Uncool Mobility

April fool's hits a week late

The last several days have been a real grind after spending last week at CTIA, but unlike Hotmail at least I didn't kill a product line used by millions of customers during my bad week.

Palm launches the Pre

Palm unveiled its new device and OS today at the CES tradeshow in Las Vegas. Engadget had great live coverage.

The launch shared some similar points to Microsoft's Windows 7/WM7 demos from yesterday as both Palm and Microsoft seek to emphasize the mobile browser as the entry point for mobile applications and services while creating a unified messaging interface based on the email inbox to present email, presence, social networking status, and photo posts in a single entry point.

The result is that messaging on the device becomes the entry point for cloud services.

The new Palm Pre features both a touch screen and slide-out keyboard powered by its new OS. From a messaging standpoint Palm's new WebOS features "Synergy sync" which automatically manages contacts across Facebook, Google, and Outlook thus becoming the control point for the social address book. The messaging inbox consolidates both email and IM services. Notification updates from applications and new messages from email and IM are surfaced at the top level of the device OS.

While Palm promised rapid and easy integration of third party services and applications it gave no information on whether the OS will be open source or have an SDK opening compenents to third parties. It also did not address how third parties would achieve distribution across its OS and devices. New devices launching today must address both of these topics to gain relevance against the iPhone, Android, and RIM platforms.

Fighting for the social address book

I noticed a nice commentary on Forrester's blog regarding the social address book.

One of the most interesting parts of the rise of social networking, especially mobile social networking, is the battle for the social address book. Email providers are trying to wrap increasing features into jammed inboxes, social networks are trying to integrate messaging as a background transport to content-posting sites, and mobile providers are trying to leverage the device address book to drive communications in real time. Who will win?

One model I'm watching is third-party, standalone services to provide a cross-platform ability to manage messaging across many sites and services. Ping does this from the web, many people use Twitter to achieve this within social networking, and Xumii is an example of a startup trying to provide this as a service across mobile devices. Of course Nokia, RIM, and Apple are all examples of device makers trying to achieve the same thing with different models.

I think Xumii got it right with it's feature for threaded conversations. Threading conversations across messaging mediums is a great use case, but is it a model that can grow virally or does it need to be experienced for the value to be clear to consumers? In this market few startups are willing to spend time on demand generation at that level.

The capabilities to share media files and create private groups are also cool but I would argue those are "deeper" features which will appeal to people who are first sold on the capability of integrating their communication needs from their phone address book--as opposed to their email inbox.

The hurdle for Xumii will be achieving a UI that can match native applications on discoverability, ease of use, and feature simplification.

INQ1: First of many, or last?

I've been noticing the the INQ1 launch in the UK which is the first example of an operator launching a social networking phone. It's a white-labelled service powered by SEVEN (interesting how the email providers are all migrating to the social address book as a messaging platform, but that is another story). Hutch has done a great job of bundling it with a special rate plan and clearly targeting the service.

Supposedly there are 50,000 pre-registrations for the phone. Will this take off? If it does will it signal a new migration to operators optimizing devices and web services for specific customer segments?

After RIM and Apple have been eating market share from handset vendors (especially Nokia and Motorola) and Operating System platforms (Windows Mobile and to a lesser extent Symbian) it would be very interesting if this model was adopted successfully by operators as opposed to device vendors.

Context-sensitive advertising coming to SMS

Mobile social network brings adwords to SMS • The Register.

This is a trend to watch. Social Networking site Wadja has created an adwords-like model which "allows advertisers to sponsor specific words in text messages sent by members".

A service like this which depends upon context would have utility to end users, and therefore be more successful, if applied to a public/private format such as Twitter which incents search as a behavior.

Twitter, are you listening?

RIM launching prepay?

The blog Boy Genius Report, a frequent leaker of internal RIM documents which prove accurate, has released an operator pitch RIM is using to propose a prepaid service which targets LATAM, APAC, and key WE countries.

As the recent Nielsen data suggest that the iPhone's fastest growing consumer segment is users with income below $50,000 this market segment has demonstrated willingness to pay for wireless data services. Launching a prepay service will significantly expand RIM's addressable market and uptake rate. As RIM points out, the majority of mobile customers are prepay.

What RIM is proposing: The end customer purchases a device and one year of BIS service through retail. The second prepay model is a standard prepay or top-up account with the device purchased through retail (no subsidy) and purchases services incrementally through SMS, ATMs, scratch cards, etc.

Positioned as cost and security control targeting students and SOHO needing flexibility, not targeting lower incomes.

RIM positions operator benefits as:

Shifting inventory finance risks to retailers

Reducing churn / increasing engagement of prepay customers

Increasing EBITDA through ARPU lift on prepay customers

The deck suggests RIM is targeting Mexico, Brazil, Chile, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, and India.

RIM offers the following GTM learnings for Ovi service lines:

Use people/people images in all promotional material to clearly illustrate service concept and educate on benefits

Retail experience critical, emphasize placement near front door

Needs to be bundled with unlimited data plan

Requires specifically trained sales people

"Better to sell in few locations that have much traffic and have stock than in many that run out of stock"

Incentivize indirect channels beyond activations i.e. margin on devices

Android phone is finally here, looks interesting but not overwhelming

T-Mobile announced the first Google Android phone today at a press conference in New York, calling it the "G1". The announcement stressed the integration of Google services onto the HTC touchscreen device, particularly search.

The two elements of Android which will draw the most attention as being directly competitive to Apple's ecosystem are the integration of a music store and an application store.

Watching the video it looks like it has some features which are ahead of Apple and RIM but the overall integration and service experience may lag.

T-Mobile announcement and information:

Details:

Amazon has provided a music store and purchasing capability. There is an Amazon MP3 icon which lets you surf the site's music store and do one-click ordering. Its default music player has options to search for related material on services such as Google or YouTube while a song is playing--a step beyond what Apple's "Genius" feature can do.

The device OS also has an "Android Market", an application store comparable to iPhone's Appstore. There are three high-level differences between Apple's App Store and Android's Android Market. Android will only feature free applications, Android has no approval process, and the Android Market will have no website or desktop element.

The G1 also features push email for Gmail; pull email for other POP3 and IMAP. No native support for Exchange.

Google products bundled on phone:
- Google Search
- Google Maps
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- Google Talk
- YouTube

Pricing: US$179 for the device with a 2-year plan required of voice ($29-99) + data ($25-35/mo) (therefore minimum of $65/mo w/only 300 voice minutes and 400 messages, unlimited data)

Availability: October 22 in the US, November for UK, Western Europe to follow early 2009

CTIA Wireless wrapup from San Francisco

I spent last week in San Francisco at CTIA Wireless. The biggest takeaways I had were:

Apple dominated the show. The extent to which the iPhone has shaken up both service and device aspects of the industry was widely evident as the not-present Apple was constantly mentioned.

Business as usual for RIM. RIM had formal product announcements and booth appearances for the new flip phone and Bold, both of which have been extensively picked over in blogs. RIM also announced content partnerships in the form of specific applications to be natively built BB with MySpace, Ticketmaster, and a streaming audio startup called "Slacker" which I'd never heard of. Microsoft will also have Live search bundled on the RIM OS. As other service providers focus on creating a platform (and specifically an appstore) RIM seems determined to keep with a one-by-one approach of selecting partners to co-develop applications. Will this scale as a model?

Search is rapidly being co-opted into the same structure as web-based search.  I had thought mobile search would see different UIs, different ontologies/taxonomies driving definitions, and a new vertical within internet search but clearly that will not happen. The need to drive growth rates in ad spending has stomped all the smaller players as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft invest to extend reach to mobile. Search is also becoming a trojan horse to package and/or pull related applications (such as Google apps or Windows Live Hotmail) onto devices.

Operators continue to struggle with "open" and by resisting concepts of openness for so long are now deeply in the hole trying to launch app stores. Verizon and ATT in particular are scrambling to catch up on this front but will not be able to move quickly enough to overcome iTunes + AppStore, the Android app store, and RIM's selected partnering model. Waiting in the wings: Microsoft Mesh.

Yahoo had the only significant new play. Blueprint and its integration into the new OneConnect is an interesting system that will dig into in a future post. Is it too late for Yahoo as a company despite innovative new products and services?

Visto launches white label social networking app for operators

Visto is announcing a new version at CTIA which includes email, social networking, SMS, IM and photo sharing.

" Featuring an innovative "living address book," VISTO Mobile 6 offers end users expanded push mobile email and mobile social networking capabilities. This living address book combines favorite contacts from multiple sources, including social networks, into a seamless user interface. VISTO Mobile 6 utilizes VISTO's patented push and synchronization technology to keep users constantly up to date in real time on their messaging and social networking activities.

In addition, VISTO Mobile 6 provides end users the ability to filter updates from their list of contacts; meaning each user has the control to see only the updates they truly care about. This eliminates the clutter of unnecessary updates and requests."

Visto will target both small business, SOHO, and consumers with this offer. For operators Visto will emphasize the ability to federate many solutions through one client application and control data costs through Visto's NOC and data compression capabilities. There are no announced operator customers yet.

Visto's product positioning:
"VISTO Easy Setup(TM): End-to-end self provisioning with pre-installed clients, enabling mobile email users to set up their service from their device in a matter of seconds

VISTO worklife.freedom(TM): -- access email from the most popular portal email providers and social networking sites including Yahoo!, AOL, Google Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Photobucket

VISTO ConstantSync(TM): instantly pushes data right to the phone so the end user is always up-to-date - alerts, emails, status messages - everything is always current. -- get notification of new pictures, posts, and other important events from social networking and photo sharing sites from your favorite contacts pushed to your phone -- share photos from your phone to multiple photo sharing sites. Support for multiple services: send and receive messages from work and personal email and social networking accounts, each with its own inbox, with full attachment handling"

MobiComp + Danger = WM7?

Microsoft to expand mobile business with MobiComp - Mobile Marketer - Legal/privacy.

Wondering what role Mobicomp services will play in adding services such as backup/restore and social networking tools directly to Windows Mobile.