Mobile Solutions CI

Do we have a smart phone yet?

Interesting post over on Markaholic about how to define a smart phone.

The key point: "a  smart phone is a mobile phone that  has “intelligent and automatic systems for controlling the operations of the device”.  

It's interesting to think about how poor even the best devices are at clearing this hurdle. But is a phone smart only if it "knows" or controls device-side information? You could have a phone which intelligently interacts with the user's state, time and presence information with contacts, location, etc. and have all of that occur on the control plane or in the cloud. And it would seem pretty smart.

The larger point is a good one and speaks to the industry's love of piling on features rather than improving the experience of the consumer. A phone which was smarter about reacting (never mind predicting) to me would be a welcome goal.

Social address book news: Messaging provider buys Shozu

Techcrunch is reporting that Critical Path bought Shozu. The social address book remains a tough user experience to solve and monetize. Will trying this as a white-label service bundled with messaging be more successful?

Critical Path has had an interesting history offering core technologies of major mobile service growth areas--mobile email, device management, mobile or microblogging, and mobile social networking--without capturing or profiting from the big waves of uptake. 

I don't see how repackaging this as a social address book suite for operators and service providers helps Memova break into this market. Too many features, too many services, not enough core use case benefit for the consumer or the operator.

Google Wave client-server architecture made for mobile

Watching the Google Wave demo was so exciting. You can't watch the Wave collaborative editing architecture demo without thinking mobile.

RIM had the chance to be the social networking platform of choice if they had only forgone the FaceBook and MySpace clients and built those capabilities directly into the native inbox. But they don't seem to get that and instead will be relegated to an email and text service niche. That is by no means a bad business but it leaves Android a wide open field to capture the social address book, or social graph, construct on mobile. With Wave Google has taken that opportunity and raised the bar for all. Android will be the mobile social address book platform.

Why Android? Because it's open source, because it's not a legacy OS laden with all years of version requirements and interfaces (ahem Symbian ahem), and because it actually works quite well as a stable mobile OS which easily supports smooth user experiences (ahem WM ahem) and doesn't kill the device or require the end user to invest in bloated client or cloud services to do so. What about the iPhone? The app store pushes Apple even further down the path of delivering packaged content and experiences as the core service--it is a consumption not a creation mobile platform. The social address book is more about individual users creating and connecting, publishing and capturing.

Google Wave can be the Twitter in 3D for mobile. It takes the sweet spots of social networking, IM, and email and abstracts those features into a single UI. For T-Mobile, HTC, and Motorola in particular this should be an opportunity they throw all their weight behind to get right. Getting it right means not just packaging their own brand on top of Wave but creating a rich vision of how they see their customers interacting with each other, and then pushing developers and third parties to enable that for them rather than baking in their own walled garden type experiences.

This means actively embracing OneAPI and similar efforts. It means driving down service roadmaps to the product managers and then making sure product managers understand they don't own feature roadmaps and MRDs but instead they own integrating partners, supporting commercializtion of third party services, and most importantly delivering the voice of the customer throughout the ecosystem passionately, consistently, and clearly.

It also means extending real resources outside of corporate walls. The developer experiences for Android are surprisingly poor coming from Google (nice comparison to Symbian developer portal here) which gives service providers a great opportunity to influence through better programmatic support.

The strange and enduring saga of Visto and what it means for mobile social networking

At CTIA this year I somehow completely missed the fact that Visto has rebranded itself as Good after acquiring the IP and brand from Motorola.

It's amazing to me that Visto is still trundling along. Changing the name and brand makes a lot of sense given Visto's aggressive litigation, brash claims of growth which it never fulfilled, and history of burning through large amounts of VC cash.

And now they have acquired moblie social networking tools provider intercasting.

On paper this might make sense. In the real world it will further delay any real progress in the one area Visto needs to make progress: Acquiring customers for its existing operator customers. Good had a very nice client UI but the server--yikes. Integrating that technology into Visto's roadmap would take a good 1-2 years. And now to add a third layer of complexity?

This further opens the window for an upstream player, either an OS provider such as Android or a service provider concentrating on one flagship OS, to develop a complete service experience based on the mobile social address book. The startups and technology vendors trying to bring white label and third party social networking tools and integration are getting bogged down in a spaghetti code fest of features rather than focusing on defining and driving the key user stories and experiences which will define the platform. This is why Twitter exists and is exploding and creates a huge window of opportunity for the player with the resolve to focus on service experience rather than features. Who will that be?

Google Wave looks amazing--when do we get a mobile client?

The slide shows and descriptions of Google Wave look amazing--it's a 3D where Twitter is 2D--and I can't wait to play with it.

Android developers and service providers should be thinking now about how they can leverage IP data to make Wave mobile clients the social address book experience of choice. So many cool possibilities!

This is the first real platform alternative to the iPhone that I've seen in terms of being able to provide a truly differentiated service and UI experience.

*Update* The blog Android and Me has a nice write-up of their hands-on experience with Wave on Mobile and suggests that we won't see a workable version for at least another year.

Google Emedding Social Networking Features

Brilliant, and scary:

Google is is weaving the various components of social networks through its existing services

Google’s Black-Box Social Network - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com.

 

Messaging APIs across platforms: The return of the social address book

I was reviewing the forums for AOL Mobile's new developer platform today and noticed that requests for information on APIs for contact lists, address books, SyncML connectors are some of the more active discussion thread areas.

Last year one of the big trends for smaller mobile email players was the repositioning of email, IM, and social networking components to create a social address book on the phone. The basic concept was that you would have an application allowing you to view and select contacts in your device address book based on their availability and recent activity on the fixed or mobile web.

You could see a range of examples of this concept from the likes of pure-play startups like Mobyko Xumii and Zyb, traditional players like Plaxo and Yahoo!, even the revamp of SEVEN and Visto messaging clients.

A year later and this concept is so established that I noticed Google shows over 13 million searches for the term "social address book"!

The big difference you see now is how quickly this concept has delved down a layer to within applications instead of as a presentation layer on top of applications. Developers are now trying to achieve the same use cases within apps instead of as an app.

This is one of the more interesting affects of the iPhone App Store and the rush to develop new apps. The product lifecycle has accelerated so greatly that what begins as a service concept morphs to an app feature within a few months. The ability of the device platforms to support APIs which can leverage these trends determine platform momentum.

And that is where I wonder if the iPhone won't run into some headwinds. So very many of these trends come back to the device contacts. Blackberry exposes the contact list and Apple doesn't; both have a straightforward distribution model with app markets and both have relatively unified platforms to develop for with active subscriber bases in the tens of millions. Will RIM begin to pull developers away from Apple because of the greater availability of the address book? I think they might and that the address book is the critical ground for platforms.

A long-term roadmap for how to leverage and enable the address book which balances consumer and developer interests is no simple thing but geting that right will be a tremendous strategic advantage for whomever nails it.