The most excellent German blog Mobile Zeitgeist alerted me (in German) to a little battle that illustrates the pitfalls of creating the seamless user experience: Nokia appears to being in a tussle with (at least) the German arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile over the pre-installation of Skype clients on some of its forthcoming handset models (including the long-awaited iPhone competitor, N97).
Tag: smart pipe
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.
- 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
We can depend on the researchers from Juniper after all (or maybe they simply felt bad after reading my post on their last report). Whichever the reason, apparently the mobile content industry could be worth a hefty $167bn (!) if – yes, if – the operators would resolve to allowing a workable commercial environment, namely by limiting themselves to lower revenue shares. Whatever the caveats (which are, as usual, hidden in the expensive main report) this number is topping even the loftiest predictions to date; right on in times of the doom and gloom. The key apparently lies in whether operators would act as dumb pipes (no richness for anyone) or a smart pipe (lots of play money for all players on the value chain). In their own words:
“If MNOs are to benefit financially, they need to move away from their Dumb Pipe roots to the Smart Pipe model, though they will clash with the content providers which already dominate the Smart Pipe. A compromise needs to be found.”