This should have come a week earlier but, alas, I was on the road – quite literally – en route to San Diego and Qualcomm’s most excellent Uplinq conference.
Life of course did not stop, and amongst the things you should not miss was (and is!) the last iteration of the formidable Carnival of the Mobilists, hosted by our very own Peggy Anne Salz on her award-winning MSearchGroove blog. Amongst the gems not to be missed were:
- An interview of a company focused on Windows Phone 7 (yes, you read that right!);
- Tomi Ahonen with another go at the app economy (which he claims isn’t much of an economy; read my comments on this here);
- A look on web bookmarks as an alternative to apps (to which I still not agree; cf. here);
- A couple of posts on Android, and specifically Motorola’s Droid X (and the future, if any, of Motoblur);
- And many, many more…
Finally, my post on Vodafone’s pondered changes to its revenue share structures featured, too.
The carnival is here, and well worth a read! And, again, my apologies for the late posting of this. But the old Highway 101 along the Pacific just had me in its grips… 
It’s been looming and was long expected but today Vodafone announced it would embed its Vodafone 360 app store on two Android devices next to Android Market. Vodafone says their store would give partners a richer retailing experience than Android Market – but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?
But cheap puns aside, the move does have some legs: Vodafone uses Qualcomm’s Xiam personalisation engine, which provides recommendations based on user behaviour. They claim – and you may have heard that before in any number of my talks – that recommendations are a much stronger driver than promotions, stronger by a level of 4x to be exact. This ties in with my preachings: nearly 3/4 of all purchasing decisions (not only mobile, all of them!) are made on the recommendation of friends. And, alas, this is where “user behaviour” as the applicable pattern comes short: do I care how many, say, Amazon buyers of Grisham novels are also buying other authors’ crime thrillers? No. Why not? Because I don’t know these people. Do I care what my friends may think I like? You bet! Why? Because they know me and my tastes. Doh!
Anyway, back to Vodafone. They have realised (and, credit to them, admit it!) that a vertical implementation where you only get the full scope of 360 services if you have one of two phones doesn’t work. And, well, that’s somewhat obvious, isn’t it? Or is it a reasonable assumption that all my friends will all of a sudden (and at the same time) exchange their various handsets for a Samsung M1? No, I thought not either.
Vodafone did divulge a little data sniplet that must encourage them though, and that is that 360 customers have a 3x higher ARPU than others. If you look at the above (recommendations, friends, etc), that is not completely surprising. So now the next hurdle is to roll it out across their whole range of handsets. And let’s face it: a simple store won’t cut that on its own. Going cross-platform also means that – depending which handset you fancy – you may find different app stores of differing attraction competing with Vodafone’s own for attention (e.g. does Nokia’s Ovi offering seem to have more traction than, say, Blackberry App World but the latter has – from a publisher’s perspective – vastly superior price levels). All in all pretty sub-optimal, I think.
On a sideline: I will be moderating a panel on “How to Make Money as a Developer” this week at Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona and I will be having the immense pleasure of having two operators on the panel (Orange and Telefonica-O2) as well as Microsoft (representing the OS side). This Vodafone announcement highlights some of the challenges the industry is facing. Interesting times!
Apple’s iPhone is only a marketing fad for vain urbanites. True purists go for Android. Those who see the light in volume go for Nokia or Samsung.
All this are points often heard when one dives into the deeper echolons of most mobile tech blog or forum. Engineers throw up their hands because those “American-centric media types” “don’t get it” and only wave their flag for whatever Steve Jobs, turtle neck and all may put up onto the big screens of his church.
I am not American and I am not a media type. And I don’t wear turtle necks (well, not since c. 1989 at least). And yet, I do prefer my iPhone (3G) over my Nexus One. And this despite obvious advantages of the Nexus: better screen, quicker, haptic feedback (yes, Mr Jobs, I do like that), the concept of open source, etc, etc. So why do I stick to the iPhone? Fanboy? Marketing fad? Vain urbanite?
Here’s why: I have been trying to set up my Nexus so it will do what my iPhone does, and I am not talking of playing a fancy game or running some other app that is not (yet) available on Android. I am talking about the two key things I need a phone for (41-year-old non-techie I am), and that is phone calls and e-mail; calendar (with sync) is important, too. For the former I need my address book, and I need it to sync properly. For the latter, I need my (admittedly too many) e-mail accounts set up on my device and syncing properly. As to calendar, wait for it below. Alas, two very different experiences:
- On the iPhone, you do the following: 1) plug the phone into your computer, 2) answer “yes, please” when iTunes asks you if it should sync contacts and e-mail addresses, 3) get yourself a cup of coffee, 4) walk off.
On the Nexus, you’re OK (-ish) if your life evolves around Google. With a Gmail account and associated contacts (and/or calendars), you’re sort of OK. It does all that. Now – shock, horror – I do not actually send all my mail from Gmail and my contacts are mainly dealt with in my address book (take Outlook or whatever you want if you’re a Windows user). And I use iCal and not Google Calendar. And so it starts: there is no desktop application that would help me do this. On a Mac, the phone is not even recognised when you plug it in (and that is a rare thing on a Mac; is this another piece of Apple vs. Google? I don’t know but I doubt it). So you are finding yourself setting everything up by hand! Entering the POP3 and SMTP (or IMAP) server addresses, user names, passwords, etc, etc for seven e-mail accounts is no fun. And (remember I am not a techie) invariably leads to some box checked wrongly here or a typo in a password there and, kawoom, nothing works. I can set up a Google Calendar/iCal sync BUT that will only sync the specific Google Calendar bit between the two, and not any of my other (work, home) calendars. I can sync my address book with Google, so that works. The whole procedure took me the better part of 45 minutes, including lots of corrections and swearing and led to me abandoning a half-configured beauty of an Android phone. Great result.
So why is that?
My answer is: because they design it with engineer-centric design. And that is wrong! Why? Well, because most people are not engineers! An engineer thinks something along the following: I am Google and we love the cloud. Therefore, I will design everything so that it will adhere to that principle and will – in a purist kind of way – design everything in a way that you can beautifully and seamlessly set everything up – if and as long as you use all the wonderful Google services we have. And if you don’t get that, you’re not worthy.
The same works with Nokia: we’re Nokia and we have the best hardware, the best distribution and an incredibly good and powerful plethora of services around it (we did spend time, resource and money after all to become mighty competitors in maps [Navteq], music [Comes with Music], apps [Ovi - and the many iterations before it], etc). I will therefore design everything in a way that I can let this hardware shine as best I can; I mean: we had video calls since 2005, for elk’s sake! And if you are too dumb to configure everything in a proper way and cannot find the destination to where your downloads were stored, you’re not worthy.
Apple looks at things a little differently (and it is not only for the better although, for most people, it is): they provide a tool that brings everything I need over to my phone just like that. Job done. Easy! They will look at whatever tools they need for this. And if it means extending iTunes (which, yes, I know, they had already) to accommodate syncing data other than music and video to something other than a computer, than so be it. In that, they follow their own philosophy as slavishly as the other guys do but they do design it from a people-centric rather than an engineer-centric point of view. And that is why it works so well for people that are not (also) engineers.
They key point is this: Apple does not try (or at least not in your face) to change what people do. If I want to run my e-mail off 5 different domains, then so be it. If I prefer my contacts to sit on my disk rather than in the cloud, that’s fine. They’ll give me tools to facilitate doing what I do already and don’t lecture me on what I have to do to make it work. That this brings about subtle changes in user behaviour is fine: if you convince me gradually that things work better one way rather than another, I might be converted. But to tell me “my way or the highway” does not work! Ever!
The downside is Apple’s control mania, which blocks things (sometimes fairly questionably) because they are (or only might) be out of their control. And this is where Google, Nokia and all the others could score: try to combine things! If you would look at how Apple does things, and then – at the very end – you provide a door (doesn’t have to be a trap door, can be a flashy entry portal) to the innards and machine room of your device, so you can show off whatever you want and open the marvels of technology to those who can and want to handle it – so they can turn their super-smartphone into an uber-super-smartphone. But do leave normal people alone.
In the post-iPhone era, things have changed already (a little): you now get hidden installers (that do not ask you 100 questions on where you want to do what and where and under what penalties and with which risks), you get better interfaces, etc. BUT the default is still engineer-centric and not people-centric. Improve this, and the iPhone killer can be yours!
Image credit: http://www.ntamco.com/main/images/stories/design-is-a-behaviour.jpg
Taiwanese handset maker and Android maven HTC has bought French idle-screen specialists Abaxia for $13m (or so industry sources say). Abaxia says it increases ARPU
by putting services at a zero-click distance to the user and pushing services directly to the front screen.
Think push notifications to a J2ME feature phone. Abaxia works with carriers and OEM to optimize the interface across multiple devices from different suppliers, which seems an apparent benefit to carriers as it will allow them to make their on-device brand communication consistent throughout the handsets available through them. That an OEM should then buy the company could therefore surprise…
And as to the use of idle screens? Hm, I am not totally convinced: an idle screen is, well, idle. I may be tempted to jump to it if an app sends me something from a friend (because, hey, it’s a friend in need) but I am not sure if the same attention can be garnered from the latest and greatest service offer from your operator. This is however what Abaxia claims it excels in. According to its website, the company helps
to drive not only data revenue but [...] to recover failing voice ARPU and secure advertising ARPU.
And here, well, show me the money. I have yet to see a convincing solution for this, and I am not sure if an attempt to capture the idle screen is the way to go.
However, when it comes to interface improvements, it might just work. So all might not be lost. And, in any event, congratulations to the teams at Abaxia and HTC!
Gartner published the latest smartphone numbers for Q1/2010 (or so I read), and it is testament to the continuing rise of this segment: sales increased by nearly 50% year-on-year (and do remember that there was this recession-thing last year). Total sales were 54.3m units in the first quarter of this year. Not too shabby!
On the OS side, the rising stars are Android (9.6% global market share from 1.6% a year ago), which is now bigger then Windows Mobile (and it took it only a year!) and iPhone (15.4% vs 10.5% in Q1/2009). The silverback gorilla still is Symbian which dropped to 44.3% from 48.8%. Blackberry is also down (albeit only slightly: 19.4% from 20.6%).
Here’s a table:
According to a recent report, Android has zoomed past Apple in US smartphone OS share, taking the #2 spot with 28% behind Blackberry (36%) but now ahead of Apple iPhone OS with 21% (and, yes, I know that Apple somewhat lamely queried the accuracy of this). Be it as it is, Android is growing (and we all knew that, did we not?). According to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, the company now sees 65,000 new phones being activated per day; this equates to a run rate of 23.7m for the year.
This is good news for handset manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung (all of who are shipping successful Android devices) as well as Google (which is fairly tightly embedded in the whole thing) but does it also reflect on the wider ecosystem of developers producing applications and services for the platform?
The main points that are usually mentioned are:
- Low overall numbers: Digital Chocolate’s CEO Trip Hawkins moaned the company sold less than 5,000 units of its hit game “Tower Bloxx” on Android Market, which was indicative for the lack of uptake. If that is so overall, may remain to be seen. I beg to take into a account that Android as a platform is fairly new and the overall install base is still smaller than its competitors.
- High price-sensitivity: according to an AdMob survey in January 2010, 12.6% of Android apps are paid vs. 20.4% on iPhone OS; the same survey revealed however that the average monthly spend was actually similar on Android ($8.36) and iPhone ($8.18) though higher on iPod Touch, which runs the iPhone OS, too ($11.39).
- Return policy: Google allows users to return an app for a full refund within 24 hours of purchase. This is seen particularly onerous for games (a lot of which can be played start to finish inside that time frame).
- Discovery: developers feel Google fell well short of Apple on this one. There is no possibility to discover apps from outside a mobile device (i.e. no iTunes) and Google has not really done anything in terms of marketing either (very much unlike Apple).
- Ease of purchase: I would like to add ease of use of the buying process. Registration with Google Checkout is a far, far cry from setting up an iTunes account. This will very likely change very, very soon as Google will add carrier-billing now that it decided to move distribution of its branded Google Nexus One from D2C web-only distribution to the usual carrier model.
So what about it? Let us not forget how young Android is – even compared to the adolescent iPhone. The platform launched from an install-base of zero some 18 months ago, with the HTC G1 being the only device out there – and available through a single US carrier, T-Mobile (with a market share around 12%). Whilst I do not want to take anything away from Apple’s superior accomplishments with the iPhone, the growth of Android is not too shabby either! And with a plethora of manufacturers deploying Android-based handsets now (cf. the growth numbers above), Android is likely to be powering into the fore even more (irrespective of whether or not the above stats on it overtaking iPhone OS in the US already being true).
Price-sensitivity is not actually as bad as people think: the aforementioned AdMob survey shows nigh identical average spending patterns. Personal impressions may again be hampered with by early experiences: be reminded that, initially, there were only free apps out there. They will surely still be hanging around, but will they also for much longer?
Apple has always been extremely scrupulous on approval of applications on its platform. And whilst this may now be held against it every now and then (e.g. in the case of nipples or Pulitzer-price-winning political cartoons), it has helped it to uphold a fairly high standard of quality, which Android was lacking (initially) and which even led to “crap-filter” apps. One can however safely assume that this will change once the market size improves: Apple’s margins might be superior to everyone else in the world but that does not mean that the margins game developers can achieve with it are the same. With Android OS primed to expand at a much faster pace, the numbers will clearly speak for it, and – I would posit – that will bring more and more quality to the store, with the fads sinking fast.
Also, do not forget the big brands: they do not necessarily care for a small share of the audience only. Whilst Android was fledgling and just starting up, they may have held back but, ultimately, they are about reach, and Android is certainly bound to deliver that. I would therefore suggest that we will be seeing an influx of large brands (gaming and otherwise) onto the Android platform very soon, and this will also help user orientation as to what to go for and what not.
The discovery of apps will also be helped by the more open nature of Android. There have been a number of announcement for curated stores by carriers (e.g. Vodafone, Orange, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, etc.), and these will certainly not be allowing a free for all! Besides that, the app store model does per se pose some challenges on developers: the more successful a platform (and/or store) is, the harder it is to be discovered. One might need to look for other solutions in that respect…
The billing side of things is bound to improve, too. With carrier-billing around the corner (cf. supra), this will get easier and better. And also easier and better than it is on the iPhone: charges will simply appear on your carrier bill (smart pipe anyone?). Besides that, the business models for games are undergoing significant changes anyhow: Freemium takes centre-stage, and so it should: the model allows people to try a game out and be charged for it only when they know that a) they like it, b) what they are being charged for (e.g. that coveted sword, a couple of precious lives, or that cool background theme).
Remains the return policy. I have been raising this with Google, and it must be pointed out that similar things exist on the iPhone (they’re just “better” hidden). So besides the obvious (Google’s good intentions came back to haunt them), it is also time to think of new business models (cf. Freemium). It is not something constrained to Android: transparency requires you to deliver value. If you do, there are good and transparent means to monetize that value; and users will follow.
So, yes, there is game in Android. If you don’t believe it now, just wait for it! 
Next week, I will be speaking at the 1st Apps Summit, a conference organized by the Conference Group in Wiesbaden (near Frankfurt). The event, which runs on 4/5 May, features high-profile speakers from the creme de la creme of German (and international) business, including:
- Otto
- Lufthansa
- Deutsche Post
- Axel Springer
- Avis
- HRS
- G+J
- Volkswagen
- Yahoo
- Admob
- Madvertise
If you’re close, come by. It should be great! The conference programme and more info are here: www.conferencegroup.de/m-commerce
We said it before: mobile is the biggest mass medium on the planet, and now game developers (and not only the sometime masochists that have been there for years) flog to it. According to a fairly large survey by GDR (which can be yours for too many dollars to count and has been reported about here) among 800 developers, a quarter of them are now making games for mobile phones with most of them (namely 75%) – surprise, surprise – choosing the iPhone as their platform of launch. This is doubling last year’s figures (apparently).
The iPhone and its non-phone sibling, iPod Touch (and you have been reading that a year ago here, here and here) are proving a more attractive launchpad onto portable gaming platforms than dedicated gaming systems like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.
The reasons will be the same as they were a year ago: a platform that is relatively easy to work to and a simple distribution model. With the number of downloads Apple continues to pile up, it is no wonder that developers from “traditional” platforms (PC downloadable, online, etc) are attracted to that. They will also be less scared of the marketing challenges since they had had to market their games in the whole wide oceans of the Internet previously (i.e. there were no carrier safe havens with feature slots). Whilst this does not mean that every traditional developer’s games will be successful on the app store, the threshold to enter is lower.
It will be interesting to see if the wave will roll further into other “smarter” platforms, including Android, Windows Mobile (see the latest rumours for WinME 7, including full Xbox Live gaming implementation here), Symbian Maemo and Blackberry. With the device numbers clearly speaking in favour of that, platforms becoming more accessible and, last but not least, with easier paths to the users via OEM app stores, this is to be expected. Good times for mobile gamers!
We’re in full swing in the conference season, and next week, one of the more exciting conferences in the game space opens its doors in pretty Hamburg again: Casual Connect Europe, the old world iteration of the event by the Casual Games Association gives a fantastic cross-section of the state of the game across platforms. There are a number of strands to follow, including mobile, where a lot – unsurprisingly – centers around smartphones and the iPhone as well as the change to ecosystems that app stores but also the higher (actual) connectivity of these newer handsets have brought about.
I will be there, too (attending and speaking). So if you are in town (or want to get a good grip on the latest and greatest in the casual games space, head over to Hamburg and give me a shout.
The latest iteration of the Carnival of the Mobilists is out over at Andrew Grill’s London Calling blog (and it is the last one for this year, too). It contains interesting posts from MMS initiatives, to the use of SMS in political campaigning, app store comparisons, a look at Samsung’s Bada and much more. It also includes my very own post on the potential of Android.
Head over there, give it a good read and enjoy yourself!
Today seems to be the day of “the others”, huh? First Android, now Symbian. But the news are too significant to ignore:
Nokia’s app store Ovi is now clocking 1m downloads a day. Make that 300m p.a. Compare this to Apple’s, what, 5.7m per day. That was c. 1 year ago though, so let’s double that, shall we? So, 1/10 then shall we say?
However, Nokia and its much maligned Ovi Store shows that it can actually starts flexing its muscle (what the law of numbers can mean, I showed on the example of Vodafone: its app store is bound to deliver – even on the abysmal uptake of legacy J2ME devices – some 200,000 downloads a day).
Nokia says it is growing 100% month-on-month, and with this pace would overtake Apple in the near future. Doable? Almost certainly! Why? Because of the law of big numbers. Nokia has about 5x as many smartphones out there as there are Apple iPhone and iPod Touch devices combined, which of course means that Nokia would overtake Apple in terms of total app downloads when each Nokia smartphone user would only download 1/5 of what iPhone/iPod Touch users download. Same fun? Arguable…
I do not know how many devices come preloaded with the Ovi Store but this has always been a huge driver: embed and prosper. Nokia confirmed as much, too. But let’s only assume that it is a tiny fraction (none of the legacy devices out there had it embedded, that’s for sure). And it shows you the potential: Nokia has a whopping 1.3bn phones out there (yes, you heard correctly), and let only a fraction of these use the Ovi Store, you are looking at a massive number, outstripping Apple immediately. Now, I doubt that they will outstrip the App Store in terms of apps per user but there is no team that plays football as well as FC Barcelona, and the others don’t give up either…
Nokia has made a lot of mistakes recently, with its stores, and others: to come out with something that was thought to be “good enough” is bad: strive to be the best at least, will you? Incidentally, it might have avoided the scrambling it finds itself in since the Apple app store launched. Hah, who would have thought? But let’s be fair: Nokia went about its business better in the past, it has unprecedented scale. Examples? What is the best-selling consumer electronics device of all time? The Nokia 1100 with more than 200m sold devices). Does anyone remember sub-10 Megapixel digital cameras? Well, there are few left, you see. Nokia killed that market by putting out camera phones with Carl Zeiss lenses: good, good stuff. I was in the room of the hotel in Zell am See when they laid the growth curve of camera phones over the shrinking sales curve of digital cameras. Impressive! Stand-alone PDAs? Gone. GPS devices? Hardly existing outside phones anymore (even Tom Tom satnav devices are offered with 50% discounts this Christmas).
It’s not over yet, it is only the beginning! Oh, and then there will be the mobile web to come, huh? Just wait for it!!! It’s bigger than the “other” Internet already (warning: this is one of Tomi’s monster posts… !
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a keynote at Droidcon, the (so far) largest Android conference, in Berlin. I spoke about why brands should look at it (I posted it here). Brands care for volume. They’re not necessarily interested in small segments of the market.
The iPhone is not an exception, it is rather a powerful reinforcement of that idea: in spite of its niche, it provides ROI (and warm, fluffy PR as well as content execs) when you compare the cost of the activity (creating an app) with its effects. The conclusion is however not that the iPhone is such a big driver in itself but that EVEN the iPhone (with its very limited scale) generates positive ROI.
The mobile phone market (and its associated content offerings) is extremely fragmented. A plethora of platforms (J2ME, BREW, Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, a couple of proprietary ones, some with middleware, now Bada and Maemo; wonderful…) and distribution channels (traditionally carriers, and lots of them, plus D2C distributors like Thumbplay, Jamba, Zed, Buongiorno, etc and now, increasingly, app stores: everything from the App Store to Android Market, Ovi, Blackberry App World and countless others). Tough for brands: they do not really care for a subset of users consisting of owners of J2ME devices on, say, Orange UK (no offence, Orange).
The ecosystem is tough to address as every mobile game developer will tell you. Which is why the iPhone was such a huge game changer: one device on one platform with one distribution channel globally. And all presented well, easy to use, great UI and users get to content with very few clicks and without unnecessary warnings). It is also always connected (rather than only connected in theory) and hence opens the doors to a new way of consuming, promoting and using content, specifically interactive one such as games and apps. Everyone else scrambles to follow but they struggle because it is such a different way to look at the world (well, different when you are a network operator or handset OEM). And because of this, competition on this platform is now fierce, very fierce.
But now then, why would one support Android? I mean, Gameloft just said it sucks (well, commercially at least). Why do I think it will be (is?) big? And why do I think one should look at it now rather than, well, later?
For starters: it took Gameloft a full 3 days or so to realize the mess it made with its announcement to cut back Android; and swiftly issuing a statement that said pretty much the contrary… But, heck, we’re not running everywhere where Gameloft runs, do we?
Android’s potential is enormous! Not because Eric Schmitt, Google’s CEO said so. But because it is O.P.E.N. This gives it a potential that is beyond all others: it enjoys wide support from vendors (HTC, Dell, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Huawei, Motorola, Acer, Creative and countless more), carriers (it’s a little like the who’s who: China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT DoCoMo, Sprint, KDDI, Softbank, T-Mobile, TIM, Telefonica, Vodafone) and has a very powerful sponsor indeed in Google. The result is a huge number of devices (cf. Wikipedia page here), and they will grow. They will grow faster than Apple can because of the law of big numbers. Even if Apple may retain an edge on running the overall sexiest package but it will not withstand the overall numbers. Incidentally, the afore distinguishes Android – for the time being – from Symbian (which is now also open source): it lacks a convinced sponsor at the moment (Nokia seems to be wavering in its support) and also seems a little clunky (no open can be so strong so as to support a weak or rather outdated proposition). However, with its massive install base of 280m+ devices it could rebound if they fix this.
Android stretches further though: it is not limited to mobile devices, it goes across to eBook readers, set-top boxes, netbooks, you name it. Users increasingly swap between screens. As a content and/or service provider, you want to be with them, be of service to them, wherever they are. They should not have to worry, you should! Android makes this relatively easy for you.
The Power of Open is tremendous. It provides for (theoretically) infinite growth. And you want to be there. And you want to be there now: They say, a tidal wave of apps is coming. You won’t catch the train once you can see it…
Do not forget: people (and brands) want to reach people. Full stop. They do not necessarily want to reach people who happen to have an XYZ device running the ABC OS on the carrier X in country Y! Apple is wonderful (I am an avid iPhone user and do not plan to change – well, yet) but it is a niche. And if you have business to do, you may want to look beyond that niche.
Here’s this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists (its 201st iteration in fact). This week, the Carnival is hosted over at Phil Barrett’s Burning the Bacon blog, and he has lots of goodies to share, including my own post showing an example of why Nokia struggles. Besides this, you will find posts on:
- Android-based tablets
- Droid taking out a bite on RIM (or will it?)
- a nice post on the ubiquity of SMS and
- NFC (near-field communication for you ignorant ones…
Go now and give it a good read. You’ll find the carnival here.
