Volker on Mobile Entertainment

New posts on vhirsch.com/blog

2009-05-29T01:09:00.001+01:00

Here's a new post for you (on Android device deployments this year).

New posts on vhirsch.com

2009-05-25T17:19:00.002+01:00

On my new blog destination (http://vhirsch.com/blog), there is news for you: I commented on O2's reported deal for the Pre and on the 175th iteration of the Carnival of the Mobilists.

A new Home for My Blog...

2009-05-21T14:17:00.003+01:00

After nearly 2 years on here, I have decided to grow up and start using my very own domain. I will continue blogging at:

http://vhirsch.com/blog

All posts and comments have been transferred although I will keep this live. All feeds are being re-directed, so if you subscribe via e-mail, RSS, etc, you should be continuing to receive updates. However, you might want to bookmark the new location and tell all your friends about it, too!

Handset Choice: Ease of Use Rules!

2009-05-19T19:53:00.004+01:00

A lot of iPhones later, the industry now also has it black on white: Ease of use is the primary reason influencing the choice of a handset for users. Or so we are being told. It is not that surprising, is it? Here's the top answers users gave on what they look at when buying a new phone. It is taken from 1,500 interviews that were conducted for Nuance, a top sponsor of MEX (which is, you guessed it, a conference on Mobile User Experience).

So any vested interests aside, here's the top results:

Ease of use (69.0%)
Screen Size (61.4%)
Coolness Factor (61.1%)
Camera (60.8%)
Range of Accessories (58.4%)
Keyboard (58.1%)
Battery Life (56.6%)
Music Playback (50.9%)

Qualcomm slowly admitting defeat?

2009-05-19T00:45:00.003+01:00

I know this is a contentious headline but one could interpret the news that Qualcomm is opening its very own app store (which is probably the oldest one!) to any device on any platform on any carrier this way. The provider will open its Plaza service to non-BREW devices (BREW is proprietary to Qualcomm). This could be seen as an admission of defeat in the platform war, which it appears to be losing against GSM platforms.

However, I plead to see the bright side of this: it is a remarkable move to highlight and capitalize on a piece in its arsenal that has long been industry-leading: Qualcomm has long been offering merchandising solutions that do not have to shy away of the cutting-edge app stores of today. The new Plaza Retail will now bring to Java, BREW, Blackberry and Flash (Android , Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Linux Mobile are apparently to follow) what BREW users have had for a while: a storefront, great device integration and flexible billing (micro-billing, subscriptions, etc). It also allows personalization and a recommendation engine (courtesy of last year's acquisition of Xiam Technologies). And it is a very proven platform that has showed its worth on many a bill to developers (the content-lock is much better than Apples; which may anger some users but will be welcomed by developers) This is quite cool!

Vodafone's App Store: Bigger than Apple?

2009-05-18T22:55:00.007+01:00

It was only a question of time before the first carriers would release themselves from the iPhone-imposed stare and come out all action, and the biggest of them all (by sales), Vodafone, has now raised the curtains on its very own app store. It is the biggest app store to date: Vodafone has more than 289m customers who will - eventually - all be able to access the store (which makes it a cool 8x or so larger than Apple's). Unlike on Apple's App Store, you also do not need a credit card (which, however, you are likely to have anyway when you can afford an iPhone) whereas Vodafone, being a carrier, will bill to their customer's phone bills directly. Very, very cool, huh?

So imagine the power of an app that would go live on Vodafone's carriers all at once. But before we get carried away, let's have a look at the numbers:

Orange UK (in its recently released Digital Media Index; see here) suggested that 4.87% of its users downloaded one game in 2008 (770,000 downloads p.a./ 15.8m users) but this is without an app store but with the traditional catalogue-style offerings.

For Vodafone Group, this would equate to 38,500 downloads per day (289m x 4.87% / 365). If (or when) it includes this offering beyond its own 27 local carriers to its 40 network partners (including Verizon Wireless!), one would be looking at North of 1bn users and, hence, 100,000+ downloads per day. Now, with an app store, this should - theoretically - be further boosted, let's say doubled, arriving at 200,000 downloads per day.

How does this compare with everyone's darling/nemesis (delete as appropriate), the iPhone: I had previously calculated that Apple's app store sees some 4,000 per minute or 5.7m per day... This however includes all those free downloads (about 22% of all apps are for free), so let's say the ratio is 1 paid: for 40 free (which is on the high end of assumptions) or 1:15. This would equate to 144,000 to 380,000 paid downloads per day. So Vodafone's 200,000 wouldn't look completely out of order, would it?

There's even more: Vodafone's decision to bill to the phone bill is only one potential booster since it minimizes friction for the user (Apple: credit card/iTunes account, Blackberry: PayPal, Nokia Ovi: a mix?, etc). The other - and longer-term potentially even bigger one - is geo-awareness: since Vodafone owns the network, it knows where any of "its" users' mobile is at any given time. Now link app usage with geographical location and you could be on to something fairly unique. There is little in the market so far but then: had Apple run its campaign of "bettering life's little problems" in June 2008, it would have looked fairly bleak, too!

So: huge potential but where are the pitfalls?

There's UI and handset fragmentation, if I dare say so. Even though it probably hurts by now, let me repeat: Apple has one model and one deployment method and it nailed content discovery (not perfectly but better than anyone else). Job done. Vodafone has hundreds of handsets on its "to be supported" list. Some are like the Porsche's of their trade ("first available on s60 devices"; ooooh), others are the equivalent to a pedal-powered toy car. The costs for developers to support all these is significant, the cost of management is arguably, too.

Most importantly though, it takes the simplicity and thus ease of use out of the game. And I would posit that this is a big contributor to the (Apple) app store's success: simplicity from entry (ingest an app into the store), management (price, etc) to consumption (download and active use). This will be a tough one for Vodafone to overcome, and it is indeed the one point where OEMs have much better opportunities to "get it right". That the relationship between carriers and OEMs is not always without strain has only recently been proven again, sooooo: the jury is probably still out on that one.

Having said this, Vodafone is better positioned than most carriers though because of its sheer size and footprint. Smaller carriers might struggle to offer developers similar incentives to support their respective offering because they don't scale as well.

For Vodafone, I am concerned that the multi-level complexities they have to deal with (number of handsets x number of operating companies x number of languages x all additional info [geographical and otherwise]) might pose a strain on its ability to roll out quickly and decisively. It might not be as huge and life-changing as Apple's app store but it would certainly lift the "mainstream" of app downloads to whole new level. I am an optimist, so, come on, Voda!

Carnival of the Mobilists #174

2009-05-18T09:53:00.003+01:00

Here's another Carnival of the Mobilists, this week hosted by Ram Krishnan on his Mobile Broadband Blog. As usual, lots of goodies: a look at Blyk (check also my 2p here), Tomi Ahonen's reasoning on why the iPhone is better than a laptop, the wider implications of Facebook Connect (yes, there are phones are than the iPhone in this world!) and lots more. Go, go, read it now here!

Blyk scraps it! No, it doesn't!

2009-05-17T22:15:00.003+01:00

Blyk, the ad-funded MVNO for 16-24 year-olds has been in the news lately a lot. The trigger was a piece by NMA according to which Blyk had announced it would scrap its consumer offering and concentrate on selling its technology/concept/both to other operators. This was quickly refuted by Blyk. The "final" position appears to being a little unclear.

Now, quite a while ago, I issued concerns about the viability of their business model as a stand-alone ad-funded MVNO (see here), and I stand by it (even if they have varied their model a little recently: from 217 free messages and 43 minutes of free calls per month to a £15 discount voucher). If they now claim that this was "only" a proof of concept, I must say that this smacks more than a bit of hopeful PR although this may just be semantics:

The pitfalls of an MVNO-only model aside, their approach is rather intriguing: if you can segment the market as they do and thus create consumer (or people) clusters that are much more homogenous than most media will be able to assemble (18-49-year-olds anyone?), you have a fairly powerful opportunity to interact with your people more directly, more intensely and - most importantly - more relevant messages than you otherwise could. And this has value, and lots of it!

Combine this now with the headaches of your ordinary operator, of which the biggest one probably (still) is churn. I am lacking current accurate numbers but, historically, an operator's churn rate (the percentage of users it would lose in 12 months) was up to 1/3. And this is painful, very painful! So get a tool that allows to reduce that churn significantly and you're off to the races. Combine this with a (functioning because highly targeted) advertising model and you can even increase your margins on this model. Sounds good? Certainly does to me!

And so it is not a big surprise that other operators are said to have shown a lot of interest in the model. Vodafone, for one, have had their own advertising-related announcement in the last week, and the use of Blyk's model and expertise could be quite compelling to them (as some voices already suggest). From Blyk's point of view, such a model is also easier and more quickly scalable than a stand-alone expansion and it should therefore greatly aid Blyk to build the critical mass it needs to stay (or become) relevant to advertisers.

It might still fly, you know...

Image credit: http://asetcenter.net/images/article/mobile_adv.jpg

Orange UK: Mobile Broadband Roars!

2009-05-15T00:23:00.008+01:00

Orange UK, one of the large carriers in the country with 15.8m mobile subscribers, has released its "Fifth Digital Media Index", containing a set of interesting numbers on the data uptake on their network, and it makes for intriguing reading!

The carrier recorded a whopping 4,125% (!) increase in data use over dongles using their mobile network in the last 12 months with dongle subscriptions growing by 504%. Data use from handset increased by 108% and that, I might add, without the help of the iPhone (which is exclusive to O2 in the UK). The increase from dongles will be connected to a big push this offering has seen in the UK (as in other countries) over the past period. Carriers have been and are promoting these aggressively, helping uptake of mobile broadband significantly.

Here are some highlights from the report:

Music and video downloads increased both by 38%.
Games only grew by 8% (but at least they grew; anecdotally, some other carriers recorded sometimes dramatic drops in take-up) to a total of 770,000 downloaded games, which equates to a market share of 23% of all UK games downloads (the total UK games market would hence be 3.35m downloads for the year with Orange claiming top spot). From the top 10 downloaded games in 2008, 8 were part of the carrier's embed programme, which shows - again - that users appear more comfortable if they can try it out before (embedded games normally are trial versions).
Social network use over mobile increased by 129% in page impressions per month and 48% in unique users. The monthly average number of pages per user was 397. In terms of popularity of social networks, Orange's Mark Watt-Jones (@MWJ) fed us additional bits via the Twittersphere: Facebook dominates, Bebo is significant, MySpace less so and Twitter grows very quickly (what was the Oprah moment in the UK?)
An average of 386,000 GB of data have been transferred via dongles and handsets per month.
Mobile search grew by 120% with 45% of the results being "off-portal", i.e. outside Orange's domains.
Good old SMS still looking good, too: 19% growth with 1.7bn sent every month.

Another key point Mark brought us via Twitter: 99% of access to social network sites came from non-smartphones. This is quite noteworthy indeed as it arguably shows that mobile data usage now transcends beyond the power users on sophisticated handsets and also that content leads the uptake: give people compelling content, and they'll use it. Mobile data for the masses seems to have arrived!

T-Mobile, Nokia & Skype

2009-05-14T17:56:00.004+01:00

Nokia's deal with Skype did not go down too favourably with German carriers T-Mobile and Vodafone, and there had been threats that they would drop the respective Nokia devices (including the long-awaited hero handset N97) from their device roadmaps. Today, T-Mobile provided some "clarification" on the issue: according to a spokesperson, T-Mobile apparently wants to ship the N97 but not with the Skype VoIP client installed ("it is up to us to decide what is on the device").

It was also said that the carrier was looking into options on how to deal with VoIP but that it was still early days. However, T-Mobile does apparently not block VoIP clients, neither Skype nor others... Hm, this does not sound like a convincing policy to me...

Android to grow 900% in 2009

2009-05-14T14:51:00.003+01:00

There are reports and there are reports. From the latter category, we are being enlightened with the latest growth predictions for Android and they come out at a whopping 900% for 2009, compared to "only" 79% for the iPhone. The report does not hide the fact that the calculatory basis may not be fully comparable as it is expanding from a low base.

Moreover though, when looking at the models applied by Apple and the Google-led Open Handset Alliance, these are quite different and it is therefore to be fully expected that Android-powered handsets will overtake iPhone numbers sooner rather than later. Would they not, it would simply reflect on extremely poor performance: Apple has always applied a model that combined hardware and OS: both came from the same mould and from one hand. This is a huge contributor to its superior usability: it can be woven in a seamless way.

However, on the other hand, this is also what arguably cost Apple the war over the desktop: Microsoft-powered systems grew exponentially, last but not least because the OS was available on hardware from any number of manufacturers whereas Apple's OS was only available on, well, Macs. The same applies now to the iPhone. Apple's one product that bucked that trend was the iPod, which commands an impressive share around 70%. This however is the exception rather than the norm. And it is unsurprising, too: it is extremely unlikely that one manufacturer and the limited number of models it can bring out will be able to cater to the needs and tastes of any number of people and demands equally.

The above does of course not mean that Apple did much wrong: the model seems to be working beautifully. The app store might only have contributed $20-45m or so in profit (or revenue?) to Apple (which is not that much considering that this is the harvest from more than 1 bn apps) but it also sold 13.7m iPhones and 22.7m iPods in 2008 alone, and this will have contributed nicely. Now, take this together with the Mac boom (which still only equates to c. 10% market share), which arguably is partly to "blame" on the popularity of iPhones and iPods (many users will experience the legendary UI only on one of these devices), and you have a good company.

The Android model is the opposite of this: here, a large number of companies get together to build an OS, which can then go (and be customized) on a myriad of devices from a myriad of manufacturers. At the start of the initiative, it was Google and 34 others, including China Mobile, KDDI, Sprint, TIM, T-Mobile, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Intel and eBay (cf. here). Today, the alliance boasts (if I counted correctly) 47 members. As per the above equation, it would be very surprising if the numbers from this model would not exceed the ones from Apple's. In 2009, we will be seeing Android devices from HTC (the front runners on this with the G1 and the Magic) as well as from Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and probably dozens more. Can they sell more? Yes. Will they sell more Android devices than iPhones in 2009? I don't know. Maybe not. Will they still grow by 900%? Yes, of course, as we are still looking at small numbers at this time: if I make $100 turnover in year 1 and $900 in year 2, I still cannot live of that but I will have grown 900%... Will they be able to grow by 900% in 2010? That will be more difficult as their starting point will be different. Very wise insights, huh? ;-)

To Skype or not to Skype: Nokia vs Carriers

2009-05-11T16:30:00.007+01:00

The most excellent German blog Mobile Zeitgeist alerted me (in German) to a little battle that illustrates the pitfalls of creating the seamless user experience: Nokia appears to being in a tussle with (at least) the German arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile over the pre-installation of Skype clients on some of its forthcoming handset models (including the long-awaited iPhone competitor, N97).

Vodafone and T-Mobile Germany (who have a combined subscriber base of close to 80m) have now publicly stated that they will not include any Nokia models into their catalogues, which will have Skype installed. Now, there's a market gone dead then... For other models, look to 3 in the UK (and my post on the Skypephone there...).

T-Mobile said that they "would not let their business be destroyed" by this. Their terms and conditions prohibited VoIP clients already but the carriers did anecdotally turn a blind eye towards this in the past. Nokia's push however now is apparently too much for the carriers who fear network issues. Interestingly, this surfaces on the same day where, in anther part of the world, some queried the sustainability of free data plans for the iPhone (namely the Wall Street Journal on AT&T's policies in respect of the iPhone). Predictably, Skype lambasted the move as "unfair practice".

The name of the game is - of course - the pipe (not new: see e.g. here and here): the WSJ quotes from an Alcatel-Lucent analysis of North American networks during the midday hour of one day, which apparently shows that web browsing consumed 32% of data-related airtime but 69% of bandwidth whereas e-mail used 30% of data airtime but only 4% of bandwidth. The reasoning goes that increased data traffic impacts the networks' capex whilst remaining - at best - ARPU-neutral (AT&T ponders to drop its data plan for the iPhone by $10), cutting down margins and hurting the carrier more than is healthy. Voice and SMS services are - on a bit for bit basis - very, very profitable as they use very little bandwidth.

To conclude though - as the WSJ does - that unlimited data plans should be abandoned "in the short term", pours the baby out with the bathwater: smartphones are paving the way into the wireless future (20% of US households are completely wirefree already!) and it is a space where the carriers have great gains to make; maybe not on the sumptuous margins they were used to but healthy and viable nonetheless. To do as the WSJ asks would be as if one would have asked ISPs to please stop flat-rate plans for Internet access; and look what has become of the Internet!

Accordingly, other voices argue that a) slowing voice ARPU is at least being part set-off by increasing data ARPU (which grew a healthy 32% year-on-year in Q1 and saw more than $10bn in wireless data plans being sold in the US for the first time), and b) that the carriers actually know this for a while now and, accordingly, upgrade their networks to better cope with higher bandwidth demands in order to make the move to data pipes; the fight is arguably now "only" about whether these would be dumb or smart: with app stores, VAS and business-to-business (and machine-to-machine) solutions opening up vast new segments that have been completely unexploited to date, one should think that there is room for the smart pipe operator. So fear not!

Carnival of the Mobilists #173

2009-05-11T14:24:00.002+01:00

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists, the weekly summary of the best and brightest from mobile blogs around the world, is being hosted by Tsahi Levent-Levi on his VoIP Survivor blog. You can read it here. This week brings you gems from some of the heavyweights, like Tomi Ahonen (on mobile data), Andrew Grill (looking at Google Latitude), Russell Buckley (on an SMS/MMS ad service that works) plus many, many more! Well worth a read - as always really!

Top 10 Mobile Phones - April 2009

2009-05-11T01:46:00.005+01:00

Everyone's favourite phone accessory makers, Krusell of Sweden, have released their top-10 list of mobile phone sales, measured by sales of accessories, for April 2009. And here they are:

1. (2) Nokia 3109

2. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia

3. (8) Nokia 5800

4. (5) Nokia E71

5. (4) HTC Touch HD

6. (7) Nokia 3120

7. (3) Nokia 6300

8. (6) Nokia E51

9. (-) Sony Ericsson C702

10. (-) Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia

() = Last month’s position.

Krusell's CEO was surprised that a "simpleton" such as the 3109 would top the list. Maybe it is a sign of recession that people now start to protect even their not so precious phones with stylish Swedish holsters. Who knows?

Again: iPhone users seem to be too precious to cover their beloved one in holsters and Blackberry users have them already, hence less of a market here. For the remainder: judge by yourself...

Nokia Ovi's 20,000+

2009-05-09T23:34:00.006+01:00

Nokia's interpretation of an app store will be Ovi, and it will launch later this month. This is a biggie since Nokia (according to its own numbers) still commands an imposing market share of - globally - 37%. True to its huge self, it now said it'll come out with all its guns blazing and kick its app store off with no less than 20,000 "items"! This is being compared to Apple's "few hundred" upon launch.

However, that contains of course quite a bit of a PR spin: Nokia does not only include applications in its count but also videos and "mobisodes", and on this definition, one would need to count in the 40,000 or so videos, 3,000 TV shows, etc that the iPhone had on offer via iTunes (numbers via Wikipedia).

So where does Nokia truly stand in May 2009? The company, once famed for cool design (7110 - also known as the "Matrix" phone anyone?) and intuitive UI (yes, really: in the pre-Java age, Nokia's were second to none when it came to usability and interface) seems to have lost a little of its gloss. Its devices still boast technical excellence (the N96 technically outsmarts every iPhone or Android device easily) but the sex-appeal is considerably lower. Nokia anno 2009 has a little more of a Siemens-like flavour: very well engineered but a bit dull and maybe, well, a little over-engineered. At a time when content finally seems to go mainstream, this is more than only unfortunate: Nokia's often announced push into the US (where it holds an uncharacteristically small market share) has faltered (again) but the company also seems to lose market share in regions where it previously was unassailable. Moreover, its incremental products, such as the Navteq business, appear to struggle, too (Navteq recorded net sales of only €132m in Q1/2009; compare that to a purchase price of $8.1bn!), as it is arguably being challenged by the - free - Google Maps (which most people I know prefer over the - paid-for - Navteq services).

Nokia's competition comes less from its traditional foes, Sony Ericsson (struggling itself), Samsung, LG or Motorola but from the newbies like Apple, RIM or HTC, all of which focus on the upper end of the market and leverage this with smart phones that comes - app store or not - with a vastly expanded range of apps and services. Apple has leveraged this in breathtaking ways but one must not forget the gains Blackberry-maker RIM has realized. And while this was not on the back of its app store (Blackberry App World launched only recently), Blackberry devices had always been used for more than only voice and SMS - data services were always at the core of the product.

So where will Ovi sit? Will it revolutionize the mobile phone mass market on the content side, too? Nokia's attempts so far were something of a mixed bag: Preminet must probably considered a failure, its successor NCD (Nokia Content Discoverer) was always a little bit in the shadows, too. N-Gage is a distinctly high-end service (with - anecdotally - 1m or so subscribers, which is small when you look at Nokia's overall market footprint), the P2P service Mosh was known (to the people who actually did know of it) for the piracy taking place on the platform rather than for commercial success. In short: Nokia's moves into content have not been an overwhelming success so far. Ovi has the opportunity to change this. Due to its massive market footprint, Nokia has the opportunity to turn more than 1bn devices into shop windows for content, and this outmuscles anything Apple could even dream of achieving by large margins.

However, the success of an app store is not being defined by the sheer number of content available on or through it but but at least equally by the functionality, the usability and discovery. This is where Apple has been doing so well: the combination and seamless integration of hardware and software and its content strategy out of one mould (with no carrier intervention at all) has lifted the bar for an interface significantly. It might look easy to copy this but it is not. Nokia has also been very (!) late to the game (bear in mind they first announced Ovi in 2007!), and it acknowledges this itself. It will therefore be very interesting to see how Nokia manages to execute it. Be not mistaken: if it succeeds, the content revolution on mobile has truly begun!

Conference: Mobile 2.0 Europe

2009-05-09T21:53:00.004+01:00

Mobile guru and blogger extraordinaire Rudy de Waele is bringing us the next iteration of the very successful (and exciting!) Mobile 2.0 conference to Europe this year. The 2-day event takes place in Barcelona on 18/19 June 2009 and focusses on the emerging mobile ecosystems and disruptive mobile innovation (for more on disruptive innovation [re-]read Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma"), grouped around six separate themes. This then looks as follows:

Rudy and his team have lined up a cool speaker line-up to illustrate each theme, comprising the creme de la creme of European operators, VCs, handset makers and application and service providers, including the CEO of Dopplr, Head of LBS at Vodafone, the CMO of Smaato, the Head of O2 Litmus, etc, etc.

The conference website can be found here. Sign up, it's well worth it!

Top 5 US Smartphones in Q1 2009

2009-05-06T15:25:00.005+01:00

After all the talk (and more talk) about Apple's iPhone, a new report provides some new numbers reminding everyone that there are more phones on this earth than the sleek one from Cupertino. It is not about the iPhone (or not only) but about Blackberry, the iPhone, Blackberry and Blackberry. Yes, this is the first four places in the top-selling smartphones in the US in Q1/2009 according to market research specialists NPD Group (it is only the press release, so pretty lean on information).

Also: completing the top 5 is a phone with an open-source OS, namely the T-Mobile G1 (the first Android handset). I will be interesting to see if there is more to come from this last group (see my post on the state of play of open-source operating systems here).

So the top 5 are:

RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
RIM BlackBerry Storm
RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
T-Mobile G1

So: even though they counted all of the 3G iPhones in, they still could not beat the Blackberry Curve. Well done, RIM!

Carnival of the Mobilists #172

2009-05-04T16:31:00.004+01:00

A long May-Day weekend but eager bloggers still bring you the next Carnival of the Mobilists. This week's edition of the best in mobile blogs is hosted by Jamie Wells at the MobileStance blog and can be found here. Jamie covers two of my posts (Why an iPhone deal with Verizon would be cool and what open source OS makers are on about these days) but also points us to monetization of apps (as opposed to games), the rise of the mobile ad aggregators as well as a look at Motorola and mobile learning amongst others. And now head over there and do some reading!

The Others: Where Android, Symbian & LiMo are

2009-04-28T00:44:00.008+01:00

The title of this post is not meant in any way derogatory but with all the hype about the iPhone it is sometimes easy to forget that we are talking about a niche product that will probably remain a niche product (albeit a powerful and cool one!). In the rest of the world (feature phones aside), a few consortia are fighting for the open-source market, which is - let's face it - a considerably larger piece than the small premium segment served by Apple.

So, where were we? There is the LiMo Foundation, which is onto establishing a mobile Linux standard. There is the Symbian Foundation and there is Android, a Linux-based OS from the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. One by one then:

LiMo Foundation

LiMo boasts a membership based comprised of the Who's Who in mobile. Powerhouses from around the world like Vodafone, Orange,

Verizon Wireless, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, SFR, TIM and SK Telecom, Samsung, NEC, LG, Panasonic, Huawei, Motorola, and ZTE (and quite a few more) are all in there. LiMo has released an SDK a while ago. Now though, they decided that enough is enough and that the world should know that their OS was actually making headway. In 2009, there will be new handsets based on LiMo's s

tandards released by Orange, Telefonica, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom and Verizon Wireless. Now, that's a statement. Non-phone devices are in the works, they say...

There are already more than 20 LiMo phones out there (without very many people having realized it). They include such mundane devices like Motorola's U9, ROKR EM30, ROKR Z6 and ROKR E8 as well as the RAZR2. Panasonic and NEC pboth produced a whole raft of devices for NTT DoCoMo. See here for a list of available phones.

Symbian

Symbian of course is coming from a differen

t mould: having been (co-)owned by Nokia for, like, ever, there are already over 200m devices running on its OS. After going open-source, they are working on consolidating the sister formats S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) now into one. Membership-wise, they're not doing badly either: they target to having more than 100 members by year-end. Membership with them is only $1,500 p.a. It remains to be seen to what extent they will extend their handset footprint beyond Nokia though. Little has been heard so far...

Android

Both foundations felt compelled to state their cause, also in response to Eric Schmidt's continued mantra that 2009 will be very, very strong for Android. The Open Handset Alliance had gone off to a well-publicized start with the T-Mobile G1. They recently announced that it had sold 1m devices (regarding which some people pointed out that Apple shipped as many iPhones on the first weekend), and are now gearing up more devices for launch (Vodafone got its hands on the HTC Magic). Samsung, LG, HTC and Sony Ericsson have all announced Android devices this year, and the first Samsung (I7500) has just been officially confirmed.

Multiple Membership

Wait a minute? Samsung? Weren't they part of the LiMo foundation? Well, yes, and that is part of the problem: a lot of the big players have their fingers in all the pies (and why should they not?). This is favouring Apple since they are a single organization producing hardware and software. It could also be argued that it is favouring Android because Google throws so much marketing and PR behind it. However, maybe not. The big OEMs and the big carriers all work according to their own agenda. And this might very well be a very different one to Eric Schmidt's: to an OEM, production cost, stability and versatility without impacting standardization are key. To a carrier, a lot will (also) ride on the ability to customize the handset so as to give it a distinct branded feel. Less PR from someone like Google makes it easier to them to focus on their own brand.

So: rock-solid, clean code, transparent and clear SDKs, no hidden hooks will mean that a lot of the feature phones that create the vast majority of handset sales (even if sales of the "classic" J2ME ones had been declining in 2008 when compared to smartphones) will quite possibly see a larger and larger move towards the open platforms. It makes it cheaper to produce and, with Apple having given the world the app store idea, content should flow in sooner or later. They "only" need to keep the standards, well, standard!

The iPhone is of course looming large, and it is the one device that has shown the old school of the telco world how 21-st-century marketing can impact market perception and sales. They have also all realized that this might actually be a very good thing, hence the eager discussions many are purported to be having on getting their hands on the next generation. However, last time I looked, the streets were not full of Porsche Boxsters either. Quite a few Hyundais, Fiats, Peugeots, BMWs, Volvos, well, you get it...

Why an iPhone Deal with Verizon Wireless would be Cool

2009-04-28T00:01:00.005+01:00

Today, interesting reports surfaced (or re-surfaced?) according to which Verizon Wireless and Apple are in discussions about bringing the iPhone to the former. However, because Verizon runs on a CDMA network and Apple has only ever supported GSM, commentators reckoned that this deal might be for Verizon's next-generation LTE network. And this is when one can start dreaming...

To recap: Verizon will be amongst the (if not The) first tier-1 network operators rolling out the next generation of wireless networks under the LTE standard (see here for more on this). Under LTE, unprecedented wireless bandwidth will be available, comparable (or exceeding) what households in Western and Far-Eastern countries have in their homes today. But then you would have it of course wherever you are (well, if the respective technology is installed).

Due to the immense speeds, a lot of people think that the first big change will be on the (computer) broadband side of things: no need for wireline access if the speeds are the same and you can actually wander around and through town and always be with your provider. Simplicity, ease of use, bliss of connected life.

When it comes to mobile handsets (previously known as phones), the iPhone is of course (and despite the heckling by its many critics) arguably the most successful multimedia device known to man (so far). To marry this with these speeds? Ah, what would await us (see here for earlier thoughts). The iPhone (if they can fix the battery life) would be perfectly suited to bring the new lush wireless life to the masses (albeit first to the more affluent ones): rich graphics, innovative inputs and the fairly unique form factor would show the opportunities off rather beautifully and could hence aid to avoid the post-3G hangover where people asked themselves why on earth they should get 3G phones: there was nothing much to do with them (other than being able to make "faster" phone calls...).

The most common uses would arguably be music and apps with the latter being even more successful than the former: it is estimated that iTunes took 6 years to record 6.8 bn downloads; the App Store did 1 bn in only 9 months (or 1.3bn p.a.), which would equal 7.8 bn in 6 years if no further growth would occur. Anyway, with 1.1 bn downloads p.a. not being too shabby either, let's take both, so what do we get?

On the music side, it would either mean quick and high-quality downloads or, more likely (?), streamed music. The same applies to the VOD and movie segments.

On the apps side, LTE would arguably push the envelope into two directions: (1) high-end, graphically rich games, and (2) ultra-connected social games that seamlessly bridge media platforms. Now: both types had their advent on the iPhone. Speak to any number of high-end games makers, and they will tell you that their life became much easier since the iPhone was there. Look at products like EA's Scrabble (with full Facebook integration), Playfish's games (coming from the other end, i.e. from Facebook to iPhone), etc and you have the foundations laid here, too. With LTE, all this becomes mass-marketable to a much higher extent. And this would be real fun!

Carnival of the Mobilists #171

2009-04-27T18:52:00.002+01:00

I missed the last one due to travel and dodgy Internet connections whilst on the move, but this week's Carnival of the Mobilists is - as usual - unmissable and unmissed. It is being hosted by Abgail Adams on their Catalyst Code blog, and you will find it here. This week's edition boasts lessons for toddlers to be learned on the iPhone, social networking going mobile, and a - daring - outlook on the (economic and social) aspects blogs in the year 2025. And now head over for some inspiration!

Social Mobile Convergence in Gaming

2009-04-24T18:04:00.002+01:00

At the European Mobile Media Conference earlier this week in Prague I gave this presentation on social mobile convergence in gaming, which I thought might contribute a little to de-mystifying this conundrum of buzzwords.

Have a look, tell me what you think...

Social Mobile Convergence in Gaming

View more presentations from hirsch30.

Opinions on LTE

2009-04-24T01:29:00.003+01:00

The Opinions in Mobile project asked this week about our thoughts on LTE. Having recently had the pleasure of speaking at Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Symposium at CTIA, being members at their ngConnect programme and with general curiosity (and excitement), this is something I find quite interesting. Head over to read what some of the industry leaders are saying It's here.

Image credit: http://www.watblog.com

Mobile Games on Twitter

2009-04-20T00:32:00.006+01:00

Birds (sic!) do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and now even Oprah (have you been there before her? Check here)... so: what about mobile games companies tweeting? Now, there's many of them already out there (see list below) but how much sense does it make (that it makes sense for your business I demonstrated recently)?

Looking at a few of them, you'll find anything from very 20th-century in-your-face selling (probably not so efficient) to enlisting (or trying to) followers to help in everything from game design, logo colours to community components that should go into the next iteration of the website. And it is in the crowdsourcing where I see a bit of potential: most mobile games companies are fairly small, and money to spend on sophisticated research, focus groups and what not is scarce or AWOL. If one can draw on the opinions and insights of friendly followers to learn about their (the consumers') preferences, this is surely all good. Since Oprah is on there now, too, there is even a chance that your followers will not only be fellow industry professionals...

Although, even to the industry, Twitter is as powerful a tool to the mobile games people as to anything else (maybe with the exception of the global car-wash industry - everyone who's been to CTIA Wireless will understand the reference): it is a great channel to get the message out to people who matter to you (and who actually show that they care by following you), which puts trade marketing (even if not in the strict sense of the word) onto the list on why you should do it.

So here's a (surely incomplete - please excuse and feel free to add!) list of mobile games companies who tweet:

EA: @eamobile

Gameloft: @gameloft

Connect 2 Media (yes, that's us): @connect2media

Glu: @glumobile

Oasys Mobile: @oasysmobile

Hands-On Mobile: @handsonmobile

Digital Chocolate: @dchocgames

I-Play: @iplaymobile

Namco: @namconetworks

Tag Games: @taggames

Fishlabs: @fishlabs

Gamevil: @gamevil

Distinctive Developments: @distinctivegame

Lemonquest: @lemonquest

Kiloo: @jacob_kiloo

Oh, and I'm out there as @vhirsch...

123 Play at Metro

2009-04-18T01:17:00.005+01:00

123 Metro could be the name of the latest Major League Soccer franchise but it signifies a neat deal that 123Play, a service that wraps mobile games with ads free to end users, has just struck with the newspaper mavericks from Metro (they're the guys with the free newspapers; see here for UK and here for the [seeming] inventors of the concept).

I like this deal a lot as it is so natural: Metro is a very successful advertising-driven medium and it ties in extremely well with 123Play's model. Seamless, simple, very neat: anecdotally, a lot of people play games on their mobile when they have time to kill. Likewise, a lot of people read Metro when they have time to kill, namely when they commute on public transport. One challenge will of course be that there is no mobile reception in the London tube (or most other undergrounds for that matter) but the overall concept should work.

Disclosure: my company works with 123play.com (although I don't think this post will bring me front-page coverage on Metro...).

22/23 April: European Media Conference, Prague

2009-04-16T10:12:00.004+01:00

I have mentioned this earlier: Next week, I will be headed to beautiful Prague in order to attend and contribute to the European Mobile Media Conference. If you can, make sure to head over (there is even some last-minute discount).

I will be speaking about the phenomenon that is "social games" (are there really that many non-social games?) and I am fairly excited to be able to meet and learn from a couple of rather remarkable people that promise to bring fresh views to the mobile entertainment table. Speakers include carriers (Telefonica/O2, Vodafone, T-Mobile will all be there) and distributors (the CEO of Aspiro, Gunnar Selleg, will be amongst the speakers), OEM and technology platform providers (Nokia, Nokia-Siemens, Ericsson) but also - and maybe most remarkably - a few luminaries from the classic agency world, namely Mark C Linder (WPP) and Jonathan MacDonald (Ogilvy) whose views will surely be tested by the godfather of mobile advertising, Russell Buckley.

Have a look at the full programme and ping me if you are coming!

Top 10 Mobile Phones - March 2009

2009-04-14T17:15:00.004+01:00

The monthly numbers on best-selling phones from our accessory-maker friends over at Krusell are out. In March, it looked like this:

1. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia
2. (7) Nokia 3109
3. (3) Nokia 6300
4. (2) HTC Touch HD
5. (8) Nokia E71
6. (4) Nokia E51
7. (10) Nokia 3120
8. (8) Nokia 5800
9. (5) Blackberry Storm
10. (-) Samsung M8800
() = Last months position.

Not too many changes as compared to last month. The trend to higher-end phones is maintained (or is it that owners of shiny touch-screen phones tend to spend a little more on that stylish holster?).

Be it as it may be (and my earlier comments on the holster-phone correlation probably stand true to an extent), the numbers are roughly in line with the previously noted growth of the smartphone sector, which continues to outperform the rest of the handset market.

Photo credit: http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/cellphone-holster01.jpg

Thumbplay raises more Cash

2009-04-14T00:30:00.004+01:00

US D2C giants Thumbplay were called by one competitor the "kings of the web" (referring to their prowess to customer acquisition enlisting web-based search). And now - recession or not - their founder and CEO, industry pioneer Are Traasdahl and his team apparently raised another $6m in funding. Thumbplay's model seems to be slick enough (pay-per-click web search ads rather than fairly unpredictable TV spots) and they have a capable team in place.

If their business is as great as they wanted people to believe, they would not need this for operations, so is this money for acquisitions? And if so, where? Thumbplay so far stuck to the US market where they made some great moves (partnering with everyone from MSN through AOL to Comcast) but have been silent elsewhere. Some of their rivals did dare making the move to Europe (though not followed through with the noise perhaps to be expected), so will use the cash to take on the likes of Fox Mobile (f/k/a Jamba), Buongiorno, recently acquired Arvato Mobile (D2C brand: tj.net) and Zed over here? Ah, the excitement... ;-)

iPhone all-time top 20 apps, countdown to 1bn downloads

2009-04-13T23:14:00.008+01:00

I've been raving about it many a time and I still won't stop but then: Apple does neither. When, waaaay back in January, I looked last, the App Store had raced through 500 million downloads and I calculated this to equate 4,000 per minute. Well, that's history: We're now through a 948 million total (count taken on 13 April, 11.23pm UK time from Apple's site [check the little clock]) and look at 6,000 downloads per minute (or 100 every second of every minute of every hour of every day!) or so some learned friends have summed it up to.

Apple also revealed a list of the top 20 all-time top downloads, both paid and free, which (courtesy of MoCoNews) is this:

So here's the good stuff for my gaming friends: 14 out of the top 20 paid apps are games! Yes, baby! 6 out of the top 20 free ones are, too. Way to go! I haven't looked at the pricing for the above paid apps but MoCoNews did: ¢99 is the prevailing price-point at the moment but $4.99 seems to be the price point of choice for "premium" games.

Carnival of the Mobilists #169

2009-04-13T15:07:00.004+01:00

The latest Carnival of the Mobilists is on now at Chetan Sharma's Always On Real-Time Access blog. You can check it out here. Besides gratefully including my last post on 4G mobile gaming, he lined up some of the heavyweights and their contributions, including Tomi Ahonen on how to monetize mobile social networking (or not), Ajit Joakar on 4G and telcos, Russ Buckley's musings over 1984 and more.

4G, LTE & Games: Casual On Speed!

2009-04-07T01:08:00.010+01:00

Next to app stores (or markets or marketplaces or app worlds or, well, Ovi), the dominating theme of CTIA Wireless was 4G/LTE. Now, as sexy and de jour as app stores might be, the latter has a hugely larger commercial impact (the Verizon Wireless contract for their LTE network will be a multi-billion deal alone!). But what is a network without applications?

So it was just as well that, one day before CTIA Wireless, I had the great pleasure of contributing to the "Connecting the Consumer" panel at Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Symposium (with Disney, Samsung, Buzznet and Atlantic Records all contributing, providing for the various facets of content [games, video/film, music, web]). The ground had been laid by the keynote of the formidable Mitch Singer, Sony Pictures CTO and a long-standing thought-leader in changing sectors (he's one of the people who brought the original Napster down and - in his own words - "look was the music industry has become"). Mitch had reminded us of "The Innovator's Dilemma" (Read it! It's worth it!), which deals with how businesses should tackle change...

And this brings me to the nucleus of this post, which is how the content industry will (should?) approach the next big thing that is LTE.

By way of background: LTE (Long-Term Evolution; don't ask why but this is apparently what it stands for) is largely seen as the successor to current third-generation (3G) networks (UMTS, WCDMA, HSDPA, HSUPA, CDMA2000, EVDO, call me if you want more acronyms...). LTE appears to have won the "fight" against Wi-Max (as some early commentators predicted) with carriers (Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and China Mobile amongst them) and vendors (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, etc) strongly supporting it. The standard is capable of delivering speeds well in excess of 10MB/s over wireless networks. So, world, be prepared!

One of the obvious beneficiaries should be the games sector home of the tech-savvy early adopters: ultra-high broadband, super-speeds, fantastic opportunities. Or so they say...

The games market can probably - to this extent at least - be simplistically divided into a) hard-core and b) casual games. The former would comprise massively multi-player online games (MMO) as well as fast-paced, high-end racing and action games. The latter is, well, everything from Solitaire to Scrabble and Tetris. And, yes, the latter is the one genre played by far more people, including the online gaming industry's "golden customer", the proverbial 42-year-old housewife from Ohio (absolutely no offense meant, implied or indeed merited!). Whilst it is easy to see how a high-end action game would benefit from high bandwidth, the case may be slightly less obvious for the casual games space (on PCs alone, this is a $2.5bn+ market already today!).

Given the casual games' higher adoption across a much broader demographic, it is however conceivable that carriers (the ultimate gate keepers for mobile content at least in the world as we currently know it) would want to reach that broader demographic: higher spending power than geeky kids, faithful, not necessarily wanting to change things every 5 minutes, predictable spending habits - this is a much safer and more promising target demographic than my 13-year-old son who will happily switch allegiance to a provider the moment another one has something cooler, cheaper, slightly funkier, whatever, ... to offer.

So what can 4G do for the (mobile) casual games space? It brings, quite simply, wireless (or wire-free; remember that sweet tagline from Orange days long gone?) digital media to par with the wireline one (and will, in very large parts of the world, effectively be digital media (or do you think Brazil, China et al will dig up their vast countries to lay down copper or fibre cables to connect their non-urban consumers?).

So what, you say? Well, this allows consumers to actually play as they did before the arrival of the first crude iterations of the Internet, and that is socially: what was a game before computers and gaming consoles took over? An intrinsically social activity (cards, board games, petanque, golf, you name it). We have seen a huge uptake of social games on the Internet with tens of millions of consumers enjoying fairly simple games on Facebook and other platforms. And the next generation wireless will enable that again wherever you are (see here for a presentation I recently gave at Casual Connect in Hamburg on the topic).

So, high connectedness it is then! Games that will allow to interact with peers, friends, total strangers that happen to have the same passion for the same type of game around the world. Games become a social activity again. It is a less fancy, less futuristic vision than all-immersive high-end niche products such as World of Warcraft (which will also see its fair share of fame once the wireless networks can support it) but it is one that will finally make any wireless device as ubiquitous as many in the industrialized world (East or West) have learned wireline connected devices to be. And it actually takes some of the sting out of concerns that (digital) games will make video zombies out of our children.

This development (with LTE as the backbone) opens a market to be counted in billions rather than millions, and most of them will be wireless (the number of mobile phones outnumbers the number of Internet-connected PCs by a ratio of 2.5:1 already today!). And this is where the true market opportunity lies!

Carnival of the Mobilists #168

2009-04-07T00:51:00.003+01:00

Due to the Nevada frenzy also known as CTIA Wireless there wasn't much from me last week but, thank goodness, there were others, and so I suggest to browse to this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, hosted this time by James Cooper on his mjelly mobile 2.0 blog over here. Lots to read there: why games are to blame for the iPhone's incapability to multi-task, what operators need to do to innovate (hint: listen to your customer...), mobile advertising, and, and, and... Go and enjoy!

And, yes, the image shows the reception area (!) of the Bellagio... Oh dear...

Conference: European Mobile Media

2009-03-27T16:31:00.004Z

On 22/23 April, the glorious city of Prague will play host to the European Mobile Media conference. The event will cover the entire spread of the mobile media sector from content (games, music, TV) through to advertising and marketing with a focus on - what a surprise - monetization. There's a great line-up of speakers, including mobile advertising guru Russell Buckley from Admob, agency heavyweights Jonathan MacDonald (Ogilvy) and Mark C Linder (WPP) as well as one of the industry's brightest analysts, Peggy Anne Salz (mSearchGroove) and, last but not least, yours truly.

The spice will hopefully added by the combination of executives from the production, publishing and distribution side with their counterparts from network operators with a large number already confirmed to attend.

Come along! Prague in spring is wonderful on its own. And a good conference won't spoil it.

Off to Vegas: CTIA Wireless 2009

2009-03-27T16:12:00.005Z

On Monday, I shall be boarding a plane to visit Las Vegas for the All-American wireless love fest that is CTIA Wireless.

I will have the great pleasure of discussing the next generation of mobile entertainment services under a 4G LTE environment with executives from Samsung, Walt Disney, Atlantic Records, Buzznet and others. Alcatel-Lucent, who recently won a tender providing the infrastructure to Verizon Wireless for roll-out in early 2010, are hosting the respective 4G Symposium.

And otherwise? These are exciting times across a wide range of industry segments: network infrastructure and ultra-high bandwidth, the coming of age of smartphones and their widespread take-up as well as the respective changes for the content industries which can now offer services people could only be dreaming of a few years ago. Stay tuned!

Get in touch if you want to meet up during the show. Best to drop me an e-mail at volker (dot) hirsch (at) gmail (dot) com.

Carnival of the Mobilists #166

2009-03-23T10:21:00.003Z

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by the formidable Caroline Lewko at WIP Jam. I am very happy to note that my latest post on Apple's growing relevance as a gaming platform is included in last week's line-up. For the remainder, there's stuff on LiMo (for some background on where they came from see here) and some very worthwhile piece on mobile marketing amongst much more. And now go to read it here!

Apple's Gaming Platform

2009-03-20T00:33:00.005Z

I wrote about this topic a couple of times already (here and here) but here's an interesting update/summary. The gist of the argument remains, only the numbers got better: Microsoft's XBox has sold 29 million units, and that is fairly respectable (in particular when you consider that people regularly fork out $30 and more per game). Apple however (Mr Gates, I hate to say it) outsold its dear competitor by selling more than 30 million iPhones (and, well, iPod Touch).

The hardware install base is fairly similar then. There are two differentiators (besides the price point as per above and the fact that an XBox is not so portable nor meant to be): 1) Apple took a lot less time to get there, and 2) there are more than 25,000 applications for the iPhone, of which about 1/4 are games. That's a lot!

And with its fairly awe-inspiring iPhone 3.0 update (more here or watch the entire keynote), one can now also add in-game micro-payments to the mix, which enhances the flexibility of billing models beyond anything its console or handheld rivals have on offer. Add to this the points raised in my earlier posts and the neat additions to the new iPhone SDK (use music stored on the device in the game, in-game voice chat, push notification waking up an app, stereo Bluetooth, etc, etc) and we are hopefully to see yet another wave of innovative, intelligent implementations of this. It is pretty cool indeed!

Twitter Can Save Your Business or How Virgin Media uses Modern Customer Service Tools (off-topic)

2009-03-19T01:22:00.007Z

This is not strictly within the realms of topics I normally cover in this blog but it certainly deserves wider notice.

We run a game development, publishing and distribution business and, just before Christmas, moved offices. Our ISP is Virgin Media, part of the Branson empire that bought erstwhile ISP NTL a while ago. Virgin was quite forthcoming to accommodate our move and were, I'd say, happy that we would stay with them. They needed - or so they said - 6 weeks to make the full switch but told us to accommodate us with a DSL line in the interim. Whilst this is stretching for the HQ of a digital company, it was only for a short time so, hey, roll with the punches...

Then we were told that all would actually take "a little" longer. A little became end of May 2009; this would have been nearly 6 months from our office move. Impossible! Software engineers, deployment teams, sales force, marketing, project management all over a DSL line? Our worst nightmare!

That Friday night, after I had heard this - fairly solemnly delivered - verdict of the Virgin customer service, I vented my frustration on Twitter, namely by addressing a tweet to Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur extraordinaire, customer service evangelist and face of Virgin. Sir Richard was at the time, I believe, on an around-the-world trip with his various Virgin airlines...

Then the power of Twitter, ordinarily available only to the digital and real-life celebrities with North of 25,000 followers, also showed its might to me: inside 12 hours, I had direct messages via Twitter from the MD of Virgin Media and their Sales Director for the business division of which Manchester is part. By Sunday I had their mobile numbers and arranged for a call with the MD on Monday morning. By Tuesday, we had a tentative date (20 March), which was then bettered to 17 March. And as of 1pm of that day, our business was, well, back in business (the engineer delivering the router et al was actually a full half hour early). Within 15 minutes our IT manager, sys admin and my good self were peppered with careful inquiries from various sources within Virgin asking if all was in order. Wow!

Besides this being a nice war story, it does show what Twitter can be used for: Virgin Media will have identified a need to address the - anecdotally very poor - customer service levels of the NTL business they acquired. Now, one could of course (and rightfully) claim that I should not have needed to go to one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs to get a response from somewhere in the bowels of this organization. On the other hand did they manage to demonstrate in exemplary fashion the passion and dedication they have: I mean, an MD of a large ISP twittering you on a weekend? Impressive.

Whilst this does not solve the root of any general customer service issues Virgin Media may (or may not) have, it does allow their management to manage change from the top, and it does - whilst not replicable (at least not through MD treatment) - allow them to accelerate sensitivity and awareness for such issues within the organization whilst displaying (and in a convincing fashion) their will to improve (and don't we all happily fall for a show of good will and effort!).

The only question that remains is whether Sir Richard has a Twitter Manager or if he actually forwarded my tweet to his lieutenants himself... I do thoroughly thank everyone involved there; a great example of how it can work, a great showcase on what Twitter can do to help your business, faith restored!

Carnival of the Mobilists #165

2009-03-17T14:46:00.005Z

The latest Carnival of the Mobilists (No. 165 already) is out and dancing over at VisionMobile. My post on Microsoft's app store initiative and why (or why not) it might succeed is included, too. It is not the only interesting post though, including one claiming the app store will fail! So have a look and check it out here!

Games Pulsating Through One Platform?

2009-03-12T02:47:00.005Z

Here's one that nearly slipped through the (well, at least my) net: according to a recent press release, the Eclipse Foundation is set to unveil a unified development platform. It is said that some major players, including Nokia, RIM, Sony Ericsson, IBM and Motorola have joined this initiative already though Android and - predictably - Microsoft and Apple are notable in their absence.

The concept is oh so simple: a developer goes to the site, downloads the platform and is ready to rumble. The platform (called Pulsar) would pull together vendor-specific SDKs and off you go. It is clearly geared to tackle the fragmentation of the many, many handsets to be addressed when publishing to "mainstream" mobile phones.

At present, it's an initiative (as there have been so many) and the presence of industry heavyweights does not always guarantee their success. I am (cynicism coming with age...) cautious over black box approaches (remember Tira Wireless?). I would love to see this succeed but let's see what it comes to...

Image credit: digitalvish.com

Microsoft App Store Better than Apple!?

2009-03-12T01:42:00.006Z

Microsoft has a central market place for Windows Mobile applications in the making. It is the latest (and maybe the last) of the big smartphone platform makers to come forth with such a model. And - with a probably already somewhat reflexive jab to its Cupertino nemesis (yes, Mr Gates' children are not allowed iPods), it vowed to be more open to outside software developers.

Apple is indeed not known for the most proactive approach to external partners but it does have a bit of a name for being a "good company". Microsoft on the other hand is, rightly or wrongly, not really known for this. It would be a nice move. Other than that - also somewhat familiar - Microsoft's store is said to be closely following Apple's lead, even the revenue share (70% to developers) is apparently the same. The only difference would then be the openness. This is presumably being highlighted following a couple of incidents where developers complained that Apple had not accepted their applications without giving them a good reason. If Microsoft were to make this bit better, it would constitute a significant improvement as it would save developers from spending money on application development only to see them canned.

The rationale for Microsoft's move is utterly simple: a) there are more Windows Mobile apps out than iPhone ones (20,000 they say). It is just a wee bit more difficult to find them, b) everyone else (RIM, Nokia, Android, hell, even Palm) does it, and c) Apple is insanely successful with it.

The big question that remains is if the integration of the store will be as seamless as Apple's. The key differentiator is that Apple has managed (which no other OEM has so far) to impose a strictly regulated environment from end to end: its program has an easy entry (a few paragraphs with a click-through agreement), a fairly well-controlled development environment and a unified output (the store), which is the same anywhere in the world. Even the biggest OEMs have struggled to impose anything even resembling this kind of control. Windows Mobile runs on a number of the tier-2 players (HTC) that have done the opposite to Apple: HTC willingly gives away its branding in favour of a carrier brand and is content to provide the hardware. Since it can be expected that at least the larger carriers will be keen to run app stores of their own, Microsoft will struggle more than Apple (which was a highly anticipated new market entrant with a tremendous brand message) to assert this type of dominance over carrier specs. The recent rumours of lower Windows Mobile output won't necessarily help either.

I would welcome a success from Microsoft; let Apple not grow overly content...

Smartphone Market Shares & Growth

2009-03-12T00:27:00.005Z

World market leader Nokia had a bruising 2008, at least in the smartphone field. According to a study, the Finns' market share in this segment dropped by 10% to a - well - still fairly respectable 40.8% in Q4/2008 (as compared to 50.9% a for the quarter in the previous year). Painful!

The big winners were RIM (growth of 84.9% year-on-year), Apple (111.6%) and Samsung (138%) although the latter grew from a fairly low share (1.8%). HTC was up 20% but its carrier-branded handsets (T-Mobile G1, etc) were not listed under its own tab but under "others", so there might actually have been more (probable when considering that the company's profits rose sharply in Q4/2008 on G1 sales).

Apple, interestingly, is said to have suffered a fall of sales during Q4/2008 with growth in that quarter driven by the Blackberry Storm, T-Mobile G1 and strong Samsung sales. On the OS side, Windows Mobile made headway, mainly via the successful HTC Touch line and the Samsung Omnia.

Overall smartphone sales in Q4/2008 were 38m and 140m for the whole year. This seems to tie in roughly with the numbers I discussed earlier this month.

The changes are of interest to the content industry, too. Smartphones make for a disproportionate amount of content consumption, and smartphones also lead the way for the new app stores that are breaking through everywhere after Apple showed its competitors just how much consumers are craving content. RIM is out of the blocks, as is Android. Nokia announced its Ovi Store and runs similar programmes with N-Gage, NCD and Comes with Music already and Windows Mobile has just announced the shop it will launch itself. Remains to be seen where Palm will go with its Pre and WebOS: it only had 0.9% of the market (some faithful Treo users!) and hence lots of catching up to do. And what about the newly coined JavaFX?

Here are the charts (courtesy of Gartner via Cellular News) for 1) Q4 2008 by vendor, 2) all of 2008 by vendor, 3) Q4/2008: by operating system and 4) all of 2008 by OS:

Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor

(Thousands of Units)

Company	4Q08 Sales	Market Share4Q08 (%)	4Q07 Sales	Market Share4Q07 (%)	4Q07-4Q08 Growth (%)
Nokia	15,561.7	40.8%	18,703.3	50.9%	-16.8%
RIM	7,442.6	19.5%	4,024.7	10.9%	84.9%
Apple	4,079.4	10.7%	1,928.3	5.2%	111.6%
HTC	1,631.7	4.3%	1,361.1	3.7%	19.9%
Samsung	1,598.2	4.2%	671.5	1.8%	138.0%
Others	7,829.7	20.5%	10,077.3	27.4%	-22.3%
Total	38,143.3	100%	36,766.1	100%	3.7%

Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor, 2008

Company	2008 Sales	Market Share 2008	2007 Sales	Market Share 2007	Growth 2007-2008
Nokia	60,920.5	43.7%	60,465.0	49.4%	0.8%
RIM	23,149.0	16.6%	11,767.7	9.6%	96.7%
Apple	11,417.5	8.2%	3,302.6	2.7%	245.7%
HTC	5,895.4	4.2%	3,718.5	3.0%	58.5%
Sharp	5,234.2	3.8%	6,885.3	5.6%	-24.0%
Others	32,671.4	23.5%	36,176.6	29.6%	-9.7%
Total	139,287.9	100%	122,315.6	100%	13.9%

Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System, 4Q08

Company	4Q08 Sales	Market Share 4Q08	4Q07 Sales	Market Share 4Q07	Growth 4Q07-4Q08
Symbian	17,949.1	47.1%	22,902.5	62.3%	-21.6%
RIM	7,442.6	19.5%	4,024.7	10.9%	84.9%
Windows Mobile	4,713.9	12.4%	4,374.4	11.9%	7.8%
Mac OS X	4,079.4	10.7%	1,928.3	5.2%	111.6%
Linux	3,194.9	8.4%	2,675.9	7.3%	19.4%
Palm OS	326.5	0.9%	449.1	1.2%	-27.3%
Other OSs	436.9	1.1%	411.3	1.1%	6.2%
Total	38,143.3	100%	36,766.1	100%	3.7%

Note: The "Other OSs" category includes sales of Sharp Sidekick devices based on the Danger platform.

Worldwide: Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System, 2008

Company	2008 Sales	Market Share 2008	2007 Sales	Market Share 2007	Growth 2007-2008
Symbian	72,933.5	52.4%	77,684.0	63.5%	-6.1%
RIM	23,149.0	16.6%	11,767.7	9.6%	96.7%
Windows Mobile	16,498.1	11.8%	14,698.0	12.0%	12.2%
Mac OS X	11,417.5	8.2%	3,302.6	2.7%	245.7%
Linux	11,262.9	8.1%	11,756.7	9.6%	-4.2%
Palm OS	2,507.2	1.8%	1,762.7	1.4%	42.2%
Other OSs	1,519.7	1.1%	1,344.0	1.1%	13.1%
Total	139,287.9	100%	122,315.6	100%	13.9%

Note: The "Other OSs" category includes sales of Sharp Sidekick devices based on the Danger platform.

Carnival of the Mobilists #164

2009-03-10T00:34:00.002Z

Another week, another Carnival of the Mobilists. This week's edition is being hosted by Mark van't Hooft at Ubiquitous Thoughts and brings you all the goodies from the mobile world in the past week (including my post on the recession-bucking smartphone sales). So go over there and get wiser...

Social Networking World Forum

2009-03-07T02:25:00.005Z

Everyone who is in London next week Monday and Tuesday should be checking in for the Social Networking World Forum and the Mobile Social Networking Forum, which are held concurrently at Olympia in London. Everyone from MySpace, Bebo, Sulake/Habbo Hotel via LinkedIn and Yahoo! all the way to Coca Cola, MTV and British Airways will be there, so should be interesting!

See you there? Ping me... Twitter me... Whatever works.

Top 10 Mobile Phones in February 2009

2009-03-06T22:23:00.005Z

Here's the list of the 10 best-selling phones (judged by accessory sales) as compiled by Krusell, our Swedish holster-maker friends. I will not comment further on the sense or nonsense of this information but reference what I said previously about it.

So without any further ado, here's the list (in brackets the ranking from the previous month):

1. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia
2. (2) HTC Touch HD
3. (5) Nokia 6300
4. (3) Nokia E51
5. (4) Blackberry Storm
6. (8) Nokia E71
7. (6) Nokia 3109
8. (-) Nokia 5800
9. (7) Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia
10. (-) Nokia 3120

The most noteworthy new entry is the Nokia 5800 (XpressMusic), and the holster-maker's CEO reckons it would shake up the top 3 next month. After Nokia's most recent US launch disaster (see even more poignantly here) for the device, this will sadly but almost certainly not be driven by US sales though...

And as for the remainder: I remain skeptical about the measure (holsters). Other surveys (based on sales, like Sound-Scan used to do for CDs) show VERY different results.

Blackberry App World Gets a Pal

2009-03-06T01:12:00.003Z

Blackberry Maker RIM launched a holding site ahead of the launch of its Blackberry App World (the equivalent to Apple's AppStore), and it had a little surprise in hand: billing appears to be handled via PayPal (the fine print does not need translation: "to be able to purchase applications from BlackBerry App World, a PayPal Account is required").

This is two things: a) a massive win for PayPal and b) and nice move from Blackberry because PayPal is one of the simpler mechanisms, which will feel, like, so totally easy to many users (everyone who has tried to download applications and pay via credit card on their Blackberry will know how onerous it is/was).

I am thrilled to see this coming on. Apple has had 9 months free reign, and it's about time that its competitors step up and bring commercial stores out. Blackberry will be fantastically suited as - due to e-mail having been its central USP - its users traditionally are on data plans anyway, and will therefore be less reluctant to dig in properly.

MEF's Crystal Ball

2009-03-06T00:45:00.005Z

Industry body MEF had put out its top 10 predictions for the year a few weeks ago (inexplicably missed by me; well it was somewhere around Mobile World Congress, so probably at least excusable), which they gathered from their members and deep discussions around this. They believe that 2009 - recession and all - will be the year in which mobile entertainment (if you count everything in, apparently a $25bn industry) will start to deliver returns.

So now, without any further ado, here are the predictions:

The ‘iPhone effect' -Mobile applications have emerged as a new content category and the mobile internet will finally come of age
Greater value and transparency for consumers will help sustain demand in 2009
Some delay in the proliferation of mobile advertising
Telcos begin to acts as enablers for the Entertainment industry with services such as billing, authentication and zero tariff data
The emerging dominance of services that operate at a multi-platform level
The rise of ring back tones
Social networking becomes an important driver of mobile entertainment consumption
2009 will be the year that mobile video really takes off
Emerging economies will become an increasingly important driver for mobile entertainment worldwide
A proliferation of touch screen devices drives discoverability and content usage

Now, now. I am glad to see that a lot of this ties in with "what I have been saying all along"... ;-) But let's have a closer look at a few of the points:

The iPhone effect. Yes, I have elaborated on this plenty a time, so I will only refer to previous posts, for instance here, here and here.

"Some" delays in mobile advertising. Also: dealt with on numerous occasions, and a while ago, too (see here and here)...

And now for a whole bunch of stuff that can, I believe, be grouped, namely greater (perceived?) value to consumers and carriers moving into smart-pipe models. The jury is still out on this, isn't it? Although it has to be said that there seems to be a learning curve indeed. But is this from new-found wisdom or because of the fruity pain from the guys in Cupertino?

Another group: multi-platform services and social networking. I would class the latter as the shining beacon of the former: social networks do one thing. They connect the dots, they are the switchboards of the digital life. And since users per se do not really care on which screen this happens, a lot of them have seen significant value contributions from mobile (e.g. MySpace sees incredible growth rates).

So there you have it...

SendMe Raises Cash on Premium SMS Services

2009-03-05T23:57:00.007Z

US Premium SMS service specialists SendMe Mobile raised another $12m (bringing the total to $35m) in order to fund their further expansion into the - what they call nascent - Premium SMS space. New boys Triangle Peak Ventures joined return investors True Ventures, Amicus Capital, Spark Capital and Grand Banks Ventures for the round (note to self: VCs need to get more creative in finding names for their firms). SendMe wants to use the cash for 3 purposes, namely a) working capital, b) acquisitions and c) "unforeseen challenges" of the economy. Unforeseen, huh?

Be it as it may be but there are a couple of points remarkable on this (though not that remarkable if you know Russ Klein, their CEO, who is a really bright cookie!):

Premium SMS is considered nascent in the US (when it really is a fairly old hat in old Europe). Is simplicity saving the day? Should European firms maybe looking to repositioning this beautifully simple monetization tool rather than turning to more complex matters such as micro-billing, etc?
Raising that amount of money in this day and age is respectable in itself. It does keep you wondering though where they are running with their cap table: on $35m total, their valuation must be somewhere in the region of $50-100m. That is big considering that the likes of Glu trade at 0.2x revenues or so.
The aforementioned report mentions that reverse auctions ("SoLo") had a "break-out year" for SendMe in 2008. This would arguably fly even higher in a full-blown recession ("darling, I just got ourselves an iPod for $1.34"), so might well have been the angle that made for convincing forecasts.

Big shout to Russ & team: you guys rock!

iPhone Dominates the Mobile Web (as yet)

2009-03-03T23:47:00.006Z

The iPhone has a meagre 1.2% share of the overall phone market. However, it has true worker bees as users. No, honestly, these guys are sooo much busier than everybody else: they produce a whopping 2/3 of the world's mobile web traffic, or so says a report. Yes, that's right. Number 2? Shared between open-source-newbie Symbian and - remarkably - Android with 6.15% each, which is, erm, less than 10% of what the iPhone accounts for (and in spite there being a gazillion more Symbian-powered phones out there than iPhones). Next one in the queue then is Blackberry with 2.24%.

Interestingly, the researchers find that the runners-up are quickly gaining market share, which begs the question (again) if the iPhone was only a big marketing coup: did people only need the Jobs magic in order to be shown what they could actually do with their phones (and, yes, did operators need Mr Jobs vision to realize that fair use might exceed, like, 137 kb per month)?

The answer? No! 4,000 downloads per minute are more than a marketing fluke! That web traffic is not a mirage! What the iPhone did do is trigger a stampede towards better usability, better discovery, a better environment, more ease. It is no surprise that the Google-dominated Android phone is catching up so fast (in spite being the youngest platform): Google itself has a knack for simplicity and ease of use. And from the platforms that have been around for a little longer, Blackberry (traditionally equipped with flat-rate data plans and affluent users to go with it) and Symbian (highest install-base on smartphones) are best suited from the pack to catch up quickest. The only question is the one for Windows Mobile (ooh, and Mr & Mrs Gates children are not allowed iPhones...).

The most encouraging bit of that report is therefore not another staggering stat on the iPhone but that the others are catching up. A race to the top then (even if some say that, content-wise, it currently is a race to the bottom; I'm sure that that will sort itself out fairly quickly but of this another time...).

"Recession? Where?" Asks the Smartphone...

2009-03-03T22:50:00.005Z

I previously looked at recession-busting sectors and products, and here's more proof that not all is bad: two reports point out that smartphones continue to outperform the market rather significantly, recording growth figures of 25.9% year-on-year in Europe; the growth for all of 2007 vs 2008 was even more impressive: they grew by 36.1%. In the US, smartphones increased their share of the overall mobile phone market from 12% in Q4/2007 to 25% a year later. Good numbers!

Half of the (US) smartphones now come with touchscreens, with 70% "instead" (?) having a QWERTY keyboard (my best guess is that this includes phones with a slide-out keyboard, such as the T-Mobile G1 or the Sony Ericsson Xperia).

So how come? The iPhone but also other devices like Blackberries, Nokia's higher-end phones (e.g. the N95) have powerfully demonstrated that the use of a mobile for things other than using voice and SMS (and take the occasional snap with a so-so camera) is not the end of all things. The overall feature sets of smartphones but - possibly more importantly still - the overall user experience is generally significantly better on a fairly comprehensive scale, and this - in particular in times of recession - would suggest a much higher value for money ("if I pay £50, then I get 4x in value of what I would otherwise have."): they now all contain decent cameras, enough storage to work as a decent MP3 player (or in Apple's case even as an iPod...), they do e-mail, connect more effortlessly to the Internet, play more fulfilling games and generally provide a much richer content experience (did I just hear "widgets"?).

For the content industry, this is good news: more powerful devices are generally easier to address and provide a better route to transport brands and production values across to the small screen. The iPhone has shown (see e.g. here and here) that users DO use their phones for all sorts of things if one makes it easy for them. Therefore, the smarter the phone, the higher the consumption. Good, good!

Carnival of the Mobilists #163

2009-03-02T16:27:00.002Z

This week's carnival (a week after the real one) is hosted at the aptly named Golden Swamp. Make sure to go there and check out what the mobile blogging world has to offer to you!

Mobile Internet is Reality!

2009-02-25T01:16:00.006Z

A Nielsen survey commissioned (sic!) by backhaul specialists Tellabs found that the mobile Internet is pretty much a part of life nowadays - at least in the territories covered by this. They asked 50,000 consumers in EU5 (Germany, France, UK, Spain and Italy) and the US about their intentions with respect to 10 mobile data services.

Italians are the quickest adopters, and Germans are slowest.

The top 5 data services were (in order of ranking): Mobile Internet, MMS (yes, really. I am skeptical, too), uploading photos, Software/app download (presumably includes games) and E-mail.

Here are some of the findings:

Mobile Internet usage will ignore the global recession and ramp up significantly in the next 12 months.
71% of consumers anticipate daily use but concerns remain over - you guessed it - cost, speed and quality of service.
There are c. 200m mobile data users in the surveyed markets (which by my count equates to about 1/3 of the total population). More than 50% of these users plan an increase of their usage in the next 2 years.
25% of the users who do NOT currently use data services, plan to do so shortly (this would be another 100m).

This would all suggest that the recent signs of an accelerated move into smarter phones is actually being underpinned by the respective service use. Anecdotally, this was always known: the more sophisticated the handset, the higher consumption.

What is still worrying is the concerns over cost, etc. Carriers do move increasingly into flatrate data plans but their varying degrees of interpretation as to when a rate is flat (or rather what constitutes fair use) still leaves consumers cautious (and, frankly, as long as a few MB of data constitute the cap of fair use, this is likely to remain like this; not good...).

So all good! Even if Tellabs have a somewhat vested interest in this: they make their money with backhaul and service reliabity, a firm as reputed as Nielsen will not have cooked the numbers on this!

Top 10 Phones in the US, December 2008: the Ascent of the Smartphone

2009-02-25T00:50:00.004Z

There's new data out on the bestselling handsets, and this time it is not being derived from accessory sales (which may have its flaws as I pointed out here) but from a survey amongst service reps and store managers across the 4 big US mobile networks (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile; these comprise 85% of the total subscriber base). Now, this would arguably reduce the recorded sales for the iPhone since this is also being sold via Apple's own retail stores as well as Walmart, Best Buy, etc. So again not an entirely accurate yardstick, huh?

It is noteworthy that only one handset is available on more than one carrier (and, yes, it ranks prominently amongst the top 1) and that Nokia, despite all waiting, has still not managed to break the top 10.

It is also noteworthy that most of the handsets would certainly be classified at smartphones (the Samsung Rant might be the exception). And this is certainly good news. The T-610 and RAZR may finally have left the building...

So here we go (number in brackets is the previous month's rank):

1. (1) Blackberry Curve

2. (2) iPhone

3. (3) Blackberry Storm

4. (6) LG Voyager

5. (4) LG Dare

6. (5) Blackberry Bold

7. (-) Samsung Rant

8. (9) Samsung Behold

9. (10) Samsung Instinct

10. (8) LG Env2

Source: Rankings are by Avian Research LL.C. (via the above link)

Carnival of the Mobilists #162

2009-02-23T10:58:00.004Z

Nothing much from me last week due to Barcelona meeting frenzy but thank goodness there are more prolific bloggers than me out there. The carnival goes on (not that one), and this week the Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Sachendra Yadav over here. Good stuff there, too, including some analysis showing that 3G is actually a success wherever it launched and a look at the spread between a technology launch and wider adaption (the latter being necessary to make it commercially feasible).

And, yes, I'll be back with more of my own later this week! Promise! :)

Carnival of the Mobilists #161

2009-02-17T13:14:00.003Z

In spite of Mobile World Congress being in full swing, this week, too, has another Carnival of the Mobilists for you. It is hosted over at Mobify and can be found here. It also features my most recent post on the iPhone and its impact on the game developer spcae. Enjoy whilst I will jump back into the crowds here...

Barcelona, here we come...

2009-02-16T00:49:00.003Z

Judging by the many Twitter updates today, I seem to be the last one to arrive at Mobile World Congress tomorrow: everyone appears to being already in the midst of networking, hunting for new revelations and, well, parties and tapas.

I'll be setting off tomorrow morning at the break of dawn, so if you would like to meet up, drop me a line. E-mail will be safest as the show is traditionally one of the most frantic ones. Try me at volker [dot] hirsch [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you're into gaming and all things mobile entertainment, you might want to check into the Mobile Backstage event on Thursday. I will be contributing on a panel on next generation gaming. But there will also be proper celebrities around with will.i.am and Kevin Spacey headlining the music and film sections...

And then I'll be back next weekend with hopefully interesting learnings to share! Adios!

Samsung Goes Green (or Blue?)

2009-02-15T01:11:00.006Z

Ahead of the Mobile World Congress, Samsung announced a super-cool device. Cool because it has the word "blue" in its name (it's name is "Blue Earth")? Or because it's all touchscreeny-feely? No! Because it's very green:

It's solar-powered, it is made from recycled plastics (water bottles, just like the Motorola one I blogged about recently). Packaging? Recycled paper. And then it also has a couple of sweet little gadgets: you can for instance see how much CO2 you saved by using the in-built pedometer. Now, this (not the pedometer, the phone) is something rather cool!

I will maintain - again - though that the question remains why they then do not do this kind of thing across all their products? In particular a company of Samsung's size and might could surely make a difference if this would not only concern one handset but their entire product portfolio. Come on, guys!

Top 10 Smartphone Games & Apps 2008

2009-02-15T00:19:00.010Z

Smartphone content vendor Handango releases a smartphone "yardstick" every year containing the top sellers from data in their store. Anecdotally, smartphone apps are more often sold via direct stores (rather than operator decks) than "normal" (not smart?) phones, owing of course to the better connectability (not necessarily connectivity) of high-end phones: input mechanisms (Querty, touchscreen, better D-pads), almost always 3G phones, etc make for a more satisfying user experience (try inputting a web URL via a basic phone keypad... painful!).

They had just under 10,000 apps on offer (spread across Blackberry, Windows Mobile [pro and standard], Palm, Symbian and Android). The average price point was a rather healthy $19, and users downloaded 1.12 apps on average.

Handango also says that games rose as part of overall "top category" sales (whatever that is) from 11% in 2007 to 19% in 2008. This is encouraging. Even so, there is no game amongst their overall best-sellers for 2008. Here's the list (price points at the end of each line):

1. Spb Mobile Shell 2.1.4 (today screen plug-in) - $29.95
2. MobiTV (streaming television) - $9.99/month
3. Ringtone Megaplex (ringtones) - $19.95
4. Spb Backup 2.0.1 (file backup) - $24.95
5. Spb Pocket Plus 4.0.2 (today screen plug-in) - $29.95
6. Pocket Informant 8 (today screen plug-in) - $29.95
7. Spb Phone Suite 1.3 (phone features) - $19.95
8. VoiceControl (voice command) - $6.00
9. Colour Your Trackball (trackball customizer) - $4.95
10. eWallet (Professional Edition) (PIM manager) - $29.95

The top 10 games across platforms for smartphones is this:

1. Spb Brain Evolution 1.2 (puzzle game)
2. Aces Texas Hold'em® - No Limit (card game)
3. TETRIS (puzzle game)
4. Guitar Hero 3 Mobile (music game)
5. Bejeweled (puzzle game)
6. Aces Solitaire Pack (card game)
7. The Sims 2 (strategy game)
8. Jewelrumble 2 (puzzle game)9. Sudoku Puzzle Pack (puzzle game)
10. Solitaire Buddy Gold (card game)

And here's a chart of the game categories - and, no, still no first-person-shooters in the top 10:

A noteworthy bit in the "Yardstick" is that Android already makes up for 10% of their sales (or so would the below graphic tell us).

From this, it also occurs that Handango does not consider the iPhone to being very smart. Hm... Well, it's probably that everyone who buys content on that one will buy not buy it from Handango but through the AppStore. OK then...

Twitter Raises More Cash

2009-02-14T12:17:00.007Z

I and many others had been speculating if they did or did not need new money (founder Biz Stone says they didn't) and amidst people scraping together money, fearing long, cold winters of recession, Twitter raised a more than respectable third round of $35m led by tier-1 VCs Benchmark and IVP. This can, according to some sources, still grow as existing investors want to protect their dilution (which would make sense, I suppose). Congrats, folks!

According to Stone's blog, they do not need the money. However, they felt the offer was so good that they could not say "no"... As they would say...

What is it for then? And, ah yes, they want to use some of the capital to "help build their revenue-generating projects". And that's about time, too! On the other hand, let's not be too derogative: they have been growing at an amazing speed (the numbers I had were 780% last year; Biz Stone now ups them to more than 900%) and with the media making the right noises and even secondary Twitter businesses being funded (which often do have at least the hint of a "how-to-make-money" set-up though), there certainly is something in this. That Twitter has its uses for businesses is a tale that you can read about from hundreds, including the traffic kings Guy Kawasaki and Peter Cashmore (Mashable); the Twittersphere is full of "top-20-business-uses" style how-to guides.

How will Twitter itself monetize on this? Rumours are flying as always and they range from paid-for corporate accounts to advertising to, presumably, big-media tie-ins. There is so much room to look when you are commanding this big and active a user base that there a plenty of angles; the Twitterati may be younger and poorer than the average (there's recently been a "Twitter census")but they are at home in the new social media and they are ultra-mobile with a higher proportion on laptop and mobile usage. Welcome to the future then! I had suggested a few possible avenues previously; and if even I can do it, I am sure they can do it... ;-)

Oh, and if you wish, follow me on Twitter here.

iPhone Mobile Entry Gate for Game Developers

2009-02-13T00:53:00.003Z

Having just spent three incredibly inspiring days at Casual Connect Europe in beautiful Hamburg, there were - in respect of mobile games - two observations to be made: 1) the horror online and PC game developers express when looking at the fragmented space and the resulting "crazy" (quote) business models and 2) the iPhone is different, from a developer perspective this time.

Many, many developers of PC and Mac-based games (be it downloadable, online, browser-based) look at the iPhone as an entry gate to mobile gaming. A lot of the developers I spoke with were interested to work with a specialist mobile games company with a view to bringing their content across to the mobile platform but would not consider including the iPhone in this: "We'll do iPhone ourselves. It's a pretty easy platform to work towards and we understand the distribution model."

This is likely to mean that there will be an ever-growing influx of games from reputable and experienced game companies onto the iPhone, and this might just increase the gap between Apple's hit phone and the "rest" in content terms even more. Today, there are c. 4,500 games available for the iPhone (or so I hear; and remember that this is a mere 7 months or so after the AppStore launched), and a lot of providers are still missing on there. Whereas "traditional" mobile games have very high barriers to entry because of the complex (and hence expensive) landscape that one needs to address (hundreds of handsets, hundreds of distribution deals all to be struck with very big, often slow-moving "old-school" companies), none of this exists for the iPhone: Apple provides a simple agreement, there is one build to be delivered and one store where it is sold. Easy!

Irrespective of where the remainder of the mobile world will run (and they all seem to run now in order to catch up with the latest "Apple Revolution"), the AppStore is likely to become the first test case where game developers from different backgrounds (PC, online, etc vs. "traditional" mobile) will compete for customers directly. The former have a huge advantage in that they could leverage their online presence to promote the mobile version, too. This is only done by a few of the mobile "pure-plays" and it is tough to compete for eyeballs with an online games company that has 100m+ unique users per month. On the other hand, the mobile specialists have better knowledge about the specific mobile device constraints (which are very different to the ones on a PC).

Another interesting field to watch this year!

JavaFX: and another one...

2009-02-13T00:41:00.003Z

Whoever had hoped that the iPhone example would trigger an end of the fragmentation will be disappointed. Android will likely come in infinite flavours as and when OEMs and carriers adapt the OS to their specific tastes (I dare not speak of needs...), Symbian when going open-source will likely fare a similar fate, and now Sun fights back to maintain its stronghold by launching JavaFX, which is supposed to provide a bit of zing to the ubiquitous J2ME middleware that dominates the mobile handsets (according to Sun, 2.6bn devices carry it).

It's early days but I will make sure quizzing our engineers to see what they think.

And now let's go back to dream of a single platform... Zzzzzzzz.

Carnival of the Mobilists #160

2009-02-09T00:37:00.002Z

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted over at AllAboutiPhone.net. Some cool stuff there. No, really: there's even a proper "how-to-do-MWC" guide there...

Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg

2009-02-07T01:39:00.004Z

With the conference season upon us, I shall be trekking to my former hometown of Hamburg on Monday to join the good folks from the Casual Games Association for their European iteration of Casual Connect. It looks like a pretty cool show with lots of interesting stuff going on, in particular also on social gaming and cross-platform initiatives: they have numerous panels and keynotes on both and a whole strand on mobile. Interesting speakers, too: Rob Unsworth (Digital Chocolate), Ami Ben-David (Oberon/I-Play), Philippe Dao (Gameloft) are there plus an interesting panel with Fishlabs' Michael Schade and Handy Games' Christopher Kassulke on the same panel (their two companies had a little bit of a tiff recently). I'll be there to elaborate a bit more on mobile social gaming... Fingers crossed.

If you are there or close, drop me a line, a tweet (vhirsch) or whatever else. I'll try to post my impressions in between but it might need to wait (day jobs turn into night jobs during conference seasons, you see...).

RIM's 50m & Symbian's riposte

2009-02-07T01:08:00.005Z

Blackberry maker RIM announced it had raced through the "epic" 50m device barrier. An honourable feat indeed! Symbian fired of a riposte (or was it Symbian-fan-boy-bloggers that did? I don't know) that it had sold just under 80m devices in 2007 alone (with a total install base of 250m), and the Blackberry story therefore was to be considered as "how very quaint".

Now: isn't this comparing apples and pairs? Every Blackberry is (and has been for, like, ever) the benchmark device for e-mail on the go. I still remember sitting in Moscow pulling down my e-mail on a Nokia 9300, and, in the time it took me to download the header of the e-mails when my dear US colleague had browsed through his e-mail and replied to 5. So: Symbian is not to be equated with Blackberry; it's an entirely different thing: Symbian was all about creating a more powerful OS that could do a lot of things, and it does them fairly well. But we shouldn't forget that most of them a N-Series devices without a QWERTY keyboard that do different things than a Blackberry does. It is probably possible (now, not 3 years ago) to create a similar experience on a Symbian-powered phone than it is on a Blackberry but I have still to find an e-mail client on a phone as pain-free, reliable and quick as the Blackberry's.

I do believe that it is less about the theoretical power of an operating system but about the end-to-end experience (iPhone anyone? I commented on this a long time ago). And - across the board - a Blackberry beats most of its rivals hands down on that; still. So this comparison limps heavily. It is probably also to blame on this odd way to define "what is a smartphone"? The mere fact that it has a "an identifiable operating system" surely is not that smart (although Admob classifies it as such).

I applaud RIM to their feat of selling 50m devices (or "i-banker phone" as they were called in their early years) and remain a fan.

On a sideline, RIM also mentioned that there have been 7m downloads of the Facebook client for the Blackberry so far. This would mean that a fairly respectable 15% of all Blackberries that have EVER been sold have the client, and this means that this is probably a rather high number of the ones currently in use. Who would have thought that? I-banker phone goes social networking. Ts ts ts...

Carnival of the Mobilists #159

2009-02-02T11:29:00.003Z

Another week, another carnival of the mobilists, and my post on mobile social gaming is amongst them. So go head over to Ram Krishnan's Mobile Broadband Blog and read up on what else was hot last week!

Top 10 Mobile Phones in January

2009-01-31T00:39:00.005Z

Our beloved manufacturer of carrying cases for portable electronics, Krusell, enlightens us again with their top 10 list of best-selling phones for the month of January 2009 (or should that be best-selling phone holsters?).

1. (1) Samsung SGH-i900/i910 Omnia

2. (-) HTC Touch HD

3. (9) Nokia E51

4. (-) Blackberry Storm

5. (2) Nokia 6300

6. (5) Nokia 3109

7. (7) Sony Ericsson X1 Experia

8. (8) Nokia E71

9. (-) Nokia 6220

10. (10) HTC Diamond

The number in brackets is the rank from the prior month.

Now, as compared to all of 2008, the iPhone went from #1 to nowhere. I explained this before: they track phone sales by the number of model-specific accessories sold, and I am still not sure if that makes any sense. I see this more in practical terms: the "suits" carrying around their business phones do not seem to have the fashion sense to realize that specific phone cases is nothing that one does (this is also popular with taxi drivers), and therefore it seems obvious that a lot of "business-type" phones are in the list (and none of the "classic" Blackberries because they have their uber-cool faux-leather holster in the box (and, yes, that's the piece I throw away first!).

Let me know what you think!

Photo credit: http://blogfreespringfield.com/wp-content/uploads/image/holster.jpg

Next-Gen iPhone Will Wipe Out DS & PSP

2009-01-30T23:43:00.005Z

Today, there was a piece analyzing recent reports whereby Apple was well on its way to wipe out DS and PSP from the handheld gaming sphere, and that it would therefore seek to address a number of weaknesses in its next iteration of the iPhone (and iPod Touch) that would add a few currently missing features that should bridge the - already slim - gap to the PSP.

You have of course read it here before but I would like to revisit this again. I had mentioned the huge advantage of having swift and global digital distribution, giving Apple and any developer pondering which platform to choose an easy solution. Accelerometer and multi-touch add new gameplay features. Plus the iPhone is lighter than its rivals (and of course does a number of other things pretty decently, too, namely playing music, making phone calls or surfing the web).

And then there are the numbers. It took Apple less than 3 months to boast 1.5x the number of games of DS and PSP combined (1,500). The digital distribution model keeps on impressing and shows that this is really what consumers want in terms of accessibility, purchase mechanism (download as opposed to physical cartridge) and - yes - perhaps also price (although there is rumour that Apple wants to introduce a premium segment).

So here is what Apple allegedly wants to change:

Enhanced graphics (to address its current lack of loading complex textures);
improved processing capabilities (through its own ARM chip, which is currently developing; this follows the acquisition of PA Semi last spring);
Better camera (minimum 3.5 mega-pixels) and video-recording.

Multi-tasking as demonstrated by the Palm Pre with its WebOS would be something I would like to see.

No word if cut-and-paste will work as well, it seems... Oh well, I guess they need to leave something to complain about for the old-school geeks to who Apple still is the fruity devil... ;-)

Photo Credit: http://www.macblogz.com/Media/2008/6/iphone-flash-nand.jpg

Vodafone ponders and prepares to bulk up

2009-01-29T01:00:00.006Z

Did you know about Vodafone's Flipfont app? No, I didn't think so; it seems to have gone more or less unnoticed. Well, it allows you to - listen to this - customise your phone frontpage. Woah! How cool is that? The downside? Well, you need to pay £1.99 for the pleasure, per screen! I don't think so... And, apparently, (now) so does Vodafone. Amidst the iPhone/AppStore rage and the "revelation" that UI might actually matter to people, they seem to have realized that changing a font will not necessarily change the uptake of consumption to new levels. And because they cannot have the iPhone (although it has the Blackberry Storm, which is performing much better than the initial damning reviews would have suggested), they will launch their very own app store, or so they said (if you read Dutch, that is; how nice that we have a Dutch blogger amongst us who translated it for us).

This is not the only bit of news though: Vodafone also wants to tighten relationships with two other players in the market, and these are none other than giants China Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Now if you thought that Vodafone was large, take this in: together, these 3 carriers combine 821 million (!) subscribers (Vodafone 280m, China Mobile 457m and Verizon Wireless 84m [although I believe that VF counts a number of VZW subscribers proportionate to its shareholding in]).

Here's what Vodafone's CEO Vittorio Colao told the FT:

“If you think of three players, China Mobile is very strong in China; it’s a big country. Vodafone is very strong in Europe, Africa, India. Verizon is very strong in the US.

“If these three companies could work more closely... in the management of customers, procurement and service creation, we could be unbeatable, quite frankly.”

And right he is...

Carnival of the Mobilists #158

2009-01-27T14:22:00.002Z

This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, the definitive guide to the must-read blogs on everything mobile is hosted over at Tsahi Levent-Levi's VoIP Survivor blog. Check it out here.

Twitter on the Money Trail again...

2009-01-27T00:48:00.004Z

Twitter is this phenomenon of which some people say it is the business that never was. Not that Twitter never was but that it never was a business... which is why they apparently need fresh money, or more specifically $20m, or so it is said (see also here) The valuation? A cool $250m. A lot, you say? Well, they allegedly recently turned down a $500m acquisition offer from Facebook, so it's a bargain!

Now, one of the issues they are facing is (never mind the unresolved business model) that a) they need to bulk up on infrastructure to cater for the 750%+ growth in 2008 and b) (OK, there are probably more reasons) they are trying to bring back SMS notifications to the UK (which it stopped last summer claiming it cost them up to $1,000 per user p.a.). And on the latter I wonder why: does anyone still uses this? I am using Twitterberry, cooler users use any one of a plethora of iPhone clients, and there are enough clients for "other" phones out there, too. It is more convenient, more powerful, a better interface and - for Twitter - much, much cheaper. If they are not satisfied with it, shouldn't they perhaps invest some $100k to build a Twitter client for all phones? I mean, it's not THAT complex...

As to business model, I am fairly confident that they will be able to translate this staggering amount of traffic into $$$. Their recent acquisition of Summize, which provides a newly introduced search option for Twitter, is one step. My hunch would be that they will utilize some of the momentum their growth afforded them will allow them to acquire some of the value-adding services (GigaOM names Twitpic and Stockwits) as well as ad-funded clients (e.g. Twitterific serves you - on the free version - an ad per hour of use).

Oh, and yes, I am a fan and Twitterer. Follow me here (vhirsch). And, no, if you're an investor, Stephen Fry's account on why this is so great will not necessarily convince you it makes sense (although he is VERY enthusiastic about it) ;-)

Mobile Social Gaming?!

2009-01-26T00:29:00.006Z

I'll be giving a presentation at Casual Connect Europe in a few weeks and have hence been looking a little at the concept of social gaming. In particular with the iPhone success story, this concept has received its fare share of the limelight recently - and rightly so: the unique distinguishing factor of a mobile phone is that it is always with its owner and that it's always on, making it the perfect tool for connecting with people (well, this is what they were invented for in the first place), and the iPhone does that well not only with voice or SMS...

The "social" aspect of mobile gaming has mostly focussed on this connectivity and this is also what has been haunting it, at least in most parts of the world because of the horrendous fragmentation on the carrier and handset side. To make a fully integrated connected mobile game, one needs to integrate with a vast number of carriers (in the US, the situation is a little different - integration in only the 3 or 4 biggest carriers - Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint/Nextel and maybe T-Mobile, and you're in business big time; there is e.g. WPT Texas Hold'Em that scored tremendous commercial success, including full web-to-mobile-to-web play), and they cannot seem to resolve on a common standard; nearly every carrier runs its own little system...

However, do games really have to be fully connected multi-player with in-game chat, buddy lists, alerts, etc, etc, in order to be "social" games? I do not think so. They "merely" have to become a social object, and set in an environment to leverage the social aspect of this (there's more from Jyri Engestrom on object-centered sociality). This does not work for every game in every case but there are plenty of examples out there both in mobile and online: Playfish (founded by mobile games veteran Kristian Segerstrale) runs a number of games on Facebook that are stand-alone single-player games but integrated into Facebook in a way that pushed them all the way up the rankings. Digital Chocolate runs a very successful franchise with TowerBloxx on mobile and online - again a single-player game with hooks into existing social networks (the latter providing the environment that facilitates them becoming a social object). Orange Israel recently created a raft of online destinations around Totomi: a micro-site, a Facebook Group is all you need to create a community around a game.

So whilst I am and will remain a big fan of connected games (phones are to connect with people!), some simple data streams out (high-scores, etc) AND links into existing social networks are actually likely to activate a lot of the potential in there.

I will be continuing to ponder this, and I would be most grateful for any input!

Carnival of the Mobilists #157

2009-01-19T01:41:00.003Z

Another week, another carnival. #157 is hosted over at mjelly this week. Check it out here! Lots of goodies in there, including the Nokia biography by Tomi Ahonen, well something like that at least ;-)

Windows Mobile: we didn't mean it like that...

2009-01-17T23:49:00.003Z

So following the conflicting news about what the strategy for Windows Mobile would be, some learned folks followed up and quizzed Microsoft. So here's what they said:

Microsoft will be focusing on building out the quality of the Windows Mobile experience, investing more in working with its partners to ensure the best hardware-software integration. While this may result in fewer phone models, Microsoft will continue working with our partners to innovate on the Windows Mobile platform.
Microsoft is committed to continued innovation of the Windows Mobile platform. Our goal continues to be working together with you to deliver exciting experiences to end users. The implication in The New York Times that Microsoft will limit the number of Windows Mobile devices is not accurate. In an interview with the paper, Todd Peters stated that Microsoft would be focusing on building out the quality of the Windows Mobile experience, investing more in working with its partners to ensure the best hardware-software integration.

So, there you have it. Despite it still being awkward that Todd Peters and Steve Ballmer would make such contradicting on the same day, the above would suggest that Microsoft has a couple of iPhone test devices running and now tries to catch up with the smooth overall end-to-end user experience (see also here) (or how would you read the first paragraph of the above?). With Windows 7 supposedly pushing into a tighter/more intuitive desktop-web integration, this would appear to being in line with an overall push to improve performance on this end.

Apple AppStore Rises and Rises: Now Past 500 Million Downloads!

2009-01-16T18:01:00.004Z

It is quite breathtaking: it took them 3 months to hit 100m. Then, only 5 weeks after they announced that they went past 300 million downloads, Apple announced that they just raced past 500 million. This means 200 million downloads in 5 weeks, 40 million per week, 5.7 million per day or 4,000 per minute! Get that! Whilst numbers don't equate to happiness, I sincerely hope that Steve Jobs will be taking some comfort from this and recover well.

I will not tire of harping about the (nigh) flawless end-to-end experience that enables that: a gaming experience that challenges "traditional" handheld gaming devices like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, an interface that promotes games beyond the hardcore crowd, connectivity that allows "social gaming" to evolve (see also here), and a purchase experience that does not force a user through onerous double-digit-click orgies and various ominous warnings.

So despite the fact that we still do not have clearer numbers illuminating the underlying commercials of the average application and game on their, I tip my hat, I take a bow, I applaud...

Mobile Music on the Rise: 40-45% of Digital Revenue for UMG

2009-01-13T22:15:00.004Z

January is MIDEM time (even though, sadly, I cannot go this year), which means that music dominates the news. In an interview, the EVP of Universal's eLabs, Rio Caraeff on the revenues of Universal Music Group that:

"about 40 to 45% of our overall digital business is coming from mobile channels like Verizon and AT&T. [...] On much of our frontline pop or R&B or urban releases [...] we're seeing mobile comprising 20-45% of the [overall] revenue for those artists."

Wow! Universal's digital sales have been growing by 33% during the first 3 quarters of 2008, and they seem determined to fully converge "online", "mobile", etc into one:

"The consumer doesn't want a mobile-only experience - they want an all-digital multi-platform experience. They want to consume their music on their mobile handset [and] on PC and other online platforms. Partners like Verizon and AT&T wanted to have multi-platform online experiences as well. [...] Now at Universal, we don't have a mobile business. We don't have an online business. We just have one multi-platform digital business."

Amen to that! And how right he is. Universal also adapted pricing, so that a song costs the same no matter on which digital platform you buy it. And, apparently, mobile storefronts play a role, specifically Amazon's MP3 storefront, which is pre-loaded on the G1, the first Android phone. So it's app stores (or markets) all over this year, huh?

This shows that the majors learned from the pain of recent years and now get a grasp on the digital world. Good stuff that!

Best-selling Mobile Phones 2008

2009-01-13T13:20:00.004Z

There is this Swedish maker of phone pouches and accessories, Krusell, and they deduce from the number of model-specific pouches (or cases) ordered from them the top-selling handsets each year. And the winner is the iPhone. Or is it only that iPhone users buy more pouches than others in order to protect their shiny toy? We don't know.

Anyway, here's the list (via Cellular News):

1. (-) Apple iPhone

2. (-) Nokia 3109

3. (2) Nokia 6300

4. (-) Nokia E51

5. (-) HTC Diamond

6. (-) Nokia N95 8GB

7. (-) Sony Ericsson K800i

8. (-) Sony Ericsson C702

9. (-) Sony Ericsson K850i

10. (-) Sony Ericsson K530i

() = last year’s position.

Win ME: Bigger, Better, Stronger, Less?

2009-01-12T21:44:00.006Z

Last week during the frenzy that was CES, Microsoft put out two statements that I find slightly confusing. Statement no. 1 was the announcement from Steve Ballmer that more than 20 million Windows Mobile devices had been shipped in 2008. He went on to marvel

"about the momentum we have…We have delivered 11 different mobile phones that have each sold a million units each, and in the past year, we’ve brought to market over 30 new Windows Mobile phones, or more than any other mobile platform in the market”

Statement no. 2 was made by Todd Peters (the VP Marketing for Windows Mobile) who said that we s

hould expect fewer devices with Windows Mobile on them. In his words:

"I'd rather have fewer devices and be more focused [as] we get better integration [between phone and operating system]."

Microsoft apparently fears they would be diluting their efforts when they would support the 140 or so WinME devices that are out there today. Hmmm.

Both gentlemen obviously glanced at Apple and the iPhone (can you imagine the sting this must have given Mr Ballmer?). There, hardware and software come out of one hand and there is one device only. The result: great UI, happy users, more use of content, data, etc than ever before. Apple is famously paranoid about controlling all bits of the user experience, and they are masters of it. However, when there is success in the mobile handset space, there is also e.g. Nokia: many, many handset models, now all running Symbian (i.e. another smartphone OS), selling lots and lots of devices all over the world (OK, outside the US). Nokia has fallen behind on the ease of use that used to be a pillar of their rise to fame (and riches) but they serve the lower-end emerging markets as well as the top end of it (something like the N96 etc boast features like few others).

So is the "1 OEM, 1 handset model" philosophy the only winning one? I doubt. Is MSFT maybe mistaken in believing that fewer handsets will mean better overall user experience? I for one do think so. Apple's success came through a winning formula that combines GUI design, user experience and superb marketing for an overall sexy product. Microsoft has always been lacking Apple's flair as well as the genial simplicity with which Apple manages to provide solutions that are often a lot less elegant and more complicated than Microsoft's. But, guys, you don't solve this by getting your OS out less. You have got to put some work into the OS and its APIs, and - as some commentators to Mr Peters' comment that they would "extract more from this license" noted - it helps to look at a product from a consumer perspective rather than from the corporate boardroom's product P&L, at least when you speak in public!

Update: There has been a bit of a media tussle over this. I posted an update over here.

Carnival of the Mobilists #156

2009-01-12T15:30:00.003Z

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted over at Dennis Bournique's WAP Review. Read it here to get an inspired overview of last week's posts on all things mobile!

Comes with Music Comes to Mama

2009-01-12T12:32:00.003Z

Nokia's "Comes With Music" service (unlimited downloads of 4m+ music tracks), which you get when you buy a phone, had been announced with much fanfare but it went a bit quiet after that. Now "early results" from the service show that it is mothers appear to be amongst the leading adopters, according to a Nokia executive. Unfortunately, that seems to be amongst the few bits of information they would let out into the public, the only other one being fairly obvious: recommendation is a driver (did they consult Amazon?) and chart coverage matters (Popularity matters? What?).

It would be wonderful would Nokia actually release a showcase of what it achieved with the service. I appreciate that they will want to wait since the service has gone live in the UK first and that only recently but I do hope that they will enlighten us...

iPod Touch mounts Handheld Gaming Challenge

2009-01-09T23:35:00.006Z

A recent article discussed the rise and rise of the iPod Touch (that's the iPhone without the phone). It apparently surged to the top of Amazon's sales charts, and mobile ad firm AdMob reports that ads served to the device more than tripled between November and December to 292m. This growth is said to even shadow growth of iPhone ads served and is being called, well, unprecedented. People are said to shun the forced marriage with AT&T's long-term phone plan that come with the iPhone. Makes you think (if you're an operator).

That's all fine and dandy but I thought this was probably a good time to look at the iPod's role as a handheld gaming device again. This was sparked by a remark from one of the Kleiner Perkins' chiefs (they're the ones who set up the iFund, which invests exclusively into companies active in the iPhone/iPod Touch ecosphere) noting that the iPod Touch was now asserting itself as a more versatile alternative to the Nintendo DS or Sony's PSP. This has of course been discussed for a while. The sales figures of the iPod Touch now seem to back these early (and initially largely theoretical) thoughts.

Nintendo has been keenly aware of this even before the recently published app download numbers were out. In the words of the CEO of Nintendo US (from the above WSJ article):

"Whether you chose to play on your DS or listen to music on your iPod, we're already in the same competitive space for time."

And whilst one could argue about the pound-for-pound comparison of pure touchscreen vs devices with gamepads for certain types of games, the huge upside Apple has created is the hassle-free and easy distribution model for games: a DS developer needs to buy the cartridges (and pay for them up-front), find retailers, and then sell. This means huge cash outlay and very significant commercial risk over and above the development cost, making for a much less risky business model. And as to the input: some of the accelerometer-powered racing games are significantly better to control than with any game pad.

The DS is and arguably will be for a while a formidable gaming platform (as the father of a 10-year-old girl I can certainly vouch for that) but the sheer number of games available on the AppStore is likely to create a space longer term that may well tilt the balance in favour of the latter: you've got a) the arguably best music player in the market, b) higher WiFi usability (the DS doesn't really allow you to surf the web), c) e-mail, maps, and all those nice little (and often useless) apps, d) much, much more choice of games at lower cost (anywhere from $0.99 to $9.99 as opposed to $30 for, say, Cooking Mama 2) and - to top it all of - e) the coolness factor of the sleek Apple form factor. Tough competitor, that.

For mobile games developers and new iPhone game entrants this constitutes and exciting development as it opens the revenue potential further up, and all that at a comparatively efficient and high-margin market place.

Finally: a new Palm

2009-01-09T18:15:00.005Z

After bloody ages (and 425m Elevation dollars later) Palm came out with a bang yesterday at CES by unveiling the Pre and its new WebOS. Palm's shareholders will be chuffed as the stock surged in the hours afterwards. Now, what is it? And does it have legs? One of the first reports (even containing a minute-by-minute live-blog of the presentation) notes that

'its form factor is a blend of the HTC Touch and the iPhone. The software looks an awful, awful lot like that of the iPhone — multitouch, gestures and so on. Many of the apps also have a very strong likeness to the iPhone [...]."

That in itself is of course not a bad thing. And other reports confirm high hardware quality and nice UI. However... Aren't they a bit late? And where will the content come from? Palm used to have a faithful following on his Tungsten and Treo product lines but this is a while ago now and there have been some awesome devices in the interim, some of which - most notably the iPhone and the G1 as well as RIM's Blackberries and the higher-end Nokia devices - have amalgamated a great device with a great UI and commercial environment into a huge following. Apple AppStore, Android Market, N-Gage and Ovi, Blackberry Application Center, etc, are all there or there about. And Palm will be up against that. The fact that it has - at least initially - tied itself to Sprint only will not be much help there.

WebOS is said to be easy to develop for. Allegedly HTML, CSS and some other stuff known from the web would be enough to develop for it. But will anyone do it unless there is a device base large enough to make it a compelling commercial case (which even seems to hit platforms like Nokia's N-Gage; THQ has just apparently dropped its "Worms World Party" development for this).

It's nice to see they're back but I think that the jury is still out on the success of this.

Top US Handsets in Q3/2008

2009-01-09T15:42:00.004Z

And it still goes on, it seems: Nielsen published its (digital) media top 10 lists for Q3/2008, and the once cool Motorola V3 still rules the United States - and by a HUGE margin. A whopping 9.3% of all phones in use are RAZR's, more than 7 points ahead of its sibling, the KRZR. Apple's iPhone follows on #4 with 1.5% share. And Nokia's call to arms with a view to the US market has as yet to materialize: its best handset is the 6101 series with a meagre 1.1% (compared to a reported global market share of the Finnish giants of close to 40%). Sony Ericsson and Samsung are both notably absent from the list.

Here's the top 10 table then:

1 Motorola RAZR V3 series (V3, V3c, V3m, V3i, V3i DG, V3) 9.3%

2 Motorola MotoKRZR series (K1m, K1) 2.0%

3 LG VX8300 series 1.6%

4 Apple iPhone 1.5%

5 LG VX8500 series (Chocolate, VX8500, VX8550) 1.2%

5 RIM BlackBerry 8100 series (Pearl,8110, 8120, 8129) 1.2%

7 Nokia 6101 series (6101, 6102, 6102i) 1.1%

8 LG VX8350 1.0%

9 Motorola V325 series (V325, V323, V325i, V323i) 0.9%

9 Nokia 6010 series 0.9%

Source: The Nielsen Company, Q3 2008

Time for a lot of people to shake things up!

Silver Lining for Games...

2009-01-07T14:39:00.005Z

... And a full-blown sunblast on Christmas Day, or so it would appear as per the latest PR from Try-and-Buy solution provider M-Biz Global. According to them, 2008 was a good year for mobile games (though I am not sure if the likes of MoConDi, Vivendi Mobile Games, Telcogames, Mighty Troglodytes, etc would agree). M-Biz's numbers would rather suggest that the market may be shifting a little (or is re-focussing the better word?) towards pre-loaded trial versions of games. It is this segment that M-Biz is addressing, and it is therefore unsurprising that they saw downloads on Christmas Day soar to 6x (!) the average daily sales in the UK: a lot of people get new phones for Christmas and if something is on the handset already (a trial version), one is much more easily enticed into actually clicking that link.

All in all, M-Biz reports a 62% increase in revenue year-on-year, and a 21.29% and 50% increase in EMEA and the UK respectively in December 2008 compared to the average of the previous 11 months. All good!

It tellies well with the findings open to see for everyone when looking at Apple's AppStore: make the purchase process easy, make things transparent, and people will buy. The difference to both the AppStore and a pre-installed trial game is that it does not take the user 8+ clicks, a download, various cryptic messages (of the "this application is unsafe. Do you really want to install? Really, really, really?" ilk) to get gratification. I have mentioned on the Opinions on Mobile blog that I would expect this to be an area of focus for this year, and the numbers quoted by M-Biz would appear to being ample support of this.

Light-Green Moto

2009-01-06T23:21:00.007Z

Motorola has recently been struggling a little to get the Koolaid out; it wasn't often the pinnacle of cool recently. However, today they unveiled a new phone, the "W233 Renew" (catchy name, huh?), and that phone is made of recycled plastic bottles. Now people might jump to the fineprint to see what the percentage of re-used components is, etc but, hey, let's just acknowledge that the concept is pretty cool, don't you think?

However, from their press release, there are little bits that do annoy me a little. They say that:

"When designing the packaging, Motorola was able to reduce its size by 22 percent and the box and all of the materials inside are printed on 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper."

Now, why on earth can't you do this with all your phones? It surely is not that big a thing, is it? And that would give Moto also a big 2l PET bottle of KoolAid: imagine the headline telling everyone that Motorola embarked on a company-wide strategy to go green. Woah!

Hungry for Opinions?

2009-01-05T22:05:00.004Z

Happy new year, everyone! And to get you a good and informed start into 2009, here's a pointer to a nice new service from Hungry Mobile, a blog run by Jan Rezab: he asked a few of us to contribute short assessments to a question he will ask once a week. Contributors include content industry executives, publishers, mobile marketing gurus, bloggers and mobile evangelists, and this should allow for a quick take from an inside circle of multipliers (as I think you call them/us) on various bits and pieces of our industry. I am chuffed to be asked to take part but I am also horrified that he allows us a full 400 characters per answer (not words, characters!).

Well done, Jan, and the rest of you, check it out here.

Just in Case: Merry Christmas Everyone!

2008-12-22T20:21:00.003Z

I have now taken the liberty to go into Christmas hibernation mode, which is to say, took vacation leave off work until the new year. I may (and, to be honest, probably will) post during the holidays but to all of you who may not read these during the season, let me extend the very best wishes for Christmas/Holiday Season/Time you are not being bothered by Christians or people living in Christian countries because they celebrate Christmas. Peace, respect and understanding across languages, cultures, colours, territories, generations, religions (or belief systems), technology gaps is what I am wishing everyone. Don't eat too much turkey, think of your loved ones, spend time with the children, relax and sleep in, party like mad, just have a good time!

Wireless Democracy in Estonia

2008-12-15T23:32:00.004Z

It was only a matter of time, I guess, and here it is: Estonia will allow its citizens to vote by SMS in 2011. However, the Estonians too have been watching the US Presidential elections in 2000 and decided hence that one needs some additional security to make it safe. Enter a chip that every citizen can apply for and get into his/her phone. If or if not this makes it really safe (my guess it that it should be possible to apply some decent security if the device is "hard-wired"), can (and probably will) be discussed at length by the experts. But it might just not matter much: I find it hard to believe that more people would actually jump through those additional hoops required to be admitted.

Cool PR, Estonia, hats off. And see you behind the curtain at the good old voting booth (or whatever it's called) in a few years time.

RIM eats Chalk

2008-12-11T18:14:00.005Z

Blackberry maker Research in Motion is acquiring mobile content deployment solutions provider (quite a mouthful!) Chalk Media for $18.7m in cash. Chalk to what they call "pushcasts", which - if I understand it correctly - is basically pushing podcasts to smartphones. The Vancouver-based company is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, so it still requires shareholder approval, and the deal is therefore not closed yet.

The move is a neat one: podcasts are increasingly used in the corporate environment for staff communications of all sorts, and the enterprise being the stronghold for RIM, it makes a lot of sense to strengthen its service offering by adding such a tool.

RIM has of course got under fire by Apple's iPhone and this will presumably continue being the case also by the higher-end Android-based phones who have been nibbling away (see here and here) on the Blackberry's pedestal as the businessman's (and woman's) favourite gadget. A lot to defend then, and the price would therefore not seem to be excessive at all... Stringent rationale, me thinks...

Most Precious Mobile Operator Brands

2008-12-10T17:30:00.006Z

And the winner is... China Mobile. Hard to guess, huh? Some research shows that the Chinese carrier's brand is worth $30.79bn. Vodafone and Verizon took the other spots on the podium. The top 10 is below (courtesy of the good folks at telecoms.com). And for some (by now a little outdated) comparison for how they rank amongst other industries, see here.

The study applies a royalty based on forecast of sales, brand strength (from qualitative panel data) which priced in market share, growth, price positioning, market scope, preference, awareness, relevance, heritage and perception. They complement these slightly fluffy markers with data on turnover, subs, churn, market share, ARPU, profitability, etc and then took the average score of the two to determine the royalty rate applicable. Apply tax and (low) discount rate and off you go. Pretty simple, isn't it? And, yes, I still think Cingular was cooler than AT&T... ;-)

China Mobile	China Mobile	China	Asia	30,793
2	Vodafone	Vodafone	UK	Europe	22,131
3	Verizon	Verizon Communications	US	North America	20,382
4	AT&T	AT&T	US	North America	18,886
5	T-Mobile	Deutsche Telekom	Germany	Europe	16,802
6	Orange	France Telecom	France	Europe	15,489
7	NTT DoCoMo	NTT DoCoMo	Japan	Asia	14,871
8	KDDI	KDDI Corp.	Japan	Asia	14,454
9	Movistar	Telefonica	Spain	Europe	10,799
10	Sprint	Sprint Nextel	US	North America	9,661