“360 will be an absolute and total failure… and then in 5 years, they’ll try again.” Discuss.

That quote was sent into me this week from a very knowledgeable source. I’ve got a lot more perspective for you — but first of all, let’s check we’re all on the same page by getting a definition of Vodafone 360 from Bobby Rao, Vodafone’s Marketing and New Business Director:

* “Vodafone 360 is an internet service that works across a range of mobiles and is accessible by a website. It brings your digital life together and at it’s heart is this rich connected address book that aggregates all of your contacts from your mobile phone, social networks and other internet communication tools.”
- speaking on the Vodafone 360 launch day (Youtube Link)

Sounds good. The trouble is, that’s not entirely accurate, Bobby. In fact, Bobby, that description is nigh-on total b*llocks. But we went over that last week.

This week it’s all about your feedback. I had hundreds of emails from readers telling me about their own experiences of 360. Some were commenting on the actual 360 service (most, like me, seem to approve of the whizzy UI interface) whilst the majority chose to place the blame squarely on Vodafone management. There were a fair amount of “bunch of muppets” style commentary pieces — I don’t disagree — but then, mid-week, after the newsletter had been forwarded around by record numbers, the juicy stuff arrived.

And I’m reproducing it in full.

Names have had to be changed. Indeed, some of the feedback I’ve had has actually quoted and highlighted the exact people that you think are to blame. I’ve edited comments to remove direct references to identities — but other than that, this is directly cut-and-paste from some of the industry’s brightest and most well connected.

Let’s start first with the direct Twitter message I was sent which formed the basis of this post earlier in the week. The sender is a big cheese in the UK mobile industry. If I gave you his name, you’d nod and recognise him. He’s not necessarily the chap who gives all the presentations at industry events — he’s one of the chaps who actually gets things done. He sat down with a set of colleagues who’d just been into Vodafone — and then sent me this:

VF360 insider gossip: Pre-orders? 50. Returns on Samsungs? Massive. Atmos in VF? Point finger / duck for cover. T-R-A-I-N-W-R-E-C-K

I’d like to point out that nobody from Vodafone has contacted me to say these figures are false. I can imagine returns being high.

Right after last week’s newsletter went out, I received this email, commenting on the poor implementation of 360:

Ewan, if you can find me 10 people working at Vodafone UK (not MIR readers obviously) who know what API stands for I’ll eat my iPhone…!

Heh. I’m not sure if that’s possible — there are quite a lot of Vodafone employees reading and I’m sure most of them know the definition of API — but I get the point.

Another well-placed industry source –let’s call him Gregory — mailed in this:

Nice rant, Ewan. BUT the problem is not that “senior management doesn’t care”. I think it’s the exact opposite – senior management do care, just about the wrong things… They care about not being a bit pipe. They care about “owning” the customer. They care about monetizing that. So if you want to upload your content to a web service, it should be a Vodafone one. Never mind that the Vodafone one is rubbish – they own you. And if you want to order a print of your uploaded photo, that will come from the Vodafone partnership with whoever. Never mind that isn’t in place yet, it is coming. That’s how they monetize it.

This never-ending obsession with controlling the user model is simply ridiculous. I asked one chap from Vodafone why I could only send photos from Vodafone360 to Facebook. He responded by explaining that, ‘Facebook is what the majority use.’ Which is a completely bullshit viewpoint. Absolutely crazy. What about Flickr? What about Picasa ? What about Photobox?  The chap looked momentarily stunned before responding, ‘But nobody uses those! We have to pick the services that most of our customers use.’ And there, is the problem. Apple doesn’t pick the applications that I download. Yes it strictly controls the deployment of applications on to its service, but it doesn’t choose which ones I can use. This is the fundamental problem with 360. Some Vodafone management arse in a nice looking M&S suit decided that 360 users will only ever want to send photos to Facebook. Job done. Put that in the specification and let’s go home. No wonder returns are so high. It’s almost 2010 and Vodafone is still trying to do its best to understand what its users want, instead of doing it the other way round. Let the market — the users — decide. Stick in 10 APIs and see what happens. Let other photo services build APIs for you. Rubbish. Absolute total rubbish.

Gregory continues:

Someone senior at Vodafone is worrying desperately about 360 cannibalizing SMS revenue – if people are sending messages over data networks they’re not sending SMS or even MMS. Need to protect that revenue. The business case for 360 will have had that objection to overcome.

Is this why they’ve just included a link to Facebook from the 360 portal? Gregory’s final point:

Don’t forget, mobile operators are the people who looked at the internet and came up with walled gardens. They genuinely thought that was a good idea, too. Senior management at Voda believes that 360 is a compelling experience, compelling everyone to ditch their operator and existing web services to come over to Voda to use 360. The same thinking that Nokia is having with Ovi.

Too right, Gregory. Too right.

Iain wrote in with this feedback:

Thank you for the hilariously insightful article on Voda 360. I spent a decade in the real media industry before going to work for an operator in 2000. Although as you say there are some very bright individuals in these businesses – the operators are self-crowned media empires – but the two industries are like chalk and cheese. There is no understanding therefore no commitment at the top to make these services work – just to be seen to be doing something…

It’s fascinating Iain — the complete lack of executive commitment astonishes me. Iain finished his email with this point:

Although I managed to escape before too long myself – the lure of the corporate pay cheque, the constant request to head the bill at conferences, and the glory of launching services on multi-million pound campaigns can be real golden handcuffs…

Agreed, Iain — I recommend that Vodafone 360 executives ensure they are a million miles away from me when they’re speaking on a panel or doing a presentation about 360. And if they find themselves on a panel I’m hosting, sparks will fly.

An industry heavyweight — who knows Vodafone intimately and asked to be anonymous — read last week’s newsletter and wanted to weigh in thus:

They are f**cked. You are entirely right on ALL points. Using ‘but people don’t use it’ as an excuse to throttle innovation is indicative of Vodafone’s state. It allows others to set the bar and for them to try and jump up to it — by which time the bar is higher.

I totally agree — this is one reason why 360 is already ‘out of date’. The heavyweight continued:

The global/opco observation is 1 of the core issues here. Internal battles and indifference is like business cancer. Boy do they have it. ANYONE who says that voda 360 is a success is living in a f**cking DREAMWORLD.

Newsletter reader Geoff couldn’t quite believe 360 is so bad:

You’d think Vodafone would just stand back and say “Actually, this doesn’t work”, and try and do something about it. They’ve got great UX guys there, so I wonder what happened. It’s as if they finished work at 5:30 and never bothered to *use* 360 on their own phones

Clearly, Geoff. You’d think an executive would have actually sat down and taken a look at the service in-depth, rather than drinking the kool-aid.

Finally I’d like to bring you this feedback from Nick, a former Vodafone employee:

Oh, I did enjoy reading this Ewan; made my cry (both with laughter and frustration). 360 was the straw that broke the camels back for me with Vodafone! When I heard about the 360 project, and saw the details of what was being created it was the final trigger that made me leave.

The problem though is far worse than you think. You’ve got one thing in your rant slightly wrong; it isn’t that Vodafoners don’t care (trust me, they really do), its that they don’t understand.

In my years at Vodafone I met about 2 or 3 other people who had a similar level of interest in all things mobile. The vast majority couldn’t tell (or care about) the difference between an N70 or a Nokia 1100.

When you’re selling minutes and worrying about network capacity, it’s perfectly fine not to care about ‘terminals’. Indeed, I remember meeting a chap from Vodafone about four or five years ago who explained that ‘terminals (that’s the word he used!) were simply a necessary evil for us’ and that they needed ‘terminals’ so that consumers could actually use their service. He went on to explain that management couldn’t give a stuff about the actual ‘terminals’. Fair enough, as I say, if you’re all about selling minutes. But when you’re developing your own range of devices — running your own software and services — well, then your entire team needs to be on the right page. That’s a big ask if you find yourself working at Vodafone and don’t actually care too much about devices, OS and usability. There was provision for assistance at the company in the form of ‘Vodafone Wizards’ — sadly, that’s been discontinued as Nick explains:

The internal mobile advocacy team (Vodafone Wizards) was shut down – a victim of the many rounds of cost cutting at the company in the past two years.

Nick reckons mindset is a key problem:

One of the biggest problems is that the company still has a ‘handset & base-station’ mindset; their market share was built by rigid control of these – there isn’t really any understanding that value nowadays is created by open collaboration with the services customers use. The potential value of the Vodafone network as a mobile web platform is just simply not understood. To most managers this just means utility, which they are terrified of becoming. Vodafone simply don’t have the culture, calibre of staff or interest needed to make the leap from being basically a mobile version of Freeserve to becoming a modern day information services provider (potentially the next Google). Although to be fair I think Three are the only network to have caught on to that opportunity.

Finally, Nick makes this prediction:

360 will be an absolute and total failure, and then in 5 years they’ll try again…

I recognise what you’re saying Nick, but I don’t think Vodafone has that kind of time. They’re already — what? — two or three years late to the table with 360. It’s so late it’s not even ‘me-too’. I can’t believe they actually shipped the service as it stands.

I remain entirely embarrassed by Vodafone 360.

I’m embarrassed to have to point out things like ‘Gents, why can’t I send pictures to Flickr?’ and getting strange stares in return. If 360 had been developed by three guys in a garage, I wouldn’t be giving it this treatment. I’d be giving it a positive write-up. What’s more, they’d have introduced Flickr and Picasa as extra features five minutes after I’d left the interview. Instead … goodness me, how much money have they blown on 360?

Laughable.

It’s laughable for about 20 seconds before you realise that Vodafone is serious.

[This editorial was originally published in the Mobile Industry Review newsletter on the 28th November 2009. Make sure you get the editorials ahead of time by subscribing here -- free.]

When you take the INQ1 out of the box it feels like a quality device with its solid metal and plastic construction. However that illusion was shattered when I switched it on, as the display looks like a low end device and the icons and menus have a basic appearance. Instead of a user guide in the box there are a series of ‘flash’ cards which explain the principle applications. Although I thought the info was a bit thin it probably reflects the fact that non geeks rarely read user guides and just dive straight in! The full user guide is on the CD along with the PC Suite software for copying contacts, photos etc to your PC. Overall the handset’s performance is sluggish and the software seems fairly buggy as the it rebooted several times when I was trying out applications. Not a good start and may mean it has to go back.

Now to move on to the INQ1 as a social networking device.

The Facebook application looks good when you load it and has icons at the top for the key Facebook features – Profile, Inbox, Friends, Photos. The rest of the screen shows your News Feed. Reading and updating Facebook from the application is very easy, although you have to wait a while when you refresh to get your latest Facebook info or select an item to read. Not surprisingly, this is much slower than on a PC. I’ve also noticed that even when refreshed, the News Feed lags behind my PC. So, Facebook on the INQ1 versus Facebook via my E51 browser? I definitely prefer the browser version – it’s more responsive, up to date and I think easier to read. However, from a usability perspective, as an application that is easily available from the home screen, then Facebook on the INQ1 probably works better for Normobs.

The Skype application is very simple to use and incorporates Skype Out for calling ‘real’ phone numbers. Several times when I tried to use Skype, the handset rebooted. Live Messenger works well, with the long and frequently bizarre user names that some people use fully displayed!

In theory the browser provides web access but more often than not it returns an ‘unable to contact the website’ message! When it does work it’s horribly slow to load pages. I wouldn’t have the patience to use it on a regular basis.

Unfortunately there’s no Twitter application. For me that’s a big miss but as Twitter is still niche compared to Facebook I guess that forgivable!

Next I’ll be letting some Normobs in the family have a play with the INQ1 to see whether easy access to Facebook, Skype and Live Messenger holds appeal or whether they’d prefer to stick with their PC.

One very neat feature is the way Facebook, Live Messenger and Skype contacts are imported into the Contacts application on the handset so you can contact people directly from their and view their status. Effectively the INQ1 has presence enabled the Contacts application – something every handset should have.

This morning I ordered the INQ1 handset from 3. Why, you may ask? Surely it’s just a 3 branded handset from an unknown manufacturer that doesn’t allow you to download extra applications because it isn’t running any of the usual operating systems – S60, Apple, Android etc. And you’d be right. But …

3 claims the INQ1 is optimised for social networking. It comes configured for out-of-the-box access to Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger. Plus, the contacts application shows you which of your contacts are online. I want to understand what this means for social networking Normobs. All these applications are available on many other handsets via downloads or web browsers and in some cases ready-to-go on high end smartphones. But the INQ1 delivers this functionality in a low cost device. My experience of many Normobs is that they aren’t interested in looking for and downloading extra apps or paying more for data tariffs to support web browsing. But they use Facebook, Skype, Live Messenger on their laptops and I think would use it on their mobile if it was there and just worked, with no additional charges.

Ewan mentioned yesterday how poor (he used slightly more colourful language!) the S60 download experience is & he’s right. For mobile geeks it’s great fun hunting down cool apps but Normobs just want to use their handsets. The iPhone delivers a simple user experience plus the ability to download new stuff for those that want it but at a price point that is out of reach of many Normobs. I think the INQ1 could be making a reasonable stab at filling this gap. I’ll be testing it out with a selection of Normobs and reporting back shortly.

Meanwhile I’ll get back to my E51 and see what new apps I can find to download to it!

It looks like Nokia’s planning to cannibalise some of the features from Plazes, with the company saying its going to extend its own context-based services with the social presence and time-based activity planning features Plazes has.

Given Nokia has spent a lot of cash mapping and/or navigation companies – think Gate5 and Navteq – it’s little wonder that it’s now looking for new services to offer on top of the maps and new ways to monetise them. Social networking though is mostly an ads fuelled business – I wonder if Nokia will be sticking with that model, or experimenting with charging users a subscription for the geographic services.

The service sounds technologically pretty nifty. It works like this, according to the company: “Moblyng technology automatically converts Flash-based content to images or video for mobile distribution, bridging the gap between online Flash objects and mobile devices, which do not widely support Flash-based content.”

With social networking now one of the most popular activities on the mobile web, it’s no wonder so many companies and VCs are gunning for it.

Here’s what the report says:

Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:
• Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
• Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
• Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
• Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

While none of the conclusions are surprising in themselves, it’s interesting to note that most of traffic is users going directly to a site, rather than via their operator’s content portal. Does this mean that the operator portal is set to die off in popularity in the same way the likes of Lycos and AOL portals did as the fixed web matured?

Opera’s report has also got some useful country-by-country comparisons. Here’s the UK section:

The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

1. www.facebook.com
2. www.google.co.uk
3. www.live.com
4. www.bebo.com
5. www.mocospace.com
6. news.bbc.co.uk
7. uk.yahoo.com
8. www.itsmy.com
9. www.faceparty.com
10. www.ebay.co.uk

The full report’s here.

Nielsen reckons around 1.6 percent of UK mobile users now access social networking sites on their phones, compared to 1.7 percent of those in the US – almost double the rate in most European countries.

It’s no surprise that Facebook and MySpace are still the big names in social networking over mobile, especially given operators’ willingness to do deals with them to trim the data fees associated with such sites. But with the big two still dominating mobile social networking, is there any room for the more niche, mobile-only social networking platforms?

Buzzd says it’s going to put the funding towards “product development and distribution” and will get a new board member in the form of Fern Mandelbaum of Monitor.

What’s clever about Buzzd is that, as well as delivering all the usual city guide info from the likes of Time Out, it also makes use of social networking techniques to give users reviews on bars and the like from their friends – and who do you trust more to send you to a good bar than your mates? It’s also done a tie-up with a tequila firm, so users can even send their friends free drinks – nice touch.