Author: Volker Page 38 of 73

Are you Smarter…?

On 26/05/2009

In 1

The sales power of the Apple App Store is legendary with its 1bn+ downloads in record time. I have repeatedly held though that the other end of this ecosystem, i.e. the entry door to the app store (and related SDK and all) – and its relative ease of use – was an equally imporant contributor to Apple’s success. And now we have a beautiful example on how cool this really is: in Chicago, an 11-year old and his 9-year-old brother designed and programmed an application called “MathTime” that has just gone live on the app store. It provides random addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems and their solutions.

The creators, Owen and Finn Voorhees, worked on it for 9 months and it is now live on the app store, which means available for sale in every country the iPhone is currently available – on deck so to speak! Try this with a J2ME app…

Now, I do not want to belittle Owen’s efforts (it is spectacularly awesome for any 11-year-old!) but this would arguably not have been possible on any other (mobile) software platform. Even if some smart kid might be able to write such a programme. To get it into live distribution on official on-device app stores (or operator portals) would be just utterly unthinkable. Try close those deals with all them operators. Good luck.

I have not seen the MathTime in action but since Apple approved it to go live, it must have passed at least certain thresholds. The whole ecosystem on any of the “classic” carrier channels would have thwarted any attempt to do the same. Would it have worked on Android Market? On the Blackberry App World? Nokia Ovi? I don’t know but it does not really matter since they are basically only further iterations of the model that Apple came out with first: a cr0ss-carrier, multi-territory, single-SKU deployment channel with a fairly regulated development environment. Fragmentation? Hah! Multi-channel distribution? What?

It is here where we should sing Apple’s praise: to make it possible that 5th graders can not only write but publish an application is truly stunning! That their dad needs to front it as the seller for being the only adult involved in the process is then only a touching and even more pronounced little detail, isn’t it?

Carnival of the Mobilists #175

By Volker

On 25/05/2009

In 1, Carnival of the Mobilists

The Carnival of the Mobilists #175 is being hosted over by Igor Faletski at his Mobify blog, and you can read it here. Included is my post on Vodafone’s forthcoming app store as well as a couple of great contributions on use of mobile technology in the education sector as well as politics, Palm OS/WebOS (see also my last update on the Pre), history of innovation in mobile technology, and, and, and. Now, go read!

Palm Pre & iPhone: O2 wants it all

By Volker

On 25/05/2009

In 1, OEM

O2 has won the exclusive distribution rights for the Palm Pre in the UK it is reported. This is noteworthy as the carrier also is the exclusive distributor for the iPhone in the country, so putting the iPhone “killer” next to the ubiquitous uber-smartphone might be a bit of a daring move? Or is it? Let us bear in mind that there are a lot of voices that caution about the operators’ for the iPhone: huge average data consumption on flat rate plans is not likely to drive ARPU. Apple managed to break the old operator model by taking chunks of the revenues realized through its devices and it does not share in any content sales. Apple does not allow anyone to put their brand onto its device (I am struggling to find any O2-related information on my iPhone, and even I think they might have taken it a bit too far… So, the Palm Pre deal actually does a couple of things:

It gives O2 a shot at what might (or might not) be the next big thing (although analysts expect that – at least initially – sales will be much lower than for the iPhone: “Its going to sell principally into the base, to existing Palm owners and existing Sprint subscribers”).
It allows O2 to put a little more leverage in its relationship with Apple. Having a device on its roster that has a powerful specs, an appealing interface and something like a cult following (although the cult appears to being a smaller one than the one of the Apple fashionistas) would help O2 in future negotiations.
If (or when?) the exclusivity period for the iPhone ends (which commentators expect to happen soon), O2 would have another uber-cool gadget exclusively (I for one swapped over to O2 to get my hands on an iPhone).

So whilst few people do not know much, the combination of the above provides any number of good reasons for O2 to go for the Pre (assuming the business model agreed with Palm is not too bruising; but one can expect Palm, which has to fight its way back into the market, to be slightly less demanding than Apple), which promises to being a fairly cool device indeed: besides having a lot of all the things the iPhone has (touchscreen, multi-touch, cult following) and some more (QWERTY-keyboard) it beats Apple on home court: take Apple’s aversion to cables, the Pre doesn’t have to be “plugged” into anything; you just place it next to its touchstone charger and it charges by magnetic induction. Steve Jobs will be fuming about this one… oh, and it runs 15-20 apps simultaneously. The one question might be: which apps? But, hey, let’s see where they’ll get to…

A new home for my blog

By Volker

On 21/05/2009

In 1

After a little over 2 years on Blogspot, I decided it was time to grow up and move to my very own domain.

I will now blog over here. All old posts have been imported and are part of this blog though links to (even older) posts will still refer to the old location.

Expect a few more refurbishments to take place over the coming weeks and stay faithful!

Thank you!

Handset Choice: Ease of Use Rules!

By Volker

On 19/05/2009

A lot of iPhones later, the industry now also has it black on white: Ease of use is the primary reason influencing the choice of a handset for users. Or so we are being told. It is not that surprising, is it? Here’s the top answers users gave on what they look at when buying a new phone. It is taken from 1,500 interviews that were conducted for Nuance, a top sponsor of MEX (which is, you guessed it, a conference on Mobile User Experience).

So any vested interests aside, here’s the top results:

Ease of use (69.0%)
Screen Size (61.4%)
Coolness Factor (61.1%)
Camera (60.8%)
Range of Accessories (58.4%)
Keyboard (58.1%)
Battery Life (56.6%)
Music Playback (50.9%)

Qualcomm slowly admitting defeat?

By Volker

On 18/05/2009

In OEM

I know this is a contentious headline but one could interpret the news that Qualcomm is opening its very own app store (which is probably the oldest one!) to any device on any platform on any carrier this way. The provider will open its Plaza service to non-BREW devices (BREW is proprietary to Qualcomm). This could be seen as an admission of defeat in the platform war, which it appears to be losing against GSM platforms.

However, I plead to see the bright side of this: it is a remarkable move to highlight and capitalize on a piece in its arsenal that has long been industry-leading: Qualcomm has long been offering merchandising solutions that do not have to shy away of the cutting-edge app stores of today. The new Plaza Retail will now bring to Java, BREW, Blackberry and Flash (Android , Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Linux Mobile are apparently to follow) what BREW users have had for a while: a storefront, great device integration and flexible billing (micro-billing, subscriptions, etc). It also allows personalization and a recommendation engine (courtesy of last year’s acquisition of Xiam Technologies). And it is a very proven platform that has showed its worth on many a bill to developers (the content-lock is much better than Apples; which may anger some users but will be welcomed by developers) This is quite cool!

Vodafone's App Store: Bigger than Apple?

By Volker

On 18/05/2009

In OEM

It was only a question of time before the first carriers would release themselves from the iPhone-imposed stare and come out all action, and the biggest of them all (by sales), Vodafone, has now raised the curtains on its very own app store. It is the biggest app store to date: Vodafone has more than 289m customers who will – eventually – all be able to access the store (which makes it a cool 8x or so larger than Apple’s). Unlike on Apple’s App Store, you also do not need a credit card (which, however, you are likely to have anyway when you can afford an iPhone) whereas Vodafone, being a carrier, will bill to their customer’s phone bills directly. Very, very cool, huh?

So imagine the power of an app that would go live on Vodafone’s carriers all at once. But before we get carried away, let’s have a look at the numbers:

Orange UK (in its recently released Digital Media Index; see here) suggested that 4.87% of its users downloaded one game in 2008 (770,000 downloads p.a./ 15.8m users) but this is without an app store but with the traditional catalogue-style offerings.

For Vodafone Group, this would equate to 38,500 downloads per day (289m x 4.87% / 365). If (or when) it includes this offering beyond its own 27 local carriers to its 40 network partners (including Verizon Wireless!), one would be looking at North of 1bn users and, hence, 100,000+ downloads per day. Now, with an app store, this should – theoretically – be further boosted, let’s say doubled, arriving at 200,000 downloads per day.

How does this compare with everyone’s darling/nemesis (delete as appropriate), the iPhone: I had previously calculated that Apple’s app store sees some 4,000 per minute or 5.7m per day… This however includes all those free downloads (about 22% of all apps are for free), so let’s say the ratio is 1 paid: for 40 free (which is on the high end of assumptions) or 1:15. This would equate to 144,000 to 380,000 paid downloads per day. So Vodafone’s 200,000 wouldn’t look completely out of order, would it?

There’s even more: Vodafone’s decision to bill to the phone bill is only one potential booster since it minimizes friction for the user (Apple: credit card/iTunes account, Blackberry: PayPal, Nokia Ovi: a mix?, etc). The other – and longer-term potentially even bigger one – is geo-awareness: since Vodafone owns the network, it knows where any of “its” users’ mobile is at any given time. Now link app usage with geographical location and you could be on to something fairly unique. There is little in the market so far but then: had Apple run its campaign of “bettering life’s little problems” in June 2008, it would have looked fairly bleak, too!

So: huge potential but where are the pitfalls?

There’s UI and handset fragmentation, if I dare say so. Even though it probably hurts by now, let me repeat: Apple has one model and one deployment method and it nailed content discovery (not perfectly but better than anyone else). Job done. Vodafone has hundreds of handsets on its “to be supported” list. Some are like the Porsche’s of their trade (“first available on s60 devices“; ooooh), others are the equivalent to a pedal-powered toy car. The costs for developers to support all these is significant, the cost of management is arguably, too.

Most importantly though, it takes the simplicity and thus ease of use out of the game. And I would posit that this is a big contributor to the (Apple) app store’s success: simplicity from entry (ingest an app into the store), management (price, etc) to consumption (download and active use). This will be a tough one for Vodafone to overcome, and it is indeed the one point where OEMs have much better opportunities to “get it right”. That the relationship between carriers and OEMs is not always without strain has only recently been proven again, sooooo: the jury is probably still out on that one.

Having said this, Vodafone is better positioned than most carriers though because of its sheer size and footprint. Smaller carriers might struggle to offer developers similar incentives to support their respective offering because they don’t scale as well.

For Vodafone, I am concerned that the multi-level complexities they have to deal with (number of handsets x number of operating companies x number of languages x all additional info [geographical and otherwise]) might pose a strain on its ability to roll out quickly and decisively. It might not be as huge and life-changing as Apple’s app store but it would certainly lift the “mainstream” of app downloads to whole new level. I am an optimist, so, come on, Voda!