Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

The iPod Touch Is This Generation's Tamagotchi

So why is iPod Touch so popular among young people? A few hints:

• It’s an excellent portable game console with 3D hardware acceleration, accelerometer, large display etc.
• It taps the biggest library of very low cost as well as completely free mobile games and applications; there’s nothing coming even close
• It interfaces with all social networking services via optimized and free applications
• It’s relatively inexpensive, even compared to other portable game consoles, and way less expensive than an iPhone or similar smartphone

No other portable game console can beat that.

Posted by Anders Borg 14:28 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

“The study found that the main attraction of mobile connection is its immediacy. Mobile users can access their networks instantly from anywhere. As a result, 91% of mobile users socialise online, compared with 79% of desktop users.”

TheWhereBusiness: Mobile beats desktop for social networking

Posted by Anders Borg 12:50 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

I’m aware this is a not too politically correct commentary, neither a light blogging topic, yet as I mention at the end, I don’t in any way criticize the parties involved in the acquisition. I’m only trying to analyze what Google acquired and why. You might for very valid reasons be of a completely different opinion (even if you might be wrong), so feel free to comment. As with all acquisitions of private companies, finding out the real truth and nothing but the truth tends to be close to impossible due to reality distortion generated by the companies and media alike, so I’m not claiming to know all the facts, but I at least know the technologies involved.

I came up with the following reasons:

• Google failed with its own attempts to do mobile advertising and felt the time was running out, despite its success in PC advertising. The question is why they acquired AdMob instead of emulating it. More below.
• Google was focused on mobile search ads, while AdMob was focused on in-site and in-app ads, hence a nice complement.
• Google wanted to get rid of an increasingly affecting/noisy competitor, as AdMob is the biggest ad broker within specifically mobile advertising. Even if AdMob didn’t hurt Google, it probably itched a bit.
• Google wanted to stop its competitors from acquiring AdMob. Google has to stay on top of the ad revenue race in competition with Yahoo!, Microsoft etc, so measures were required.
• Google wanted to save market and technical development time.
• Google wanted to get AdMob’s customer accounts.
• Google wanted to get hold of AdMob’s backoffice system (mobile stats has been mentioned as a valuable complement, and Adwords is in my opinion unnecessarily hard to use, by design).

You don’t need more reasons than that, but if you think they are mainly technical and specifically regarding mobile technologies, you don’t know the actual technologies involved. Not that the complexity of technology is in any way proportional to the health of a business.

Considering Google already has a hefty inventory and the backoffice ad technology, providing small in-app ad gadgets as well would be very simple. It would be even simpler to provide the “form factor” needed for in-site ads, as Google Adwords text-only ads are already well suited for mobile use (a title, two short lines of text and a link).

I’ve been surprised every time AdMob got an innovation award, considering what the company does is a very basic form of click advertising, hence not innovative at all technically or business-wise, without even awareness of content context (which Adwords supports), yet AdMob now provides positioned ads with greater granularity for smartphones. Also that would be very simple to add to Adwords though.

There are ways that AdMob is innovative, but I doubt these were what the award juries considered:

• AdMob is quite profitable, and has had a sound revenue model at the core from day one. Click advertising is simply a very good business model, and a very proven one too, so AdMob didn’t really have to tread any new ground. You can’t say that about many other mobile (or even Web) services. That’s innovative, right? Due to knowing this we actually discussed moving into the mobile click ad business when mm3 was founded during 2007, but for different reasons we came to focus on other things.
• AdMob started off as a service that was completely void of anything mobile on a technical level, yet being promoted as a mobile ad service: Providing short text-only ads on mobile sites doesn’t require any knowledge of the device it’s shown on, not even that it’s a mobile phone, so the ads could as well be shown on a PC. Neither was SMS or any other mobile-specific technology involved, meaning no need to set up partnerships with any operators or service aggregators. This meant the company was completely free to focus on the ad engine and viral promotion for worldwide use, initially not having to think much or at all about the delivery. Again, this applies to the starting up of AdMob and maybe the first two years thereafter. It’s not the case now, but again, what followed wasn’t complicated either.
• AdMob started off as a company that helped mobile site providers promote their sites on other mobile sites, as mobile search and mobile directories didn’t exist at the time (and arguably still don’t). That’s kind of a grassroots beginning, but required initially no negotiation with large ad publishers, that would be very hard without an established ad network. When the inventory and “shopping windows” reached some mass, such publishers could be brought in to complement the mobile site ads. At that time it could be proven that there was actually an ad network.

Interestingly, Apple has now stopped Google/AdMob from providing positioned ads, which takes away part of the value of the acquisition, but this might be temporary until Apple has finalized the acquisition of Quattro and provided their own positioned ads via them. I doubt they will open for this possibility before then.

Was the company worth $750M? In this virtual and almost surrealistic economy of Web services it seems that anything goes. There has been a lot of guesswork about the last year revenue of AdMob, so I won’t quote any of those. In any case AdMob had a good revenue and margin, and having something like 100 employees indicates the business was very sound. Also, without a doubt Google easily sinks the cost of AdMob. It will hardly make a dent in the armor.

Many Web services are un- or hardly profitable, relying on investors to pump in money (this is still the case even for Twitter), and I’m sure there will be many that (even more now) hope they will be acquired as well. It’s also to be expected that other companies within Google’s field of business (ad revenue from search etc) will gobble up other mobile advertising companies, as it’s clearly the right time for it. It’s also clear providers of mobile advertising will see the Google deal as a way to justify a high acquisition cost.

Again, I’m not in any way criticizing the founders/owners of AdMob nor the M&A folks at Google. It’s all business as usual. I was well aware that this could and would become big from the day AdMob was founded, but didn’t act. S**t happens.

I can’t say I’m a fan of ads in any shape or form (when talking mobile I find animated ads in mobile games extremely annoying, as it takes focus away from the game play), and I doubt many are, including people within the ad business, when it comes to being force-fed ads themselves, yet I realize that ads are needed and will never go away, and what we see now is just a natural evolution from TV and paper magazines over to digital and interactive media, and increasingly mobile.

Posted by Anders Borg 00:29 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

My project leader role in the Motimate project is at an end (yet I remain co-founder and technical advisor in Trivendia), I’ve left as CEO for Mobile Labs (yet I remain chairman and active in other roles), I’m no longer active in mm3 nor Netville (at least for the time being), and I’m in the process of converting Abiro into a holding company.

That means I’m open for new business. From now on I intend to better balance risk and security, with the goal of becoming completely independent before my next “if (($age % 10) == 0) break;” birthday.

If anyone has an opportunity that consists of preferably creative IT product strategy and visionary work that makes use of my knowledge in mobile and related technologies, and that has nice benefits, I’m all ears.

Posted by Anders Borg 22:10 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Twitter

Here’s a (slightly dated) listing of ready-to-go and open source microblogging services, primarily written in PHP, but there’s one also for ASP: 9 Open Source Microblogging Applications. Some even have accompanying mobile applications, also open source. I’m quite certain they are as good as or better than Twitter. That’s the easy part. Getting millions of users is the not so easy part.

Facebook

If you want to make a Facebook clone, you can come rather close with e.g. Ning, that is free but with ads, that even has Facebook-like applications. There are also commercial products, like from Agriya, etc.

Posted by Anders Borg 22:04 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

I call them overshadowed due to the overwhelming focus in media and the minds of people on mobile applications on smartphones right now. Consider though that the vast majority of users don’t have iPhones and similar advanced and information-centric mobile phones. Most people don’t even know how to download mobile applications.

When it comes to covering the lion share of the market for the mentioned phenomena, other criteria apply.

Tickets and Coupons

SMS is the best way to transfer tickets, that works on absolutely all phones and is usually enough to convey the message, and is very reliable and low-cost, unless you don’t charge for the tickets. Consider that the cost of an SMS is below 0.02 €/$ via bulk providers, not counting the cost of providing the higher-level service.

If you want to convey more than the usual, and get a better look-n-feel, use MMS (self-contained) or SMS with a link to a mobile landing page (requires the user to follow the link).

There are certainly still many users without, or with very expensive, data communication. In that case SMS will always work, still with a possible link to a more detailed page, but the ticket/coupon information should preferably be complete in the SMS itself.

Positioning

To get enough accuracy for consumer-oriented “What’s/Who’s near you?” or professional-oriented “Where’s the truck/goods/personnel right now?” type services, cell-based positioning is often enough. Knowing that a truck is in country A (delivering) and not in country B (smuggling) might be all you need to know. No offense to you, if you happen to live in country B.

Network-based cell positioning (mapping cell IDs to GPS positions) is preferred, as it’s device independent. An issue is that being able to read out the position might require collaboration with many parties, so the market really needs aggregators to be able to provide services that reach beyond country boundaries.

You can read out the cell information from within at least Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia Series 60 phones, but that requires an application in the phone, which is a problem for mass market use.

Of course you need to provide opt-in for positioning in consumer services. If you provide such services for corporate use you can probably get away with letting the management decide who should be positioned, provided the ones being positioned are told.

P.S.

As many have said before me, positioning is not in itself a service, it’s a service enabler. Kind of like SMS. It’s a clean slate. The usages are vast once you start to think about it.

If you are in Sweden, you can try out network-based positioning in a simple way by sampling a few of my SMS services, namely:

• här (here) – positioned map sent back to you (a la simple car finder etc)
• gmail – positioned (geo) e-mail (with the message and a map link)
• gsms – positioned (geo) SMS (with the message and a map link)

More information is available via mobiltliv.se (PC or mobile; in Swedish). Please read the “Villkor” before use.

D.S.

Posted by Anders Borg 21:48 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

As many have their PC screens set to 800 pixel height or less, I trimmed the top of the main and landing pages by shortening the description and moving both rating and rotation below the content. That way more of the content is shown.

Ideally all of a photo or video would be shown without scrolling, and it’s not quite there yet. Maybe I should lose the curly menu as well, going for a clean shave.

Enough with hair dresser analogies…

Posted by Anders Borg 21:42 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Well, the price is really too high (twice the price of a vanilla Windows/Linux PC with the same hardware configuration), but design-wise it’s in many ways ideal for an office:

• It’s really small, almost like a DVD drive for a PC; it’s almost invisible beside my gami…sorry…development PC
• It’s absolutely silent; my desktop PC is definitely not; not even my laptop comes close
• It has all the connectors and communication technologies you’ll ever need
• It’s fast enough, has memory enough and hard disk enough to handle most white collar requirements, including for development
• You can use almost any keyboard, mouse and screen with it. I use a wireless Microsoft EX 100 PC kbd/mouse combo and a Sony 20” screen shared with my PC; the drawback is that special keys are not mapped correctly
• You can get a remote control and connect it to a TV via DVI, to get a very lean and mean entertainment machine
• It looks pretty good and very solid; not like the “bent aluminum plate”-feel PCs usually have
• It’s a great podium for my Smurfs

Why on earth doesn’t Dell etc sell PCs with this form factor, or rather why don’t companies ask for such PCs? Dell had such a series a year ago, but they dropped it. Due to lack of customer interest? If so, something is clearly wrong in the way companies think about workspace, noise, environment, ergonomics etc.

I’m sure some will ask, why not buy a laptop? Well, laptops have tiny screens. If they don’t they are way over-priced, so a mini PC using separate cost-optimized keyboard, mouse and screen will be much more cost efficient and much more ergonomic. This is provided you won’t move around with the PC. I wouldn’t be able to work without a laptop, no doubt.

In my case the purchase of a Mac Mini was for the sole purpose of developing iPhone OS applications, and as such it fits in nicely beside my over-sized and pretty noisy desktop PC and my slightly over-aged and under-achieving laptop.

Posted by Anders Borg 20:44 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

And the Mobile Premier Awards winners are....!

As far as I can see, all are about services, even though often presented via mobile applications, which obviously will be even more the rule than the exception in the future.

Sweden’s contribution MoSync didn’t win any award though.

Posted by Anders Borg 21:36 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

It’s over and done. Here are some executive summaries of others’ writings.

The Juniper Research Blog - Eight observations on MWC 2010

In brief:

1. Bad weather
2. Apps, apps and more apps…
3. App store via operator collaboration
4. Big interest for Sony Ericsson’s Android phones
5. BBC launches news apps, but what’s the big deal, really (it's just a simple feed application, right)? Even so, this effort hit a snag recently (lol)
6. Cloud computing
7. Nokia was there, but not at the exhibit
8. Bad weather, again…

The Juniper Research Blog - Top Five Hot Topics at Mobile World Congress 2010

In brief (their own words):

1. Flurry of launches to increase competition in the smartphone space
2. Operators announce Apps Community
3. GSMA embarks on LTE interconnection standards
4. NFC payment trial at Mobile World Congress to presage widespread NFC adoption?
5. Android platform gains critical mass- the rise of the open source OS

MWC 2010: The Year of the Android

How true: But the general consumer doesn’t care. They just buy the phone and get apps from either the handset maker or their carrier (if they add apps at all). They probably don’t even know they have an “Android phone”.

Gallery: Biggest Smartphone News From Barcelona

Posted by Anders Borg 20:38 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

I tried to find out if it matters how personal a blog is for it to become popular. Many use e.g. Blogger as-is, on the blogspot.com domain, many use Wordpress with the ugly default theme, some packages either one in their own site (like I do) etc combinations.

Is this a major factor for the success of the blog? Not at all, rather the content matters, that you keep it coming, and that it rings with the most amount of people. My blog is a good example of the opposite.

Posted by Anders Borg 21:16 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

A few important highlights from the GSMA newsletter:

• Google will now focus service development on mobile.
• HTC introduces new phones with social networking integrated with the core UI.
• Huawei CEO coins “Key to unlocking the potential usage of 3G is the need for a $150 smartphone with iPhone-like capabilities”.

Posted by Anders Borg 10:22 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Microsoft announced a completely revamped mobile platform called Windows Phone 7. It’s interesting how Microsoft seems to have realized they can’t sleep on the wheel (as they have for way too long), as also WIndows 7 is a real step forward compared to the not so good (nor still not ready) Windows Vista.

Nokia and Intel combine the best of Maemo and Moblin into the new Linux-based platform Meego. It will compete head on with primarily Android.

Ericsson launches an application store with the intent that it shall be used by many telecom operators and with applications for most mobile application platforms. I’m not sure if it ties together with the previously mentioned operator collaboration.

It’s time to make a first extrapolation for 2010:

• There will be too many application stores. More than makes commercial sense. There has to be a shake-out of the market.
• Android phones will evolve faster than iPhone and will be available in many more form factors. Preliminary information from e.g. Sony Ericsson indicates there will be all kinds of phones with or without keypad, with or without high-resolution camera, with or without business focus, both low-end and high-end etc etc.
• Symbian will be dropped. Sony Ericsson already should have. Nokia will have to.
• Porting toolkits will become essential for long term cross-platform development, due to all the mobile platforms and all the form factors.
• Mobile applications will even more be used as service front-ends, provided for free even if the service is not for free. This is a big monetization opportunity for mobile application developers, developing for service providers. They will require cross-platform support.

Posted by Anders Borg 11:04 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

It has just started. I’m not there though, but one of my colleagues is, so if you want to talk text rendering, language and font solutions I can arrange for a meeting.

Regarding application platforms: It’s a lot about Android, but interestingly Symbian is holding on (for a while; Sony Ericsson will for sure drop it sooner than later to focus its resources) and Samsung tries with a new mobile phone platform Bada.

Many operators are collaborating on a common solution for app stores. That’s quite interesting for developers.

Posted by Anders Borg 10:39 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Here’s a very lively thread, where I’ve written rather long entries, as I’m quite opinionated about e-books.

Viktig diskussion för oss eboksintresserade!

It’s a pity it’s not in English, as this is certainly of worldwide interest. You can try Google Translate, but I’m sure some unintended comedy will arise if you do.

Posted by Anders Borg 22:04 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Here are the blogs and communities I’m most active in at the moment:

More combinations are on the way.

Posted by Anders Borg 15:05 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Motimate is not just a mobile service of course, as access is also available via PCs, but it has several elements of mobile functionality, and we needed to sign up several partners to achieve the desired complete solution. For several reasons I can’t say who they are, and I only mention the more critical ones.

Hosting: We use a dedicated server solution that is maintained at a server park. We realized early that hosting and maintaining the server ourselves would be much more expensive. The same server hosts both the PC and mobile aspects of the service. Actually it’s “just” the same service with different views.

Video streaming: All videos are streamed from and hosted at a video streaming provider. Videos are though uploaded from within the Motimate service, so that they are associated with the other content they belong to. The provider also handles the adaptation of videos for different devices. Motimate was their first customer for a mobile video solution, so we had some hick-ups during the integration and the device detection, but now it works perfectly.

Bulk SMS: SMS’s are sent out at least once daily to all members. We send out SMS’s for a very low price via an external partner. They can send SMS’s to the whole world (if we ever need that) for equally competitive prices.

Flatrate data: To avoid members getting a cost shock from playing videos we have agreements with most Swedish operators (not the major one though, as they refused) for flatrate data. For them to be able to achieve that they simply look for our domains or IP addresses (differing between operators). Remarkably inexpensive per user.

iPhone application: This was developed in-house, and is yet another “window” to the Motimate service, but it of course needed publishing via App Store to become publically available. Approval was completed in exactly a week, which was faster than expected.

Each sent SMS contains a temporary link to the mobile site that when followed enters that specific user’s home page with automatic log-in, and there showing the daily schedule, daily food, daily motivation, with possible videos etc, hence combining the mentioned elements.

Posted by Anders Borg 01:33 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

The power of today’s community engines: Riidoo Boksnack (Riidoo Book Talk) was set up in very short time via Ning and already has quite active discussions, yet not that many users yet.

I didn’t set the community up, but I recommended the engine and am active in the community.

If you master the Swedish language you are most welcome to contribute, as this is an important area of discussion right now, and Sweden has come relatively far in terms of publisher acceptance of the e-book concept.

Posted by Anders Borg 00:27 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

This is irrational to say the least, but I guess no one has claimed the financial market is rational in any way.

Twitter And The Revenue Dilemma

In short this note says that if you have a hard time getting a revenue, it can be better to have no revenue at all, than just a little, as your company can’t be valued using normal means, but instead analysts can just guess about the potential value, based on absolutely nothing.

Of course this applies mainly to Web services that have lots of users and are dominating in a certain niche, where somehow those users obtain a virtual value even though they are not paying anything for using your service.

Those that have invested in the company will do anything to inflate the value of it, so they can make a profitable exit (which of course is the goal for all investors). Meanwhile they will pump in money in the company, so that it survives. A dangerous game, and many investors have been fried (while the founders of the companies in question have laughed all the way to the bank), but nothing new per se.

It all sounds like a self-nurturing Ponzi scheme to me, and should be controlled somehow, but in a free capitalistic system anything goes, provided the company itself doesn’t lie about the situation, which seemingly is not the case for Twitter.

From the note: The result? Your valuation can actually go down once you turn on revenue. And if revenue isn’t as awesome as you think it might be, or you have other…cough…problems, you may be in real trouble.

It mentions a new revenue stream I’ve become aware of recently: Selling information to search engine companies, so they can better index content. In theory that wouldn’t be needed (search engines should be able to index everything that is public via their bots), but seemingly this is a big business for services with millions of users.

Posted by Anders Borg 11:20 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Found a number of interesting charts at Business Insider with more or less connection to mobile:

CHART OF THE DAY: iPhone Blows Past Windows Mobile
This should not be a surprise to anyone. Windows Mobile will simply not be able to compete with iPhone and even less with Android. Let it RIP.

CHART OF THE DAY: Android Taking Wind Out Of iPhone's Sails
This should come as no surprise: Android has been adopted by all major mobile phones providers except Nokia and Apple (obviously), and there will also be a greater span of lowend to highend, so this is just the start of a trend. Windows Mobile, LiMo, iPhone/OSX, Bada, Maemo, WebOS etc will suffer.

CHART OF THE DAY: Apple Dominates Smartphone Growth In Q4
Yet, iPhone sails on with good speed.

CHART OF THE DAY: The End Of Newspapers
This ties in to the e-book and e-magazine trend. I haven’t had a paper newspaper (sic!) for years, but this note indicates that current newspaper publishers will have problems also on-line, and never recoup the current decrease in the interest for magazines, being more and more replaced by more immediate and “chaotic” news services, like pro blogs (not this one) and social network services.

CHART OF THE DAY: Another Monster Christmas For Apple's iPod Touch
CHART OF THE DAY: iPod Touch Is Apple's Sleeper Hit
I’ve read elsewhere that teens have found out the iPod Touch is an excellent portable game console due to its 3D hardware, and there are clearly many games for it, making it the best portable game console on the market, without having being marketed as such at all. Also, it obviously serves very well as a media player as well, and it’s a good everyday web pad too.

CHART OF THE DAY: AdMob Hits Pause On Growth To Focus On Smartphones
This doesn’t make sense concerning bottom line, but I guess Google is putting pressure on AdMob, that’s now obviously out of the risk zone of ever going bankrupt, being acquired and all.

Posted by Anders Borg 23:54 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

I believe publishers are starting to see that e-books are actually a really good thing, considering there’s no cost for printing, stock and logistics.

This means publishers will not be penalized by failing sales of certain books, meaning publishers will become more profitable overall, provided they sell the e-books for a reasonably high price, which is easy by the way: If selling the e-books for the same price as paper books, the margins are way better than for paper books. As you know, the same goes for CDs vs online sales of music. That was why I hinted in The death of music as we know it and Mobile Trends 2020 that all mulitmedia content will be downloaded or streamed in the future. It’s definitely not a wild guess.

Not that e-books will have an immediate major impact on book shops. It’s not like with music that there’s a huge piracy “market”, nor that e-book readers are flying off the shelves either, neither that people understand the concept of e-books as well as they do “e-music”, so the growth will be considerably slower.

The comments to Behold ‘The Amazon Effect’: Now Murdoch’s Gunning for the $10 E-Book indicate that many (including the publishers) don’t understand the benefits of e-books.

I believe more in e.g. the iPhone than the iPad as e-book reader, as there will be so many more that have iPhones (and Android’s, Pre’s, etc) than iPads, or even Kindles, even in the longer term. Buying an iPad is a conscious “I need a reading device” question (except for gadget freaks), but an iPhone is primarily purchased as a phone, with reading etc coming as a free feature. The display is a tiny bit too small though. 5” seems to be a sweet spot for emulating pocket books.

Posted by Anders Borg 20:35 | Permalink | 0 comments | Links to this post

Occasionally technology ignorance reaches new heights.

An example in Top 10 Social Networking Sites (the Twitter section): “Twitter sends messages between users via the Short Message Service (SMS), better known as text messaging.”

No, it doesn’t!

If you want to know how it’s done, or want a Twitter clone developed, just let me know.

Mwahahahaha (think Dr Evil)…

Posted by Anders Borg 19:32 | Permalink | 4 comments | Links to this post