Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Sunday, March 14, 2010
Today is Pi Day
π or Pi (pronounced “pie”, not “pee”) is celebrated today because it’s 3/14 (get it?).
Only a mathematician, physicist or even worse an engineer (read: nerd) could come up with such a holiday, and considering this date format is mainly used in USA it had to be an American: Larry Shaw. During the celebration, pies are served (what else?).
There’s also a Pi approximation day July 22. Oddly 22/7 is the European date format, so I guess that one was invented over here. Wikipedia doesn’t say.
Congratulations! You’ve done a lot of good.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Mobile market size
See Cellphone Overshare for a self-explanatory bunch of colorful pies.
“Mobile Operating Systems” is wrong, as it normally tends to be in these kinds of stat collections. It should rather say something like “Smartphone Mobile Application Platforms”, as Nucleus, OSE, Series 30/40, BREW and several other featurephone RTOS’s and platforms are not mentioned, and still the bulk of mobile phones use them. In other words, Symbian is nowhere near 51% of the market. Unfortunately the information doesn’t provide the split between featurephones and smartphones, and I didn’t find any reliable figures to extrapolate the real shares from.
It’s still clear that phones run more and more advanced OS’s and platforms overall, and Symbian and Android will be used in ever lower-cost phones, a market that Apple might not ever want to deal with. Competition in the low-end Android market is likely to be fierce, so margins will become slim.
Babies and dogs can tweet too
I wrote a long time ago about location of babies and dogs, and now they can tweet too (unknowingly):
Both solutions rely on a PC for performing the Twitter update. Twoddler is based on an off-the-shelf toy, an Arduino board and ZigBee communication.
It would be way more expensive to make toys that would include the mobile radio as well. Yet for other applications, like tweeting the position of the ice cream truck (or whatever), this function would better be implemented as an application for mobile phones.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Will iPad succeed?
I actually believe it will be a relative flop compared to iPod Touch and iPhone. Partly because it goes against the megatrend of mobility and is too much of a tablet PC. You get a very good laptop or netbook (with a keyboard, more storage, a real PC OS etc) for a lower cost than the iPad, and there’s no subsidizing hiding the cost of the iPad.
Anyway, not everyone agrees:
The iPad Boom Begins: Accessory Makers Rush to Market
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Viruses in smartphones
My second blog post ever (2004) was about viruses in mobile phones, and now it’s very much a reality, or at least a very feasible reality.
Mobile botnets threaten smartphone chaos
Myers-Briggs on the Net
There are forums for some of the MBTI types. I found “mine” at INTP Central.
Sony to launch own smartphone
Update 20100308: Sony Ericsson will make the phone(s), but Sony will market them in its name in certain markets, so the phones are still all Sony Ericsson.
The Wall Street Journal: Digits: Sony takes on Apple
The phone will be able to play PSP games. Maybe (under-statement) Sony has noticed the success of the iPod Touch and the iPhone as gaming consoles, and wants a piece of that pie. What will be problematic for Sony is the completely different business model of Apple games (completely free or very low price) compared to games for the PSP.
Might this be a crack in the veneer of the Sony Ericsson collaboration as well?
No more FTP from Blogger. Oh noes!
Blogger will drop publishing of blogs via FTP, which I use to embed Abiro Mobile News at abiro.com. I’ll likely switch to Wordpress (that I know and love), provided I can export existing content.
This video describes my feelings.
Android won’t / will be fragmented
Entelligence: Will Android fragmentation destroy the platform?
This anecdote highlights a few things between the lines:
- Android Market needs to be vastly improved, with automation for phone-specific applications, a certification process that involves handling those differences, etc.
- Android Market needs to serve as a platform upgrade portal, to minimize the fragmentation caused by phones running old platform versions. This will not be easy, due to all the vendor-specific customizations of Android.
Different screen resolutions is just the start of the fragmentation puzzle, yet a very crucial one for e.g. full graphics applications like games. Less so if they are truly 3D, more so if they are sprite-based 2D.
Quote:
Either Google addresses the fragmentation issue immediately or it will find that Android suffers the same fate as Linux on the desktop.
Or as Java ME, but hopefully it will not be that bad.
Reasons for focusing on iPhone for application development:
- No fragmentation. You practically develop and test for just one device. iPad has hight resolution, but due to pixel scaling your iPhone / Touch application will still work.
- Excellent e-shop, equally good on PC and phone. iTunes is though in my opinion crappy bloatware, even worse than Acrobat Reader. Microsoft has lost the “bloatware war” to Apple and Adobe.
Reasons for focusing on Android for application development:
- Less over-exploited/heated application market.
- Good chance to still offer unique applications.
- 2010 is the year of Android establishment.
Leftie or rightie?
Some claim left-handed people are more creative and/or clever than purely right-handed people.
I write, drink, comb and use a spoon with my left hand, but am otherwise right-handed, and not according to the average ( Which hand do left-handers use for various activities? ). The survey indicates left-handed on average do considerably more than I do with their left hand, like throw, hold, unscrew, kick.
It seems left-handed at least themselves think they are more clever and creative ( What are the effects of being left-handed? ), which actually might rather mean left-handed people are more arrogant and self-righteous. Yet, asking someone about traits supposedly caused by a given group belonging tends to make people lean towards the positive rather than the negative (obviously). Therefore it’s not a scientifically relevant result.
A mentioned benefit of being left-handed: Helps: using a mouse and writing simultaneously (righties can't do that!). If meaning writing on paper, clearly there’s no reason to write anything on paper while using a computer, neither is using a pocket calculator by the way. If meaning using the keyboard, I can’t do that effectively at the same time anyway. I wonder how many can.
I loved this response: As I am only 4 years old I am unable to answer these questions. Clearly written by an adult that wanted to be funny.
Does this mean anything substantial? Most likely not. Whatever your talents, the important thing is to achieve valuable and long-lasting results (career-, money-, power-, social-wise). Bragging about being left-handed won’t help.
The litmus test for entrepreneurs
Do you accept the ideas of others even though you believe, or even know, they are bad?
or
Do you drive your own ideas with the conviction that they are good, and make others believe in them too?
In a situation where a lot of money and personal reputation is at stake it’s easy to fall for the siren’s song of the first statement. Therein lies peril: You might feel safer (“It wasn’t my idea, so it’s not my fault if everything goes to hell.”), but if it fails you’ll be as guilty as anyone else of the outcome.
There’s always need for compromises in management teams, as people have different views and different experiences and knowledge, but if you are primarily and persistently going for the first statement, you probably shouldn’t be in a corporate management position. You simply don’t take responsibility.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Why I develop mobile applications
I was mail-interviewed by Carl Williams at OdinJobs for my thoughts about mobile application development, and here’s the summary together with others’ responses.
Mobile Apps - How To Develop Apps And Get Paid For It.
I forgot to write something about the negative sides of mobile application development, and the biggest negative is that it’s a very uncertain revenue stream, despite what people might say. Developing for others as a consultant or employed provides much more secure revenue and honestly also more revenue compared to direct sales, unless you are really lucky.
Not that developing mobile applications is a very critical part of my business anymore. I now focus on company ownerships and management., with revenue from application and service development on the side.
It can be fun too though.
E-books overtake games at App Store
Related stories:
Mobclix: Books Outnumber Games in the App Store
FierceMobile: Books now outnumber games in Apple's App Store
AnalystXpress: Battle of the e-Books
Highlights:
the App Store boasts more than 26,500 books, representing 18.6 percent of the total 142,000 available applications--the storefront features a little over 25,000 games, or 17.6 percent of all apps
books first usurped the top position in September of last year--as of August, 1 percent of the entire U.S. population was reading a book on the iPhone.
A recent RBC/ChangeWave Research survey reports that 13 percent of consumers are either somewhat or very likely to purchase the iPad, compared to only 9 percent who expressed comparable interest in a 2007 survey gauging demand for Apple's original iPhone.
Meanwhile, Apple’s iPad will shortly be hitting the stores – which is presumably the main reason underpinning this uplift in e-books for the App Store. Because the iPad, as well as being a rather nifty games console and video device, will also serve as a first rate e-reader
Note though that the ratio is not in favor of e-books when it comes to downloads. There games have a considerably larger volume.
Note that the current e-books are encapsulated in applications. iTunes / App Store will offer e-books without the application wrapper as well, and this will likely dominate in the longer term.
Also, in InformationWeek: Amazon Kindle Sales Push Profits Up 71%:
[Amazon] sells six books for the Kindle for every 10 physical books with the same titles
Some analysts estimate the Kindle accounts for about 60% of the e-reader market, with the Sony Reader a distant second.
The iPad has more capabilities than the Kindle, which is focused only on reading digital books, newspapers and magazines. However, the Kindle is less expensive, costing $259 versus the iPad's starting price of $499.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Android Market needs improving
From Android Market: For a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the thousands of titles that are available, you will need to view Android Market on a handset.
I wonder if that’s a good decision, considering it’s much easier to browse applications via a PC, even though they are then downloaded via the phone. It would be very easy for Google to provide the complete catalogue this way too.
Also, don’t you think it’s quite empty on the PC site in general? Very few applications and very little is said about each application. I had to go to each provider’s site to get the full picture of each application. There’s neither any pricing etc.
Android Market has a long way to go to be even close to what Apple has achieved with App Store. Whatever might be the qualities of the phone access to Android Market, PC access is clearly sub par.
Also, iPhone vs Android: iPhone has in my opinion a much better-looking UI with more flexibility. I have still to investigate the new features of Android 2.1.
Android phones will compete head-on with the iPhone even so, and will gain market share through sheer mass, but it’s crucial that the after market with media, applications and gadgets is also top notch.
Twitter expands
Today’s newsletter from Twitter says they now have 140 employees. That’s a cost of roughly $10M per year, so either they have that level of revenue and/or investors are pumping in that money. I hope the first. As indicated in How to make money from social networks, they should be able to get a sizeable revenue by now, but if it’s at this level I don’t know.
It also says there are something like 70k Twitter applications. That’s an astounding figure. On the negative side, how many of those are profitable in any sense of the word? My own Twitizer is not, except for scraps of ad revenue. It’s really a showcase (that’s at least my excuse), but I’m now considering an opportunity to monetize it. Press release about that is being written as we speak.
This diagram might be interesting, showing the number of Twitter updates over time.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
The digital Swiss Army Knife
The mobile phone is.
From The Next Web: 8 Things Your Phone Will (Probably) Replace
- Satellite Navigation Systems
- The Humble Alarm Clock
- Remote Controls
- Payment Terminals
- Your Wallet
- Car Keys
- Portable USB Storage
- Video Conferencing/Projectors
Nothing far-fetched really, except I think there will be inertia for Payment Terminals and Your Wallet, and I doubt Video Conferencing will become a hit. Already no one cares for video conferencing (the supposed killer app for 3G).
Also (partly already the case):
- Music player (streamed or stored)
- Video player (streamed or stored; not the least TV Shows)
- Camera and camcorder
- Notepad / shopping list
- Magazines / News
- Books
- PC, in terms of applications, communication and digital mingling
- etc etc
What makes the newer smartphones so creative and open is that the application fully controls the user experience. That’s a big paradigm shift.
