Mobile Multimedia

Last night the Momo London group had a session on mobile media, which I couldn't get to - however, James Cooper did and blogged it here (he also has done a very good job with Momo's mobile advertising session here).

The things that hit me from this session were the following:

1. Dan Applequist of Vodafone did a quick presentation including his top 11 mobile 2.0 trends, which were ... smart mobile browsers, mobile ajax and widgets, mobile search, mobile advertising, mashups and APIs, RFID and 2D barcodes, location and geocaching, mobile social networks, mobile UGC and smart web devices

2. BBC experience is that mobile is quite simple really, it just needs to be personal, location aware, immediate. James isn't so sure of this but it sounds right to me - and I'd add simple.

3. Last year i.e. 2007 was The Year of Mobile, it's already happened - for the first year in 2007 UK mobile ad spend (4th Screen) was greater than Cinema (1st screen)...

4. ....but FT isn't really seeing "the year of mobile" in business - no enthusiasm from agencies yet in the B2B space

5. Mobile can ACTIVATE other media channels through short-codes, it's "the glue that ties together the marketing mix" (nice line from Incentivated)

6. Killer app for mobile is email (wow - they realised ) - FT have developed some smart approaches round this e.g. when you click an email link on mobile e.g. blackberry they make sure they provide a mobile formatted view of the link

7. The key test is "Does this look sh*t on your phone?"

Apart from point 3 and some of Dan's trends I'd agree with all the others - and say I'd heard it all before - but what is interesting is that these conclusions are now emerging as firmer views, rather than ones you had to argue hard for say a year or so ago. I think point 3 is a non sequitur, cinema advertising has always been minute.

The test of the Year of the Mobile Internet is when more than say 15% of ordinary people (the typical % at jump from early adopter) start to be able to use the web easily, not give up in sheer frustration - ie when a larger number of people have an iPhone like experience.

I don't usually read Joi Ito, but a friend of mine pointed me to his post on whether or not the Mobile Internet has a future. He notes that:

I don't think there is anything wrong with mobile or with some of the great new mobile applications and devices, but we have to be careful to remember that most mobile networks that actually work are built on infrastructure that is operated by a small number of mobile operators who use a lot of regulated and closed technology.

The reason that we have vibrant startup driven innovation is because the Internet is open by nature. Anyone can participate without asking permission and anyone can compete with anyone else at every layer of the stack. This DNA of open and free competition (except for the occasional semi-monopoly) is what allows startups like Google to come in and displace incumbents. If it weren't for the Internet, I'm positive that the telcos would have determined that it was the most efficient that THEY design and operate the "online directories".

Apart from calling Google a startup (would a new Google be able to start so well now the old one rules the Web?) I think this is a pretty sound analysis, and one we've made before in our Planet Mobile posts (see here and here for instance).

Joi's post is interesting in that he is critiquing the Japanese market, which is usually held up as the shining beacon of the Future of Mobile. He notes that:

In 2006 in Japan, mobile advertising was only $330M vs Content (Ringtones, Song-tones, Games) at $2.2B and Commerce at $4.7B. (http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper/eng/WP2007/2007-index.html) Although all of us are experimenting with advertising and advertising is increasing on mobile, the overwhelming percentage of money spent on mobile devices goes to paying for and the collection of payments for a small number of not so innovative products from a small number of providers.

So - same old same old as we have in Europe then. As Joi notes, in many ways the mobile Telcos are captive to both regulation and the prices they paid in mobile auctions, which drives their strategy and thus their "DNA".

However, what really caught my eye on this post was this paragraph:

In Japan, services like Mixi have announced that their web usage is decreasing, their mobile usage is increasing and that more of their users are using their services from mobile and than the web. I don't think mobile monetizes as well (for the company) as the web. I think that if we move over to mobile too quickly we're risking moving our game to a platform where the DNA is not what we're used to on the Internet and most importantly, putting money in the pockets of people who do not redistribute it to startups, but instead feed giant vendor ecologies instead.

So - there is apparently a shift to Mobile Internet by some companies, but less surplus goes into their pockets - clearly teh classic new entrant approach, ie enter a market by being prepared to take a lower margin. Joi's solution?

Maybe those smart companies in the mobile space like Vodaphone and Nokia who see the future should create a fund to invest in open innovation on mobile.

Vodafone is experimenting with the BetaVine ecosystem though its still small scale, and hopefully Nokia has had a significant kick up the *rse from the Apple/iPhone business model and will start to truly innovate again.

However, given the DNA in the US/EU industry I'm familiar with, and that the above article implies Japan is not too different big picture, its not clear why they would do this investment unless pushed.

More effective I suspect is to create real competitive alternatives

Update - in a counterpoint, it would seem that Google's Eric Schmidt thinks the Mobile Internet is the new new thing - for advertising anyway. Well, we hear that annually, who knows, 2009 may actually be the Year of the Mobile Internet!

From Ars Tech - looks like Alton Towers (UK fun park) is going to ban "PDA"s (aka Crackberrys, Smartphones etc):

The apparent reason is to stop hyperconnected people ruining a family day out for the rest of the family by mainlining on their crackberry. This trend is also ceen in Cinemas in the UK, where Orange sponsors high production value "don't let the phone ruin your movie" ads. And in the US, as Ars Tech notes:

There seems to be a new interest in some parts of the world to set a few boundaries around how and where technology is used in public. Movie theaters in the US, for example, have kept up with the times by displaying pre-film warnings about silencing phones and conversations. Some carriers like AT&T have begun sponsoring new "silence your phone" promos with high production values.

The airlines, sadly, are going counter-trend and hope to add money by opening up mobile conversations in 'planes, though even there it looks like most people are appalled by the idea.

Its interesting how new social norms emerge - rather than a consensus among a "social network" of users, it requires some form of authority to drive rules that people by and large agrees with. I wonder if there will ever be a backlash against the corporate "always on" culture?

And from now on, take your laptop to Alton Towers - that's not banned yet

Seems like we're not the only ones unhappy with the idea of people talking on their phones on 'planes - a Yahoo survey shows most people don't want it:

"There is an increasing debate about the use of mobile phones on airplanes," said Bruce Stewart, vice president and general manager, Connected Life Americas, Yahoo!. "This new survey overwhelmingly proves the desire of consumers to stay connected to the people, information, interests and passions that are important to them while in-flight, but they don't want to be forced to listen to the conversation of the passenger sitting next to them."

Across the U.S.A., but especially in the West, most consumers agree that mobile phone usage on planes should be restricted to non-talking features only:

-- West: 83 percent

-- Northeast: 72 percent

-- Midwest: 73 percent

-- South: 69 percent

More than half of consumers (60 percent) would want to use silent features while flying on an airplane such as:

-- Text message: 38 percent

-- Access e-mail: 28 percent

-- Play games: 29 percent

Age impacts consumers' mobile phone service preferences while in flight:

-- 35-44 year olds: 43 percent, more so than any other age group, would want to check e-mail on their mobile

-- 18-34 year olds: 62 percent would want to text and 29 percent would want to instant message (IM)

The Talking Zone

If usage of mobile phones was allowed while in-flight, more than two out of three (69 percent) consumers agreed that there should be a designated area of an airplane for passengers who want to talk on their mobile phones. In fact, older consumers (76 percent) and women (73 percent) are more likely to agree than their younger (64 percent) and male (64 percent) counterparts.

Lets hope this stops the Airlines, who have sadly sometimes been known to put profit ahead of customer benefit

The dance of the seven veiled requests to buy has started.....sez the Grauniad:

Speaking after the announcement of O2's first-quarter results, the chairman and chief executive of Telefónica Europe Matthew Key said his company will be making an announcement with Apple in "the coming weeks".

....and yes, I admit it - this is what I've been waiting for.

Not because it so unutterably cool, you understand - but as a sensible investment in endgame CPE technology and to expand my mobile multimedia modus oprandi

Ars Tech notes that Nokia has at last seen the light:

During Nokia's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo seemed to change the direction of the entire company. "Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an internet company," Kallasvuo told his shareholders. "Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively."

Well, that is a very good start, people outside Planet Mobile have known the game is up for several years, but better late than never...so, the billion dollar question - how will they execute?

Nokia has reorganized into two reportable segments: devices and services, which is the sum of three divisions under the previous system (mobile phones, multimedia, and enterprise solutions) and an unchanged Nokia Siemens networks segment, also known as infrastructure. The pending acquisition of GPS specialist Navteq promises to take Nokia into new markets

Devices...ah. These are hopefully not the guys who let Blackberry, iPod and iPhone steal markets that should by rights have been theirs. I hope they have grokked (to grok here = to re-structure skills, organisation, culture, incentives etc rather than just rearrange the bods in chairs) that the Apple or Microsoft device is just the part the punter sees of an integrated end to end delivery service system ?

Its hard to give advice on Nokia devices that doesn't seem trite, but my overall feeling - as a 'Nethead - about Nokia devices is that they are built by people within Planet Mobile for what they want a mobile internet user to be, whereas Apple built the iPhone for what mobile internet users *are*. I think that is simply because Apple has been closer to internet users, and Nokia needs to let the 'Net culture dominate internal culture.

Sez the Vodablog:

Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.

I'm scratching my head on this one, its a bit out the blue and details are very sparse - I held off blogging it until this evening as I was expecting more data and was very curious about the UK and Germany, Vodafone's major markets. But as Dean Bubbley notes:

There is no quote from either Jobs or Sarin - just two abrupt sentences. As I'm writing this (9am in London), the release isn't up on Apple's own site either. No details on pricing, contract length, how Voda will work with (or around) iTunes...

Yes - seems odd to me too and I'm writing 6pm London time, and still no razzmatazz at all.

From Slashdot - Engadget has an interview on future mobile usage with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz. A good interview overall, but this below is I think the main part of the economic money shot. Interview questions in italics below:

Is there any driving force or impetus for you guys to become a part of one of the Linux or open source mobile phone standards groups like LIPS, or OHA, or one of those?

You know, consortiums don't produce phones. Companies produce phones and companies produce products so we'll certainly -- look, the Java community by definition is a open source community. It's the world's largest open source community if you think about it in the sense that every day we distribute 15 million GPL software artifacts into the marketplace, called Java runtime environments. Every month we ship about fifty million GPL software artifacts. We are certainly going to work with the consortia that have volume and mass to make sure that we can identify standards.

Probably the most important for developers though isn't what are the driver APIs you use, it's going to be what are the developer APIs you use. What are the things that a developer who wants to deliver a service on a phone want to think about. The construction of the phone itself there is a much smaller group of companies. Most of which are frankly hardware companies and what we want to go do is to focus on the developer platform which gives them the broadest access to the broadest market.

So it sounds like from where you guys stand, obviously you are very enterprise focused--

Well, we're very developer focused.

But from the sound of things, it's really more that you guys believe in the democratization of mobile platforms whereas what we are seeing in the market -- especially in the consumer market -- is people becoming less concerned about access to cheaper open mobile platforms and even more concerned about a better end-to-end user experience. Do you think that these two interests can coexist?

First of all we are very focused on the democratization of network access. Now second and apart from that, I think that if you want to captivate a consumer audience you have to build an engaging user experience. A simple example for the consumers we really care about who are for example, MySQL users is the product must be freely available, downloadable, installable and up and running within fifteen minutes. Why? Because if it takes seven hours of configuration you are not going to get any users.

The same applies to a mobile platform which is: you'd would like to be able to get it turned on and get it up and running. And that's why companies like Blackberry, Nokia and Apple have done better than their counterparts who may not have been as easy to interact with. I think that the price of that product and the user experience of the product and the innovation of that product are not necessarily related in any way. But I can tell you that the intersection of all of those will produce the most popular products in the world.

By definition free is a more accessible price than six hundred dollars. A beautiful six hundred dollar phone will almost by definition ship in lower volume than a slightly uglier but functional text phone for no dollars. I think if you look at the proliferation of gadgets in the world, the proliferation of devices, the world is filled with way way more simple phones than they are WiFi enabled devices that allow you to look at maps.

We've argued before that Planet Mobile needs the equivalent of an "MS-DOS" to transform a Tower of Babel market market of many variants into an economically useful large, single market....a similar thought by a commentator on slashdot:

Where's the open source mobile platform that will run on top of third-party hardware?

I think about this every time I look at the OpenMoko and Qtopia stuff. I don't think that producing hardware designs is a bad thing per se, but I don't understand why there hasn't been more effort at rolling out distro for mobiles hobbyists could install on existing phones they might have lying around.

I understand there are Linux-based phones. But think about where FOSS computing might be if Linux and BSD had to wait for custom-designed hardware, or for a manufacturer to build a PC around that product. There'd have been nowhere near the growth.

There needs to be mobile FOSS for more-or-less commodity hardware if there's really going to be a part for it to play in the growth in the mobile market.

It would appear Twitter is looking for more funding - about $ 10 - 20m apparently (Sarah Lacy reckons its getting the cash in now before the sh*t hits the Web 2.0 fan), even though there is as yet no real Business Model - apart from give free service to lots of people at the moment. Still, it has captured quite a few million people already in its social web.

I guess the bet of any VC today is to pop in the $ XX m to keep Twitter going until either (i) it finds a business model or (ii) someone buys it. I suspect case (ii) is far the more likely. Sadly, Google and eBay are probably out the frame as they have both bought things that could be Twitter competitors (Jaiku, Skype).

Its an interesting thought therefore, as to who may value it most and thus pony up for it. If I were to make an educated guess, apart from the usual suspects it would be a global mobile Telco or mobile Telco Wannabee - because Twitter, unlike so many of the other SocNet products it:

(i) Is simple enough to use on today's mobiles
(ii) Actually works on today's mobiles !

Not only that, but Twitter generates mobile and internet traffic (some of which is trans-country), and in nice, small (and relatively low cost) SMS size bits. It thus has fairly high synergies with mobile network providers who like applications that drive traffic.

It also captures users, who have social graphs that a moble service could integrate onto a 'phone and/or platform and add other forms of "value", based on user's proclivities - not to mention a useful development environment one could nurture in these Platform Service days. And its quite a sweet advertising service for an SMS style play.....

A veritable Beacon of new opportunities in fact

Microsoft, Yahoo or even Google could buy it, but they don't get those marvellous transport layer synergies that a Telco would - and a mobile Telco would get even more of it methinks.

And of course there is the cachet, as Ms Lacy puts it, of being Cool:

At any price, a stake in Twitter-- not to mention a chance to cozy up to a true Web visionary in Evan Williams-- is a steal.

(Disclosure of selfish interest - I would far rather people Twittered their banal lives to each other on trains and planes than talked on their mobile 'phones )

Article on Read Write Web today arguing that just because one (albeit well respected) guy, Russel Beattie, can't make it work, its all over for the Mobile Web:

Beattie's announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP. "The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices," Mace wrote.

While Mace concludes that apps are being killed by the mobile web, Beattie says even mobile web traffic is a non-starter. His site Mowser specialized in rendering the rest of the web mobile friendly. Except for smartphones with good native browsers, Opera Mini and iPhone users, though - Beattie says the billions of people mobile advocates expected to come online aren't.

"I don't actually believe in the 'Mobile Web' anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I'm talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn't happened, and now I'm sure it isn't going to.
In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I'm tired of wasting my time."

We've argued before on Broadstuff that the "Pure Mobile" Web is dead in the water, especially post iPhone, as its now quite clear that the Future of Mobile is with the Real Internet.

But rather than us saying it yet again, here are some of the commentators on the article - here's Jason Grigsby:

First, when Russell says Mobile Web, he is narrowly defining it as "developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time." Basically, he is describing building sites for pre-iPhone mobile devices.

What we know now is that given the right browser that mobile web usage takes off. And every phone manufacturer is working to copy the iPhone experience. Russell seems to equate this iPhone-like experience with desktop browsing.

Russell's argument is that the mobile web is moving towards the iPhone experience. He acknowledges that Mowser was a "short term bet against Moore's law." And he lists the numbers that show that web browsing increases for iPhone users.

To put this in perspective, Russell is arguing that there is no money to be made using Gopher (xhtml-mp w/o javascript) now that Mosaic (iPhone) has been released and consumers have released that they don't want anything less than the Mosaic or better experience.

That's not proclaiming the end of the mobile web. It is the beginning.

And here's Betsy:

I've been one of the people chasing after the mobile web for close to a decade now. I wanted desperately to be an early adopter. Bought the painfully slow AT&T brick-phone back in the day, signed up for pricy data plans, tried (and failed) to use mobile apps on my cell phones.

Finally, I gave it up as dead. Bought my iPod Touch last December purely as an iPod replacement and long-overdue PIM.

Guess what? I'm also using it as a mobile device, much to my surprise. Now, most evenings, I'm not even bothering to boot up the laptop - instead, I can check work email, my personal Gmail account, Google Reader and Twitter - all from the Touch using my house WiFi network, from the comfort of my living room couch.

I never thought I'd say this a year ago - but now that my Sprint contract has expired, I'm waiting for the 3G iPhone - and I'll be *so there*.

But I do want to pick up on something an old colleague, Miles Galliford wrote as well:

These are interesting comments from an industry insider. Coming at it from the other direction, I have asked many of my clients, who run niche content websites, whether their clients are demanding better mobile access to their information. Not one (out of over 100 site owners) has said they think mobile access is important. These sites cover both B2C and B2B subjects in the US and Europe.

Here's our summary (if you want a view of all our more detailed thoughts, type "Planet Mobile" in the blog search box on the top right corner):

(i) The Original "All Mobile" web was a non starter, it was invented by Planet Mobile to fits its own techno-economic needs and never appealed to customers

(ii) It takes outsiders to shake Planet Mobile up every time (think SMS, Blackberry, iTunes, iPhone) and show it what is possible, there is little reason to think this will be different now

(iii) As we argued at the time and onwards, the iPhone is different because it shows users they can have what they always wanted, so they aren't going to settle for less now

(iv) However, they are still a very small adopter base in total, so current demand is still low.

But it will grow - anyone who has used small laptops, the iPhone or even gone up the learning curve of various clunky smartphones will know the potential of the mobile Web. And where today's early adopters rush in, tomorrow mass market will eventually tread.

It's just not here yet.

(By the way, Beattie says traffic at Mowser was poor and 80% of it was made up of porn seekers - sounds like a standard Net app then ).