Doing Words

Don’t get stuck selling shovels

// June 24th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Hardware, Mobile, Products

There’s an old saying (who knows, it may even pre-date the internet) and it goes, ‘in a gold rush, it’s better to be selling shovels than trying to find gold’. Well, that only holds true if (a) you can control the market price of shovels; and (b) nobody knows where the gold is.

Once the gold deposits are mapped, or if cheaper shovel-makers start eating into your margins, you better pivot quick and become the best gold miner in the business, or the best refinery, or the best goldsmith in town. If the gold market changes from being about discovering gold to locking up, distributing and selling it, the act of shovelling becomes a much smaller slice of a much bigger pie, and your shareholders will punish you for not adapting to the changing market.

This story isn’t about gold mining, it’s not even about shovels. But as with most of my writing, I need analogies to set the scene. This post is actually about the smartphone market, and it’s partly a response to a post by Jojo over on 37Signals, where Jojo asserts that the new Nokia N9 handset may still be successful, even though the app offering for the N9 looks sparse. This post started out as a comment at the end of Jojo’s post, then got way too long for anybody to read at the end of many pages of other comments, so here it is in full.

Here’s the thing: the N9 will find customers and will be profitable, but will it be a big enough success to do what Nokia shareholders *really* want from the company? To take back #1 place? No. And the answer lies in the way Nokia just keeps selling shovels. Or, if you prefer, keeps making TV sets…

Oh dear me. Billions of dollars, thousands of well-paid employees, and this is what you see when you first go to Nokia.com?

The handset market is changing

Being a handset maker is becoming a smaller slice of a much bigger pie, in the same way that making TV sets is now a small slice of a pie mostly made up of content production, distribution/licensing, and advertising.

By sticking to handsets and partnering with Microsoft for mobile operating systems, what Nokia has done is to commit to making TV sets, handing the content production to Microsoft (the networks, remember, are already owned by carriers).

That would be fine, if making the hardware was still a premium margin business, or if the market for content was still unproven. But a seething mass of Asian manufacturers making Android handsets are cutting all the margin out of making smartphones, and the market for content is very much proven. VERY much proven.

For Apple, meanwhile, is the fastest-growing content production, distribution, licensing and sales business that the media industry has ever known.

Shareholders expect Nokia to make the same leap and the reason it’s taking a hammering is that it’s failing to do so. In fact, it’s been failing to do so for a very long time.

Build a better marketplace

Enough of TVs and shovels, they’ve served their purpose. Nokia can be a successful and profitable handset manufacturer, but it is now clear that it won’t be the biggest brand in the mobile space unless it has the biggest content marketplace. Mobile content is now largely about music, TV, movies and, more than anything, mobile apps. How’s Nokia doing?

Not good. Nokia’s first opportunity to build an app marketplace was actually with the N-Gage platform, which it launched in 2003. Apple didn’t launch the first iPhone until mid-way thru 2007. Here we are in 2011 and Nokia’s had several attempts at building a thriving content marketplace, yet has been overtaken by every other competitor of note, most especially by Apple.

Nobody likes inertia, especially a shareholder

Nokia’s had an eternity in ‘market time’ to see the change coming, from a hardware market to a content market. It’s even had the luxury of being first to market with a content store. Yet with each strategic decision it makes, and with each product releases, it just confirms that making hardware is written so deep into its corporate DNA that there’s no room in there to become anything else.

That’s OK, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Nokia’s doomed, it just means that the market will adjust its valuation of Nokia, and we see that happening right now, with shareholders pricing in the adjustment, realising that Nokia’s probably only ever going to do one thing well, and that’s make shovels.

The best camera to have is the one with apps on it

// May 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Mobile, My life

They say the best camera to have is the one you have with you. Never more true than this evening when the universe hit me with a stunning sunset as I crossed the shared cycle path across the Warringah Freeway at Neutral Bay. I certainly wouldn’t have thought to take my DSLR out with me to pickup tomatoes from the shops.

Very little trickery used here, just the iPhone in my pocket with the apps Darkroom (for minimising blurring in low light) and Tiltshiftgen (for a touch of blur, saturation and brightness).

Check my Flickr feed and you’ll see a significant percentage of my photography in the past year has been low-resolution because I’ve been taking more shots on my iPhone than my DSLR.

It’s certainly not the quality of the lens or the performance of the shutter and sensor that make the iPhone my camera of choice; it’s the programmable power of the apps I’ve installed, the fact that I can post photos direct to Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly it’s the way the iPhone is always in my pocket, on the arm of my chair, in the glovebox of my car, and since it became my alarm clock, on the side of my bed.

If I were a futurist I’d predict in the next five years, the photography industry will be dominated by devices that have lenses and sensors, but also have SIM cards, 3G and WIFI radios, address books, calendars and browsers. Quality of lens and sensor will still matter, but quality of OS and apps on your ‘camera’ will increasingly matter more than the lens and sensor.

It may be tough for a phone maker to make good cameras, but it’s well-nigh impossible for a camera maker to make good phones. Unless you’re a premium professional brand like Leica or Hasselblad, better merge or seek to be acquired by a Samsung or Nokia. Yes, Nikon and Canon, I’m looking at you.

The future of photography is not about what happens in the process of capturing the image, it’s about whether there was a camera present at all, and about what happens to the image after it’s been taken.

Welcome to the Century of Live Streaming Semi-Conciousness

// December 10th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Mobile

If this century is to be remembered for anything other than fiddling while Rome burned, Beijing fumed and various tiny island nations sank slowly beneath the waves, I predict we will be remembered for the tremendous progress we’ve made in communicating nothing interesting, to millions of people worldwide. This is the Century Of Live Streaming Semi-Conciousness.

The professionals have been doing it for a century or so (I’m looking at you, Daily Mirror, Fox News, Big Brother) but until very recently they’ve been constrained by the need to make a profit from it. We amateurs have no such constraint — we do it because we like to be watched, and because we like to think that someone is watching us.

With each passing day I learn of new ways I can say nothing interesting in front of an ever-growing audience, sitting at desks, in living rooms, glued to their mobile phone, all waiting to see what kind of nothing I’ll talk about next.

Today was a big day in Nothing Publishing, with the release of Ustream.tv’s free iPhone app, Ustream Live Broadcaster. Until now, Ustream’s thousands of nothing-broadcasting users have been stuck in front of the webcam stuck on top of their computers, and most of the video on the Ustream network is stream-of-semi-conciousness stuff, poorly-lit by a too-close LCD monitor, with heavy shadow on the wall of the den in the background.

With the release of Ustream Live Broadcaster, at last the semi-concious live video broadcasters of the world are set free to roam the pavements and hallways of the world, shuffling slowly like zombies, mouths half-agape as they try to frame the shot, try to keep it steady and think of nothing to say while they create an online poll with one finger and scout around with half an eye, looking desperately for something — anything — that might be happening, which would be twice as interesting as the nothing they’re filming right now.

I’ve installed Ustream Live Broadcaster on my iPhone, I’ve carried it with me to the car, mounted it in the windscreen cradle so my iPhone can play rather-ordinary-GPS, and then driven up to the tennis courts to pick Boy8 up from school. Nothing much happens. There’s some traffic, and I couldn’t think of nothing to say, but I’ve left the afternoon ABC news on the radio for you so you won’t fall asleep while you watch.

The best bit about this app is that I don’t need to take a hand off the steering wheel to publish my video about nothing to thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The worst bit about it is that even when my network coverage was strong, the quality of the video takes you right back to the beginning of the last century (you remember, The Century Of Everybody Watching The Same TV Show About Nothing.)

No, wait, I’m forgetting: the worst bit is, despite the technology, I still have nothing interesting to say.

Yes, we can all now broadcast live streaming video from our iPhones. Now all we need is something interesting to broadcast.

Augmented Reality: your ad makes me want to hurl chunks

// September 28th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Mobile

The original headline for this story was “Lucy in the sky with De Beers?” — a reference to the final sentence of the story’s first paragraph. Shortly after I first published the story, the news broke that Lucy O’Donnell, the woman who’d inspired the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was dead. It wasn’t me — she had reportedly been suffering from an auto-immune disease. I’ve got nothing against the song or the woman who inspired it so changed my headline to avoid offence, using one of the subheads from later in the story. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s entirely inoffensive and wholly appropriate – alan.

To my great disappointment, ‘augmented reality’ (AR) doesn’t mean a Lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds hallucinatory overlay on the real world. Nor yet will it allow me to reach out with my dataglove and fondle the loins of a lover in another timezone. So far, it seems limited to showing me where the nearest train station is (should I bang my head and forget) and to plastering advertising messages across my field of view. As if there weren’t enough of those already. Lucy in the sky with De Beers, anyone?

Never  mind.

Congratulations all the same to the small team at Australian mobile marketing developer Insqribe who have just announced an ‘augmented reality’ platform for the iPhone that allows other iPhone app developers to add AR features to their own apps. That puts them in the forefront of a burgeoning wave of AR apps and platform solutions and I’m always pleased to see an Australian company in the forefront of anything.

Before I explain what this means for us all, please set aside the problem that very few consumers own a phone smart enough to do AR. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up with me and gets an iPhone too. Especially when they hear that it will let them see advertising which isn’t really there!

Here’s how the consumer marketing industry could use a platform like Insqribe’s to being this utopian future to life.

If I understand it correctly, if you’re , say, Sensis and you have (a) the geo data for your YellowPages.com.au advertisers; (b) an image for each advertiser; and (c) and the urge to build or add new coolness to your iPhone app, you now can. Alternatively, if you aspire to be the next Sensis (and we definitely need a next Sensis) you could build your app, add Insqribe’s AR, and then all you have to do is the easy bit about signing up all the small business advertisers. Here’s a sample in action:

I think we’ll see a lot of excitement around AR in the next 12 months, some of which I share (distant lover, have faith, it can’t be much longer). But I hope it proves to be a bigger hit than other forms of location-based mobile marketing.  And I worry that you may be overestimating how keen I am to wander the streets holding my iPhone up so I can find vouchers for $2 off a coffee here, 10% off a pair of jeans there. I may not the alone in my lack-of-keenness. Here’s why:

(more…)

The iPhone changed how i park my car

// May 29th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Me, Mobile, Other news

How the iPhone changed how i park my car

If you don’t yet have an iPhone but you have friends who do, chances are you’ll have seen them struggle to define how the iPhone is more than just a phone.

It’s hard to describe, but for me the essence is that the iPhone’s hardware components are programmable. I’ll delve into that in more detail in a later post but for the moment, consider the way my iPhone has changed a very everyday aspect of my life not usually associated with telephony: parking the car.

When i drive to work i have to move my car every hour. After a few re-parks i forget which street my car is in. Dropping a pin on gmaps on my iphone helps me find my way back. Setting the timer on my iphone takes five seconds and means i never get a parking ticket… unless a meeting runs late!

So this cellphone has saved me walking time, parking fine money, and this morning, it went one step more: I used the Shazam app on my iPhone to ID and tag a great song playing on the radio and then buy it from iTunes.

iPhone’s a game-changer. All you haters better step back.

mHits needs a bit more for mobile payments to work

// March 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Mobile

mHits needs a bit more work

Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy

iPhone apps that help me mock Blackberry users

// November 17th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Mobile, Reviews, software

Me at WebJam, fiddling with my iPhone when I should be paying attention

So far I haven’t written much about iPhone apps, considering they’ve changed my life, and all. They help me get more productive, stay organised, record thoughts, check directions, split bills, mock Blackberry users and fill in the many interstitial moments of nothingness in my day that I should really spend focusing on remaining in the present, observing my ahamkara… rather than fiddling with my iPhone. Ah well.  

Today all that changes (iPhone apps continue to change my life, but today I write about some of them.)

I’m promped to get recommending because Kate over at The Zeitgeists has a good short list of iPhone apps she finds helpful and fun, but like many Web 2.0 dreamers, she has an aversion to paying for things, even good things. So while she’s got some good apps on her list, she’s really missing some of the cream of the crop.

So, after the click, here’s some iPhone app recommendations from me: (more…)

Loving that iPhone ringtone feeling

// September 14th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Mobile, Music

I’m loving The Feeling’s music at the moment, particularly the 2006 song ‘I Love It When You Call.’

Then it struck me how good it would sound as a ringtone on my iPhone.

Just in case you think it would sound great on your iPhone too, here’s the ringtone I made.

(Just drag it onto iTunes and it should appear in your list of ringtones.)

Don’t thank me, just buy the album, it’s great!

• Twelve Stops and Home on iTunes Store US
• Twelve Stops and Home on iTunes Store Australia

Mobile ads are working for brand advertisers

// September 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Mobile

Tweak o’ the knob to Gavin Heaton for locating Chris Schaumann’s recent presentation on digital brand advertising in the Asia Pacific region (see the presentation below.) Only 5% of advertising budgets in the region are spent online so it’s no wonder that Schaumann finds 65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumer behaviour.

For me, the numbers that really struck me were on slide 43, which researched 21 mobile branding campaigns and found a 24% increase in brand awareness, 12% increase in message association, 5% increase in brand favourability and 5% increase in purchase intent. I’ve never been much of a believer in mobile brand advertising, preferring instead to apply it to social marketing and click-to-buy. But here’s some clear evidence that mobile brand advertising works – at least, in Asia.

There are some other surprising results to be found in Chris’ presentation comparing YouTube, embedded video and TV for delivering video ads. You won’t believe how well YouTube scored against TV…

Do CDs have a future in the developing world?

// June 23rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Mobile, Music

‘Doomed’ in music album covers rendered by Amaztype – check it out

In Canada, PWC forecasts that music downloads will exceed physical music sales by 2011. That’s no longer amazing, though it would have seemed so to the music industry five years ago. Now it’s just further confirmation of what we already knew – the music industry is undergoing change at of such magnitude and pace as to be almost indistinguishable from extinction.

It’s not so much the fact that it’s happening but the rate at which its occurring. In 2007, the Canadian download market was less than a quarter of the size of the physical sales market, yet in only four more years the minnow will overtake the whale due to the rapid rate of change – the decline in Canadian CD sales, for instance, was 11.9 per cent in 2006 and 19.8 per cent in 2007.

So far, all shocking stuff that no longer shocks. The unanswered question is: where will the CD market bottom-out? How many CDs can the industry still expect to sell in, say, 2020? And where? (more…)