Another week, another Carnival of the Mobilists. This week’s edition is being hosted by Mark van’t Hooft at Ubiquitous Thoughts and brings you all the goodies from the mobile world in the past week (including my post on the recession-bucking smartphone sales). So go over there and get wiser…
Author: Volker Page 44 of 73
Everyone who is in London next week Monday and Tuesday should be checking in for the Social Networking World Forum and the Mobile Social Networking Forum, which are held concurrently at Olympia in London. Everyone from MySpace, Bebo, Sulake/Habbo Hotel via LinkedIn and Yahoo! all the way to Coca Cola, MTV and British Airways will be there, so should be interesting!
See you there? Ping me… Twitter me… Whatever works.
Here’s the list of the 10 best-selling phones (judged by accessory sales) as compiled by Krusell, our Swedish holster-maker friends. I will not comment further on the sense or nonsense of this information but reference what I said previously about it.
So without any further ado, here’s the list (in brackets the ranking from the previous month):
1. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia
2. (2) HTC Touch HD
3. (5) Nokia 6300
4. (3) Nokia E51
5. (4) Blackberry Storm
6. (8) Nokia E71
7. (6) Nokia 3109
8. (-) Nokia 5800
9. (7) Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia
10. (-) Nokia 3120
2. (2) HTC Touch HD
3. (5) Nokia 6300
4. (3) Nokia E51
5. (4) Blackberry Storm
6. (8) Nokia E71
7. (6) Nokia 3109
8. (-) Nokia 5800
9. (7) Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia
10. (-) Nokia 3120
The most noteworthy new entry is the Nokia 5800 (XpressMusic), and the holster-maker’s CEO reckons it would shake up the top 3 next month. After Nokia’s most recent US launch disaster (see even more poignantly here) for the device, this will sadly but almost certainly not be driven by US sales though…
And as for the remainder: I remain skeptical about the measure (holsters). Other surveys (based on sales, like Sound-Scan used to do for CDs) show VERY different results.
Blackberry Maker RIM launched a holding site ahead of the launch of its Blackberry App World (the equivalent to Apple’s AppStore), and it had a little surprise in hand: billing appears to be handled via PayPal (the fine print does not need translation: “to be able to purchase applications from BlackBerry App World, a PayPal Account is required”).
This is two things: a) a massive win for PayPal and b) and nice move from Blackberry because PayPal is one of the simpler mechanisms, which will feel, like, so totally easy to many users (everyone who has tried to download applications and pay via credit card on their Blackberry will know how onerous it is/was).
I am thrilled to see this coming on. Apple has had 9 months free reign, and it’s about time that its competitors step up and bring commercial stores out. Blackberry will be fantastically suited as – due to e-mail having been its central USP – its users traditionally are on data plans anyway, and will therefore be less reluctant to dig in properly.
Industry body MEF had put out its top 10 predictions for the year a few weeks ago (inexplicably missed by me; well it was somewhere around Mobile World Congress, so probably at least excusable), which they gathered from their members and deep discussions around this. They believe that 2009 – recession and all – will be the year in which mobile entertainment (if you count everything in, apparently a $25bn industry) will start to deliver returns.
So now, without any further ado, here are the predictions:
- The ‘iPhone effect’ -Mobile applications have emerged as a new content category and the mobile internet will finally come of age
- Greater value and transparency for consumers will help sustain demand in 2009
- Some delay in the proliferation of mobile advertising
- Telcos begin to acts as enablers for the Entertainment industry with services such as billing, authentication and zero tariff data
- The emerging dominance of services that operate at a multi-platform level
- The rise of ring back tones
- Social networking becomes an important driver of mobile entertainment consumption
- 2009 will be the year that mobile video really takes off
- Emerging economies will become an increasingly important driver for mobile entertainment worldwide
- A proliferation of touch screen devices drives discoverability and content usage
Now, now. I am glad to see that a lot of this ties in with “what I have been saying all along”… 😉 But let’s have a closer look at a few of the points:
The iPhone effect. Yes, I have elaborated on this plenty a time, so I will only refer to previous posts, for instance here, here and here.
“Some” delays in mobile advertising. Also: dealt with on numerous occasions, and a while ago, too (see here and here)…
And now for a whole bunch of stuff that can, I believe, be grouped, namely greater (perceived?) value to consumers and carriers moving into smart-pipe models. The jury is still out on this, isn’t it? Although it has to be said that there seems to be a learning curve indeed. But is this from new-found wisdom or because of the fruity pain from the guys in Cupertino?
Another group: multi-platform services and social networking. I would class the latter as the shining beacon of the former: social networks do one thing. They connect the dots, they are the switchboards of the digital life. And since users per se do not really care on which screen this happens, a lot of them have seen significant value contributions from mobile (e.g. MySpace sees incredible growth rates).
So there you have it…
US Premium SMS service specialists SendMe Mobile raised another $12m (bringing the total to $35m) in order to fund their further expansion into the – what they call nascent – Premium SMS space. New boys Triangle Peak Ventures joined return investors True Ventures, Amicus Capital, Spark Capital and Grand Banks Ventures for the round (note to self: VCs need to get more creative in finding names for their firms). SendMe wants to use the cash for 3 purposes, namely a) working capital, b) acquisitions and c) “unforeseen challenges” of the economy. Unforeseen, huh?
Be it as it may be but there are a couple of points remarkable on this (though not that remarkable if you know Russ Klein, their CEO, who is a really bright cookie!):
- Premium SMS is considered nascent in the US (when it really is a fairly old hat in old Europe). Is simplicity saving the day? Should European firms maybe looking to repositioning this beautifully simple monetization tool rather than turning to more complex matters such as micro-billing, etc?
- Raising that amount of money in this day and age is respectable in itself. It does keep you wondering though where they are running with their cap table: on $35m total, their valuation must be somewhere in the region of $50-100m. That is big considering that the likes of Glu trade at 0.2x revenues or so.
- The aforementioned report mentions that reverse auctions (“SoLo”) had a “break-out year” for SendMe in 2008. This would arguably fly even higher in a full-blown recession (“darling, I just got ourselves an iPod for $1.34”), so might well have been the angle that made for convincing forecasts.
Big shout to Russ & team: you guys rock!
The iPhone has a meagre 1.2% share of the overall phone market. However, it has true worker bees as users. No, honestly, these guys are sooo much busier than everybody else: they produce a whopping 2/3 of the world’s mobile web traffic, or so says a report. Yes, that’s right. Number 2? Shared between open-source-newbie Symbian and – remarkably – Android with 6.15% each, which is, erm, less than 10% of what the iPhone accounts for (and in spite there being a gazillion more Symbian-powered phones out there than iPhones). Next one in the queue then is Blackberry with 2.24%.
Interestingly, the researchers find that the runners-up are quickly gaining market share, which begs the question (again) if the iPhone was only a big marketing coup: did people only need the Jobs magic in order to be shown what they could actually do with their phones (and, yes, did operators need Mr Jobs vision to realize that fair use might exceed, like, 137 kb per month)?
The answer? No! 4,000 downloads per minute are more than a marketing fluke! That web traffic is not a mirage! What the iPhone did do is trigger a stampede towards better usability, better discovery, a better environment, more ease. It is no surprise that the Google-dominated Android phone is catching up so fast (in spite being the youngest platform): Google itself has a knack for simplicity and ease of use. And from the platforms that have been around for a little longer, Blackberry (traditionally equipped with flat-rate data plans and affluent users to go with it) and Symbian (highest install-base on smartphones) are best suited from the pack to catch up quickest. The only question is the one for Windows Mobile (ooh, and Mr & Mrs Gates children are not allowed iPhones…).
The most encouraging bit of that report is therefore not another staggering stat on the iPhone but that the others are catching up. A race to the top then (even if some say that, content-wise, it currently is a race to the bottom; I’m sure that that will sort itself out fairly quickly but of this another time…).