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.

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.

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.

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:

Stop the phone, I want to get off

Viewing the world through an iPhone camera — especially one with 3D ads floating around in it — can be a disorienting experience that can cause motion sickness. Move the phone too fast in a busy spot and refresh rates slow as your phone needs to re-render all those 3D objects overlaying the actual view. Trying to concentrate on a jittery, laggy version of the world on the small screen while the jitter- and lag-free reality is right behind it can throw your inner ear out, much like reading a book in the back of a moving car.

Even with a stomach like a rock, waving your iPhone around in front of you is a dorky way to behave (unless you’re a flashmob camera operator or starring in an iTunes ad.) Navigating while holding your iPhone at a cooler altitude (yes, it’s hip to keep it at hip level) may mean you’re more likely to bump into a street sign than a bargain. You may also be limited to advertising offers on the floors below you at the mall.

Kids may be better at this walking-without-looking-ahead than me, since they are already well-practised at shuffling slowly ahead while staring at their shoes through a veil of carefully-flopped emo hair.

But associating brands with nausea is not the biggest problem. I’m not at all convinced marketers and consumers actually want AR advertising.

I demand to see the demand

When I work with advertising sales teams, I never fail to marvel at their ability to come up with ideas for new kinds of advertising inventory. I thank them and remind them that they are here to sell what’s already in the inventory. But nobody wants to sell what’s already on the shelf — that’s too hard. It’s much more fun to come up with new kinds of ad. We may be seeing a little of that with AR already. Thanks, but when advertisers are worried they won’t be able to buy enough AR inventory in five years’ time, I’ll come running to you. I may be too late to capitalise on it, but at least I won’t be so early I’ve over-capitalised on it.

Then there’s us, the poor ad-fatigued consumer. Technologists and marketers have always over-estimated how interested consumers are in their advertising. Why else would they show us the same television commercial, once every ad break, throughout an entire season of Rugby Union or cricket? Reinforced by more ads on buses, in trains, in newspapers and on websites. Enough! We got it. We’re beginning to hate that stupid ad, and by extension, that stupid advertising agency, their stupid client, that stupid product and the stupid brand behind it.

Two dollars off your coffee if you’ll just turn Bluetooth back on

Five years ago, Bluetooth location-based marketing showed us what can go wrong when we overestimate consumers’ need for more advertising. This, we were assured, would be different. There would be no generic untargeted campaigns — these would be short, smart campaigns, targeted by time and place, offering only relevant coupons for amazing, irresistable discounts on brands the advertiser already knows we want. We’d walk past a billboard and it would know so much about us, it could follow us home and pick out an outfit for us to wear to dinner that evening.

Not quite. Smart billboards proved so dumb that the Bluetooth features in most phones were turned off within weeks of purchase. Untargeted, dumb campaigns for movies that finished screening months ago lingered on, friendless and neglected, still trying to push unwanted ringtones and desktop wallpaper at passers-by long after the campaign had ended. Age, sex and demographic targeting wasn’t available, so the same offers got pushed to anybody who walked past. And then Bluetooth got viruses. Imagine AR viruses (trust me, distant lover, I’m clean, I swear.)

AR is more consensual than Bluetooth marketing (nothing bothers you unless you launch the AR app) but the problem with Bluetooth wasn’t just the invasive ping. Consumers would rather gather and select offers of interest to them at a time and place of their own choosing, not while they’re engaged in a task-focused activity on a busy city street. Talking to your friend, dodging other pedestrians, not getting run over by bicycle couriers and remembering how much time you have before your next appointment is quite challenging enough. Most of us would rather do our discount shopping planning from the comfy couch at home, which is why my letterbox and what remains of my weekend newspaper supplement are still stuffed full of catalogues and inserts.

Catalogues don’t need location-awareness, integration with the subway timetable or (Jebus save us) social discovery. They have tactile satisfaction, high-resolution colour printing, massive scale and penetration, they can be targeted to subscribers or by subject matter. And they’re downright indestructible. In the peace and quiet of my own home it is so much easier to survey the sales and coupons and discounts on offer, pick and choose, and plan a journey in to cherry-pick my selection. Like land-mines, I hate catalogues — I’d support any move to ban them outright, but like land-mines, they aren’t going away any time soon.

The cathedral and the bazaar both have 10% off today

As to the AR advertisers and the AR platforms themselves, will business listings from different publishers be pooled or will they be firewalled off? In other words, will McDonalds locations rub shoulders with KFC locations if the AR publisher has both brands as clients, or will the publisher maintain datasets separately for each client using the platform?

If you’re able to negotiate the former, then the benefit to consumers is multiplied by the network effect, you get greater adoption by developers and by consumers. But in an AR platform, the processing power of the phone and the consumer’s tolerance for visual clutter both limit the number of advertisers you can service in one city block. Do you give priority to advertisers closer to where the consumer is standing, or to the advertiser most likely to collect a click-through, or to the advertiser in that block who’s paying you the most?

If you’re required to maintain separate datasets and set out to build separate AR apps for each client’s brand, you may see money sooner but you’re less likely to get widespread adoption since the consumer benefit is far lower. Few consumers will be interested in installing, learning and using an app that shows them only the location of one brand’s outlets unless it’s something they use frequently (in which case, unless they’re travelling, you’d imagine they know where to find it.)

We’ve seen examples of both approaches on the iPhone so far, and I think the apps offering open, broader datasets (like Google Maps) or narrower, deeper datasets (like Urbanspoon) have the brightest future.

My advice: choose either the broad or the deep. Choose early and stick to your choice. If the market direction changes, the tailwind disappears and you get caught somewhere between the two, you may walk into something more painful than a street sign.

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.

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:

Banner – display a big scrolling LED message across a crowded bar (such as, “Ahem, excuse me, but I couldn’t help notice you have an iPhone too…”)

Bejeweled 2 – best mix of interstitial casual gaming payoff, high quality graphics and sound, and strategy if you have longer than 2mins to play.

Bloom – awesometastic! Never have to buy another Brian Eno album ever again!

Comic Touch – enLOLify those craptastic low-res, misty, poorly exposed iPhone camera images in two shakes and a drag.

Face Melter – take a photo of your face, drag to ‘melt’ areas of the image, then click the ‘animate’ button to see it all move. Will convince any <10 kid that their mum/dad must trash the Blackberry and buy an iPhone.

Flick Fishing – casting the line by flicking the iphone is even funnier than waving your iphone around like a light saber and playing a two player game across wifi is hilarious after a couple of drinks.

Fring – if you simply must remain connected to everybody, via everything, all the time, this is the app.

Midomi – like Shazam, only even more accurate. Also lets you say some lyrics rather than sing, or even just type in a snippet of lyric. Not as pretty lookin’ but works great.

Smule Ocarina – infreakingcredible. play a woodwind instrument by blowing into the mic. and click on the social tab to listen to other people’s tunes in a cool Google Earth-like globe animation.

Oz Weather – the best weather app for .au and $0.00001 from every copy sold goes directly to a company in which i am negotiating to become a minority shareholder.

Pano – up yours SonyEricsson! Now I can take panoramic shots on my iphone. Misty, poorly exposed, and low-res panoramic shots, but panoramic all the same!

Remember The Milk – if there’s only one paid app you buy, this should be it. Actually, the app is free, but you need to subscribe to the online task management service that goes with it for it to work. Once you’re done, you can mark that task as complete.

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

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…

‘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?

Remember, the music industry still supports a small but healthy market for vinyl records. It’s still possible to buy movies on VHS tape. Everything we’ve learned about new media in the past 30 years tells us that no medium becomes extinct; it just assumes a minor niche in a richer, more diverse marketplace of media.

Could CDs become the default medium for servicing developing markets such as Africa that don’t yet have the disposable income and mobile carrier penetration to support a mass market of mobile handset downloads? Could the physical music production component of the music industry cushion its fall by repositioning to focus on servicing developing markets? My guess is no; that either the disposable income won’t increase fast enough or the penetration of mobile carriers will make the window too narrow and short-lived.

Having done some work in mobile content and mobile social networks, I’ve seen for myself how quickly African consumers have leapt onboard and adopted mobile technologies. Even (and perhaps because of) in cities where there’s almost no terrestrial internet access and where mains electricity is available for only a few hours a day, mobile handsets have become the communication tool and social glue for not only resident communities but the broader diaspora created by the guest worker industry, refugee resettlement and overseas study programs.

Instead I’d expect developing nations to create a new class of music consumer; one who wants to mix western top 20 artists with a melange of local artists and music genres.

For the next decade or so handset storage on low-end phones will be limited to a few gigabytes so this consumer won’t be able to stay loyal to a small set of artists or brands. Instead they will delete/download/delete/download, choosing new content over keeping old content. You’d be wasting your time trying to build a multi-song or multi-album relationship with them.

Music and video content will be intermingled and video will be listened to as much as watched since content will be chosen from mobile portals that tend to blend the two together to increase the odds of a download from limited screen real estate.

Distant future? Hardly. Here’s a living, breathing example of the music consumer of the future, who I found on a train between Delhi and Chandrigarh last July, grooving along to bangra dance music on his mobile while his battery held out.

Bangra on the train to Chandrigarh from bigyahu on Vimeo.

I don’t know what this error message means when I sync my iPhone with my contacts and addressbook on my Mac, but know i don’t need it right now.

I especially don’t need to go fishing through Apple discussion forums and enthusiast groups, trying to separate wild guesses from knowledgeable advice, trying several different things until one thing works.

And I especially don’t need to accidentally delete, duplicate or triplicate all my events and contacts as a side-effect of trying to fix the problem.

Oh, woe is me! But an unsynced iPhone is like a Motorolla Razr with a nicer interface – it cannot remain so for long.

Praise Jobs I have an iPhone now so I have one fewer gadget in my bag when travelling, but still, I’m sick of changing timezones on different devices and applications.

I live a moderately-wired life: my wife and I share iCal calendars, I refer to my schedule on my iPhone and Mac during the day, and I work at bluepulse.com where we use Google Calendar to manage office schedules.

Is it too much to ask OpenID and the online identity industry to include ‘current time zone’ in the data they store on my behalf? I foresee a future in which we need only tell one device or service that they’ve changed timezone, and all their devices and services are updated.

Meanwhile, I just need to forget to change timezones on one device or service and events start appearing at the wrong times in one or more places. If I don’t notice, and then sync the devices again, it’s way too easy to end up with two copies of each event, and then it takes a lot of searching and deleting – event-by-event – to bring things back to an even keel.

Imagine telling bluepulse or <twitter that you’re now on Pacific Time and knowing that your phone, calendar app and web service will be updated automagically. It’s not utopia, but it’s in the same timezone.

The only really shocking thing: that so many Australian consumers are still paying through the nose for the physical music product when the identical track is available online for about a third of the price.

Anyway, there’s nothing to wring your hands about (unless you own a CD pressing business) because sales of online digital single tracks increased by 64% in the same period, and at $8.38m in sales revenue is a little more than twice the value of physical single sales. Plenty healthy. Factor in the higher margins at almost every step in online versus physical production, distribution and delivery, and it’s a healthy business to be in, as long as you’re big enough to have a roster of successful artists and at the same time small enough to be able to keep up with the pace and true direction of change.

By “true direction” I mean where the industry is actually going, versus where some believe it can be steered. The former is entirely in the hands of the consumer, influenced by the content offerings available to them, how that content is priced and to what device it is delivered. The latter almost entirely the exclusive domain of large music labels and the industry bodies that serve them.

Evidence of a failure to keep up with the true direction of change: talk of prolonging the life of CD singles by including “ringles” – ringtone versions of the single – on the CD, along with software that will make it “easy” to transfer the ringtone version of the track to a mobile phone.

Please, don’t let’s pretend for a moment that this might have the slightest chance of widespread consumer adoption! Consider the “Sony rootkit” fiascos, and what might need to be installed on the consumer’s PC in order to deliver a ringle from CD drive to handset. Better find a way to provide technical support for Windows ’98, 2000, XP, Vista, OS X and Linux installation issues for product that retails for $5. Don’t even start about what tiny percentage of mobile consumers ever successfully connect their handset to their PC, or want to do so for any reason.

Is it even possible to deliver a software application within the constraints of CD single data storage limits that might have a chance of being compatible with the diverse community of mobile handset operating systems, ringtone file types and carrier locks out there in the marketplace? I don’t like the word “impossible” – it always seems to get me in trouble – but let’s just say I’d be flabbergasted.

The only sensible way to deliver ringtones to mobile handsets is online, and for the majority of mobile consumers, the carrier – not the label, not the handset manufacturer – owns that pipe. No CD single “ringle” is going to influence that in the slightest. Labels: work with the carriers… or maybe acquire them. Carriers are to the future of music what radio broadcasters have been in the past, plus the entire retail supply chain. Getting out of that headlock they have on you is going to take more than a “ringle” or two.

The only really shocking thing: that so many Australian consumers are still paying through the nose for the physical music product when the identical track is available online for about a third of the price.

Anyway, there’s nothing to wring your hands about (unless you own a CD pressing business) because sales of online digital single tracks increased by 64% in the same period, and at $8.38m in sales revenue is a little more than twice the value of physical single sales. Plenty healthy. Factor in the higher margins at almost every step in online versus physical production, distribution and delivery, and it’s a healthy business to be in, as long as you’re big enough to have a roster of successful artists and at the same time small enough to be able to keep up with the pace and true direction of change.

By “true direction” I mean where the industry is actually going, versus where some believe it can be steered. The former is entirely in the hands of the consumer, influenced by the content offerings available to them, how that content is priced and to what device it is delivered. The latter almost entirely the exclusive domain of large music labels and the industry bodies that serve them.

Evidence of a failure to keep up with the true direction of change: talk of prolonging the life of CD singles by including “ringles” – ringtone versions of the single – on the CD, along with software that will make it “easy” to transfer the ringtone version of the track to a mobile phone.

Please, don’t let’s pretend for a moment that this might have the slightest chance of widespread consumer adoption! Consider the “Sony rootkit” fiascos, and what might need to be installed on the consumer’s PC in order to deliver a ringle from CD drive to handset. Better find a way to provide technical support for Windows ’98, 2000, XP, Vista, OS X and Linux installation issues for product that retails for $5. Don’t even start about what tiny percentage of mobile consumers ever successfully connect their handset to their PC, or want to do so for any reason.

Is it even possible to deliver a software application within the constraints of CD single data storage limits that might have a chance of being compatible with the diverse community of mobile handset operating systems, ringtone file types and carrier locks out there in the marketplace? I don’t like the word “impossible” – it always seems to get me in trouble – but let’s just say I’d be flabbergasted.

The only sensible way to deliver ringtones to mobile handsets is online, and for the majority of mobile consumers, the carrier – not the label, not the handset manufacturer – owns that pipe. No CD single “ringle” is going to influence that in the slightest. Labels: work with the carriers… or maybe acquire them. Carriers are to the future of music what radio broadcasters have been in the past, plus the entire retail supply chain. Getting out of that headlock they have on you is going to take more than a “ringle” or two.

When I read that 3 had launched its X-Series offering here in Australia, I thought maybe that day had arrived. But no, I must wait a little longer. Instead, 3′s X-Series is more of the same mobile superhighway robbery, only this time they’re claiming it’s ‘just like an ISP plan’. Don’t be fooled; it’s nothing of the sort.

Fairfax quotes 3 boss Nigel Dews on this: “It is very similar to broadband pricing consumers know at home today, but in many cases will be much better value.” Bollocks. The Australian X-Series offering would be “like an ISP plan” if your ISP restricted you to one of only four PC models, made its most generous plan $20 per Gb of data, limited the internet sites and software you could use, and then limited your use of that software, capping it to a certain number of minutes per month.

Initially excited to see Skype was one of the apps bundled with the handset, my enthusiasm faded when it became clear that only Skype-to-Skype calls are supported. No Skype-to-PSTN calls. Worse, even your use of Skype-to-Skype is capped, starting at 1,000 minutes per month on the cheapest plan and then 5c a minute thereafter.

Because X-Series plans are in addition to your voice minutes plan, you could quite easily find yourself paying a 5c a minute premium on your usual voice call rate to talk to Skype with someone on their PC using a device designed to place calls more easily and more quickly to their telephone! How attractive is that?

Your use of the other bundled apps and web services (Orb, a file-sharing app, Google search, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and eBay) is also capped, with a 10c per Mb charge over your cap. Yes, that’s cheaper than other Australian mobile networks. But are the kind of users savvy enough to want a mobile internet plan going to want a walled-garden of apps and web services? Do they need on-deck links to eBay and Google, or will they find that just a tad patronising? Most I know have these services bookmarked in Opera Mobile.

There is an uninspiring range of only four handsets available, omitting SonyEricsson, and surprisingly, not one of the phones supports all of the features and apps offered in X-Series plans. It’s a question of ‘which features can I live without?’ when you come to choose your handset rather than ‘which phone do I most like?’

Finally, the X-Series offering in Australia is considerably worse value than X-Series in other markets. Perhaps 3′s reliance on Telstra to deliver some of the network is to blame, but X-Series is less expensive in Asia and the UK, and their plans are uncapped.

When I read that 3 had launched its X-Series offering here in Australia, I thought maybe that day had arrived. But no, I must wait a little longer. Instead, 3′s X-Series is more of the same mobile superhighway robbery, only this time they’re claiming it’s ‘just like an ISP plan’. Don’t be fooled; it’s nothing of the sort.

Fairfax quotes 3 boss Nigel Dews on this: “It is very similar to broadband pricing consumers know at home today, but in many cases will be much better value.” Bollocks. The Australian X-Series offering would be “like an ISP plan” if your ISP restricted you to one of only four PC models, made its most generous plan $20 per Gb of data, limited the internet sites and software you could use, and then limited your use of that software, capping it to a certain number of minutes per month.

Initially excited to see Skype was one of the apps bundled with the handset, my enthusiasm faded when it became clear that only Skype-to-Skype calls are supported. No Skype-to-PSTN calls. Worse, even your use of Skype-to-Skype is capped, starting at 1,000 minutes per month on the cheapest plan and then 5c a minute thereafter.

Because X-Series plans are in addition to your voice minutes plan, you could quite easily find yourself paying a 5c a minute premium on your usual voice call rate to talk to Skype with someone on their PC using a device designed to place calls more easily and more quickly to their telephone! How attractive is that?

Your use of the other bundled apps and web services (Orb, a file-sharing app, Google search, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and eBay) is also capped, with a 10c per Mb charge over your cap. Yes, that’s cheaper than other Australian mobile networks. But are the kind of users savvy enough to want a mobile internet plan going to want a walled-garden of apps and web services? Do they need on-deck links to eBay and Google, or will they find that just a tad patronising? Most I know have these services bookmarked in Opera Mobile.

There is an uninspiring range of only four handsets available, omitting SonyEricsson, and surprisingly, not one of the phones supports all of the features and apps offered in X-Series plans. It’s a question of ‘which features can I live without?’ when you come to choose your handset rather than ‘which phone do I most like?’

Finally, the X-Series offering in Australia is considerably worse value than X-Series in other markets. Perhaps 3′s reliance on Telstra to deliver some of the network is to blame, but X-Series is less expensive in Asia and the UK, and their plans are uncapped.

• It runs OS X, which means a unix kernel, and a secure, dependable, stable environment, and great efficiency when it comes to battery life and processor power, if Apple’s laptops are any indication. Remains to be seen how much, if any, the widget versions of the calendar, addressbook, photo etc vary from their desktop equivalents.
  
  
• Could it (or a future version) also run small OS X apps that are not widgets? There’s no information on the chipset and RAM capacity, even in the tech specs. Someone like Endgadget will no doubt break those details in the next few days. Could you run Parallels Desktop on it and run Windows Mobile on that? No reason to do so except to demonstrate to people why the iPhone is so superior to a Windows Mobile gadget. But there are many other apps that would be helpful, particularly instant messenger and VOIP apps (since the iPhone has quad-band GSM and EDGE and WiFi.)
• The phone features integrated tools from Yahoo! and Google, including search and maps. But there’s no mention of an instant messaging client from Yahoo!, Google or Apple, and no mention of VOIP. Is that a concession to Cingular, which has the exclusive rights to sell the device initially, and future carrier deals? Because I don’t see how that’s going to prevent people from running their own VOIP app on the iPhone unless there are undisclosed barriers to doing that we have yet to discover in hands-on use.
• The device syncs with PCs and Macs, but there’s no mention of any cooperation with MSN on this device, and I can well imagine that the gulf between Apple and Microsoft will have deepened with the launch of this device. Microsoft has sunk a lot of cash into trying to build an early lead in mobile communications devices, and it looks to me like Apple has just leapfrogged Microsoft by five years of product maturity with its very first product in the segment.
• The two-finger touch screen user interface is truly ground-breaking, especially when tied to the accelerometer. I love the way you zoom in and out by drawing your thumb and forefinger together and apart. I also like the way the object onscreen ‘bounces’ when you try to drag it past the borders of the screen – nice silent way to indicate there’s nothing more hidden ‘below the fold’.
  
  
• Finally, and least importantly, does it come with an unscratchable crystal face like an expensive watch? Because this thing is all screen, and it’s a touch-screen too, so I’m going to get muffin residue all over it regularly, which I’ll want to wipe off with whatever is readily at hand – not with a fancy soft cloth. And I do NOT want to buy a third-party clear acrylic shell for this thing of beauty like I had to do with my iPod Nano.
  
  

initially in the US only this July

]]> http://js-kit.com/rss/doingwords.com/p=627 1 http://doingwords.com/2007/01/09/calling-it-an-iphone-sells-it-short-its-a-new-class-of-device/ http://doingwords.com/2007/01/09/calling-it-an-iphone-sells-it-short-its-a-new-class-of-device/#comments Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:51:00 +0000 alan http://doingwords.com/?p=252



Good lordy, why does the ground-breaking news always seem to break while I’m away on vacation? Am I taking too many vacations? This time I’m on a ski holiday in Canada when Apple unveils the iPhone, and after skimming the specs and early news reaction, I’m left with the impression that calling it an “iPhone” sells the device way short of its actual capacity. It’s only an “iPhone” in the sense that a laptop is an “iTypewriter.”



For this is not just the “iPod with mobile phone capabilities” device we were all hoping for – it’s something much more powerful and more flexible than anybody (outside the product team and the dealmakers) expected. It’s capable of so much more than just being a phone that I don’t really know how to describe it in 50 words or less, except to say that this device delivers a huge blow (Oliver calls it a “mortal blow“) to other manufacturers in the portable entertainment and handheld computing market, whatever it should be called. In terms of capability and integration it appears to be so far ahead of all the other devices in those categories that it’s as if Steve Jobs travelled back in time from 2020 to announce it today.



It’s got so many cool features, and so many bloggers are going to cover those, and I really need to get off my laptop and go skiing this afternoon. So I won’t cover the obvious stuff. But here’s the shortlist of elements that really caught my eye this morning:

• It runs OS X, which means a unix kernel, and a secure, dependable, stable environment, and great efficiency when it comes to battery life and processor power, if Apple’s laptops are any indication. Remains to be seen how much, if any, the widget versions of the calendar, addressbook, photo etc vary from their desktop equivalents.
  
  
• Could it (or a future version) also run small OS X apps that are not widgets? There’s no information on the chipset and RAM capacity, even in the tech specs. Someone like Endgadget will no doubt break those details in the next few days. Could you run Parallels Desktop on it and run Windows Mobile on that? No reason to do so except to demonstrate to people why the iPhone is so superior to a Windows Mobile gadget. But there are many other apps that would be helpful, particularly instant messenger and VOIP apps (since the iPhone has quad-band GSM and EDGE and WiFi.)
• The phone features integrated tools from Yahoo! and Google, including search and maps. But there’s no mention of an instant messaging client from Yahoo!, Google or Apple, and no mention of VOIP. Is that a concession to Cingular, which has the exclusive rights to sell the device initially, and future carrier deals? Because I don’t see how that’s going to prevent people from running their own VOIP app on the iPhone unless there are undisclosed barriers to doing that we have yet to discover in hands-on use.
• The device syncs with PCs and Macs, but there’s no mention of any cooperation with MSN on this device, and I can well imagine that the gulf between Apple and Microsoft will have deepened with the launch of this device. Microsoft has sunk a lot of cash into trying to build an early lead in mobile communications devices, and it looks to me like Apple has just leapfrogged Microsoft by five years of product maturity with its very first product in the segment.
• The two-finger touch screen user interface is truly ground-breaking, especially when tied to the accelerometer. I love the way you zoom in and out by drawing your thumb and forefinger together and apart. I also like the way the object onscreen ‘bounces’ when you try to drag it past the borders of the screen – nice silent way to indicate there’s nothing more hidden ‘below the fold’.
  
  
• Finally, and least importantly, does it come with an unscratchable crystal face like an expensive watch? Because this thing is all screen, and it’s a touch-screen too, so I’m going to get muffin residue all over it regularly, which I’ll want to wipe off with whatever is readily at hand – not with a fancy soft cloth. And I do NOT want to buy a third-party clear acrylic shell for this thing of beauty like I had to do with my iPod Nano.
  
  

initially in the US only this July

]]> http://js-kit.com/rss/doingwords.com/p=252 1 http://doingwords.com/2006/12/05/meanwhile-bluepulse-20-goes-off-2/ http://doingwords.com/2006/12/05/meanwhile-bluepulse-20-goes-off-2/#comments Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:33:00 +0000 alan http://doingwords.com/index.php/2006/12/05/meanwhile-bluepulse-20-goes-off-2/

Wow, serves me right for going to the gym this morning without checking my email first. When I went to bed last night Oliver at Mobilecrunch hadn’t yet run with the news of the Bluepulse 2.0 launch and everything was quiet. Then Oliver ran his news item, with a headline including “…may be the ultimate mobile media platform”, it got mentioned on Techcrunch by Natali and with that dynamic duo of power-packed blogging exposure, everything pretty much went nuts.

Thanks for your long-standing faith in the platform and your support of the team at Bluepulse, Oliver, you rock!

Digg dug us, Technorati rated us, and by the time I was done staving off the beer gut for another day, lots of people were downloading bluepulse to their phones.

And then, when even more people started trying to download it, we hit overload. Think: servers making grinding noises, green lights on panels turning amber and then orange, a wisp of steam escaping from a rattling waste pipe, the smell of hot metal and burning cable ties… I’m exaggerating, of course – these days when machinery gets overloaded, it’s disappointingly quiet. In reality, the only action to be seen is Ben and the dev boys flipping from terminal to terminal, shaking fists in the air, slapping foreheads against monitors, and begging for more capacity.

It’s not like we didn’t anticipate significantly more demand than usual – we added many times more capacity than we’d had prior to the 2.0 launch. But it was not enough. Everybody wants to try Bluepulse!

The scramble is on now to add additional capacity, and already things are starting to smooth out a little. If you’ve experienced delays getting through to http://get.bluepulse.com in the last 12 hours, please go back and try again, as you should be able to reach it now.

If you’re still having trouble, here’s one possible cause: when you go to type the URL into your mobile browser, before you type in “get.bluepulse.com” make sure you delete any “www.” that your browser has automatically inserted at the beginning of the URL. There’s no “www.get.bluepulse.com” only a “http://get.bluepulse.com”. Delete the “www.” and you should be fine.

The next challenge: shipping Ben and about half the office over to the San Francisco bay area at the end of this week to begin setting up our US operations. In the midst of our biggest-ever product launch. Just before Christmas. All we’re now missing from the Top 10 Stress-Inducing Events is a divorce, a health crisis, an alien invasion and a continent-cracking earthquake.

(Actually, about the health crisis, there was the Bluepulse Christmas party we held last Friday night at Zachary’s, home of the Bluepulse-themed ‘pulsator‘. Who knew absinthe shots were that toxic? You’re supposed to dilute it one-in-five? You’re supposed to sip it through a sugary spoon? That explains why my head still hurts. I hope the Bay Area is ready for Bluepulse…)

Technorati Tags: bluepulse mobile widget technorati techcrunch mobilecrunch

Wow, serves me right for going to the gym this morning without checking my email first. When I went to bed last night Oliver at Mobilecrunch hadn’t yet run with the news of the Bluepulse 2.0 launch and everything was quiet. Then Oliver ran his news item, with a headline including “…may be the ultimate mobile media platform”, it got mentioned on Techcrunch by Natali and with that dynamic duo of power-packed blogging exposure, everything pretty much went nuts.

Thanks for your long-standing faith in the platform and your support of the team at Bluepulse, Oliver, you rock!

Digg dug us, Technorati rated us, and by the time I was done staving off the beer gut for another day, lots of people were downloading bluepulse to their phones.

And then, when even more people started trying to download it, we hit overload. Think: servers making grinding noises, green lights on panels turning amber and then orange, a wisp of steam escaping from a rattling waste pipe, the smell of hot metal and burning cable ties… I’m exaggerating, of course – these days when machinery gets overloaded, it’s disappointingly quiet. In reality, the only action to be seen is Ben and the dev boys flipping from terminal to terminal, shaking fists in the air, slapping foreheads against monitors, and begging for more capacity.

It’s not like we didn’t anticipate significantly more demand than usual – we added many times more capacity than we’d had prior to the 2.0 launch. But it was not enough. Everybody wants to try Bluepulse!

The scramble is on now to add additional capacity, and already things are starting to smooth out a little. If you’ve experienced delays getting through to http://get.bluepulse.com in the last 12 hours, please go back and try again, as you should be able to reach it now.

If you’re still having trouble, here’s one possible cause: when you go to type the URL into your mobile browser, before you type in “get.bluepulse.com” make sure you delete any “www.” that your browser has automatically inserted at the beginning of the URL. There’s no “www.get.bluepulse.com” only a “http://get.bluepulse.com”. Delete the “www.” and you should be fine.

The next challenge: shipping Ben and about half the office over to the San Francisco bay area at the end of this week to begin setting up our US operations. In the midst of our biggest-ever product launch. Just before Christmas. All we’re now missing from the Top 10 Stress-Inducing Events is a divorce, a health crisis, an alien invasion and a continent-cracking earthquake.

(Actually, about the health crisis, there was the Bluepulse Christmas party we held last Friday night at Zachary’s, home of the Bluepulse-themed ‘pulsator‘. Who knew absinthe shots were that toxic? You’re supposed to dilute it one-in-five? You’re supposed to sip it through a sugary spoon? That explains why my head still hurts. I hope the Bay Area is ready for Bluepulse…)

Technorati Tags: bluepulse mobile widget technorati techcrunch mobilecrunch