Social Networking World Forum

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

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

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

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

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)

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...

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

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!

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

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

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

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...

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?)

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

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...