Juley* I’m back!
*”Juley” means “hello” in Tibetan.
I was on a speaker panel at Mobile Feast today so I suppose I can’t pretend to be in the Himalayas any longer! Yes, I’m back, though it took me a week to complete triage on 1900+ unread emails and deal with a pile of bills and other snail mail.
I’m still in the process of uploading some 8Gb of photos I took while in the Himalayas, but there are already some good shots there if you have a moment to check them out. I’ve sprinkled a few at the end of this post if you don’t have time to go to Flickr.
This was the first Mobile Feast conference, and while any new conference can use a tweak, it was a promising start for a conference that aims to help businesspeople from outside the mobile industry understand what the future of the mobile internet might look like. I was speaking on a panel predicting what future mobile content might look like, and with me on the panel where Stephen Kilsby of game developer Viva La Mobile, Jennifer Zanich from mobile social networking startup Xumii, and Christina Thurn from Walt Disney’s internet arm.
While I didn’t have to present with any slides (yay) I had a few things to say along these lines:
- Youth finds its own uses for things. Young film makers took cinema – originally a fine art medium – and invented Hollywood blockbusters. Young music producers took the music production industry built for recording jazz music and used it to make something 100x bigger – rock and roll. TV and computers were both built by an older generation, then ‘hacked’ by a younger generation who did things that were new, different and world-changing. The next big generations (Y and Z) will be consuming content and services primarily via a mobile, not a desktop or laptop. They won’t grow into a desktop as they age. They will make content and services on mobile devices that are as incomprehensible to us as Jimi Hendrix was was to the men who invented the LP, but which will find millions of customers and make millions of dollars for those of us smart enough to back the right young innovators. We should stop trying to define how this generation ‘should’ use the mobile web and focus instead on observing how they use it – that’s how we’ll discover how to make the mobile blockbusters of the future.
- The iPhone Appstore is the beginning of the end of the mobile ‘carrier deck’. The appstore is the mobile equivalent of the ‘My Yahoo!’ and ‘My Excite’ personalisable homepages of the late ’90s desktop internet – a necessary middle stage between the walled garden of AOL and Compuserve and the open, unrestricted access of Google. On mobile devices, the carrier deck will be replaced by a user-generated deck – a mobile homepage created by the mobile user and their sphere of friends – the content, topics and products they love/hate right now. Find the right taste-makers and mavens in the mobile youth market now if you want to get big usage of your mobile content or applications – these people are nearly free at the moment but will become more expensive as they realise the commercial power they have.
- The demise of the carrier deck will also allow content and application publishers to derive some ‘long tail’ revenue. Carrier decks kill long tail revenue by burying old content/apps too deep. To illustrate the potential of long tail revenue for mobile content I pulled out my iPhone and played ‘Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century’ – a Daffy Duck cartoon made by Warner Bros. in 1952 – I’d just rented it on iTunes Store for my son to watch on my iPhone and Apple TV. 1952 and still renting? Talk about a long tail!
- Carriers will soon be forced to share data revenues with content/app publishers like they do with handset manufacturers. Too much of the revenue in the mobile industry still rests with the ‘dumb pipe’ providers. Too much consumption of that data will be driven by the publishers. Critical mass will be reached sometime in the next five years, probably with a deal between social network or social messaging providers.
- Apple’s total market cap recently overtook Google’s. I’ve been a user of Apple’s ‘soup to nuts’ delivery channel from content publisher tools to online content sales systems to home entertainment hardware for long enough to make this prediction with confidence: Apple will be the largest entertainment company in the world, measured by revenue, in the next five years. Feel free to remind me I said that!
Finally, what I didn’t get to say was that eight years ago this month I was busy delivering the first mobile content for an Olympic games – the Sydney Olympics 2000. So much amazing progress has happened in less than a decade!
See, in 2000 Yahoo! was angling to try and be the major online partner of the games. Though no mobile content rights were made available by the IOC, Mark Jackson and the good folks from the Sydney Olympic Organising Committee did their best to help us out. Problem: there were almost no web-enabled handsets in Australia at the time.
So we recruited and trained spokesmodels to ride visitors around Sydney in Yahoo!-branded rickshaws and offer to show them our WAP coverage and SMS alerts, driven by content licensed from local content publishers.
The content was served in an early WAP browser, was text only, woefully behind the live results available on TV, and was delivered incredibly slowly on Nokia 7110 handsets. If you were really in no hurry to get somewhere, our spokesmodels would help you login to your Yahoo! account on the handset (it took about 4-5mins per login) and set up some SMS alerts (which most users would soon turn off because not only were they out of date, SMS was punishingly expensive.) The spokesmodel could also take your photo at the Olympics in Sydney and upload it to Yahoo! Photos so you could share it with your friends… only, not until the spokesmodel returned to a desktop PC later in the day, since the handset didn’t have a camera and even a 100k image would have taken centuries to upload even if there was a way to get the image file onto the handset. My first cameraphone was a SonyEricsson T68i that had the camera as a separate plug-in device, released the following year.
From memory, I think we had 10 spokesmodels on rickshaws at any one time, each with a Nokia 7110 and we just about emptied Nokia’s stocks of 7110s – we had most of the 7110s in the country at that time. Let’s be generous and say maybe there were a hundred 7110 handsets in Australia at that time and assume all of them had been setup for WAP access (the 7110 didn’t usually come with WAP settings pre-installed) . So in August 2000, less than a decade ago, there were maybe a hundred mobile handsets in Australia capable of mobile browsing. Desperately slow browsing, in greyscale only, at very great expense and with almost no Australian-generated content or applications to browse.
Yes, we have a long way to go, but we have already come so far.
