes across to the new versions of the OPhone OS. DoCoMo has traditionally been focused on content-consumption and browsing with its i-mode services. i-mode nicely mixes Java, Browsing, Flash and e-mail into a very strong application suite. Customers know what they are getting. These services are built on top of two different operating systems, namely Linux and Symbian. So far, DoCoMo has not exposed native APIs to developers, but has focused on Java. The content market is therefore very strong in Japan, but the software application market is not well developed. Recently, DoCoMo has released its first Android handset, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which gives it access to the Android market. This is the company’s first experience with an application market. Google has combined the introduction of the Android operating with a strong suite of applications (Gmail, Google Maps, GTalk and Android market). While on the surface Android is an open source project, you only get access to the application suite if you agree to Google’s commercial terms.  There is no surprise that Google’s strengths come from its applications – it has less control of the core infrastructure components. RIM has full control of its OS and has used Java as the AEE to create a third-party community of developers. The real strength in the RIM offering, however, is peer-to-peer messaging and this is the subsystem that ties RIM to its users. Over the last three years, RIM has made improvements to the subsystems that are more focused on mass-market consumers, such as content consumption/creation, but it is not considered to be its strength. Nokia is active in all the subsystems above. Focus is probably one of the weaknesses of the Nokia offering. Traditionally, Nokia has been focused on peer-to-peer messaging and communication, but recently it has moved aggressively into search and content consumption, which are emerging as their new areas of strength. Taking inspiration from Blue Ocean Strategy, it is possible to create an Organ Map. I have included an example below. (Each area included in this map warrants its own discussion, so please take it as an educated view rather than a universal statement of truth). Getting started on your own Organ Map Any serious player looking at the app store Long Tail needs to look at the organ system above and decide how to build a serious software strategy first. Some companies, like HP with their Palm acquisition, are at a cross-road and should make tough choices up-front. Others are in the middle of executing on their software strategy and need to evaluate progress. In both cases, key questions to answer are: –        Which organ systems are the focus of my strategy? –        What is the right mix of core organs to application organs? –        What level of control do you want to exert over each organ system? –        How will the chosen organ system allow me to build a relationship with my customer? –        How do the organ systems interact to realize value for the customer? –        How are my organ systems mapping against the competition? Through the discussion around these questions, you should document the criteria by which you and your organizations determine the scoring of each organ system. That will answer questions like, what is a high-end offering in the browser space and who is offering this in the market. To have a truly independent strategy, the choice of organ systems need to include at least one core organ system over which you can exert a high-degree of control. This does not have to be complete ownership of the organ system, but you should be able to determine the roadmap and direction of the organ system. The Long Tail as a Greenhouse for New Organ Systems Once you have a nice set of organ systems up and running, the real point of the Long Tail app store is to act as a greenhouse for new organ systems. By monitoring the sales statistics and trends on your app store, you get a very good view (from your business intelligence system) as to what the next organ system might be. It is no coincidence Apple just added iAd to iPhone OS v4. They are on top of their business intelligence game and have been tracking advertising in their app store for a while. As apps or features develop into viable businesses, they get promoted from the tail to the body. They become new organ systems for the value-creation machine called Apple. What are your own thoughts on strategy as a biology metaphor? What other examples of use of software-based organ systems have you come across? What Organ Systems does HP currently have that would render Palm as successful business? Which new ones should they build? – Morten [Morten Grauballe is EVP Marketing at Red Bend and ex VP Product Management at Symbian, and has been in the mobile industry long enough to boast both scars and medals] Note 1: The 11 major organ systems of the body are: (1) The integumentary system is the organ system that protects the body from damage – it includes nails, skin, hair, fat, etc. This is the largest system making up ~16% of the human body. (2) The skeletal system is the structural support system with bones, cartilage, ligaments and tendons. (3) The muscular system is the anatomical system of a species that allows it to move. (4) The nervous system is an organ system containing a network of specialized cells called neurons that coordinate the actions of an animal and transmit signals between different parts of its body (5) The endocrine system is a system of glands, each of which secretes a type of hormone to regulate the body. The endocrine system is an information signal system much like the nervous system. Hormones regulate many functions of an organism, including mood, growth and development, tissue function, and metabolism. (6) The circulatory system is an organ system that passes nutrients (such as amino acids and electrolytes), gases, hormones, blood cells, etc. to and from cells in the body (7) The lymphatic system in vertebrates is a network of conduits that carry a clear fluid called lymph. It is used to fight diseases and transport fluids from the cells. (8) The respiratory system’s function is to allow oxygen exchange through all parts of the body. (9) The digestive system is the organ system responsible for the mechanical and chemical breaking down of food into smaller components that can be absorbed into the blood stream. (10) The urinary system is the organ system that produces, stores, and eliminates urine. (11) The reproductive system is a system of organs within an organism that work together for the purpose of reproduction. #mobiledevices #network #browser #rim #google #nokia #chinamobile #Apple #operatingsystem #organs #xray #palm #docomo #hp #mobilesoftware

[Which are the most ubiquitous mobile software products out there? Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis opens up our 5th edition of the 100 Million Club, the watchlist of embedded software products and talks about the really big numbers of mobile software.] Welcome to the H2 2009 edition of the 100 Million Club, the semi-annual watchlist of mobile software products that have been embedded in more than 100 million mobile devices since their release. Despite the apparent opportunity in the one-billion-a-year handset market, very few software companies have managed to overcome the commercial and technical challenges inherent in the mobile industry. Key highlights in this H2 2009 edition: – “The cumulative number of shipments of all the 100 Million Club software products up to the end of 2009 is 24.6 billion – an 11% increase since the previous half” – “The estimated 250 million cumulative shipments for Apple’s WebKit show that it is fast becoming a de facto browser platform.” – “BlackBerry is the next smartphone platform, after Symbian, that will break through the 100 million shipments barrier.” What’s new in H2 2009? So, what major changes have we seen since our previous update? First off we’re happy to welcome three new entrants to the Club: ARM, Mimer and Numonyx have joined, adding three new middleware products to our watchlist. Mimer has just broken the 100 million barrier with its SQL database engine, while ARM brings us Mali-JSR184, a 3D graphics engine for wireless devices. The Flash Data Integrator by Numonyx is already ahead of the game, having been shipped in more than 900 million devices. We have also had to remove three software products that have long been part of the Club. For different reasons, Mobile BAE by Beatnik and Picsel’s File Viewer are no longer part of the 100 Million Club, while Nokia’s Series 60 OS has been incorporated in the Symbian OS. (click to download) Growth in the 100 Million Club The H2 2009 edition of the 100 Million Club is comprised of 30 software products by 26 companies. The total number of shipments of all 30 products, up to the end of 2009, comes to 24.6 billion – an 11% increase since the previous half. In the previous edition, the Club featured 15 software products that exceeded 500 million shipments, 6 of which had also broken through the 1 billion barrier. The H2 2009 edition features 17 products with more than 500 million sales, 7 of which have surpassed 1 billion shipments. In other words, for the first time the majority of the products featured in the 100 Million Club have over 500 million shipments. In the second half of 2009, CAPS by Scalado and OKL4 by Open Kernel Labs managed to break through the 500 million barrier, while Myriad Group’s messaging client and Nokia’s Series 40 OS now have more than 1 billion shipments each. Category leaders: apps, browsers, middleware and operating systems Quickoffice wins by default in the embedded applications category, since it’s the only embedded application featured in the 100 Million Club. Adobe is still number one in the application environments category, with Flash/Flash Lite having been embedded in more than 1.3 billion devices up to the end of 2009. The growth of Flash Lite has decelerated significantly from 43% (1H09) to 15% (2H09) as share of devices sold with the software embedded; however the pace should be picking up pace again with Flash shipments later in 2010. Myriad Group, whose browser has almost twice as many shipments as the other category products combined, dominates the browser market. In the middleware category things are not that clear, due to the diversity of products. In absolute numbers, the messaging client by Myriad Group has the most shipments (1.2B) and vRapid Mobile by Red Bend shows the highest of growth over the second half of 2009. UI software is also highly penetrated within mobile devices, led by graphics engines by Ikivo, Scalado and The Astonishing Tribe which are at or around the 500 million mark. The operating system market features 6 products that have been embedded in more than 1 billion devices. It’s worth noting that mass-appeal operating systems like OSE, Nucleus and recently Series 40 have cumulative shipments numbering in the billions, while BREW has just broken past the 500 million mark. In contrast, most major smartphone platforms – Android, OSX, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry – apart from Symbian have yet to reach 100 million shipments. Finally, the input engines category features two products, both by Nuance inherited from the past acquisitions of Tegic and Zi Corp. As is evident in the chart, T9/XT9 is by far the most prominent, having been embedded in a staggering 4.8 billion mobile devices up to the end of the second half of 2009. 100 Million Club facts and trends Two companies account for 38% of shipments: Only two companies have multiple software products included in the 100 Million Club, each company featuring three products. The cumulative number of shipments of these two companies is 9.5 billion, representing 38% of all 100 Million Club products’ shipments up to the end of H2 2009. The software products are Myriad Group’s Browser, messaging client and Jbed and Nuance’s T9/XT9, eZiText and VSuite. WebKit on the rise: We estimate that up to the end of 2009 WebKit, the open source browser engine, has been embedded in more than 250 million devices. WebKit owes most of its market penetration to Nokia (Symbian shipments with the Series 40 contribution picking up), while its recent adoption by RIM can only accelerate its market penetration. Top revenue models: In this edition, we asked the 100 Million Club members to provide us with the top two revenue models for their products. The responses revealed that the most common revenue models for embedded software are per-unit royalties,followed by NRE (non-recurring engineering fees) for product integration or customisation. Despite the tight profit margins, handset OEMs and network operators are still paying for software on a per-unit basis, with the ‘paradigm shift’ to per-active user revenue models taking longer than most would have expected. What’s in stock for the 100 Million Club Our watchlist continues to grow, as more products make it past 100 million shipments. Blackberry should be entering the Club in the next edition (H1 2010), with OSX, Windows Mobile and the much younger Android lagging a further 6-18 months behind. The bigger picture of mobile software is very different than the industry hype would have us think. – Matos #packetvideo #rococo #ARM #opera #qualcomm #symbianfoundation #openkernellabs #100millionclub #nokia #nuance #Apple #mentorgraphics #tat #ikivo #scalado #bitflash #quickoffice #mimer #aplix #enea #numonyx #nxpsoftware #hicorp #Adobe #windowsmobile #redbend #Android #mobilesoftware #Blackberry #myriad #iphone #osx #access

[The acquisition by HP will not save Palm. Guest author Michael Valukenko explains why the sum of Palm and HP is close to zero] As an old-time Palm user, I was always secretly hoping for resurgence of this familiar and trusted company. At a rational level however, I didn’t believe that the new Palm stands a chance in rapidly changing smartphone market. See my earlier analysis in Who can save Palm here at the VisionMobile blog. HP’s acquisition makes Palm part of large and financially solid company, but doesn’t compensate for its other weaknesses. Smartphone competition today boils down to competition of service platforms with Apple and Google leading the way. Considering the realities of today’s smartphone market, there are very few real synergies between HP and Palm. The three missing synergies Today people don’t buy smartphones for their hardware, but for what they can do with them. This largely means software platform and services built around the phone. Both Apple and Google excel in this area, albeit using very different approaches. Palm’s WebOS offers a slick UI and a promise of simplified app development by fully adopting the web paradigm. But it lacks a clear differentiation (a killer use case) and an ecosystem unlocking the device into hundreds or thousands different things people could do with it. Let’s face it: It wasn’t that WebOS devices didn’t sell well because Palm lacked marketing dollars. They didn’t sell because they weren’t good enough compared to competition. HP marketing money and distribution muscle won’t save the day. Today’s leaders – iPhone, Blackberry and Android – all have clear differentiation: iPhone is all about entertainment and Internet and is backed by large iTunes user base. Blackberry sells mobile email and is backed by corporate IT adoption and a strong distribution network. Android seamlessly integrates with Google services promising free and open Internet. The vague notion of “HP Experience” looks pretty pale in comparison. Critically important, app developers and Internet companies already have their hands full with iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, not to mention the upcoming Windows Phone 7. What does HP have to offer in exchange for some mind-share? Any bright ideas? Last, but definitely not least. Mobile operators/carriers take on the lion’s share of smartphone promotion and subsidy costs, hoping to attract new subscribers and increase ARPU of existing ones. What can HP/Palm offer to convince operators to take marketing and subsidy dollars from iPhone, Blackberry and Android, and put them into HP/Palm?  I don’t see much. Do you? Clear differentiation, developer mindshare and operator subsidies  are all critical today for the success of a smartphone platform. All these were and remain Palm’s weaknesses regardless of its financial situation. HP does not complement Palm in any of these critical areas. Chasing the Apple dream A quick glance at HP earnings breakdown reveals HP as an electronics equipment company at its core. The company generates most of it revenues from selling printers, laptops, desktop PC and servers. Smartphone unit sales are catching up to laptop sales, while laptop margins are getting thinner and thinner. It is easy to see how tempting would it be for HP management to try to emulate Apple’s model of selling high-margin devices. However Apple owes much of its success to its vertical integration, which allows blending hardware, software and services into iconic products. This vertical integration is ideally suited for breaking new grounds and creating new product categories. It is critical factor in Apple’s ability to create such products as Apple Lisa, iPod, iPhone and iPad. As explained by Clayton Christensen in this seminal paper, vertical integration is an advantage in emerging product categories, where it helps to overcome technical challenges. Vertical integration however becomes a disadvantage in maturing markets, where flexibility, customization and modularity are of greater importance. It is difficult to see HP successfully reproducing Apple’s model. The opportunity to be the first with iPhone-like product does no longer exist. Is this good news? The deal doesn’t look particularly bright for HP shareholders. But may be in the broad scheme of things the deal is great news for many other people: Investment bankers will pocket multi-million dollar commissions, Palm’s investors and management will be spared from their misery, HP executives will boost their ego, business newspapers will sell some ads, and bloggers (including myself) will have something to write about. How do you think the acquisition will shape up for Palm and HP? – Michael [Michael Vakulenko has been working in the mobile industry for over 16 years starting his career in wireless in Qualcomm. Throughout his career he gained broad experience in many aspects of mobile technologies including handset software, mobile services, network infrastructure and wireless system engineering. Today Michael consults to established companies, start-ups and operators. He can be reached at michaelv [/at/] WaveCompass.com] #acquisition #claytonchristensen #ARPU #smartphone #webos #palm #synergy #hp #Blackberry #mobile #operators #mobileindustry #windows #subsidy #visionmobile

[The Wholesale Application Community has made big headlines in the last two months. But beyond the affectionate operator feelings and investments this signals towards developers, will the initiative succeed where JIL has failed? Guest author Simone Cicero digs behind the hype to see what lies behind the WAC buzz] Despite its impressive line up of network operators, the Wholesale Applications Community initiative has been greeted with skepticism across both industry-insider and developer audiences. Founded in February 2010, WAC is an initiative backed by 24 operators with the incredibly audacious vision of unifying apps distribution, packaging and execution. WAC’s mission is about realising “write once deploy everywhere” for mobile applications and enabling developers to “create applications for the long tail” (a concept that dates back to 2004) So how does WAC plan to achieve such ambitions? The operator-backed initiative has indicated it will provide: – a reference implementation for a web runtime environment as well as Network Operator APIs – tools for development including an SDK and an emulator – billing enablers and specifications for WAC compliant application stores (as mentioned in the FAQ) WAC = BONDI + JIL Like a phoenix, WAC seems to be born out of the BONDI and JIL initiatives and has committed to evolving BONDI and JIL into a common specification within the next 12 months. OMTP’s BONDI has been the most-successful operator-backed initiative aimed at developers. BONDI is in essence a specification of Device APIs for securely accessing device functionality (incl. status, sensors, telephony and SIM APIs) and user data (incl. phonebook, location and gallery). BONDI APIs are accessible from widget runtimes and should (theoretically) also become available via browsers. The BONDI project has attracted the interest of a few thousand developers and provided an official Windows Mobile reference implementation (with more unofficial implementation projects in the pipeline). We should also see deployment on commercial handsets by the end of 2010  with the first BONDI-compliant widget SDK already appearing from LG. The JIL (Joint Innovation Labs) project was created by four mega network operators (Vodafone, Softbank, China Mobile and Verizon) to hook operators within the App Store game, and control the app submission, billing and distribution process. JIL  is a realisation that the standards route (read: OMA or GSMA) is a turtle-speed approach in a rabbit-speed market. As such, JIL embraced and extended the existing W3C widget specs, adding its own APIs and security model.  However, despite the operator investments and ambitions, to date JIL has not delivered much beyond a widget spec and SDK. A third operator initiative that is part of the WAC scope is Network APIs, i.e. APIs allowing resources from the network (e.g. location, presence, user info) to be exposed programmatically to developers: in this area WAC will build on early achievements of GSMA OneAPI Initiative. In essence WAC is an attempt to wrap BONDI, JIL and Network API specs and tools into a single operator-led initiative. In parallel to the technical objectives, WAC aims to define a simplified distribution and deployment model for mobile apps. Rather than build its own Market WAC will probably seek to certify “associated WAC application stores” as well with third party markets offering WAC compliant applications. WAC challenges ahead To pragmatically assess WAC’s potential, we need to consider how it differs to what’s come before, the environment in which it plays in, and its stated ambitions and roadmap. Some industry observers compare the Wholesale Applications Community with the JCP (Java Community process) and Java ME in terms of the challenges of standardising app development and distribution. Despite being still the most used and, for sure, the runtime with the largest installed base, the story of Java ME as a platform has been undoubtedly fraught with strategic and execution flaws. Sun failed to see the opportunity of an app store; Java store is both a half-baked effort and a latecomer to the App Store market considering that Java ME was launched in 2001. Neither did Sun succeed at its main goal – promulgating a consistent runtime (open source or closed source) within the 1B-a-year device market by choosing to over-protect its traditional revenue streams coming from licensing and TCK testing. Sun also chose to license its reference implementation rather than impose a Sun-brewed, mobile Java runtime with consistency and compatibility as the first priority. In parallel, the design of JCP proved too slow and bureaucratic. The JCP members spent too long entangled in preferred ballots, drafts, reviews, public vs private releases, resulting in specs that were just too late to market. The best testament to that was probably the MIDP3 saga, which arrived at the era of Android and iPhone development that doesn’t need Java ME any more. With 24 operator members behind the WAC initiative, it’s going to prove hard to reach consensus amongst competitors. It’s also worth realizing that whereas Java ME has been loosely governed by Sun Microsystems (an entity external to the mobile value chain) the WAC consortium is led by operators who play a critical role in the mobile value chain and can, at least in the developed mobile markets, drive the product customization phase – and as such WAC is better positioned at – for example – mandating WAC runtime specs to be preloaded on an Android handset. At the same time, operator specs are seen by handset OEMs as long wishlists with the device compliance index being on continual decline for European operators. The timing of WAC is another challenge. Given that it will take (at least) 12 months to merge BONDI and JIL, the first WAC-compliant device won’t hit the market before mid-2011. Where will iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and the other competing platforms be in the next 12 months? What features should a developer expect from a runtime hitting the market in 18 months’ time? Not to mention that developer choices are already being set in stone as the major platforms lock-in developer mindsets (just look at how fast iPhone/iPad apps are ramping up now that that OSX is the number one choice for many mobile developers). Is there a future for WAC? The apps market is showing worrying signs for operators: mobile app stores are depriving operators from new revenue streams and pushing them further away from the customer front – only leaving operators with the cost burden of supporting customers in the post-sales phase and building out bigger, fatter bit pipes to carry the app-induced traffic. Once upon a time, operators were responsible for most technology innovation like voicemail, the 2-line-in-1-SIM, premium SMS and Multimedia MMS and high speed networks. Operators are still in the driver seat with 70% of the mobile trillion-pie flowing through the networks. In Europe, North America and the Far East, network operators still play the dominant role whilst in control of product ranging, subsidy, distribution and retailing decisions. Yet during the last few years, the ownership of innovation in mobile services and handset products is migrating from the operator hands to Internet/PC players, with operators left to play the role of bureaucrats, support providers and handset subsidization agents.  The latest operator innovation like RCS, JIL and network-exposed location seems only to reinvent the wheel. All this, while players from the PC/internet industry like Apple exploit the rivalry between operators by soliciting major subsidies. At the end of the day, the Wholesale Applications Community initiative is a knee-jerk reaction on the part of operators – an effort towards embracing developers and seizing the community of value-adding actors away from the likes of Nokia, Apple and Google. Now the question is how well and how quickly can WAC execute on the ambitious declaration of intents that WAC is today. WAC should exploit its stronghold to add value where gaps exist at present, rather than reinventing the wheel. As such, instead of specifying runtimes or gating (and chocking!) the application submission process, WAC should focus on mandating an affordable and consistent revenue sharing policy across operators. By facilitating micro-payments WAC could enable new service charging models such as pay per (single) use, giving developers important alternatives to the free, ad-supported or paid app options. Another key focus for WAC should be to empower developers with unique network-based APIs like user demographics and targeting and provide decent usage analytics (as mentioned by O2’s James Parton) and a recommendation engine to allow developers to better target the user audience and their application features based on the vast amount of demographics and usage information the operators/carriers hold in their network. Finally, rather than specifying a web runtime spec based on a lowest-common-denominator approach, WAC should embrace existing runtime specs as much as possible, and consider embracing HTML5 which seems to be unanimously adopted by the major players of the industry, including Nokia, Apple and Google. [Update: On May 5, WAC held an analyst webinar outlining a few important points. Specifically, Tim Raby, CEO of OMTP is acting as the interim CEO of WAC, while a formal Board for the non-profit organisation will be elected in July 2010. Secondly, WAC indicated it’s planning to standardise the commercial model (perhaps extending to the revenue share formula) for developers and ‘compliant’ app store owners. Developer documentation, developer events and further details on the mission and deliverables of WAC are planned for the second half of 2010.] What are your thoughts on WAC and the role of operators in mobile apps? – Simone [Simone is an mobile strategist, innovation specialist, technology addict and open source enthusiast, having followed the disruptive changes of the mobile industry over the last few years. Simone has served at Three’s Global Device and Application group and at as a consultant at Altran. You can also follow Simone on his personal blog at meedabyte.wordpress.com] #mobileapps #javame #mobiledevelopers #jil #google #nokia #Apple #jcp #lg #bondi #motorola #Android #omtp #iphone #samsung