MobHappy

@ CTIA -- Kyocera Gets My Best Product Award

CTIA was pretty quiet in terms of product annoucements, with most of them front-loaded at the beginning of the year at shows like CES, 3GSM and the Spring CTIA show. But Kyocera was showing off a new product that was very, very cool nonetheless, its KR1 EV-DO Router. It's pretty straightforward: you take an EV-DO card and plug it in, or connect and EV-DO handset via USB, then share a single connection out over Wi-Fi or its 4 Ethernet ports.

This certainly isn't the first product of this type, but there's one major difference -- its price. While its most popular competitor goes for $500-$700, the KR1 will cost closer to $200, without the EV-DO card.

There's another interesting facet to the story, though, too: while some European carriers have started selling similar products for UMTS networks, US carriers have thus far put an emphasis on getting their equipment built into laptops, which lets them control the hardware like they control handsets and try to prevent multiple users from sharing a single data subscription. Kyocera apparently approached one of its carrier customers with the device, and the carrier responded that they'd love to sell it -- if they integrated the EV-DO card into it. Kyocera balked at this, presumably understanding it would undermine what could be sizeable retail sales, and said no. (It's not hard to guess which US CDMA carrier with EV-DO that was.)

So the KR1 will be available in retail stores -- and from a second-tier US carrier that's looking to grab more of the enterprise market. Nice one.

@ CTIA -- Yes, Trip Hawkins Gets It

I wrote about Trip Hawkins and Digital Chocolate last week, when the company released some casual multiplayer games. I noted then that Digital Chocolate's releases highlighted his understanding of the mass market for video games. While the games aren't anything with fancy graphics or deep gameplay, they're much more likely to resonate with a wide audience than the latest Madden football or Mortal Street Fighter Grand Theft Kombat Auto 37 are on mobile.

Hawkins gave a keynote Wednesday morning at CTIA and elaborated on this further, but probably the most interesting thing I took away from it was that he said games have to give people an excuse to be social. He raised the example of Trivial Pursuit when it came out -- it gave people a reason to invite their friends over and have a party -- and also fantasy sports leagues for guys, which becomes a way to reach out to and interact with their friends, rather than calling each other up to have intimate chats.

This drives Digital Chocolate's choice of games, but also how it builds them. Not only does it create casual, social games, it also seeks to build communities around them that encourage both in-game and out-of-game communication among players. That's where it gets interesting for carriers: instead of just getting $5 for a Java game download, they get that revenue, then additional revenues from all sorts of ancillary services: adding on additional content to games, messaging, sending in high scores, and so on.

Hawkins realizes that we all play games, but since a lot aren't console games or the type of games teenagers play, we don't always know it. But what he really gets is that the games most people play are built in one way or another around social interaction -- and encouraging that, rather than flashy graphics, is how to attack the bulk of the market.

@ CTIA -- Bronfman Wants Your Mobile Phone and Glaser Says You'll Pay

Edgar Bronfman, ever the consumer's friend and CEO of Warner Music, gave one of the keynotes this morning, and he's definitely bullish on mobile music -- mostly because he thinks it's a way to stop piracy (which doesn't really make sense, but then neither does much of what he says about piracy, copy protection and DRM). Some highlights:

- He's impressed by the fact that KDDI's attracted a relatively high number of mobile downloads at a price higher than standard online downloads. It's not clear if he has an understanding of why people in Japan will pay a premium, or just that they do it. The idea that people will pay a premium for a service just because it's mobile really doesn't always hold -- after all, what premium price does mobile voice attract these days?

- His general motivation behind mobile music is that it adds another point of distribution and, in conjunction with copy protection, another de facto format for music. He said that the music business was its "healthiest" when it sold vinyl, cassettes and CDs, and it sounds like that's how he sees mobile music, as another media. Meaning that you'll have to buy a CD to listen to on your stereo, another file for your computer and another for your mobile phone (in his ideal world, anyway).

- He also mentioned how Warner has integrated wireless into its business, saying they even train their A&R people that find talent about new media products. Does this mean they're signing bands because they think they'd make a great ringtone? Apparently when Green Day was in the studio recording their last record, their producer also produced ringtones from the album. I'm not convinced a truetone is of high enough fidelity that anybody would really care.

- Bronfman's main belief really seems to be that mobile will be great for him because it offers a closed network, from browsing to delivery. (Remember, Bronfman is the guy that argued big corporations, like his, should control the Internet, and how dangerous it is that people can be anonymous online.)

Bronfman was followed up by Real CEO Rob Glaser, who gave a pretty uninspiring demo of some of his company's mobile products. For a company that was such an early dominant force in online multimedia, it's interesting to see how little it's used in mobile, regardless of how long Real says it's been involved. As an aside, it's Coding Technologies' aacPlus that's becoming the standard for audio.

What I took away from Glaser's keynote was that he's selling the company's Rhapsody subscription service hard, maybe too hard. He talked about how users have access to a "jukebox in the sky", but with Rhapsody, they don't, they're still stuck syncing up to a PC whenever they want new music. There are plenty of smaller competitors, though, that actually make use of a phone's network connection.

But Glaser's also a believer in the "people will pay for anything on a phone" mantra, which simply isn't true. Adding mobility to a service doesn't automatically dictate a premium price. He mentioned things like IM and email that people expect for free on the Internet and said they're premiums on mobile phones. That may be true, but those services are quickly becoming commodities just like voice. Mobility doesn't dictate an inherent premium, people still need value. And being able to do something "on the go" doesn't always add much value.

Glaser also tried to talk up Real's silly Breaks and Beats freestyle rap service, showing a "spontaneous" video of four kids using it to rap. I'm not exactly down with the kids these days, but I really don't imagine too many of them "spontaneously" find themselves in office conference rooms rapping with a video camera going.

@ CTIA -- SK Earthlink Is Coming For You, Too

It was interesting meeting with Amp'd yesterday, then having a chat with another MVNO that will be launching soon, SK Earthlink. The two are targeting the same age group (roughly 18- to 30-year-olds), but whereas Amp'd sees itself as an entertainment company, SK Earthlink is all about the technology.

The SK in the company's name (which won't be the brand under which it offers service, by the way) comes from Korea's SK Telecom, and SKE will leverage its technology for all it's worth: the service and billing platform that makes everything happen, advanced content and services, and of course, the handsets. SKE isn't like a lot of MVNOs that work through an enabler company and offer basic services at cut-rate prices. It's targeting people that are willing to pay for data services, and in return, they'll get an experience the company bills as unlike anything any other carrier in the US offers. It won't offer low-end phones that presumably wouldn't be able to handle the advanced services and content it's promising to deliver.

The company is keeping a pretty low profile and is still speaking in generalities rather than specifics about particular handsets or features before its launch next Spring. But, like Amp'd, they're saying all the right things, and it's hard not to believe they won't come up with something cool. They're planning to doggedly attack their niche market with a differentiated approach and proposition that should resonate well. Watching these companies come to market is like MVNO version 2.0, bigger and better than just basic service cheaper than your usual MegaCarrier. They're taking their network providers' pipes and really using them to their full potential, unburdened by legacy brands and services, but most importantly, not encumbered by telco thinking.

Location Based Dating Comes to Town

Korea's leading operator, SK Telecom, has launched what it claims to be the world's first location based dating service, based on an operator's LBS system. It's powered by WaveMarket, for the LBS element and Psynet, who provided the dating platform.

There have been plenty of forays before into MoSoSo (Mobile Social Software) based on Bluetooth, ranging from Nokia's Sensor (no, they haven't gone into the razor blade market) to MobiLuck, that I wrote about yesterday.

The problem with Bluetooth systems is the very limited range means that until real critical mass is achieved, any contact with another device is going to be a rare event. And certainly when you start applying a degree of matching profiles on top of location, you may be in for a very long wait to meet Mr or Mrs Right, or even Mr or Mrs SoSo (no, not another mobile acronym).

There's a further issue that often gets forgotten with short range systems, and that's time. The chances of finding another phone, with a matching profile at the same time is statistically very unlikely, certainly at the beginning. And why would users sign up for something, or recommend that their friends join, if nothing happens when they do?

An operator's LBS system doesn't have the same restrictions and can pair people within the same, say square mile - a distance that can be covered pretty quickly with the right incentive. This means the chances of a successful match increases exponentially.

Admittedly, there's a few downsides to the operator-led approach. Firstly, there's the accuracy question. Even if Assisted GPS is used (the most accurate I'm aware of) this is unlikely to let you make contact with someone in the same bar. If you're out of line-of-site of a satellite, the system falls back onto a less accurate technology like triangulation or cell ID, which is not good enough to pinpoint two phones in the same room. If you know more about the tech, please leave a comment as I'm sure someone knows more than I do about this aspect.

So from that point of view, it seems that the perfect dating application would be based on a hybrid of Assisted GPS and Bluetooth, for shorter distances.

The other problem with some LBS systems is speed. You're not going to want to wait 10 minutes or so to find a match - we're living in a broadband world and that means we want things now.

Perhaps inevitably, the press release touts "killer app", which seems something of an exaggeration - voice is the only killer app of phones for the foreseeable future. But it does have all the hallmarks of being an important sector - youth, sex, communication based, local and I'm sure it'll do very well.

Just one question; why oh why do SK Telecom think it's a good idea to have an annoying sound track playing on their website? Hasn't anyone told them how annoying it is - and soooo last century Darlink? Or is it a bit like BO - everyone's too embarrassed to say something?

@ CTIA -- The Loose Ends, Day One

Some bits and pieces from the first day:

- Had a chat with the head of Rocket Mobile, a company that mainly does BREW development of both applications that get embedded in OEM devices, but also a number of consumer apps. The company's a good example of how a platform-centric viewpoint can be beneficial: its embedded applications become a platform on which it creates consumer applications. Instead of just having its applications be the end of the story, they're a jumping off point for even more.

- Sprint's got a couple of new business devices, a Windows Mobile phone for Nextel and the EV-DO Pocket PC PPC-6700 (pictured here). If you're into Pocket PC, it's a nifty little device, although a little on the thick side.

- Schwagwatch: nothing of note, although USB memory sticks are still undeniably the giveaway of choice.

- Overheard: "I wonder if it bugs the bags of all the people around you," after noticing the attendee bags were sponsored by the infamous sms.ac.

@ CTIA -- All Your Base Belong to Amp'd

I feel it's pretty safe to say that Amp'd is going to be an incredibly disruptive (or destructive, depending on where you stand) force on the US mobile scene. Their general strategy seems to be "Okay, so everything every incumbent carrier does? Yeah, we're doing the opposite of that."

So it's EV-DO phones (from Kyocera and Motorola at launch, which sounds like it will be towards the end of the fourth quarter) without the usual restrictions: open Internet, tethering (supporting both PC and AC), sideloading of content actively supported ("We don't care where you get your music," they say), and a consumer-driven mindset that sees it be as agnostic as possible. Whereas some CDMA carriers hamstring devices and close down their networks, Amp'd's thinking is that if the phone supports it, go ahead and do it.

And that doesn't even consider the content. As appealing as Amp'd is in general, its library of content sounds pretty staggering as well. Its target market is 18- to 35-year-olds, and the stuff it's got lined up should be wide and deep enough to satisfy the whole range: lots of video (streaming and download), music, tons of games and so on. The phone ships as a blank slate, essentially, and users set it up via the Amp'd Web site to make it appear exactly as they want. Amp'd also has a pretty slick UI for its content portal that organizes things in a much more intuitive way than the usual list-based carrier deck. Amp'd thinks of itself as an entertainment company more than a telco, and it shows.

One of the most telling quotes from the company's rep was "We don't want to ask people to change the way they do things." And they don't. Like I said, that's pretty much the opposite of most carriers.

@ CTIA -- Open Mobile Alliance Wants To Talk DRM

I had a meeting this morning with some people from the Open Mobile Alliance, who were, um, kind enough to add the chair of their DRM working group to the meeting (without my knowledge, although I didn't really mind), to address my fairly strong feelings about it. OMA's in an interesting position on this and a lot of matters in the mobile industry. The group was essentially born out of the realization by vendors and carriers that they needed to work together to ensure interoperability of services -- "The industry has gone through a tough school and learned its lesson," as chair Jari Alvinen put it.

They made the case for their unified, open DRM standard, and were quick to draw a distinction between actual DRM and simple copy protection, since the two aren't necessarily the same. While the OMA DRM spec does include copy protection (so you can't forward a ringtone to your friend, for instance), it also features some actual DRM that enables some new business models and revenue streams. For instance, it's got a mechanism that allows users to pass content on to others, who can then preview it and decide to pay for it if they want to keep it, and it's even got "reward" functionality to encourage people to pass around content in this way. It also allows people to define "domains" of devices to which they can assign the same rights, so if you buy a song on your phone, you could also play it on your computer or on your home stereo and so on.

I'm still not sure what to make of this. While clearly the spec does allow for some new business models, why does it take an OMA DRM standard, rather than some innovation from record labels or some other content provider, to come up with them? It also still doesn't address copy protection being used as lock-in by vendors. It's true that the OMA DRM spec is open and can be licensed by anyone (the group's IP policy dictates all its specs' underlying technology be made available on a RAND basis), but is that any different that Microsoft licensing its Janus DRM to anybody that ponies up the cash? The idea of a unified DRM across all devices is a decent one -- if it were a reality. And while OMA DRM will no doubt fall into favor simply because of the high volume of handsets sold a year, it's still up to individual device manufacturers to license the different DRMs and integrate them into their devices if they care about interoperability. While the number of major DRM technologies may have declined in recent years to 3 (MS, Apple/Fairplay, OMA), that's still too many when it's used not as DRM, but as a tool to lock people in to certain brands.

I appreciate the work OMA's done to make the DRM useful to content providers and to consumers by enabling new businesses. But is it just a case of adding sugar to the medicine to make it go down easier? I hope not. They seem to have a good idea of what they're doing and the impact it will have on consumers (both negative and positive) and also that they're working in a communications medium, not a broadcast one -- a point they made explicitly, and one that's lost on a lot of companies. A unified standard, properly implemented, would be an improvement over the current situation. But when the point of DRM and copy protection often isn't to manage digital rights, but to lock people in to certain products, it's hard to believe that it's coming any time soon.

O2 Bets Big on i-mode

O2 announced last year that they were launching NTT DoCoMo's highly successful i-mode in the UK (as well as Germany and Ireland) and recently declared this Saturday (October 1st) as launch day.

However, it wasn't too clear exactly what their plans are until now, vis a vis the existing O2 Active brand and 4.2 million customer base. The implication so far has been that they'd sort of slide i-mode into the market and see what kind of uptake it would get.

But according to the International Herald Tribune today, O2 are backing the launch with a £20 million ($35 million) advertising and marketing campaign. Make no mistake, this is a very, very large campaign in European terms. And historically, this is O2's largest since the demerger from BT in 2001, according to Russ Shaw, their Marketing Director.

This indicates to me that O2 are viewing i-mode as a a key strategic part of their business and actually more important than O2 Active in the longer term. In fact, I think they see it as a way to leapfrog the leading brand, Vodafone's Live!, altogether.

This would also imply that they're going to aggressively encourage O2 Active users to trade up to i-mode in the immediate future.

i-mode is meant to deliver what WAP promised 5 years ago - the internet of your phone. Initially, O2 have bundled about 100 leading sites on there and enabled it with email. What's more, they have announced the best rev share arrangements with content owners outside the Far East - an unprecedented 86%.

On the downside of the launch, email is expected to be charged at 10p (17c) each - presumably so as not to cannibalise sms traffic. And net access is expected to be £3 ($5.30) per MB, equivalent to 100 pages. This seems a shame to me, as surely this would be a great opportunity to launch an "all you can eat", really simple data plan and really stick it to the competition. Surely, one reason that's holding back data is that people want to avoid Bill Shock syndrome?

Saturday will reveal all, including their pricing. But, every journey starts with a small step and O2 seem to have made several big strides from what we know so far.

Bluetooth Messaging = Bluejacking on Steroids

It's been a while since we last looked at Bluejacking, but it's alive and well and seems to be going from strength to strength. At least, that's what I deduce from a look round BluejackQ, which is the spiritual home of the movement.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out my post in June 2004 for a definitive guide. But essentially, it involves ordinary mobile phone users (as opposed to commercial organisations) sending unsolicited messages (text and pics) by Bluetooth. The messages range from harmless and childish (in a good way) pranks - such as "your shoe lace is undone" - to perhaps initiating a friendly contact.

As Bluetooth messages aren't trackable, unlike say, an sms, no one can say how popular Bluejacking is. But anecdotally, I'd say it's big and getting bigger - perhaps even now crossing the chasm from early adoption into the early majority, if you know your Moore.

MobiLuck have clambered on board this bandwagon and just released version 3.5 of its short range, Bluetooth messaging system. This takes Bluejacking, which is actually rather a clumsy interface, involving using the entries in your phone's address book, and makes the whole thing that much slicker and easier to use.

It automatically searches for other Bluetooth devices and alerts you when they're found. This casting process is still quite a hassle using the normal method. It also has built-in virus protection, as playing around with Bluetooth messages from strangers' mobiles is the digital equivalent of unprotected and promiscuous sex.

The interface is a lot easier to manage as well.

The app costs Euro 14.95 ($17.96) a year and is currently only available on Nokia Series 60 phones, although you can send to any Bluetooth enabled phone, providing that Bluetooth is in discoverable mode, obviously.

Apart from Bluejacking, there are MoSoSo applications, to find other people you might want to meet or network with in the immediate vicinity.

But also if you study kids, you'll find that they quite often sms their mates who are in the same room - messaging is often a parallel communication channel, as opposed to an alternative one. For instance, they may want to take the piss out of someone else in the room, share a joke, communicate a private message or exchange those icky love notes that we've all sent back when we were teens ("i luv u" "i luv u more" "no u dont" "yes i do" kind of thing).

Of course, the great thing about Bluetooth is that it's also a completely free-to-use channel, so you can send as many messages as you like, without paying a penny to your operator or anyone else.

"Screw the nano", ZNDR Says

MOTOCEO Ed ZNDR sounds pissed off: 'Screw the nano,' said Zander. 'What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs? People are going to want devices that do more than just play music, something that can be seen in many other countries with more advanced mobile phone networks and savvy users,' he said."

Fresh off Friday's advice for Motorola, here's a few observations from the opening morning of CTIA here in San Fran:
iPod nanos spotted walking around SF this morning: quite a few
Motorola ROKRs seen: none

Don't hate on Apple because they've come up with something people want to buy, Ed. Watch and learn.

PlaceOpedia - Location Based Information

PlaceOpedia (spotted by Carlo at The Guardian) is a way of linking Location to Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia.

It's interesting as it combines a number of different trends (I nearly used the meme word there).

- It's a low-cost mashup of two different, websites/services - Wikipedia and Google Maps.
- Like Wikipedia, content is generated collaboratively by the readers and users.
- It's linking digital information to the real world, which is what Location Based Services is all about, in my view.

Last month I presented the idea to the Wikimania conference of using a location-enabled phone to access Wikipedia information about place where you were physically. Examples might be information on local buildings, residents or even property prices. One of the missing pieces of this puzzle would be to find editors to do the linking - the other being deciding what technology is best suited for it.

It seems to me that PlaceOpedia solves the first problem (assuming enough people contribute). So all we need now is an agreement about the technology - no trivial task admittedly.

The first choice seems to be if the solution is best to be a physical link that you can see (like ShotCode or SemaCode) or a virtual link that your phone sees (like Siemens' Digital Graffiti). Ultimately, the latter type of concept will prevail - we can't put barcode-type stickers all over the planet. But the barcode route does have the double purpose of alerting people to its presence and thus marketing the idea and encouraging the download of the appropriate mobile phone software.

But one thing is for sure. This is something that's rapidly moving out of the concept stage into deployment. An idea whose time has come.

There's Some For Motorola, Too

Following the earlier "you better hurry up" message for the Palms, I saw this pic of Motorola CEO Ed ZNDR on News.com, where he's holding up a couple of phones that he says will be ready in December, ahead of schedule, the Q and a pink version of the RAZR.

There have been a number of stories over the past several months touting the strength of the RAZR and how it's the harbinger of a design revolution that's going to drive Motorola. It's been a year or so since the release of the RAZR, and what's it been followed up with, apart from the usual assortment of mid- and low-end wonders? The underwhelming ROKR and a black version of the RAZR. For a design "revolution", not much is really happening. Motorola's got a long way to go to prove that the RAZR wasn't a one-hit wonder, and it's still a little early to proclaim they've used it to turn things around.

We're still waiting on the PEBL and SLVR design models, so let's see when they arrive, and how they sell before we make any more proclamations. One more thing -- drop the stupid names.

Thoughts On Palm

Just got this email:

"SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 23, 2005 -- Ed Colligan, Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) president and chief executive officer; Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect; and Denny Strigl, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless, invite the news media to join them for a press conference on Monday, Sept. 26, at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco beginning at 9 a.m. PDT."

This is to announce the poorly-kept secret that is the Treo running Windows Mobile. This comes the same day as Palm's stock took a beating after it posted a wider quarterly loss and gave a disappointing outlook. The only real bright spot is Treo sales, though they still are significantly behind BlackBerry and Nokia smartphone sales.

All of this comes after PalmSource was bought by Access, PalmSource itself having bought Linux specialist China MobileSoft last year.

So what's all this mean? The Palm OS, if not already dead, is nearly there. I'd lay most of the blame on the continued lack of multi-tasking, something that's becoming more and more essential in the smartphone world. It had been promised in Palm OS Cobalt, which as far as I'm concerned is holed up somewhere with UIQ 3.0 and may or may not be found. It's been far too long since both were announced with no products or any real movement. While I'm fairly certain we'll see a UIQ 3 device soon, I can't say the same about Cobalt. Why else would Palm go to Windows Mobile and risk alienating its most loyal backers?

Palm choosing Windows Mobile opens up some interesting possibilities. The Treo's nowhere near as popular in Europe as it is in the US, with Symbian and Windows Mobile ruling the continent. Ewan Spence over at All About Symbian speculates that perhaps Palm might like to license Symbian and UIQ, then make a Palm "skin" that would allow it to retain the familar Palm look and feel, unlike Windows Mobile.

Whatever Palm does, it too needs to get things moving. I'm not going to get into PDA sales, that market is dying and inconsequential. It sold 470,000 Treos last quarter, which is a pittance. Its sole smartphone product is just a continuation of something it didn't even develop. It's going to have a hard time surviving with just one product with such relatively low sales.

Next Week @ CTIA

I'll be in San Francisco next week at the CTIA show, delivering news from the show floor and the slate of interviews I've got lined up, staring Monday. So be sure to check back early and often.

P2P Live Video Streaming

First we had P2P music sharing, then video and film (via BitTorrent) and now we have P2P live TV streaming, according to the Big Picture.

It seems that some clever Chinese engineers have figured it out and now you can watch live TV on your broadband connected PC.

This is bad news for subscription channels, as it means we can all watch their broadcasts for free. And as music and video sharing have proved, these new technologies spread faster than a fast thing. Indeed, BitTorrent is said to now account for 35% of all traffic on the net.

The other victim will undoubtedly be Big Sport. Indeed, the driver in China so far is English Premiership Football - unfortunately only with Chinese commentary so far, but you could always turn the sound off and listen to Radio 5 Live or something.

But it's going to be difficult to negotiate multi-million dollar exclusive broadcasting rights, when anyone can now easily watch for free from anywhere with a broadband connection.

Like the music industry, TV companies will be slow to wake up to this new threat. But it amazes me that they don't do something - like at least allow a legal channel to develop quickly. If I want to watch The Simpsons current material in the UK, I either have to wait for two years and take out a subscription to Sky. Or I download it free on BitTorrent. If I want to pay a fair price - like $5 - or even an unfair price, I can't.

One of the main reasons why Napster took off was because there was no legal alternative at the time. And it looks like the TV companies are going to make exactly the same mistake. Doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result each may not be the definition of madness Einstein claimed. But it's certainly bloody stupid.

Mobile Manga

When an industry starts to change, it's like a large tree being felled. It starts off imperceptibly, but rapidly accelerates until it comes crashing down. As an example, the world's first camera phone was only launched in Japan in November 2000. And now Nokia is the leading digital camera maker in the world.

One of the latest sectors experiencing the dizziness of the TIMBER! effect seems to be Manga comics in Japan, according to Japan Times. Putting Manga on mobiles only started in 2003, spurred by 3G availability, and already is showing signs of killing its paper based parent.

Paper-based publishing is actually experiencing a double whammy onslaught from mobiles. Even before Manga was available on phones, sales had started to decline in line with the growth of mobiles. This is attributed to young people spending their disposable income on their phones, communication and content. But now the phone itself has become a publishing channel, this effect is accelerating.

Indeed, many famous Manga creators are apparently considering bypassing the old publishers and going straight to market via Ketai (mobile phone).

Of course, the mobile is really well suited to reading comic strips on the mobile - unlike say, a text-based book. With displays of either page scroll (navigation by scrolling up and down the page) or even better, picture card (one frame at a time), the user experience is just as good - if not better - as the "real" thing.

I wonder what the next industry will be to fall to the mighty mobile? MP3 players? Certainly. The PC itself? I think so anyway.

And the Winner of Hype of the Year is....

The tech sector seems especially prone to hype - it's difficult to imagine that say, the ice cream cone industry suffers from quite as much hyperbole and over-claim.

So to really stand out and become a Super Hyper, you really have your work cut out.

But my nomination is the mobile anti-virus industry, most of whom have spent this year attempting to scare mobile phone owners into rushing out and buy their products - otherwise your phone will turn into a zombie and eat all your relatives and turn your brain to mush, or something.

Actually, all their stories are characterised by wild headlines, only to conclude that actually, one virus has been found "in the wild" on a whole continent. My favourite was this one where the CEO of a software company caught the virus and disinfected it with anti-software, provided by one of his anti-virus partners:

"Somehow, I'm not sure whether I pressed yes or no but it ended up in my handset. When I rebooted my phone, the anti-virus software said I have a virus and asked me whether I want to delete it from my inbox," [he] said.

This is a man whose company makes and sells software, by the way, not some techno-ignoramous.

It rather came to a head yesterday with Sophos, another anti-virus company finally getting fed up and issuing a "why don't you just shut up and get back in your box?" kind of statement and describing the latest claims to be "bonkers" (via Silicon).

While it is possible to get mobile viruses, the average user is more likely to get one than I am to ride to work this morning on a dolphin - and I live in land-locked Germany. And even if you do get one, you still have to agree twice to install it, so you have to be unlucky as well as stupid, so you're probably not long for this world anyway.

One day, mobile viruses will be as big a problem as they are for PCs, but we're a long way from that right now.

Virgin Mobile Exploits Pester Power

Virgin Mobile's hot New York agency, Mother, have created the Parental Enlightenment Kit, according to Adverblog. The idea is to give kids some tools to pester their poor, long-suffering parents into buying them a mobile - you can tell I'm a parent of mobile-phone age kids.

Tools include stuff like T-shirt stickers ("Do you love me? Yes __ No __") to The Instigator - a cutout version of a mobile phone. The idea is the kid nonchalently starts talking into it and when the parent asks where they got it, they can introduce the subject.

It's quite funny and as Martina points out, it turns teens and tweens into little guerilla marketers.

If my kids tried something like this though, I might eventually give in. But I'd equally nonchalently not buy them a Virgin phone.

The Death Knell for Telephone Marketing

One of the recurring themes at MobHappy is the slow death of traditional interruptive marketing, where people are forced, by various means, to stop what they are doing to listen to a marketing message.

Of all the techniques practiced, there can be few more interruptive marketing methods than telephone marketing - where someone phones you while you're having supper to woodenly read you a script about one of their double glazing "consultants" being in your area and would just love to visit and tell you all about their products.

So it's hardly surprising to anyone that the UK's Telephone Preference Society (TPS) has reached the 10 million mark (via Brand Republic, free reg required). The TPS, despite its euphemistic name, simply allows people to opt out of all telephone marketing calls.

To put this into perspective, there are about 22 million households in the UK, which means that nearly half of them have expressed this preference now. I will qualify that slightly by saying that you can also opt out mobile numbers and I don't have any information on the split, though I will ask and write an update if the info is available. Gut feel says it'll be a fairly small number though.
UPDATE: It is actually only 3.3% of the file, so the argument holds. Phew!

A further interesting little nugget in the same article is that a recent Mori poll found that awareness of the TPS had risen to nearly 50%. Spelling this out, it means that practically everyone who knows about it, registers.

This is clearly a big worry for outbound call centres, who were recently outraged when BT started to actively promote their Privacy Service, which includes a big plug for the TPS. Registration has indeed increased following BT's initiative, which seems to be supporting the theory that everyone who finds out about it, joins.

A nice bit of additional irony to consider is that the TPS is paid for by the direct marketing industry themselves - there's no government subsidy or anything. Therefore, the industry is facing rapidly increasing costs in the face of a rapidly decreasing pool of customers it can piss off approach - and I assume rapidly decreasing profits. There must come a point (maybe two years away) when the economics dictate that this is a dead industry.

So if you run an outbound call centre, you really should change your model pretty quick now. The writing is on the wall - people don't like your service and feel so strongly about it that they'll overcome their natural inertia and do something about it.

For other traditional marketers, it's also a clear indication of the way the winds are blowing in modern marketing. People don't want to be interrupted anymore and your only hope is engagement marketing - a term you're going to hear a lot more in the future.

Vodafone: Global Power, Local Expertise?

One of the supposed motivations for Vodafone's massive buying spree a few years back was so it could build the biggest economy of scale in the industry, and get the best prices for network equipment and handsets through common sourcing. Another was so that it could take innovations in one country and apply them around the rest of its networks. This was the case with Japan, where Vodafone used the J-SKY content system of J-Phone (now Vodafone Japan) as the basis for its Vodafone live! platform.

But James Enck points out how the company was touting at its recent analyst day that it can innovate in local markets with services and offers to meet particular cultures or needs (like what's happening in Africa and other emerging markets), using its success in Egypt as an example.

While Vodafone may be doing well in that emerging market, its long-running struggles in Japan are well documented. One significant factor in its downturn was that Vodafone tried to push foreign handsets with subpar features there, and failed badly. So while Vodafone says it can tailor innovation in Egypt, its Japanese operation languishes after the home office tried to fit it with a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Perhaps Vodafone's learned from its Japanese experience and is giving its local managers more autonomy. But, in a sign that old habits die hard, it continues to eye acquisitions.

Advertisers Still Clutching At Mobile Straws

Via Tom Hume is a review of the recent Mobile Content World conference on Mo:Life. Tom points out two juicy bits from the lengthy review, which has a pretty comprehensive explanation of how the advertising industry, by and large, doesn't get mobile at all.

To sum up Jason Wilson's three main points: the ad industry doesn't get it; they don't know what to do; this upsets them. "The naff and/or derivative nature of much of what was forwarded as innovative mobile campaigns underscores the structural problem the advertising industry is still encountering vis-à-vis media which don’t allow them to simply pump ads through to the audience," he adds.

Doublespeak Reaches New Heights

Anybody that follows the mobile industry needs to be pretty adept at deciphering doublespeak (and a well-tuned BS detector helps too). But this quote is off the charts. Gizmodo points out how a Nokia spokesman explained the delay of the N91 music phone:

"'The process of integrating Windows digital rights management solution into the phone happened faster than expected,' the spokesman said. 'We have therefore decided to delay the launch so that we can provide a better service.'"

Color me confused. Reuters has a little better one from somebody else, that pretty much sounds like it contradicts the first one: "What we basically decided is that we will postpone it a few weeks, push it out to Q1 and do this Microsoft DRM implementation solidly." Hmm. That doesn't really clear things up, either.

In any case, implementation of the Microsoft DRM is the sticking point. This is the DRM licensed in a deal announced back in February, a few months before the N91 was announced. It's hard to believe Nokia's had this much trouble getting the DRM to work on its Series 60 software, but if it is such a pain, why use it at all?

As Gizmodo also mentions, the pretty horrible reception the ROKR has gotten seems a more likely culprit. But if the N91 is as good as Nokia wants us to think, why not bring it out according to plan and essentially say "this is how it should be done"?

Image from Buzzword, the board game.

Microsoft Reshuffles Rather than Rethinks

Om Malik links to the Microsoft press release announcing a new reorganisation at Redmond. Scoble has a bit more - especially in the comments.

While the announcement is suitably upbeat, as you'd expect, I think it does show that senior management know something is wrong, but aren't quite sure what it is or what to do about it. The reorg establishes 3 divisions; Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division, Microsoft Business Division and Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division.

“These changes are designed to align our Business Groups in a way that will enhance decision-making and speed of execution, as well as help us continue to deliver the types of products and services our customers want most,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft. "By bringing together the software experience and the service experience, we will better address the changing needs of our customers’ digital lifestyles and the new world of work.”

The mobile part, in case you were wondering, is in the devices bit - but they had to stick it somewhere, I guess.

This doesn't seem to address how the world is fundamentally changing though; open source, thin client, web services, mobile - the combination being what I call Mobile 2.0, but many people still refer to as Web 2.0.

While Microsoft may be able to make faster decisions now, this doesn't really help if their framework and strategy is fundamentally flawed. They're not only paddling their canoe in the wrong direction - they're paddling up the wrong river.

Digital Chocolate Sounds Tasty

Trip Hawkins is a mythical figure in the video game business, having founded Electronic Arts more than 20 years ago. His latest venture is Digital Chocolate, which he hopes will become the EA of mobile games. I don't pay a ton of attention to mobile gaming, but I find Hawkins' thinking to generally be good stuff. He's quoted over RCR News, talking about some new DC games that eschew fancy graphics and gameplay for social connection.

There's a market for high-quality mobile gaming, just ask Sony. But as Hawkins points out, it's probably not on the mobile phone. While it's certainly possible to make some very graphically slick games on phones, the PSP, or whatever, is always going to be slicker. But the phone is still a relatively unique platform in that it offers a constant network connection, and that's where it can make up the difference.

What Digital Chocolate's thinking sounds like casual games meets multiplayer, and an interesting facet here is that these types of games probably won't appeal to your hardcore 15-year-old boy gamer -- but that's sort of the point. These are the kinda of games that will have a much wider appeal. Flashy? No. Successful? I'd predict yes.

Just 17% of UK Subs Do More Than Talk and Text

160 Characters posts the results of a survey that found just 17% of UK mobile phone owners use their devices for anything other than texting and calling -- on a daily basis. Somehow that's not as surprising as the headline made it out to be. In any case, the company behind the survey says "although the services may be clearly explained in accompanying manuals, users often do not understand the purpose of additional services and therefore do not feel any need to learn how to use them."

Usability is a big problem, though I think they're overstating the importance of the manual -- does anybody read them anymore? The part to focus on there is "users often do not understand the purpose of additional services". Part of that's a marketing problem, where telecoms too often focus on marketing technologies rather than services, like MMS or WAP. But the real problem is that users aren't being presented with a whole lot of data services and applications they find compelling. I'll use of of Russell's favorite examples here: video calling. Video calling's failed to catch on, not because people don't understand it, but because they're not interested in it. And so it goes with many other services, particularly carrier-supported ones.

An operator should look at this figure and think, "gee, there's a whole lot of room for growth there." Then, they need to figure out how to make it happen -- by creating a better ecosystem for developers and content providers.

As an aside, to lump daily SMS use in with calling masks its widespread use for data and services. Remember, it's a platform, not just and application.

Mobile TV Looks Promising

MobiTV have announced their subscriber figures, according to Moco News. Across a network consisting on a few US and Canadian carriers, and Orange in the UK, they've reached 500,000 people. If the average subscription price is $9.99, this is going to be quite a healthy income, especially given that it's still early days.

Of course, in percentage penetration terms, this is still tiny and we also don't know what kind of free and subsidised trial packages might be included. Plus it's too early also to come up with any meaningful churn rates.

Personally, I'm extremely sceptical about subscription-based mobile TV as a business model, especially at the $9.99 level. But if they have the potential to attract and keep viewers in the millions, it's not out of the question to see advertising subsidised services emerging.

The other element everyone always overlooks when thinking about new services and products is the percentage of people who say they'll subscribe or buy, pointing to things like "only 25%" said that they will. The percentage isn't actually that important (up to a point, obviously) provided that the ones indicating an interest really mean it and are really passionate about it.

As a parallel, if you do focus groups on new car design, you'd think that intuitively you be looking for a design that was liked by the most number of people. This is wrong. What you actually need is a design that is loved by 10% to 30%, with the rest feeling ambivalent or actually hating the car. It's the people with the passion who actually will go out and buy your product.

Clearly MobiTV has a long way to go before it commands anything like 10% of the subscriber base as customers. But, if accurate, this is a certainly good start.

Me? I'm still wary about this service and business model (certainly at this pricing), but I could be wrong - there's enough companies placing big bets against me, so maybe it has some kind of future after all.

Now There's A Good Business Model

Mocoblog points out some idiocy from Verizon's SuperPages directory service: a press release announcing that Verizon Wireless subscribers -- for 30 cents each -- can get directory information, movie times and weather for casts via text message.

So, let's just briefly review for those of us that have missed Google SMS, Yahoo SMS, 4info and all the other similar services.

Verizon Superpages SMS:
- phone directory information, movie showtimes, weather
- easy-to-remember shortcode (SUPER)
- available only on Verizon Wireless
- 30 cents per message

Google SMS:
- directory information, movie showtimes, weather, driving directions, stock quotes, product prices, dictionary definitions, Google answers, calculator, area code lookup, zip code lookup, Google search results
- easy-to-remember shortcode (GOOGL)
- available on all major US carriers
- free

As Mocoblog says, compared to the $1.50 or so a Verizon Wireless sub would pay for a 411 call, it's a bargain. But this smacks of old-school telco thinking: sure, it's great idea to have an inferior product, available to a smaller market, up against a far superior free one with wider availability. I guess they think Google's one of those fly-by-night dot-coms that will be gone in a little while anyway.

Yes, Ringtones Have Jumped The Shark

I've been getting all sorts of press releases lately about new ringtones that are launching, and the general rule is that each is more desperate than the last. One of my "favorites" has been the annoying and offensive ringtone, for when you can't be annoying and offensive enough on your own. There's been talk of how a ringtone bubble has been building, as evidenced by the entry of everybody and their grandmother into the business, along with a proliferation of companies built on shady business models.

As if you needed more proof, here's some that ringtones have jumped the shark: Donald "You Can Never Have Too Much Money" Trump now has ringtones. They'll be lining up online for that, I bet.

NPR Debut

Ok, an NPR affiliate -- but anyway, I made my radio debut this week when I was interviewed for The Weekly Rundown on WAMC in the northeastern US about the ROKR and other music phones. The MP3 is up, and I'm about 33 minutes in if you're interested.

Mobile Marketing Campaign Claims 80% Success

Cuervo Tequila is claiming a phenomenal 80% success rate to a recent mobile marketing campaign, which is being picked up by the marketing press, like this article in Revolution.

80% would indeed be impressive, but if you dig a little deeper, I really don't think it would have been much different using traditional techniques.

Cuervo firstly ran a PR-based campaign, supported by radio and posters offering people the chance to win tickets to a free party in a London nightclub. If you wanted to enter, you texted in and you were put into a free prize draw.

There are no figures for entries received and anyway, you couldn't possibly say what percentage of people exposed to the message entered it. However, it's probably fair to say that the immediacy and ease of entry boosted response rates to this element of the campaign.

The winners were then selected and sent their tickets in the form of an sms voucher. Of those who won, 80% turned up to the party on the night. In other words, 80% of people who had entered a competition to win tickets for a free party they had already said they wanted to go to, claimed their prize. Actually, I'm surprised it was that low!

Cuervo and their agency should certainly get a small pat on the back for using mobile as part of the marketing mix - although running a free prize draw by sms, rather than snail mail, is a bit of no-brainer these days. It would be like congratulating someone 10 years ago for allowing people to enter by post, as opposed to carrier pigeon.

But this isn't pushing back the envelope of mobile marketing and the 80% response is no great leap forward for mobile marketing or marketing in general.

Intelligent mobile marketing can certainly achieve impressive results, but let's not pretend it can achieve miracles.

2 Billion Mobile Phones

This weekend, the 2 billionth mobile phone was connected, which is a pretty important milestone for the industry and for our very society too.

Another slightly mind buggering stat is that it took 20 years for the first billion and a mere 3 years for the next.

The world population is only 6.5 billion, so Nokia are forecasting slightly slower growth - the next billion will take around 5 1/2 years, they reckon. Meaning that sometime in 2010, around half the world's population will own a mobile phone - and probably considerably more will have access to one. This level of technology penetration is simply unprecedented, as it bestrides both developed and developing nations. Is there anything else that comes even close?

Many great fortunes lie in wait for the entrepreneurs and investors who make the right bets. Just as many great companies will crumble away unless they accommodate the rapid changes that are already in train.

One of the old guard with perhaps the most to lose as the world changes from PC-oriented to mobile-oriented is good old Microsoft.

VC, Fred Wilson, has an interesting post speculating that MS has already used up 3 of its corporate lives and he wonders if they'll do it a fourth time. Fred thinks that the driving force behind this is open source, but I think that's only a symptom of the changes that are going to happen. Much more fundamental is that the mobile will become the primary way we access digital information and MS doesn't even really have a toe-hold in mobile.

Fred calls the next phase on technology Web 2.0 but I think it's actually Mobile 2.0 and once you get your head around that, you can start to understand that "paradigm shift" begins to look like an understatement, such as describing Everest as "quite a big hill".

Brad Feld, another highly respected VC, inspired Fred's post and it's worth checking out too. Brad says that products like Vista and Office 12 will make 2006 the year of Microsoft. That may indeed be the case. However, unless they start seeing the way the mobile wind is blowing, it's likely to be their swan song.

Platforms vs. Applications

In the presentation I gave at Mobile Monday Austin this week on messaging, one of the key points I tried to make (and hopefully the audience took away) was that things like MMS and SMS aren't just P2P messaging applications, they're platforms that allow for other applications.

Mark Donovan of M:Metrics (who coincidentally I interview this week for my next Gizmodo column) has posted a blog entry illustrating this point, via an anecdote about a road trip in an RV. If I had to pick just one sentence out, it would be this: "I only care about your technology if it makes my world better when I need it to make my world better." Technology is great, but it's real power is as an enabler for compelling -- and ultimately useful -- applications.

Skype And Mobile Still Isn't A Big Deal

In case you've been underwater this week or something, Skype's been in the news a a bit. With the big push from its purchase by eBay for a bubble-like figure, the "Skype is going to destroy all telecoms, especially mobile" line has been getting a lot of play. As I've been saying for a while, Skype and mobile isn't a big deal. But this week, The Economist leads with "How the Internet killed the phone business". That'll probably shift some magazines, but they've got it all wrong, and Tomi Ahonen does an incredibly thorough job explaining why.

Tomi hits the nail on the head with his arguments of why Skype over a mobile data connection doesn't have mobile operators shaking. What they have to worry about is Skype being used as a substitute, not a replacement. People will substitute Skype for standard mobile service on expensive calls -- international and roaming calls, for instance. But many of the charges for these are already inflated well beyond margins acceptable to an operator, and the inherent advantage of a mobile phone over Skype -- mobility, and mobility in a size more acceptable than a laptop with a data card -- will still allow for some premium price. Skype is nowhere near being a replacement for a mobile phone, and it's doubtful it will ever get there.

Comment of the Week

The comment of the week this week comes from Charlie Schick, who had a nice response to my little rant about handset subsidies and how they affect service from carriers:

"handset subsidies were removed in finland and italy. in finland, there is still no stopping the growth of handset purchases. in italy, the sales of handsets dipped when the subsidies were removed, but then started to climb and return to normal once folks were accustomed to full priced phones.

the problems with subsidies (and i am not whining as a manufacturer) is that it removes any value from the handset, such that folks couldn't give a damn what phone they have, so long as it's free or cheap. in this way a 6680 ends up on par with a basic 33nn phone.

also, in the us, you have all these buckets of minutes you need to use up every month, extremely long contracts, high termination fees, and user paying for incoming and outgoing calls. all this removes any incentive for the operator to improve service or retain customers - the contract and all guarantees that the oprator makes money whether the service is krappy or not.

real competition would be to have no fixed contract, calling party pays, and number portability without hefty termination fees - then the operators would have to compete for customers and would have to provide great services.

it is no coincidence that finland is mobile phone heaven - the competition here has been fierce: at least 4 operators duke it out for a few million users.

wake up usa - let's have some real competition for customers."

Mobile Payments in the Wild

Back in June I wrote a post exploring the mobile payments sector - or what I called the next billion dollar market.

In the post I used Mobile Lime as an example of a company who were getting it wrong, in my opinion. In fact, I concluded "Mobile Lime, in the nicest possible way; Change or Die" , so I wasn't exactly sitting on the fence when I wrote it. I was therefore very interested to read an article on Seattle PI which tested Mobile Lime in the wild, in the Boston area.

Would my theories and experiences be validated?

The first and most important point about any mobile payment system is what I called Buckley's First Law of Mobile Payments:

If the transaction process is any more complicated than using a credit card or cash, it will never succeed.

Note the "never" part.

Over to Seattle PI:

When you're ready to buy something, you pull out the cell phone and call MobileLime. An automated voice greets you by name. You key in your four-digit PIN followed by the location code, a short number posted in the store. Then you give the cashier the last four digits of your cell number.

It's pretty fast - though with all those steps it's slower than cash, unless you begin the keypunching even before the clerk begins to tally your order.

90% of the success comes down to usability. This is not a good system.

The next point I made, which is kind of related, is staff training. It's an area that is always overlooked and in fairness, almost impossible to tackle effectively. The retail industry is notorious for its high turnover and seasonal and part-time workers, so even if you try to visit every single store and every single staff member, you're still going to miss someone. This means that your service has to be simple and intuitive to use for the staff, as well as the user.

Back to Seattle PI:

In my first attempt with it, the sales attendant at KaBloom insisted I couldn't use MobileLime to buy things. She thought it was merely a way to record my purchases so KaBloom could grant me rewards as my spending increased. Paying with the phone? That would leave her register short at the end of the day, she said.

I persisted, and tried to explain, but she stood her ground, and quickly the situation became ridiculous. Someone behind me was waiting. Unwilling to make a flower-buying commuter late for her train, I dropped my pleas, plunked down cash, and left.

Hmmm.

Mobile Lime also suffer from the classic chicken and egg syndrome that I wrote about. You can't get enough merchants on board until you can show that you have lots of potential users. And users aren't interested until they know they can use the system with lots of merchants.

Unless a payment system can crack this classic conundrum, they'll never succeed, even if the usability is sorted out. This is not a nice-to-have in the business plan, but essential to success.

I know how I'd do it. How would you?

On the plus side, Mobile Lime have built into their service a merchant discount and loyalty tool:

Most attractive are the discounts many MobileLime merchants offer in exchange for being able to track your spending. I got two freshly made smoothies for a total of just $1.09 thanks to the combination of two such deals.

This gives the potential user a reason to use Mobile Lime, though I'm not convinced it's a strong enough reason to overcome the violation of Buckley's Law. I'd guess that many of these discounts are funded by Mobile Lime themselves actually, though there's nothing wrong with that, as a short term marketing cost.

Longer term, someone has to create, organise and co-ordinate all the stores' local marketing programmes and that'll become a problem in itself. My experience suggests that retailers will rely on Mobile Lime to do the running in the next 3 - 5 years, which will also be difficult to scale. If users are using Mobile Lime primarily because of the offers and the offers don't happen.....you see the problem.

The other potential glitch was that the system itself didn't work several times, which the company claimed was down to switching computer systems for 20 minutes. Now, please don't get me wrong - I have worked with technology for many years and I know that systems crash, upgrades must happen and things do go wrong. I also know that you should avoid live demo's.

But if you've got a live payment system, you need back up and contingency to make sure that this simply can't happen. Imagine the chaos if this were a popular payment method and the system went down on a busy Saturday in December? I also think that loss of service on the very day that a journo was testing it and in a 20 minute window when he was trying to make a payment was either incredibly unlucky or symptomatic of a bigger problem than they are admitting to, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

In terms of results, so far Mobile Lime have signed up 80 merchants (most of whom seem pretty small) and 10,000 users. You could argue that this is just a test phase and in fact, they claim to be about to increase this "dramatically" with several nationwide additions to the merchant network. But I guess they would say that, wouldn't they?

However, unless the company can improve the transaction complexity and time, I have to say I'd be surprised if a large offline retailer would take this on. Their Ops people would never approve something that slows down shop throughput significantly.

So, is there anything here to make me move away from my "Change or Die" gauntlet? What do you think?

In fairness to Mobile Lime, this is an insanely difficult product offering to get right. But the prize for the winner in mobile payments is more than worth the effort.

Too Many Mouths To Feed

It seems sometimes like news is very streaky. The last few weeks brought lots of stuff on mobile TV. This week it seems to be music's turn, so bear with me. Following yesterday's post on dual-delivery systems carrying dual charges as well, comes a story on MocoNews highlighting the difficulty carriers are setting up for themselves in the mobile music download space. Long story short, the carriers want to get paid from downloads, too, making it nearly impossible to compete on price with wired download stores' $1 per song. There's just too many hands grabbing for too small a piece of pie.

Operators assume that people will pay more for mobile downloads because of "convenience", by which they mean you can download songs from anywhere. I seriously doubt that's a strong enough motivation for people to overcome the inconvenience of browsing through a download shop on a handset and pay more on top of it. Think about buying a ringtone through a carrier portal or something similar, then compare that to browsing the iTunes Music Store -- because that's how consumers will think. Why go through a difficult process and pay more, when for a short wait, you can find what you want more easily and pay less at home, then just transfer it to your phone?

Well, that's assuming that you're not caught in the middle of some DRM lock-in, of course, but I think you get my point.

Location Based Tourism Study

In my lonely vigil supporting Location Based Services, I came across this interesting, if a little dry, article about LBS, tourism and hotels in Hospitality Net.

The basic idea is that hotels will be in a prime position to promote LBS hotel concierge services to tourists (which includes business travellers in this definition). Therefore, they can also influence what these services might be. The study was conducted among only 323 tourists in Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland, so we should be careful about extrapolating this to a worldwide audience. But the conclusions are nonetheless interesting, if a little unsurprising.

Here's the main chart.

The two audiences most likely to take up services are traditional business travellers and "techie male travellers", who are more likely to have PDAs or smartphones and are used to getting information online.

But, for me, the most promising element about the study is that no one seems to question IF people want LBS concierge services. It's more of a question of WHAT they want and WHO will use them initially.

I think we can also take what services they think they say they want with a big pinch of salt. The interesting applications have yet to emerge for LBS, so they end up choosing those that they can imagine a use for today.

For instance, anyone who has ever traveled alone on business knows that eating on your own is a pretty boring business. So social/business networking software could really come into their own here. As an aside, I've also always thought that this would be a nice opportunity for airlines and business travellers. If you complete a short online profile, they could seat you next to people you might find interesting to network with - or put you with other people who specifically didn't want to talk.

The other opportunity that seems to be missing in the hotel survey is adult services, but since Carlo is our resident porn specialist (FleshBot just lurve linking to his posts), maybe I'll leave him to explore this another time.

Juicy Fruit Goes Blogging and Gets it Soooo Wrong

Quite the most bizarre "blog" I've ever seen. I've kept returning to it all day with the kind of macabre fascination that you might have for a really bad car crash.

What do they think they're trying to do? Which agency managed to persuade this client that they understood the first thing about blogging?

Lord Hanson famously said "If you can see a bandwagon it's too late". But these guys have seen a bandwagon lumbering down the street, tried to jump on it and missed it completely.

I'm sure it won't be up for long before sanity prevails. So get your rubbernecking in while you can.

Dual Delivery, Dual Charge

It's been funny watching operators' ideas about mobile music change. First, in typical fashion, they assumed they'd make their music stores closed systems -- any music you listen to on your phone will be bought from us, and any music bought from us will only be listened to on your phone. While pretty much anybody could instantly recognize that wasn't going to fly, it took operators a bit to catch on. The next groundbreaking realization was that people might actually want to listen to music they already own on their mobile phones -- again, what a surprise. While there's a lot more that needs changing, least of which the problems DRM causes, I guess we can take some solace in the fact that they're learning, no matter how slowly.

One significant "innovation" was dual-delivery mobile download systems, where a user that buys a song from either a mobile or Web store gets it delivered both to their mobile device and to their PC, letting them use it both places. Sounds good enough, but some carriers still manage to find a way to mess it up.

Vodafone Germany is touting its download service, which features dual-delivery. It's already at a disadvantage to rival services -- its songs cost 1.49 euro, compared to what seems to be a relatively standard price of .99 euro. The real devil is in the details, though: "Depending on your tariff, additional connection charges may be payable for surfing in the portal and for the download." So on top of the 1.49, there's traffic charges too? That's pretty ridiculous.

This has always been a problem with third-party content, but this is on an operator's own system. Data charges are still problematic because it's hard for users to figure out exactly what things are costing them. So when downloads are already 50 euro-cents more than competitors before a mystery traffic charge, don't be surprised if they're unpopular.