Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

What’s the definition of a smartphone?

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

I was asked this question the other day:

What’s the definition of a smartphone?

I didn’t immediately have an answer. I had the answer in my mind… I could feel the neutrons firing but not giving a distinct summary sentence.

Then I formulated this:

A smartphone is a handset that enables you to manage your work and social life via means other than just the medium of voice.

What do you think? The thinking behind my definition is that, irrespective of what platform or specific functions, the main element that differentiates a ’smartphone’ from a ’shit phone’* is the fact that you can DO stuff. Manage a diary that’s synced from your Google Apps. Use instant messaging to talk to your team in Singapore whilst on an extended conference call at the office. Browse a spreadsheet or powerpoint on your device whilst you’re waiting for the ‘check’ at the restaurant.

What do you think?

* By the way: Will people PLEASE stop ’shit phones’ that only call or text as ‘feature phones’. They have next to NO features.

Vodafone and Carphone are friends again

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

If you remember, back October 2006, Vodafone decided to go-it-alone with the UK’s second largest mobile phone retailer, Phones4U.

The removed the UK’s largest chain, Carphone Warehouse, from the roster and gave Phones4U exclusivity.

So if you walk into a Carphone Warehouse, even today, you can’t get a Vodafone service. They won’t offer you a Vodafone contract.

Rumours abound as to why Vodafone made this decision in the first place — and what that meant for Carphone Warehouse.

Well, this is all changing. Again.

From the 7th of July, you can now walk into Carphone Warehouse and be furnished with a new Vodafone connection.

You can’t talk to them about your existing service offering. Mind you, you can’t even do that in a sodding Vodafone shop. You need to phone Customer Services.

That said, it’s a good move for the consumer looking ‘for a deal’.

You simply walk into Carphone Warehouse or Phones4U and — this is where the mobile operator gets an absolute kicking — you tell them you want a ‘better deal’. Let’s say you’re on Orange, right. Well, you won’t be. Not for much longer. The retailer typically gets a heck of a lot more revenue for obtaining a new customer than it does for ‘retaining’ and upgrading an existing customer. The deals for new customers are usually a lot more appealing.

So you’ll be whisked off Orange before you can say ‘can I get free minutes with that’ and the sales executive will begin pointing you to the operator that offers the highest revenue payout/bonus/vouchers for them.

So, from July 7th, you could now be walking out with a new Vodafone connection from Carphone Warehouse.

Good news for the consumer.

Good news for Carphone.

Bad news for Phones4U (slightly less reason to get your hands covered in snakeoil).

Good news for Vodafone. They can hopefully benefit from the churn that these retailers are generating. Carphone Warehouse, by the way, sold 19 million handsets last year. A majority of which were obviously churned from other networks.

Bad news for the operators in general.

We shall see…

MIR 3.0 is hunting for shit hot mobile rockstar columnists

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

If you’ve got an opinion about the mobile industry — or life related to the mobile industry — I’d like to read it. And what’s more, so would more than a quarter of a million Mobile Industry Review readers.

Opinion and commentary is a a lot more valuable to MIR’s readers than your average handset review. Phonedog, Engadget, the industry leaders have that covered.

I want to know what you think of the implications of the iPhone extending reach into the medical environment. I want to know whether you think the market for mobile messaging is slowly dying. I want to know whether life in India is better with the addition of mobile, or not at all. I’d like to know what your mother thinks of her Motorola. Or why you think Palm are poised to take over the world. Or fail.

MIR’s readers aren’t necessarily commenters. Now and again you’ll see a post that attracts a lot of feedback. For MIR, it’s not always about the comments. It’s about the fact that your contribution is printed out and put in front of one of the mobile operator’s CEOs. Or having your article about the future of mobile music being included in the background dossier as briefing for one of the world’s top music companies.

Those are both real world examples that I’m aware of. Indeed I know of one mobile operator and another handset manufacturer who regularly prints off entire segments of MIR to forward round the office.

If only we could make people pay for that…. oh wait…

Anyway, part of the reason I’ve brought back MIR 3.0 is because I was missing really good opinion. I’m certainly capable of forming my own. Indeed I’ve never been known to be short of a perspective or two. But I thoroughly enjoy reading other people’s viewpoints.

So I’d like you to consider taking the time to write a post for MIR. On whatever mobile related subject turns you on. You don’t need to be *somebody*. You don’t need to be a jobbing columnist. You don’t need to have your own blog or 50,000 followers on Twitter. Nor do you need to worry about committing to a punishing 5-post a week schedule.

Submit one. Or try it weekly. Whatever. Provided you’ve got something to say — I’d like to publish it.

And the MIR audience would like to read.

I can’t commit to paying for content at the moment, but I can put your name in lights and give you an influential platform to reach hundreds of thousands of people, not just in the industry, but all across the tech blogosphere.

Here’s how it works.

1. Email me and tell me you’re interested. Tell me who you are, tell me what you reckon you’d like to write about. If you’ve just got one post in mind, no problem. Or if you’d like to try doing a few, tell me what you’re thinking.

2. I’ll write back as soon as I can. Usually within a day. I’ll give you some feedback as to what I reckon the audience will think of your idea.

3. If you’re still up for it, I’ll sort you out with a MIR publishing account and we’ll go from there.

If you think this might be a useful way of promoting you or your company, sure. That’s not a problem. We’ll put in a link and tell the audience about you — they typically want to know that level of context anyway. Indeed some of the readers might want to do business with you or hire you.

For anyone thinking about writing 4 paragraphs of puff rubbish and getting it published: No. The MIR audience are old enough and smart enough to be able to identify a bullshitter from someone who is passionate about a particular subject (and happens to be writing from a company who specialises in that area). We’re all about helping out with business development anyway.

Now, I’m often asked about word count.

There is no word count limit.

If you’re a new columnist then the readers aren’t going to react that well to three lines of text. Equally, there’s nothing worse than reading an article that’s a really cool subject — but finding that there’s only five paragraphs, because the author stuck rigidly to some imaginative 400 or 500 word limit. The key thing with MIR is we have — deliberately — a conversational editorial tone. If you want to write with the Queen’s English, brilliant. I set the tone as conversational originally because I wanted to be able write-as-I-speak, or perhaps, write-as-I-think. I find it a lot easier to get the stuff out my head that way. So don’t be worried about word count. Worry about quality. Get the stuff out of your head and keep writing for as long as you feel is relevant. And if you can’t find a decent end to the post, say something contentious and end with a question mark.

;-)

If we’ve talked in the past about you writing — and you didn’t necessarily get an immediate response from me, it’s because I’m rubbish. It’s because I probably wanted to reply properly — but that’ll have required 45 minutes work and [insert more excuses here]. I do my best, but there’s a constant inbox of about 4,000, so please don’t be put off. Try me. Drop me a note and let’s see what we can do together.

Mail me on ewan@mobileindustryreview.com or get me by Twitter (ew4n) or instant messenger.

Why Ashton Kutcher should launch his own Twitter

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Ashton hasn’t reacted all that well to reports that Twitter is getting into bed with a TV channel/show that may well, “put ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.”

Here’s a quote from that CNN report:

Ashton Kutcher — Twitter’s top tweeter — warned he may pull the plug on his tweeting if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show.

“It’s all fun and games until somebody gets stalked,” Kutcher wrote in a Twitter posting late Monday.

I think it’s an interesting concept, getting members of the public (“ordinary people”) to use the likes of Twitter to keep tabs on celebrities. It’s the next evolutionary step. Do we all want to know that Brad Pitt just used the bathroom? I don’t. But I’m sure a good few million people who’ve got nothing better to do would be delighted to give their attention to this — and make it a ratings winner.

Brad Pitt. Live.

And all you need to do is pay some guy $2,000/month plus expenses to literally follow him everywhere? Done.

It’s a genius concept.

I don’t agree with it. But it’ll work.

Introduce photos (ShoZu) and live QIKing when the network speeds and batteries support it.

Yup it’s a genius concept, it really is.

“What’s Britney Spears doing right now? Right now? Well I can tell you because Jimmy is inside The Beverley Hills Four Seasons with this latest update [link to Twitter feed/photo/video].”

Yeah. That’s going to get eyeball-after-eyeball. Sad, but true.

It’s the next step in the evolution of celebrity obsession.

But what’s Ashton going to do about it?

Could he, theoretically, setup AshtonLive, himself? And send an invite to every one of his 2 million followers? How many would join? 70%?

It’d would be more or less frictionless for them to do so. One click and your account, friends and whatnot are imported.

After all, a lot of those who’ve joined are genuinely interested in what Ashton’s up to. They’re fans. They’re on Twitter for him. Ashton is the draw, not Twitter.

So isn’t it better for Ashton to own his own AshtonLive feed — and make it wholly compelling, so he can control it? So he can switch it off when he really wants a break? So he can put re-runs (or highlights or something) up when he wants to go away for 2 weeks to get some peace and quiet?

Much better to own your own medium, right? Do it now, while you’ve got the authority and control over those 2 million followers.

Setup AshtonLive.com — do a carbon copy of Twitter, hire a few smart developers and woosh, you’re live over night. You’ll need a bit of help scaling but there’s plenty of technical assistance out there ready to access. In fact you could probably stick it all on Mosso and let them sort it out.

Launch your own AshtonLive iPhone app.

Stop Tweeting on Twitter immediately. Transfer the attention assets out over night. Make huge, huge headlines while you’re doing it.

Meanwhile do a deal with the talent agencies across Hollywood to rip their celebrities off Twitter and on to their own services.

I’d really like to see what would happen if Ashton, Demi and the celebrity Twitters launched their own microblogging alternatives.

(Mashable also covered the story here.)

Vodafone’s ‘App Store’: Mobile developers respond

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

I just published Vodafone’s news regarding their ‘app store’ initiative — and I’m already getting questions and reaction in from developers.

Here are some quotes right off the press from some mobile developers. (I have removed names).

- “I’d like to know how much of my revenues they’ll demand.”

- “I like the ease of billing and the potential of micro-payments.”

- “I suspect they’ll take 30% just like Apple / Nokia etc. I hope it’s not more than that.”

- “It’s just another App store – we WILL develop for it, obviously, but only because I’m yet to see which store will capture the minds of consumers.”

- “I very much like the concept. Especially if one SDK works across a number of MNOs. That would be really cool.”

- “Is this too good to be true? It sure looks like it.”

- “If they were REALLY thinking of developers, they’d be finding a way to reduce the amount of work we need to do across the various mobile programming languages. Perhaps they are, I can’t quite work it out yet.”

- “Interesting, interesting… that’s all I have to say until you tell us more, Ewan.”

I’m aiming to have more information soon! If you’ve got a comment or opinion, drop me a note — ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv.

(I regularly tap up people for live reaction — if you’d like to be on that list, add me at ewanmacleod@gmail.com on Google Talk or ewanjmacleod on Skype.)

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Originally published on Mobile Developer TV and automatically republished here on Mobile Industry Review. View the original post.

Welcome to Mobile Developer TV!

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Hello and welcome to Mobile Developer TV.

My name is Ewan and I’m founder and Editor.  You can find out more about me here.

After Mobile Industry Review turned subscription-only back at the end of March, I’ve been looking around for other projects to commence.  Mobile Developer TV started off as a concept in the back of my mind about 6 months ago.

Here’s the Background

I’m founder and editor of Mobile Industry Review (”MIR”), one of the world’s most influential commentators on the mobile industry.  The site published daily news and opinion for almost 3 years, reaching a core audience of 250,000 industry executives and fanatics.  MIR’s feed is integrated directly into the intranets of many mobile operators, handset manufacturers and mobile service companies.  Super reach, super influence.  Witness, for example, our ground-breaking video of the never-before-seen Nokia Test Labs in Farnborough (Over 175,000 people viewed it within days of publishing). Or take a look at the recent post I published about iPhone centric developer mindset in Silicon Valley, picked up by MocoNews, VentureBeat and the Washington Post.

I thoroughly enjoyed producing the site with a team of brilliant contributors.  In March 2009, I turned MIR subscription-only, providing the site’s on-going feed to one company.  The nature of the company’s requirement developed to the point that I was able to engage a small team of writers to deliver the on-going service.  I still retain all MIR rights and content — including the domain names and the site’s extensive reach — so I’ve been looking for another project to put these resources to good use.

Why Mobile Developer TV?

I really, really enjoy producing online video features. There’s something about ‘TV’ that you just can’t match with the written word.  It’s about seeing the person (or people), visualising their excitement and seeing just how passionate they are about their products and services. I did a lot of experimenting with the Mobile Industry Review Show — the MIR Show — and after a good few hundred hours of stress and learning, I think I’ve more or less perfected the art of brilliant online video production: Top quality HD cameras, excellent HD video hosting, super-expensive microphones — in fact, the best equipment you can buy, a bit of creativity in the editing studio (Final Cut is excellent, but iMovie, although frowned upon from the professional sector, is extremely quick).

Marry this passion for online television with my fascination with the mobile industry — and more specifically, with mobile development — and it didn’t take me long to hatch the concept.  And here it is!

The Aim

I’m going to meet the best and the brightest in mobile development — and I’m going to put them on camera.  I’m aiming to publish one TV show per week to start with.  Each show will centre on one or two people in the mobile development space.  iPhone App developers, certainly.  But I’m interested in the whole spectrum — from Blackberry’s App World, to Nokia’s Ovi, to Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace and beyond.

If you’ve ever seen any of the interviews I’ve produced in the past, you’ll know I like to keep myself out of the picture. It’s not about me, it’s about the interviewee.  In some cases I’m aiming to do a straight interview — me to the right of the camera pointing the microphone and asking questions.  In other cases, I’ll do a walk-about or a show-and-tell with the developer.

I’m interested in talking to and profiling:

  • Mobile application developers
    (Platform agnostic: iPhone/Blackberry/Nokia/J2ME/Samsung/Microsoft/Android)
  • Companies whose primary business is NOT in the mobile space — but who have developed or are developing mobile applications.
    (For instance: A travel company launching an iPhone app, dotcoms launching their own apps — eg. Lastminute’s FoneFood app)
  • Companies who supply services to/work with mobile developers
    (Example: Providers of mobile advertising, debug/testing)

Video will comprise most of the content here on Mobile Developer TV — however in my research over the past months, it’s clear that, whilst there are a lot of developers in Silicon Valley and London (my two primary locations), there’s a considerable geographic spread of developers.  Only today I was talking to developers from Ohio, Johannesburg, New Zealand, Ukraine, Paris and Scotland.  I’d like to be able to fly into meet each — that might be a bit of a challenge in the short term though.  So to supplement, I’ll aim to publish text interviews and profiles regularly.

One developer I spoke to suggested recording his own interview on video, answering my questions to camera with his own facilities — and sending it over to me to publish.  I think it’s a super suggestion and I think we’ll do that.

Can I profile you?  Contact Me!

I’m based in London and San Francisco so I’ll be producing the majority of in-person videos from those locations.  If you’d like to feature, drop me a note.  I’m ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv — this is the best way of contacting me.  But you can also phone/text me.  My mobile numbers are:

+44 7769 658104 (UK)

+1 415 200 9515 (US)

… (I’m happy to hear from PRs too.)

Don’t Be British

Please don’t be British — that is, sit at the back and hope I’ll come across you.  I really will do my best to find mobile developers and companies to profile — I’ve already got a big list from working with MIR — but I am most certainly no genius.  So I need your help in order to profile you — I need to know you exist. So please do drop me a note if you’re keen to be profiled.  At the very least I’ll aim to send you out a list of questions to answer by email that I can turn into a profile piece here on the site. (Who are you, what are you creating/have you created, what platform, why, what challenges have you had, and so on).  Ideally I’ll arrange to meet physically to interview you on-camera and perhaps produce an application walk-through.

Got News?

If you’ve got a particular topic of announcement that you think mobile developers and those working in related fields should know about, knock me over an email right-away.

Design

I’m doing a Robert Scoble at the moment — that is publishing with a default Wordpress Theme.  I’ll update it as we progress.  The content is way more important than the theme and that’s where my focus is at the moment.

Editorial Policy

As for editorial policy, I’m aiming for a macro view of mobile development.  I don’t plan on publishing code level discussions, or discussing the finer points of the Symbian operating system.  Instead, I’ll be looking at the commercial aspects of the mobile applications development sector along with the trends I’m witnessing.  The overriding focus is, of course, on profiling developers.  I’m particularly interested in talking with one-man-bands:  The chaps (and ladies) who’re single-handedly driving the massive change sweeping the industry.  That said, I’m also keen to talk to the business people — the product managers, the executive teams — about the challenges and successes in the field of mobile applications development.

This is a work in progress so I’d welcome your feedback, either below or by email.

I’ll be syndicating the output through the public feed on Mobile Industry Review so if you’re already a MIR RSS subscriber, you’ll start to get updates shortly.  You can also catch blog updates via the new Mobile Developer TV Twitter account @mobdevtv.

Standby!

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“MIR should go camping” – what do you think?

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Regular reader, Mike Stead, reckons Mobile Industry Review should ‘get out a bit more‘.

I took exception to this statement on the basis that we’ve reported from six different countries in the last 3 months. But what Mike meant was we should get OUT more. Out into the fresh (read: cold, rainy) air. In the countryside.

Here’s his full statement:

We love Mobile Industry Review. The team are great guys, and their videos are the gems of an otherwise staid and boring industry. However we do think that they should get out more. Way out. In the countryside. Back to nature. Mobiles are at their best when out and about, and come into their own when a PC is not an option. So instead of jetting off somewhere exotic, incurring a massive CO2 footprint, let’s see the lads down home in the West Country somewhere, under canvas, kicking back but using their mobiles to have fun in the outdoors.

And he’s setup a Facebook group. Dear Gods…

You can take a look and decide whether or not to join here.

I made the commitment that we will go camping if 500+ people join Mike’s group. We’ll film the whole experience and make a MIR TV show from it.

I think that, right now, this 500+ number is a safe bet. Maybe 10 or so people will join, right?

I reckon James Whatley will be up for it. He’s generally up for doing ’stuff’ like this and he’s also been to that festival. What’s it called? The mud-infested one that’s much, much better when you can switch it off (i.e. watch on TV)? Glastonbury, that’s it.

I reckon Ben Smith might exhibit some good old fashioned plucky ‘come on Tim’ positiveness and will probably, at a push — and provided there’s electricity — be up for it.

Meanwhile Dan Lane and I share an affinity for warmth and comfort. My own perspective is that we (the Royal ‘We’) came out of the cave. We discovered fire. We evolved beyond our original programming. We got warm. We got comfort. I like to celebrate that, in a quiet way, each night.

I also happen to believe that I — and everyone else reading this text — is particularly lucky to have the ability to sleep more or less soundly in a warm environment every night. Millions do not. There’s a teeny bit of me that reacts negatively to going camping as a recreational thing to do when lots of people don’t even have a home to get back to. But then, looking at my 5 or 6 mobile contracts … they are highly, highly unnecessary in the context of daily life.

That said, the prospect of spending a sleepless night in some godawful field in the middle of the West Country of England with ‘wildlife’ crawling over me is not, on any level, appealing. I know some people enjoy that sort of thing though. Each to their own.

Mike’s had one chap, Justin Davies, join his Facebook campaign today. I joined as well, so I could write some outrageous things on the group’s discussion board.

So if you’d like to see us getting cold, soaked-through and generally really, really annoyed trying to ‘enjoy’ a night or so ‘camping’ in the West of England — and making a MIR TV show out of it — vote with your feet and join Mike’s group.

We are always responsive to our audience.

;-)

And Mike, if no one joins, we’ll stick to the Four Seasons or the Ritz Carlton… ;-)

A first look at O2’s new Joggler home appliance

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

O2 UK has unveiled it’s new family oriented Joggler device, a 7″ touchscreen photo frame based on Openpeak’s OpenFrame platform and I jogged along to take a first look.

The screen on the Joggler is incredibly bright and crisp and the device itself feels very solid and well-made with a fixed sturdy stand on the back. Also on the back of the unit is a power socket (No batteries here, this is a wired device), an ethernet port and an audio out jack. On the side is a USB socket and on top is an LED but I didn’t see any applications taking advantage of this. Inside the device is powered by an Intel Atom processor, has WiFi connectivity and runs an O2 branded version of the OpenFrame software (which appears to be based on Ubuntu linux with hacking opportunities aplenty!).

Overall I found the Joggler to be a bit of a disappointment. I’m familiar with the OpenFrame platform this is based on and was expecting to find the same Flickr, YouTube and RSS content included. Unfortunately the only place the Joggler can show photos from is the built-in 1GB of storage or a USB stick. O2 are definitely downplaying the photo frame aspect of the Joggler and concentrating on the O2 Calendar integration which itself has a few disappointing aspects such as not having any sync capabilities. I think it’s safe to assume that any family that’s tech-savvy enough to buy one of these on launch has someone in it that already uses an online calendar such as that provided by Exchange or Google and it would make sense to sync with that calendar. The kids might not need to know that Daddy is in a meeting with his boss but at least some availability information would be useful. The biggest disappointment of all is that I know the OpenFrame platform has a Dominos Pizza button and the Joggler does not!

I think the Joggler is a good start to what is essentially a new market for MNOs but I can’t help but think that an untouched OpenFrame device would be more appealing to a wider audience. I certainly know of some other MNOs that are working on similar device offerings so this should be a very interesting market to watch over the next 12 months.

Alongside the Joggler, O2 announced the O2 Calendar, a free family oriented web-based service that is available to anyone in the UK regardless of them being an O2 customer or not. For those users who are O2 customers the service provides free SMS reminders of appointments and integrates with the Joggler device. O2 also announced a family bolt-on for existing customers allowing one person to pay a monthly fee to add a number of other O2 customers to their family group. Once part of the group every family member can make calls or send SMS or MMS to other members of the group completely free of charge.

The O2 Joggler will be available in April from O2 stores and their website priced £149.99 or free if taken instead of a handset when upgrading or signing a new 18 or 24 month contract. Pricing for the O2 family bolt-on has yet to be announced.


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