LONDON -If you are passing by London at the start of October, make sure you don't miss out on DroidCon 2011, taking place at the Islington Design Centre on the 6th and 7th of October.
This is the UK's largest Android-only development event taking place this year and will include some big names in the Android world. The first day features a Bar Camp and Developer Camp. The second day will be a conference day with presentations from Android experts worldwide.These include Richard Hyndman and Nick Butcher from Google and Mark Murphy from CommonsWare.
The Super Early Bird tickets are now sold out, but you can still grab some Early Bird discounted tickets at 150 GBP.
There were will be plenty of goodies and related discounts for attendees, including a special delegate discount on my book, "Location Aware Applications" published by Manning (US). Check back here soon for the discount code and more updates on the event!
It’s that time of the year again when mobilists around the world prick their ears to detect the crescendo of rumours concerning the 2010 edition of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Changing times
Globally, mobile is growing at a steady pace, with emerging economies taking the slack from mature ones, smarter phones encouraging greater use of data connections over the 3G and 4G networks and new services (like mobile money) coming on stream to create more captivating services on mobile.
So, why the gloomy faces on the mobile operators’ executives? Because times are a changin'. What began as an easily shrugged-off trend, ‘openness’, has seriously destabilised the comfortable world mobile operators were operating in. Threats of ‘dumb pipes’ loom large on the horizon. What I’ve referred to as ‘Open Playgrounds’ back in 2008 are now becoming the norm. Increasingly, operators find themselves at a loss to come up with a compelling consumer proposition that they can control (control being the key to monetisation). Meantime, that much loved measure, ARPU, continues on its gradual downward decline. Not the best situation to be in if you need to upgrade creaking 3G infrastructure to ‘gold standard’ 4G or LTE architecture by investing billions of euros.
Much more than hardware
Where exactly is the light at the end of the tunnel? No-one is sure, but increasingly operators think they can see an Apple silhouette against that light. Because no-one has been able to engage consumers in a controlled or closed environment quite the way Apple has done with the iPhone. Hence the launch of the GSMA App Planet (it’s all about the apps) during the Congress –which is great in a kind of ‘let’s jump on the bandwagon’ sort of way, but not so great when you notice that Apple isn’t in the GSMA’s App Planet (presumably Apple’s planet orbits within a different galaxy). Still, Google will be there to let everyone know that they are serious about mobile.
Google’s presence will loom large
In fact, Google will have the biggest profile ever at the Mobile World Congress, following its NexusOne launch and also with the much anticipated Key Note by CEO Eric Schmidt. Without a doubt, Google will shake up the industry and create (as well as destroy) new market segments –what I’m not sure about, is how much they will tread on the toes of operators in doing so.
Nokia and LG absent
Even for market leaders,this is a dangerous strategy –despite agreeing with Nokia’s strategy to re-invent itself into a de-facto software provider, their manner of doing so has also meant they have eroded their market leadership in the hardware/handset market. Partly so, by annoying operators with an attempt to create their own controlled system (remember, this is what operators consider part of their territory). It should come as no surprise therefore, that Nokia will be absent from the show,as is the case with LG. They too plan to create their own controlled App store and ecosystem.
Let Innovation Take Centre Stage
When the going gets tough, the tough start innovating! Now is a great moment for new services and companies to test out new concepts and shake up the industry at the grass-roots. We already saw at the CES Show last month some great innovations in the area of 3D technology. I expect Augmented Reality to be one of the key innovations buzzed about at the MWC (if it isn’t, something will be amiss!). If you are visiting the show, I recommend you check out the Innovation Zone and see where the services of tomorrow will be born.
AdMob announced today in a mailing to its customers that it was being acquired by Google for $750m.
"After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our developer and publisher partners by:
Building even more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.
Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.
Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our publishers."
said Omar Hamoui, from AdMob in his email earlier today.
But what does this mean for mobile advertising?
Google's logic for making the deal is to ramp up its position in mobile advertising, seeing that growth in this ad market is likely to be higher than in traditional Pc-based web. It also can be interpreted as a sign that its own AdSense product for mobile was not sufficient in itself to give Google the edge in this market.
Where Google can really innovate is in the area of location based advertising on mobile, by stepping in the gap being left wide open by all the big mobile ad networks (who have capability to deploy LBS ads but lack the commitment from other members of the mobile ecosystem). It is no secret that Google has the best generic mapping product in the market (which was also skilfully deployed on mobile).
By combining its current capabilities with its web know-how and AdMob's mobile ad network, Google is now in a great position to transform the market and can deploy quickly, thanks to its Android platform.
I will be speaking next week at the Informa Mobile Location Services 09 Conference in London and one of the key subjects I was asked to present on was privacy.
One of the key issues has to do with semantics:what do we mean by privacy exactly? How private is private? My argument is that the privacy sphere, like it or not, is getting smaller and smaller for most people. Over time, the level of intrusion that each person is willing to accept in their 'private' sphere is also increasing.
I like to point to the example of Google Street View, as this is a full on example of a significant intrusion into everyone's private sphere which was accepted and ultimately embraced (I recommend you see also the example of the Japanese mashup of a Virtual Jog using Street View).
The other key issue is that legislation is dictating the approach that mobile social networks that use location should use. This is the key concept of 'opt-in', such that it is always down to consumer choice whether or not anyone has access to the location of a mobile subscriber.
This is fine as a preventive measure to assuage the public's fear of location based services in the interim period during which the key players (like Google) educate and inform about the benefits of location based services.
But ultimately, it is not the way in which 'push' services, somewhat of a marketing mecca in terms of delivering the right marketing message to the right customer in the right place, will be achieved.
PARIS-Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product & User Experience at Google, gave an insightful view on various challenges facing both Google and its competitors in terms of Search.
Marissa pointed out that there is still some way to go to improve search (harking back to a previous interview she had given where she had stated that 90% of the work on search has been completed but that the last 10% was the tricky part).
One area where Google is looking to improve its game is in personalised search, with the recent launch of the Google Search Wiki seeking to test the waters in this area.
Another area, is search through devices other than the PC, notably through a mobile phone and, linked to this,voice-activated search.
Loic le Meur asked Marissa whether she thought any improvements in video search were in the pipeline. She answered that improvements are imminent in detecting voice within video and searching on this. However, graphic recognition (e.g.of a face in a video) is still a few years away partly due to YouTube's success and the proliferation of video content on the web.
Finally, and critically for companies in the LBS space, Marissa stated that "local search is one of the big opportunities in 2009".
PARIS-LeWeb08 managed to pull off a great event in a time of economic uncertainty, and despite the heavy atmosphere associated with the global financial system, it offered rays of hope as well as advice on how to weather the storm.
Many industry heavy hitters, from Marissa Mayer at Google to Marc Simoncini of Meetic, Maurice Levy of Publicis and Martin Varsavsky, serial entrepreneur, gave their take on future plans and opportunities in the market.
Marc Simoncini gave a very entertaining talk on different dating habits he had to consider when launching his service in different countries in Europe. For example, in Italy, women were not overt in their dating habits as they normally 'had to ask permission from their brother to date' while in Sweden, the Meetic offer of free membership for women was met with a 'why should it be free for us' reaction.
A friend of mine pointed me to the video of Kevin Kelly's (Editor of Wired) presentation at the TED conference and his 'The One' vision is well worthy of being shared further.
His premise is that the web (not the internet) is only 5000 days old and has grown to an amazing level in that time in terms of complexity and functionality (and the amazing thing, he says, is that no-one is amazed).
He then looks at the future 5000 days of the web, which will be the 'Internet of Things'. He envisages total personalisation of the web in the future but at a cost of providing 'it' with total transparency of personal information...if you forget your phone number in the future, you will only have to google for it...
The future web will be smarter (and incorporate AI), will anticipate what we do and will be more ubiqitous.Everything will go through the web or be saved by the web. Scaringly, today the sum total in processing power (or 'intelligence') of the web is equal to that of one human brain but in 30 years' time, the intelligence of the web will exceed that of the whole of humanity put together...
In terms of mobile web, Kelly's vision puts portability of the web high on the agenda and connectivity everywhere -implying a dominant role for portable connected devices, mobile or otherwise.
I recommend you take a look at the video and judge for yourselves...
According to the Wall Street Journal, the first of the new Google phones developed on the Android platform, will become available by the end of 2008, at least 3 months behind the original planned launch.
Taiwanese firm HTC is expected to be the first manufacturer to release a G-phone and will be met with high expectations, given the claims by Google that Android-powered phones will make the internet as easy to use on a mobile phone as it is on a PC.
Google's aspirations to become a leading force in telecommunications should not be under-estimated -via the Android Developer Challenge, the internet powerhouse is tempting developers into its fold by offering $10m in prize money to savvy programmers able to come up with the best applications.
Android consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications and is available under an open-source license, which has been praised for setting a new industry standard.
However, detractors comment that Google is not moving fast enough to be taken seriously and that its partner line-up for Android is missing some of the key industry players, notably Vodafone and Nokia.
Madrid-based Tuenti is making waves in the Spanish-speaking social networking space. Billed as the 'Hispanic Facebook', it has managed to register the biggest Spanish-based web community despite still only having a beta-version available of its platform.
The company is playing coy with the figures, but suggests that it already has exceeded Facebook's 380,000 Spanish members.Co-founder Zaryn Dentzel states that Tuenti emphasizes the privacy element of its members above any aggressive growth target...yet, the company has proved extremely capable at expanding its membership. It now serves over 70 million page views every day and the company is already experimenting with advertising.
Tuenti states that even though they will rely on advertising for their revenue, that 'it will not look like normal advertising' but instead will be intergrated within the normal user experience on the website.
The company is now planning to roll-out a mobile version of their website and has recruited a Swede to handle this task and who will join Tuenti's other 18 employees. Possibly the biggest coup (as yet not officially announced) is that Bernardo Hernandez, Marketing Director at Google Spain, will be taking a 1 year sabbatical in order to take over business development at the ambitious start-up. He will join Rupert Van Millinguen, another former Googler, already installed at the company.
Interesting developments lie ahead, particularly as the company builds its mapping capability and rolls out Location Based Services...
BARCELONA -I attended a great seminar on Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress, where various panellists presented and then debated their view on LBS's for 2008, including Nokia's Michael Halbherr and Googles' Gummi Hafsteinsson.
Nokia kicked off the session by stating their expectation to ship 35m handsets with GPS in 2008 and that all N-series will come equipped with in-built GPS. Michael also stated that increasingly, Nokia is looking to incorporate a compass for navigation within their handsets (making the vision outlined in my earlier post on 'Point to Discover' one step closer).
A key note from Nokia was that LBS were 'really about the pedestrian experience', a point that is sometimes lost amongst the noise surrounding LBS.
Onwards to Gummi from Google, who emphasised that for LBS's to work they need to get 3 things right: Openness, Comprehensiveness and Juxtaposition of Data.
Other key items discussed were: the need for educating the consumer on the usage of GPS functionality and for hybrid solutions that can ensure location coverage in all situations (GPS outdoors and Wi-Fi hotspots indoors) as well as the trend towards 3D mapping, with the height of buildings in urban areas being an important factor in adding relevance to a LBS.
Finally, the panellists concurred that in the same way as Web 2.0 was all about the comunity effect, so will the success of future LBS applications be determined by community-generated content.
Shortly before releasing their latest results showing a slowdown in advertising sales in the fourth quarter of 2007, Google announced the launch of their 'new' mobile search engine (or, should we say, the improved version of the previous one).
Google says that with the new search service, mobile phone users will get results that best fit what they're looking for, with search results combined from different bodies of information, so users don't need to sift through both mobile and regular web results, or specify their search type. Instead, Google will search through the whole web, mobile web, news articles, local business listings, and image index to get the information needed and then provide the most relevant results. A search for cats, for example, provides links to photos of cats as well as web pages.
Google's new mobile search also improves the local search experience. By remembering a user's recent search locations, the new service is said to provide relevant local results in subsequent searches-no need to retype the location every time. Once a user has entered a location, searches for weather or restaurants, for example, provide information tailored specifically to that user's location. The service is now available in the UK, France, Germany and Canada. It has been available in the US since March last year.
It is claimed that fewer clicks will now be necessary to access meaningful search results on mobile devices, which is a welcome improvement. The jury is still out as to how effective the new search engine is, but while we may not be there in terms of ultimate functionality, it is clearly a step in the right direction. Bizarrely, we still have to type in "http://mobile.google.com" instead of just "http://google.mobi" or "http://m.google.com", but that's a different story...
PALO ALTO (CA) - No matter which part of the mobile community you question, the same issue keeps on popping up: mobile users need a simple, effective browser on their handset to get the most out of the mobile web.
Wake3, a Silicon Valley start-up, sets out to deliver just this. Their vision: 'to deliver a single standard across all the world's phones' via their Webkit, an open source web browser engine that received a warm welcome from the developer community last year.
Wake3 is now planning to launch a beta version of their browser 'in the next few months'. Barry Andrews and Daniel Zucker, both Stanford PhD's, recently announced they already had a top tier European operator lined up and that they would be looking to kick off their first financing round shortly (they are currently on bootstrap financing).
Both company founders will be present at the Mobile World Congress next month in Barcelona and no doubt will attract an eager crowd. At long last, simple and visually-pleasing web browsing on wireless devices could become a reality for all those non-iPhone users out there.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is excited about the future of Location-Based Services (LSB): "...location-based advertising will be a very good business and useful to the end user". This was his comment at a panel discussion held at the WEF in Davos last week (see Andrew Grill's blog for his excellent post analysing the key messages of the session). Many share Schmidt's excitement about the prospects for LBS's, albeit few are clear as to exactly how and when these prospects will materialise.
One firm that could be positioned to benefit from growth in this area is Boston-based uLocate, owner of the 'Where' GPS widget platform, capable of automatically porting programs onto GPS-capable handsets and publishing them on US-based networks with access to millions of users.
uLocate is hoping for location-based widgets developed on their platform to experience the same kind of viral growth that Facebook experienced for some of its applications.Already a number of practical widgets have emerged, ranging from the 'Zipcar Car Sharing' widget allowing members to locate and view the nearest Zipcars on their mobile screen as well as instantly connect to Zipcar's reservation system to select a nearby vehicle, to the 'Nearbio' widget, enabling users to quickly find the closest biodiesel pumps.
In addition, uLocate also offers "BuddyBeacon", a geo-social networking service that is reminiscent of Plazes (but however lacks the geo-tracker functionality of Ipoki, for example).
If uLocate's platform takes off within the developer community, then we could see the company expanding outside of the US and take advantage of the popularity of its platform to access an ever-growing LBS market.Its partnership with Twitter to track users' whereabouts could also fuel growth for the company.And for a subscription fee of $3 a month, uLocate appears to be delivering value to its US-based end-users.
It already raised $11m im venture capital in May 2007 in an over-subscribed financing round, so access to funding could further power its dash to grab global market share in 2008.
BARCELONA 08/01/2008 - Interesting session yesterday night at FIRSTTUESDAY SPAIN where Bango CEO Ray Anderson gave some background to his entrepreneurial adventure at the company he founded in 1999 with €1.5m of his own money. He was very open in admitting that the venture required far more time and money to take off than he expected (he is still due to make an overall profit for the business) but that he was confident he would be in a position to exit via a buyout from a bigger group within 2 years should he wish to do so. The often repeated point about having to grow the company above all else in the first few years was backed up by Roberto Fernandez, founder of Spanish start-up Aztive Mobile (both Bango and Aztive will be exhibiting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month).
Ray voiced the opinion (that is being repeated by several commentators) that mobile operators are becoming less important, increasingly allowing new companies to enter the fray and offer services independently of the operator restrictions.As operators are more concerned with protecting their revenue streams than with competing between each other, they have traditionally adopted a 'wait-and-see' attitude and jumped on the bandwagon at the last moment.
He stated that it was an odd coincidence indeed that only once handsets were placed on the market with free wi-fi browsing capability that operators reduced their data transfer rates or how only once handsets with in-built GPS were launched that operators agreed to the release of location-related data for groups of customers.
He also stated that monetising revenues from the mobile web will remain an issue until operators are in a posiition to claim a substantial chunk of revenues from add-on services and he called for a Paypal-style new entrant to create a new global standard for payments that will stimulate new revenue models and open up new earning opportunities.
While talking about mobile site design, he stressed the need for developers to adapt web pages to the reality of the mobile screen (obvious but still not widely acknowledged!) with vertical navigation, simplified browsing, removal of flash-type graphics etc. Interestingly for me, he did not mention the whole dot.mobi movement spearheaded by the consortium of Nokia, Telefonica, GSMA etc. which is odd, as dot.mobi aims to do just what Ray preaches-viz.adapt web pages for mobile and create a 'gold standard' for mobile.
Ray also called for a simple and universally-accepted browser to be developed for mobile (i.e. Google for mobile) and circumvent some of the cumbersome browsers that are around today which reduce the quality of the user experience.
PARIS-LeWeb08 managed to pull off a great event in a time of economic uncertainty, and despite the heavy atmosphere associated with the global financial system, it offered rays of hope as well as advice on how to weather the storm.
