Volker on Mobile

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is out, and it is hosted – very, very fittingly – from Vancouver by the good folks over at WIP Connector.

As always, there is exciting stuff on there. Besides not one but two posts of yours truly (which I trust you have read by now; if not, they’re on the Freemium model for mobile and a look on the web v apps), a lot of the industry’s luminaries are speaking out:

• AJ Wright has an intriguing post on how software and services dominate the overall experience (over and above hardware). A sneak preview into the future…;
• MobiThinking’s Andy Favell looks at if mobile search is working;
• Ajit Jaokar offer us a free download of his latest book on “Open Mobile: Understing the Impact of Open Mobile – Implications for Telecoms/Devices, Web, Social Network, Media and Personal Privacy” (I know the title is a mouthful but the man has a very sharp mind indeed!); and
• Tomi Ahonen, master of stats (and many other things) treats us to an account of Google’s mobile firsts.

Enough teasers, this. Now, go over and read the good stuff here.

Back in summer last year (when there was a whole lot less rain), I looked at comparing the mobile web to mobile apps. There is quite a discussion raging on which it will be. The Church of Jobs raving on about their uncountable number of app downloads on the one hand, and the brave warriors of ubiquity on a technical level on the other.

Asking the right Questions

I would posit that there are three distinct issues to be discussed:

1.    What is the web?

2.    What is the mobile web and is it distinct to the web?

3.    What about the content and its context (irrespective of platform)?

Every attempt to an answer should really start from the point of the user (who, I am aware of that, more and more becomes a creator at the same time) because, without them, there is not much of a (commercial) point to it.

Now, distinct to what old lore may have, users do not tend to care for technology much. They care for what technology allows them to do (or not to do). I therefore think the first question to be asked is: can the web do things better than an app (or, indeed, vice versa)? When you then start looking at what is being done (and what users may want to do if and when technology allows them to in a convenient and accessible way), you will come to a couple of easy conclusions.

The web in itself is just one huge content repository,

… which is – currently – being accessed predominantly by browsers. Some questions on this:

• Has this always be that way? No. Pre-web, there were libraries with clever people in them that could help you find what you needed. With enough time, you would eventually get close(r) to the truth.
• Does this always have to be that way? No. Text input via keyboards is not an “intuitive” way of communicating (the old folks here may remember the finger that hovered like a hawk above the keys of an Olympia). May touch control be a game changer? Later more on this…

Prior to Google, people search through catalogues, and they thought that this was an awesome improvement over having to run to libraries and stuff in order to find things. Along come the Google fairies that deliver the same more easily and quickly, and everyone now feels that catalogues are a little quirky and very old-fashioned indeed.

This is to illustrate that the packaging and connection into discovery mechanisms are more important to the usability of the content than its actual delivery. Ease of access matters as, otherwise, there is, well, none.

The mobile web is the web, the web and nothing but the web.

It only so happens it is being accessed from a device with a smaller form factor (that is, until H&M starts shipping those iPad anoraks with monstrously big pockets next autumn). Increasingly, browsers available for mobile devices render web content originally formatted (not created!) for larger devices for the smaller screens. This does not, however, mean that they are the best way to deliver content to a small device.

One big thing speaking in favour of a unified web platform (including on mobile devices) to deploy content is, of course, volume and unit costs: all other things equal, the cost of deploying via a unified web platform is significantly lower than on others (no need to build custom solutions for every man and his dog and unit costs drop to virtually zero very quickly. This is arguably the key argument in favour of the web but I would suggest that it will only work if you can deliver at least as well as other routes of deploying that content offer to.

The usefulness of content is, per se, independent from the device.

In other words, device constraints have, per se, nothing to do with content being accessed, used, consumed, processed. By way of example, who would have thought that people would read a book on the go in the early 90s? Doesn’t seem to be a big thing anymore today, does it? And why not? Because we got used to solutions that make this convenient.

It is a question of packaging and approach that will determine how well (or poorly) access and usage of content on any device works. If you call it an app or a widget or whatever else does not matter. Most people just do not care. They look at how easy it is to retrieve the latest weather forecast. If an app does that more quickly and comfortably, they’ll use that. If a widget does the same thing, they’ll choose what they like more. And if you can deliver the same thing as easily, as comfortably, as quickly and as discoverable on the web, they might just do that.

Not everything is delivered best on the web

Now, the web is big, it is very big indeed but it is unlikely – despite of what Apple tells us – that there will be an app for every web page. Then again, does there need to be? No. Why not? Because not every web page will be accessed from mobile devices or, rather, will not need to be accessed from mobile devices in numbers large enough to be of commercial relevance.

Hah, I hear you say, he is taking a short cut here: the above implies that, if there is a need to access content from a web page, an app is the better solution. And, yes, you are right. But I will come to this later.

Sometimes, the web does not even work well through a browser. Google Earth is one of these: it is a desktop application because of functionality constraints over the web. It is connected, mind you.

Not everything is best delivered through an app

The equation works around the other way, too. There are things I will normally access through a browser, simply because it would be too onerous to have a single app for all web pages I access. Moreover, there are indeed web pages (this blog included) that use nifty code (don’t ask me; it’s run through WP plug-ins) to render content in a more useful way for smaller devices. Would you care much for a “Volker on Mobile app”? Probably not. Because I only update this blog a couple of times a week, and it probably does not generate enough value-add to merit the (presumably) superior functionality you could deliver with an app.

Some things don’t work on Mobile, or do they?

Did you ever use Google Earth via its iPhone app? If not, let me tell you that is a pretty poor experience compared to the wow-feeling all of us will have felt the first time we played around with it on their desktop app. Why? Because it just doesn’t translate properly. Imagine watching Independence Day on the iPod Touch: you’d get cute little spaceships but not really the awe-inspiring size Emmerich had in mind when shooting it.

Both of these lack of one thing mobile can never deliver, namely the big screen. They are, in their current packaging, unsuitable. This may not however apply to subsets of the content and/or information embedded in them. Google Earth may provide useful data that, if re-packaged, delivers a powerful and good user experience on a mobile device, too.

Functionality and Usability are King and Queen

Almost all considerations result from and in questions of functionality and usability. On devices with larger form factors and constant high-bandwidth connections, a lot of rich content can be appropriately delivered via a web browser. The same cannot (yet) be said of mobile devices. Even with 3G, performance of rich media can often be shoddy. Poor user experience = frustration = low or no usage.

With 4G on its way, this may change considerably. With down-speeds North of 10 Mbps to your mobile device, there is a lot of rich content that you can get to your device in no time (or, rather, real time). That would be functionality solved then.

In the short and medium term, I see, however, two other constraints, and these are a) usability from a device perspective and b) usability from a user perspective.

Currently, a device running constantly on a high-speed data connection sucks battery life. With an iPhone already running on something like 30 minutes when in full use (OK, I exaggerate, and, yes, I do know that Nokias do better – but then, they are not as usable [anymore]), this is a non-starter. People will not do it. Once this is solved (and this is a question of when, not of if), this goes away, and that will be a huge constraint removed.

The other obstacle is usability from a user perspective. What does an app actually do? It pre-packages content. And because it (or some of it) is already in there, you don’t have to download it again. It also allows you to build in specific input mechanisms that optimise use for the mobile device (and how this impacts uptake, the iPhone has shown!).

Touch as a game changer?

Touch control is very much on the fore. And it makes perfect sense: that stylus just seems to dangle on the end of one (OK, normally two) of your limbs, it’s always on, it’s always with you (quite literally at arm’s reach) and you learn how to control it from pretty early on in life. Heck, it’s even been used to get us onto this earth in the first place (or so some people believe).

Touch control then also does away with a few constraints in particular on mobile screens (where mouse control, touchpads, etc are not normally readily available nor as useful as they are on a desktop). So once HTML5 is widely deployed (which – I am told – makes the UI life within web pages a whole lot easier), the usability thing might just go the way of the mobile web.

Touch control (and other nifty things; check here for another Apple patent on finger-based input using the camera) then propels the usability forward (or back? the first maps were arguably drawn with fingers in the sand…), and this will be quite helpful – in particular also on the smaller device.

Until then, build apps that incorporate controls that make the user’s life easy (or at least easier). If you call them apps, widgets or whatever else you can come up with, doesn’t really matter…

This week is still all about Casual Connect Europe but then it is off to Barcelona for the annual mobile fest that is Mobile World Congress. I will be there from Sunday night onwards and you should earmark a couple of things (where you will likely be able to meet me, too):

Mobile Sunday has fast become a tradition amongst the mobile bloggerati and it is now being frequented by more and more industry folks. The list of attendees (which funnily still has me with an ancient affiliation that I haven’t held in years) reads well. Check it out and come by for a gentle kickstart into the week!

Next up is the Mobile Premier Awards, the global competition of Mobile Monday-nominated high-flyers where I had the great pleasure and honour to judge upon. The award night is on Monday.

On Wednesday, we have Swedish Beers (Facebook Event page) in Barcelona, which already had 254 confirmed guests (as per FB) the last time I checked.

And on Thursday, Caroline Lewko’s WIP Jam, the developer world’s leading and most beloved un-conference, opens its doors, an event I really look forward to. There’s a party for that, too, of course…

If you would like to get in touch, drop me a line through the contact form.

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!

On 15 February, one of the most exciting showcases of mobile innovation of the year will be on display in Barcelona: the Mobile Premier Awards in Innovation. The awards are the largest start-up competition in the mobile sector and they are a unique grass-roots discovery tool: each chapter of the global community of Mobile Monday chooses one candidate. 49 candidates have been chosen (have a look further down). An international jury (I am flattered and proud to be a member) selects 20 finalists who will pitch in Barcelona at the Palau de la Musica on the afternoon of the first day of the Mobile World Congress.

It is a wonderful display of the innovation and creative power the mobile industry has to offer and I invite you to have a good look at the candidates.

If you are in Barcelona that week (and who isn’t?), you should make sure to book your ticket for the event here.

I hope to see you in Barcelona to celebrate innovation in mobile!

To stay in touch with everything around the awards, follow them on Twitter (@mobilepremier), become a fan on Facbook,

And, once your in Barcelona, you should not miss Mobile Sunday Barcelona 2010, which has fast become an unofficial kick-off event to MWC for mobile bloggers. It is on on Sunday, 14 Feb, from 7pm CET onwards.

Here’s a list of the 49 candidates (with links here):

• MobileMonday Austria – Mobilizy
• MobileMonday Barcelona – fonYou
• MobileMonday Belfast – SpeechStorm
• MobileMonday Bergen – ComCom
• MobileMonday Berlin – spendino
• MobileMonday Bogota – RedSalvavidas
• MobileMonday Brussels – Getyoo
• MobileMonday Buenos Aires – Beepoint
• MobileMonday Caracas – Consorcio Si-SMS
• MobileMonday Chennai – mobiSiteGalore
• MobileMonday Copenhagen – Cepa Mobility
• MobileMonday Dallas – Wave Integrated Marketing Solutions
• MobileMonday Dublin – Locle
• MobileMonday Dusseldorf – Yoose
• MobileMonday Edinburgh – Mobile Acuity
• MobileMonday Estonia – TaxiPal
• MobileMonday Frankfurt – match2blue
• MobileMonday Hamburg – apprupt
• MobileMonday Hungary – InfomatiX
• MobileMonday Jakarta – dotus indonesia
• MobileMonday Kuala Lumpur – CWorks Mobile
• MobileMonday Lithuania – SendFlow
• MobileMonday London – Audioboo
• MobileMonday Madrid – Tooio
• MobileMonday Malmö – Color Monkey
• MobileMonday Medellin – Wanbee
• MobileMonday Melbourne – Callernizer
• MobileMonday Mexico – Binbit
• MobileMonday Mid-Atlantic – Amphetamobile
• MobileMonday Milan – Soundtrckr
• MobileMonday Mumbai – Umundo
• MobileMonday Munich – Aloqa
• MobileMonday New Delhi – Voicetap Technologies
• MobileMonday New York – PercentMobile
• MobileMonday Oslo – Bipper Communication
• MobileMonday Paris – Presselite
• MobileMonday Rest of EMEA – Layar
• MobileMonday Rio de Janeiro – iMusica
• MobileMonday Rome – Mobnotes
• MobileMonday Sao Paulo – Atope
• MobileMonday Shanghai – mInfo
• MobileMonday Silicon Valley – CloudMade
• MobileMonday Singapore – Just Mobile
• MobileMonday Slovenia – Visionect
• MobileMonday Sofia – Bianor
• MobileMonday Stockholm – MoSync
• MobileMonday Tel Aviv – waze
• MobileMonday Toronto – Fonolo
• MobileMonday Vancouver – Sort Shots

A fresh new year with the conference and rumour seasons already in full swing, 2010 promises to becoming an exciting one for all things mobile. So let’s be kicking off another Carnival of the Mobilists (it is carnival season, too, after all). What do we have this week?

Russell Buckley looks at the benefits but also disadvantages of a retail experience online, on mobile and on the high street. He looks at this from the perspective of search vs discovery and, alas, the mobile being, well, mobile, he predicts some impact. Suffice to say, it involves the renaissance of the (much beloved by me) local bookstore! Russell’s post is here.

Mark Jaffe has an almost lyrical contribution musing about “monetizing passion” (and he is quick to point out that, despite the closeness to that other show in Las Vegas last week, he is not talking about adult entertainment). It is an intriguing angle on a well-covered topic: he basically posits that the ability to digitally provide the immediacy of satisfying passion presents one of the greatest marketing opportunities around. I concur! His post is here.

WIP Jam contributes a very insightful guest post by Informa Principal Analyst Malik Saadi who suggests that the fragmented smartphonosphere (great word!) and resultant increasing costs of native development will provide a lever for the mobile web, and he reasons it well! He reckons that the low latency of next-generation networks (LTE et al) will make the web the new ubiquitous platform for app development. If the battery life of the devices holds up, I might add… Malik’s post is here.

The good folks at mobiThinking have a great overview of available mobile metrics reports from the various ad networks, and all of them in one place. A fantastic resource! Their write-up is here.

And, finally, Aviv Revach looks forward to the Mobile World Congress and the second most important thing (after actually finding a place to sit down for your meetings) and is assembling a compilation of networking events (and, well, yes, parties) in Barcelona. Make sure to check in on his post (which he will update) here.

Which concludes this week’s Carnival. Now get back to your work and if you are attending the Mobile Games Forum or the conference that starts the mobile build-up to this summer’s FIFA World Cup, namely M-Football (both in London), make sure to connect; I’ll be at both.

Image credit: http://cbertel.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/carnival-masks-2.jpg

The biggest event in 2010 is, distinct to certain fanboys opinion, the launch of the iSlate or new iPhone or iAnything nor, as Canadians will have us think, the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, but the Football World Cup this summer (and, no, my dear American readers, this is not the Super Bowl). And whereas one could already see mobile rearing its beautiful head at the last World Cup 2006 in Germany, many people think that South Africa 2010 will provide a breakthrough in mobile service provision around this.

Therefore, quite fittingly, the wonderful guys at Camerjam have put together a conference on the topic, and a nice one, too. The speaker line up includes some proper rock stars, such as (in no particular order):

• Former FIFA Product Director Rupert Daniels
• Author and Blogger Tomi Ahonen
• WPP Global Client Leader Matt Linder
• ITV Media’s Commercial Director Alex Goudsmith
• Real Madrid’s Head of Mobile Pedro Duarte Gonzalez
• MMA Managing Director Europe Paul Berney
• AdMob VP Russel Buckley
• BBC VP Global Adsales & Strategy Tom Bowman
• Sky Mobile GM David Gibbs
• Layar co-founder Claire Boonstra

and many, many more including yours truly (and as a licensee, I will be cheering the reigning World Champions, Italy, on this time, believe it or not!). Besides all that, the venue is the best: Arsenal’s home ground, the Emirates.

If you want to come, it’s on next week (21 January) and you can register here: http://www.camerjam.com/events/m-football/register/

Gemalto, SIM card maker turned “world leader in digital security” (I wonder how many companies claim that title; it’s like boxing, it seems) announced it would subscribe to a capital increase in Netsize, turning Gemalto’s share (24% pre-money) into a majority position.

This may well signify another move towards a closer tie to highly integrated hardware/software/service solutions on the mobile value chain. Gemalto is one of the leaders on the SIM card side, it manufactures SD cards, USB tokens, smart banking cards, etc. Netsize sits on the service side of things: it provides SMS and MMS delivery, is one of the leading mobile payment providers and provides content management platforms. Glue it together, and it becomes a vertically integrated solution from the same mould. Has someone been reading Apple’s philosophy?

Besides these points, cross-selling opportunities would appear to be fairly obvious, too. The only mismatch could be that Gemalto focuses on digital security (they list mobile connectivity, identity and data protection, credit card safety, health and transportation, e-government and national security). Alas, no messaging and entertainment here, the two main areas of Netsize’s business.

This little mismatch is not unprecedented: does anyone remember the VeriSign acquisition of Jamba? Whilst it seems it may (just) have been paid off, the match between the companies was never really there, it seems. Let’s hope the Gemalto-Netsize story will be a brighter one.

A very happy new year to all of you, and let’s kick this off with a new carnival of the mobilists. This week’s version, the first of the new decade, is hosted by the debutants from Omio. And despite the holidays just being over, there is a wealth of really interesting stuff on there. Posts include:

• Ajit Jaokar on mobile cloud computing and operators;
• David Doherty on mobile phones and health care;
• First-time contributor Alexei Polyakov with a very comprehensive report on the state of mobile social networking in Japan;
• Antoine Wright with a new take on bookmarks;
• Chetan Sharma sticks his head out and shares his 2010 predictions; and
• Steve Smith pleads the cause of comic strips as perfect for mobile.

Go over there now, get yourself a good read to get into the spirit for the wild and exciting ride 2010 promises to be for the space!

It is this time of the year where people start looking forward (and back) and come up with clever analyses of things we have always known and those that we haven’t. And because Europe has always (?) been the thoughtful and fashionably skeptic part of the world, it is that one of the leading newspapers, the Guardian, posts an article querying, gosh, Twitter. The link actually contains the words

trouble-twitter-social-networking-banality

The proof? Iran is still not free (or so most of us Westeners think) and only 0.027% of Iranians use Twitter. There you have it. It concludes that it is all narcissistic navel-gazing. The comments, alas, are a delight to read…

Where are we then? Is this true? It is – you may have guessed that this be my stance – not. And here’s why:

Social media (Twitter included) is nothing in itself, it merely defines a group of tools. Therefore, it is not the emperor’s new clothes, it is – if anything – the emperor’s new herald: if the emperor has nothing new, interesting, noteworthy to tell, it will remain as dull and meaningless as before but social tools actually allow you to filter, to focus, to spread noteworthy, sensible and truly good stuff to a group of people that is much larger than you could have reached before at a cost that is (per capita and in toto) much lower than before. And that means it is one cool tool!

There are a gazillion reasons to dismiss Twitter (or Facebook – although fewer people seem to do just that these days) on the basis of boring info about breakfast/lunch/supper/traffic jam on way home or to hype it up on the basis of opposition in Iran/arrests in Egypt/tsunamis in Thailand or a mere plane landing on the Hudson. The argument fails both ways. It is not that. It is the fact that it is possible to communicate at nigh zero costs with people that may be interested – and it is upon the people to find you but it is also upon you to find the interesting bits!

I am already slightly tired to refer to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody who provides us with some beautiful examples of this but the point is (and here Shirky’s academic background serves him really well): it is a tool, and a tool makes only sense (or nonsense) in the hand of its user. So here’s to everyone who complains about useless and redundant info over Twitter: choose better who you follow; you would not stick around some dinner party endlessly discussing the virtues of starching napkins either, would you?

As with every tool (say, a hammer), social tools are more useful, the easier and intuitive they are to use. If it is self-explanatory on how to extract something positive (e.g. to get that bloody nail into that bloody board), the better (and if you can do it without walking away with a bloody thumb, even better). At the moment, many people walk away from Twitter because of a bloody thumb. But would you dismiss a hammer only because you hit yourself? Probably not. Unless you find a better hammer of course…

Finally (and because I called this blog “on mobile”), here’s why the combination of social tools with this other tool in everyone’s hands, namely the mobile phone, is so powerful:

• Daily circulation of newspapers worldwide: 450,000,000
• Number of TV sets in use worldwide: 1,500,000,000
• Number of Internet users worldwide: 1,600,000,000
• Number of credit cards worldwide: 1,700,000,000
• Number of toothbrushes in use worldwide: 2,250,000,000
• Number of mobile subscriptions worldwide: 4,600,000,000.

Have a great 2010!

Cartoon credit: Hugh MacLeod (http://gapingvoid.com/)