Nokia recently shook the world by starting to provide its Ovi Maps app including turn-by-turn navigation for free. And only just under 2 weeks later, it announced that users have downloaded the app more than 1.4m times. Good stuff.
The numbers led some people (Nokia’s Vanjoki as well as various industry pundits) to claim the dawn of Ovi downloads had arrived. I beg to differ, and here’s why:
1. A mapping application with turn-by-turn navigation cost, until very recently, anywhere between $30-80 a pop. And all of a sudden it is free. It is a little akin selling a Porsche Cayman for the price of a VW Polo: people will jump through any number of hoops for that. This is not proof that the download boom has finally also arrived with proud owners of Nokia phones; it merely shows that this is too good an offer to decline.
2. 1.4m downloads across the Symbian install base of c. 300m is not actually that impressive a number. To put it into context: a simple ad-funded game, Waterslide Extreme by German high-end development house Fishlabs, which is also a free download, clocked on the iPhone more than 10m downloads. As far as I am aware, the developer still sees around 40,000 downloads per day. And this is a long time after its release and for an app that fills significantly less of a need than satellite navigation. But even if one leaves aside this last bit (which is taking a very favourable view – no ceteris paribus here), Ovi Maps would need to hit roughly 100m downloads before it could say it was, pound for pound, as successful as Waterslide Extreme (NB: this is not exactly true because Nokia only supports some 20m devices to date).
3. It is not actually proof that the Ovi Store works as users can also download the app via the Nokia Website or via the “SW Update” application on the phone. At a time when the store still needs 90 seconds (measured on an N97 running on a Vodafone UK 3G network) and more to even load the opening screen, I struggle to believe that the store will see an uptake across the band.
4. It is likely being a bit of a one-off: Nokia also announced that, from March, every Nokia will come pre-loaded with the app.
Now, to clarify things: it is great news for boosting awareness of mobile phones as location-aware devices, and the pre-install on future phones will help that. It is likely that this will contribute to the fall of the dedicated satnav sector in much the same way Nokia’s landmark deal with Carl Zeiss lenses (and the resulting higher image quality of photos taken with your phone’s camera) was a doomsday scenario for the lower end of the digital camera market.
Also: Ovi Maps looks like a VERY good app: it covers more than 180 countries (car & pedestrian navigation: 74; traffic: 10), it is available in a whopping 46 (!) languages. It includes 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world and incorporates Lonely Planet and Guide Michelin city guides. It is good, no doubt!
Finally, Nokia started early with the mantra of location-awareness. It was just that it had not executed particularly well to date. I know there is probably much more in the works than is visible to the untrained eye (or any other eye not from within the company) but the company does need to ramp up here since its hard-earned (and well-deserved) fame is/was beginning to fade quickly.
It would be fantastic if the world market leader would see uptake of applications rise sharply. I would very much like to ask them though not to fool themselves into believing that the store is not so bad after all only because of one successful application on it. There is a lot of work to do. The Ovi Maps case simply shows that one does not have to be a crazy Apple fan boy to be craving cool and useful apps. So, dear Nokia, continue to study the app store and try solve the shortfalls of the Ovi Store. It’ll be good for everyone!
This is something of an old hat but, alas, the conference season in full swing (with my day job making serious demands there) and a little flu to go with it, and I keep falling behind.
Anyhow, at the Davos World Economic Forum‘s “power panel power panel” with the head honchos from Google (Eric Schmidt), Sony (Sir Howard Stringer), NBC Universal (Jeffrey Zucker) and, to top it all off, China Mobile (Wang Jianzhou), a couple of interesting comments were made that do merit some reflection, I think. Google CEO Schmidt in particular was vocal on a couple of points of interest.
One point is so blatantly obvious that I hardly dare to repeat it: “it’s the recreation of the Internet.” Doh. Yes, all the same features, all the same cornerstones: restricted bandwidth, warped business models (one used to pay per minute for dial-up and/or for KB of data, remember, and that would include any ads delivered to you [only that there weren't that many -- for rather obvious reasons]), restricted processing power of devices (my 80286 with a whopping 2o MB hard drive was considered a rocket at its time, and I was the first in my class with a 9,600 bps modem), etc, etc. So for the whole world to get all excited when Mr Schmidt mentions these parallels, I was, well, somewhat disappointed.
Moving on, Schmidt suggested that mobile phones, in particular future ones, would increasingly offer the wonderful touch of being location-aware, in other words come with GPS, and this is indeed what users seem to want. China Mobile’s Wang pondered that phone calls might in fact come for free as LBS may well take over… But isn’t Google one of a very select few who can actually can run carrier-independent zone detection, i.e. get proximity data already? Why do I need to know when a user is within 3′ from my burger shop, aren’t 100 yards enough? As long as he/she’s hungry, I’d say it is. So, is it all there already then? It of course is only one piece…
I would venture that it is in the process of unfolding: next to the handset technology (data usage per se isn’t much fun on a 4-year old black-and-white 6310i), the main obstacle to a more comprehensive take-up is costs of use, namely data charges. Do you remember the Internet in dial-up days? Connect, retrieve e-mail, disconnect. Not much time for anyone to get additional messages (commercial or not) across then. Only when flat rate data packages became available did people start to use the medium to its potential. And this seems to be where we will go in 2008. A lot of the large carriers now offer flat rate data plans and, as it wouldn’t be much fun otherwise, open their walled gardens in the process. This effectively gets the Internet proper onto the user’s phones, and not only a minutely small, hand-picked extract from it. Will this stir usage and uptake? You bet!
Could it be better? Oh, the holy grail of connecting data: see who was where when with whom doing what… This meets widespread privacy concerns and would also require a number of rather complex arrangements between key players that all guard their little secrets jealously as they don’t want to give their advantage away: the carrier doesn’t want to tell, the advertizer either, and the solutions provider wouldn’t ever.
But, hey, aside from that, it is only the “usual”, i.e. the things that I and so many other frequently lament: fragmentation, non-availability of consistent platforms and interfaces. But on all of these fronts, huge steps have been made forward (e.g. do Apple iPhone users google 50x as often as others, and 95% regularly use the Internet; other carriers moan the data usage is “unheard of“). If it is Google’s 4 demands or less doesn’t matter so much: as long as there comes more consistence, so that users get familiar with the approach and the use, it’ll fly. With the mobile phone always sitting in their pocket, i is too close to people’s hearts — well hands.
What a title, huh? Following the hype on the Internet with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and all the others, social networks started to see traction on mobile, too. Jaiku (acquired by Google) showed the way. Twitter‘s next move is waiting to happen. Plazes is waiting in the wings. And then there are all the others still flying under the radar (or, in Silicon Valley speak, operating in stealth mode). These would include people like French Mobiluck and German student-come-entrepreneurs from aka-aki. There is also Finnish venture Ironstar Helsinki whose MoiPal combines mobile, social networks and games.
Most of these companies attempt a rather wonderful thing, namely to bring the networks back into the real world by combining it with location-based (or should one better say: location-sensitive) components. Mobiluck scored early successes with a Bluetooth application that scans the immediate vicinity for other users; think Saudi girls quite literally under wraps having the opportunity to contact that OMG guy on the other side of the club… Mobiluck tells us they scored more than 750,000 downloads of their application, and all with the most basic of seed funding and without marketing. Impressive!
Unfortunately, very little is being published about the actual success of these initiatives. Facebook got some coverage over the release of their Blackberry client, Jaiku more or less went silent since the acquisition by Google (probably working hard to integrate with other Google goodies), Mobiluck and aka-aki is in closed betas, MoiPal continues to grow its proposition but doesn’t engage in much PR so far either (some coverage here though). Twitter seems to get their heads down and work (a brief evangelizing piece in the Guardian was about it). Plazes holds a “camp” in Berlin later this month to develop its propositions further but doesn’t tell us much more either…
On a strategic level, it may be expected that a couple of online and other media players without a footprint in the space might feel inclined to gobble up some of these guys: if Google leads the way (as they do with Jaiku), others may feel compelled to follow. So where’s the big thing?
Social networks are about interaction. Facebook started to gain traction because US college students had an opportunity to organize their social lives. In the US, the relative penetration of broadband is high, whilst advanced mobile use may have to catch up with some European (and Asian) countries. However, the links always are somewhere in the real world, and mobile phones offer the opportunity to actually link back to some real-world beacons, a simple yet incredibly powerful one being location (isn’t it so much more exciting to liaise with that hot someone if you know that he/she is within a couple of hundred yards from where you are?). Your mobile is always in your pocket (yes, check now), and it carries the inherent possibility to identify your geographical location right now. Simple, huh? However, simplicity requires that speed, ease of use and reliability of the service are a given. They are the match points – next to absolute reach of course.
The integration of currently existing tools, most prominently IM, is a given here, and most of the companies mentioned above provide for integration of MSN Messenger (or Windows Live Messenger as it is now known) already. And this makes a lot of sense as it is a convenient and now incredibly established way of communication between friends. The integration of IM into mobile social networks also promotes the convergence of the Internet as it is (or was?) known and mobile devices. People who use IM are normally always online whenever they are on their computers. Extending it to mobile is quite literally a no-brainer and moreover the easiest gate of entry: it is nothing new to users, and it adds a lot of convenience to mobile users.
Technically, triangulation (using signal strength with base stations) seemed to have been the game initially. However, as this was too tough to do (deep integration with every carrier, and for rather sensitive data), everyone from early leaders (remember ZagMe?) all the way to Jaiku, Twitter, etc relied and relies on the crudest of things, namely SMS. Facebook has a rudimentary WAP site and a rather cool Blackberry app but then? Mobiluck uses a combination: WAP site, web access plus Bluetooth (a downloadable app using the handsets’ Bluetooth functionality). This is promising as it utilizes handset-based features, which does away with long-winding negotiations with every carrier and a much easier available dataset of location data. Now, does it also experiment with a deeper integration with everyone’s new favourite feature, namely GPS (see here for the latest on the hype)? Let’s hope so! And let’s also hope that this will be only step 1 of many to make social networks truly social again — by interacting with real people in real life contexts.
The Global Positioning System (better known by its acronym GPS) sees a meteoric rise to popularity on mobile phones. According to a survey 24% of all Americans want GPS as a feature on their next phone, and they seem to be served: nearly every large OEM offers the feature in their higher-end models already and others rack up to get there (Nokia N95, HTC Touch, Blackberry 8800, to name a few). And – no buzz without the iPhone these days – there is rumour that one of the GPS leaders, TomTom, is developing the respective module for the iPhone.
As the feature shows appeal to a very wide demographic, this might become a feature like the camera today: initially dissed (“who needs a camera in his phone?”), camera phones are the overwhelming standard today and are putting ever-increasing pressure on digital cameras (well, OK, probably not the high-end SLR but otherwise).
This is not entirely surprising: one does not normally turn to one’s phone when feeling the urge for a movie but it provides true value-add when you walk through the streets of an unknown city (or unknown district of your home town) looking for the right street, and you can actually turn to your phone’s GPS function.
GPS of course provides a completely new take to the holy grail of mobile services, namely LBS (or: location-based services), too. I prefer the term location-aware as such offerings need not necessarily be “based” on this. Way beyond simple “sat nav”, everything from dining out, clubbing, flirting, and generally looking for like-minded people in a given environment would be greatly enhanced by such features. Not to mention marketeers of retailers and consumer brands who are surely already drooling on the thought of what they could do when they could lure consumers into their shops with tailor-made offers just when they walk past their shops. ZagMe was a bit too early for this, it seems but then this was pre-GPS. Brave new world?
And the pretty news comes from Disney Mobile. The MVNO shared some insight on usage patterns of its subscribers, and there is some interesting little pieces of information that would suggest that the combination of a consumer value driver (here: security) with a technology (here: GPS) might make a business:
Allegedly 30% of the their subscribers use its GPS location tracking services (parents can locate their kids via the handsets’ GPS functionality), and parents who do so use the feature 14 times per month on average.
56% of Disney Mobile subscribers are adults and 44% are children.
A take-up rate of 30% of a relatively novel service with high service usage (every other day) is pretty impressive for any media!
Final blurb: 30% of location requests were made from the Web and 70% from the handset, demonstrating the cross-platform nature of the application – and the huge potential of mobiles.
It’s out of its cage! Nokia tells us it started shipping the brand-spanking new N95, which includes – a first outside advanced markets such as Japan – GPS on board of a mobile phone (next to MP3 player with proper 3.5mm audio connector [!], 3D hardware acceleration, WLAN and a 5 mega pixel camera with Carl Zeiss lense)
Now, not only does the phone have GPS but also comes preloaded with Nokia Maps, an application that has the street maps for 150 countries in (the few remaining countries that presumably include such remote places like Queen Anne land in Antarctica probably don’t have streets!).
This would arguably be into the face of Roger McNamee (see yesterday’s post on this) concerning the defeat of multi-purpose devices. If the N95 would take over, it would probably be bye-bye to TomTom and other SatNav single-purpose devices. Since you are carrying your phone with you, it would also reduce the risk of your car being broken into: thieves apparently are mainly to into SatNav devices these days…
