// March 19th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized
In these busy times, most parents of young children spend at least some of the time wishing they could give their kid something that would keep them amused in those interstitial periods waiting to be seen at the doctor’s surgery, waiting for a train or in the car. Problem is, there’s guilt attached to the purchase of a Nintendo DS.
So I think there’s a soon-to-boom market for “interstitial parent-saving iphone apps” (though I have to think of a better name for the category.) In fact, in conjunction with an author, an illustrator and the talented team from Mogeneration I’m working on an iPhone app in this category. It’ll be in beta soon, stay tuned.
In the meantime, here’s another great example: Mouth Off from Us Two. It uses the microphone in the iPhone to animate one of a library of silly mouths. Hold the iPhone up to the lower half of your face, say anything that comes to mind, and anyone watching you will see the cartoon mouth move roughly in sync with what you’re saying.
Because you can’t use the app and see the effect at the same time, this takes two kids to play, but I’m betting it keeps them amused for 5-10 minutes, so for $1.19 that’s a bargain for any hassled parent.
Another interesting app I’m playing with at the moment is dB which uses the iPhone microphone to measure current and historical sound levels wherever you are. That sounds very dry and boring but like many iPhone apps, dB adds some great user interface design and social glue to make this a very interesting app. For instance, it saves the geolocation of the sound levels you’ve recorded and it will let you share that sound level with friends via Twitter or email and will let you include a photo like this:
// March 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized
OK, I’m easily excitable but I’m excited any time I think about person-to-person (P2P) mobile payments. Aren’t you? I love the idea of settling up a lunch bill or paying my share of the team basketball registration fees straight from my mobile before I forget all about it, avoiding all the dreadful “did I remember to pay Roger for that?” moments that come later. An Australian startup has the beginnings of a good product in mHits.com.au but has a way to go before it achieves widespread consumer love.
Some of the reasons for this are apparent when you register for the service – you go from a colourful, friendly homepage experience like this…
…to an unfriendly, FAQ-free, ho-hum-ly user experience like this once you register:
Formethebiggestdisappointmentisthatit‘smobile-only. Here I am signing up for a mobile service from a desktop computer – why can’t I sign up from my mobile phone? And once I’m signed up, I’m there on my desktop computer, but if I want to invite some friends to try mHits or just send someone some money instantly, I must do it from my phone. I can’t do it from my computer. Huh? Why? Keyboard and mouse beats triple-tap keypad any day for adding all my friends or quickly sending a small payment to get started.
Promising beginning and I’m still excited, but still some way to go.
As fun to get to know as an early Linux install, for all the same reasons.
I’ve got no mobile clients at the moment but I’m a mobile geek so I’ve been watching with great interest to see what the market makes of the first handset to ship with Google’s Android mobile OS. I’m not surprised that it’s gotten a rave review by people who like to overclock their PC and a ho-hum review from people who just want something as easy to use as the iPhone but not from Apple. I’m surprised that Google and its partners really believe they can create an open architecture for mobile handsets that can compete with the seamless nature of the iPhone. I don’t think it can.
To borrow Eric Raymond’s seminal definition the fundamental difference is that iPhone is the ‘cathedral’ and Android is the ‘bazaar.’
Everything that makes the iPhone such a revolutionary user experience depends on Apple’s ‘cathedral — its absolute control over hardware, operating system and applications. Even third-party applications are developed using Apple’s tools and marketed and delivered in a market tightly controlled by Apple.
Everything reviewers find disappointing about HTC’s first Android handset boils down to the difficulty in making a ‘bazaar’ product work – not controlling every aspect of the product and its software makes it harder design things that work smoothly.
Will the cathedral or the bazaar approach win out in the mobile handset market? Apple’s incredible success in the music player market suggests the cathedral is the model to adopt whenever you’re shipping high volumes of units to consumers who aren’t geeks – they just want something that works.
Google and its handset partners will probably garner a large and sustainable market of customers who like to take pride in their ability to configure, tweak and debug their Android handset, but that will always be a vastly smaller market than the number of people who just want to be delighted by how easy their phone is to use.
Android handsets will get better and better, but the capabilities will drift further apart over time, so that Android handsets will get better at specialist field applications – the sorts of things tablet PCs often do now — while the iPhone gets better at entertainment content and services.
People sometimes forget that Apple now owns a controlling stake in one of the biggest Hollywood studios, has very powerful relationships with what remains of the music industry, has a great set-top box (AppleTV), a robust delivery platform (iTunes) and is rapidly funding (presumably eventually to acquire) iPhone application developers.
Android may put price pressure on Apple, but we’ve seen with iPods how ready Apple is to crush competitors when it comes to price.
Could Google outmarket Apple? The word-of-mouth hype that created the Google behemoth was mostly an accident — byproduct of a bunch of people working really hard and keeping their heads down while the market watched with fascination. Google’s got no clue when it comes to marketing – how else to explain why they left their mobile platform with its original codename when they launched it? Is “Android” accessible? Cute? Sexy? Fun? Yeah, maybe if you like fiddling with code, but otherwise, probably not.
[update: those iTunes Store links don't appear to be working at present, looks like the fault may be with Apple's phobos redirect server. Check back soon!]
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.
