We've mentioned Amp'd Mobile before, but since they gave me another look-see at their phones and services at CTIA, I figure it's worth re-hashing. As some of you already know, Amp'd Mobile is made for the younger set of cellphone consumers. Some of the major things that's setting them apart is a completely customized UI that is heavily focused on entertainment, as well as a large content database that will include live event coverage (like concerts), short video snippets, and so on. One thing was clear: they are not aiming to be another MobiTV. According to them, most young consumers would have already seen TV shows on TiVo, or on the Internet, and all they would be supplying would be supplements to that experience. For example, instead of a Desperate Housewives episode, you'll get interviews with the cast about that episode. There were other features like downloadable wallpapers and ringtones that didn't interest me too much, but I'll admit I was very intrigued by the UI's built-in ability to blog and check your RSS feeds on-the-fly (!!).

The first phone that they're rolling out with Kyocera is the Jet, seen here. It's a CDMA phone, with push-to-talk walkie-talkie features. The Jet is EVDO-capable, able to show 30 fps video, has a built-in VGA camera, and supports up to 2GB of memory. Word is that the phone itself will cost $99. As for the service fees, the Amp'd rep says that they're following the cable subscription model: there'll be the basic voice package, and consumers can add on a data package, a premium content package (like Sports), and even some On Demand items (like a music video). Pricing wasn't available yet but it'll probably be out later this year.

I was also told there'll be another Amp'd Mobile phone coming out from Kyocera called , and a Motorola phone codenamed "Hollywood" (though the name is subject to change).

12:53:15 PM    comment   

I firmly believe one of the things about Skype that is frequently misunderstood is what makes it special. Many media articles tend to focus on the people (“lanky forrin folk”) and the product. But what makes Skype unique is really how it is adopted.

A department store sells a unique aggregation of goods. The trousers are the same as in the fashion store next door. The scented candles no better or worse than those from the boutique candle shop. So the products are pretty standard. Likewise, the standard goods were manufactured in standard ways. They are sold in a standard way — just pick one off the shelf, walk up to the counter and lay down your credit card. (This isn’t always so — for example, Argos in the UK has its catalogue retail stores where the goods are picked for you from its warehouse while you wait.) The department store is financed in standard ways, marketed using standard techniques.

So it is the distribution of the goods that is what makes a department store special. And the same applies to Skype.

In essence the Skype product feature set has never differed much from instant messaging and open source competitors. At least when viewed as a simple feature ‘tick list’. What Skype has done uniquely well, though, is to tailor every part of the product experience for ease of adoption: from investigation to use to recommendation onwards.

This could glibly be dismissed as ‘viral marketing’, but that doesn’t do justice to the depth of their achievement. For the term ‘viral marketing’ doesn’t explain how everything in the web site and product is oriented towards getting people on board with the minimum of obstruction. The term ‘viral marketing’ merely focuses on the moment of contagation.

To find out how well Skype’s doing, you just need to take a look at some of the competition. Let’s examine the download experience of AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, and contrast them to that of Skype.

(Apologies in advance for the layout mess of this article; I just don’t have the energy to do some fancy CSS to put borders around the images and scale them better.)

12:52:23 PM    comment   

DoCoMo has developed their first mobile handset to receive terrestrial digital broadcasting and analog TV in target="_blank">here. [Wireless Watch Japan]
12:43:44 PM    comment   

We have signal. Mobile digital terrestrial TV broadcasting hits the wireless airwaves in Japan April 1st, 2006. Japanese telecom carriers and commercial broadcasters will be ready to start simulcasts of hybrid terrestrial digital programming and data feeds to cellular phones in just a few months. "Our handsets will be ready to comply with that date and we are targeting March/April 2006 release of mobile digital terrestrial TV phones," NTT DoCoMo spokesperson Tomoko Tsuda told WWJ.

No April Fools prank, the start up date was announced by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Vodafone also confirmed to WWJ they should make the April deadline. "We are gearing up production to have handsets ready in time for the start of this new digital TV service," says Vodafone spokesperson Matthew Nicholson. Details on when other broadcasters will start mobile programming and what contents they plan to spin to mobile should be available soon. [Wireless Watch Japan]
12:42:07 PM    comment   

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's technology strategist, has an interesting post about the ways technology and process standardization influence competitive advantage. He points out how the Internet is turning information technology from a fragmented, proprietary resource into a standardized, shared one. As IT becomes a universal (and commoditized) infrastructure, it necessarily loses its power as a business differentiator ("IT doesn't matter," in my terms) but at the same time it increases its value as a platform for innovation. A company no longer gets advantage from distinctive IT, in other words, but from the way it builds new products and services on top of the shared infrastructure. "The Internet," he writes, "showed everybody how much more valuable IT becomes when you can connect and access everything regardless of vendors ... The more standardized the underlying technologies and services available to a business, the more critical innovation becomes as a way for the business to avoid becoming just another commodity provider."

Wladawsky-Berger then goes on to suggest that the same thing will happen with the standardization of business processes. He argues that "we need to evolve from today's labor-intensive and one-of-a-kind approach to building business solutions, and embrace methodologies based on science and engineering, using sophisticated tools and disciplined processes, much as happened during the Industrial Revolution. And, as was the case with the Industrial Revolution, we need to standardize those processes where differentiation brings little or no incremental value, so as to avoid the huge inefficiencies involved in re-inventing the same process over and over again. We can then apply our energies to innovating around those processes and business models that bring true differentiation and value to the business."

I think this is much too rosy a view. I agree with Wladawsky-Berger that as more and more business processes become encoded in software, they will become more standardized across companies. Everyone will be able to more easily adopt "best practices." But I think this will on balance tend to corrode competitive advantages rather than provide a platform for creating new ones. I discuss this phenomenon in my book Does IT Matter?, in a chapter titled "The Universal Strategy Solvent": "Because IT is so flexible in its application and so deeply entwined with business processes - particularly the informational processes that have supplanted physical processes at the core of modern economies - it can corrode advantages not just in one or a few areas, but across many aspects of a company's business. Any traditional advantages in prosecuting a particular activity or process, from setting type to designing componentry to providing customer service, will tend to dissipate as that activity or process is automated. As businesses adopt similar systems, best practices turn into universal practices, and performance converges."

Businesses are made of processes, and the more standardized those processes become, the less room companies have to maneuver in setting themselves apart from rivals. Wladawsky-Berger implies that standardization will only occur for those processes "where differentiation brings little or no incremental value," but that's hard to believe. Indeed, from an economics standpoint, the greatest value will come from standardizing processes where there are currently large discrepancies in performance - that's where bringing every company up to best-practice levels will generate the greatest productivity gains throughout industries. And that's where process outsourcers that are able to offer best-practice solutions - like IBM, say - will make the most money.

Toward the end of his post, Wladawsky-Berger writes that "just as the Internet proved to be a highly democratic platform available to lots and lots of people, the availability of standard business processes in a competitive marketplace means that small and mid-size businesses can have access to many of the same advanced technologies and capabilities once available only to large companies, thus helping them better compete with those companies." That's exactly right, but it's important to remember that the more level the playing field, the harder it is to seize competitive advantage - or the outsized profits that competitive advantage confers.

12:35:56 PM    comment   

I've been laboring under the belief that Microsoft's tardiness in enhancing its Internet Explorer browser was a mistake, opening the door for alternatives like Firefox. But at a dinner recently, one of my tablemates offered a very different explanation. Microsoft has deliberately avoided enhancing Explorer, he argued, because it doesn't want it to get too good. As long as browsers are hampered by poor responsiveness and incompatibility problems, they're less likely to provide an alternative user interface for a broad range of applications. Microsoft, in this view, wants the browser to be good enough for viewing web pages, but not so good that it takes over the desktop.

I certainly have some doubts about this thesis, but it seems to be backed up by a new story in Fortune. In interviews with the magazine, Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer and director of platform strategy Charles Fitzgerald both went out of their way to pooh-pooh the browser's ability to serve as a front end for applications. What should become the default interface for business apps, they argued, is Microsoft Office. As Fortune's David Kirkpatrick reports: "Ballmer said the browser just isnít good enough as an interface to corporate information. 'As people want to view information, comment on it, mark it up, and make it pretty, then you want to do that in Office,' he says. Added Fitzgerald in a follow-up e-mail: 'The browser is a great way to access information, but a pretty crummy tool for acting on information. It is basically read-only.'" According to the magazine, "Ballmer said Microsoft wants Office to become the front-end portal to just about every business application."

Transforming Office from a set of by-now mundane office applications into a common interface for enterprise applications is a smart move for Microsoft. It's probably the best way for the company to maintain - or even expand - its traditional hold over the user interface in business. But it also exposes conflicts in Microsoft's business. If the company wants to maintain the dominance of Internet Explorer, it's going to have to dramatically improve the program, which it's promising to do with the rollout of Windows Vista next year. If it doesn't push Explorer's capabilities forward, it could face the worst case scenario: the browser emerges as the default front end for applications while Explorer is displaced as the leading browser.

It's in Microsoft's interest, in other words, to enhance the browser, but it's also in the company's interest to keep the browser "a pretty crummy tool," as Fitzgerald put it. In a very real sense, Office and Explorer are now competitors.

12:34:45 PM    comment   

Softricity, a Boston company delivering software applications over the Internet, has put together a nice little film about the transformation of software into a utility service. Check it out.

12:34:11 PM    comment   

As we shift to a new model of software delivery, software companies are heavily promoting their "platforms." As with so many terms in the IT world, the definition of "platform" hinges on the interests of the seller. In some cases, a platform is simply a suite of applications that draw on the same data pool. In other cases, it's a set of interfaces and tools that outside developers can use to add features, extensions and elaborations to a vendor's core applications. In still other cases, a platform is little more than a marketing concept, an umbrella brand for disparate products. In all cases, though, the platforms being promoted share one important characteristic: they're proprietary. The vendor owns the platform and, in one way or another, collects tolls from those who use it.

Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies, a supplier of one of the leading software-as-a-service applications for managing customer service, thinks the "platform fetish," as he puts it, is dangerous. He shared with me a brief essay he's written that attacks platforms like Oracle's Fusion, SAP's NetWeaver, Microsoft's .NET, and Salesforce.com's AppExchange as either "global hegemony" strategies to "exercise total control over their customersí computing environments" or "'marketectures' that exist purely to rationalize bad acquisitions." Grand platforms, in his view, run counter to the real interests of corporate customers, who simply "need business solutions that actually help them compete and succeed in the real world."

He underscores his point with an analogy: "How would you feel if your mechanic handed you a 125-piece wrench set rather than actually fixing your car? What if another mechanic then walked up to you with his tools and started arguing with the first guy about whose tools were better? You sure wouldnít feel like either of them was going to help you with your problem, would you? Yet thatís exactly what software vendors are doing today as they engage in their platform wars ñ much to the detriment of their customers and the industry."

Gianforte's argument provides a good counterweight to platform hype. It's hard not to see the big software vendors' platform strategies as counterrevolutionary ploys to partition the open Internet - the uber platform - into lucrative fiefdoms. On the other hand, platforms have advantages. They can make it easier for users to share data among applications (although XML and web services promise to make this advantage less important), and by opening up proprietary software to outsiders, they can lead to useful innovations. The latter benefit seems to be the real goal of an effort like AppExchange, which won't bring about a wholesale transformation of enterprise applications but may well enhance Salesforce.com's core CRM software. When I questioned Gianforte about this, he tempered his rhetoric a bit. He granted that AppExchange is "an interesting experiment," but questioned whether "any serious software firm [will] really deliver their solution via someone elseís 'platform' where most of the application revenue goes to that other third party. If it works, it would be the first time in the history of the software industry." That may be true, but it's not only the "serious software firm" that produces useful code.

Ultimately, Gianforte believes, the on-demand utility model for IT delivery will combine with open-source software to render platforms irrelevant. As the underlying IT infrastructure becomes a commodity that users neither own nor care about, "the need to create a proprietary technology platform as a competitive differentiator" disappears. "MySQL replaces Oracle. Linux replaces Windows. TomCat and JBOSS replace Websphere and NetWeaver. Vendors that are still trying to differentiate themselves in these commodity businesses are clearly headed in the wrong direction. Yet that is exactly what platform vendors continue to do."

12:33:34 PM    comment   

At the TPRC policy research conference last weekend, I listened to a presentation about digital mobile broadcast (DMB) service in South Korea. DMB means television on your mobile phone. It's up and running today in Korea, with plans to expand the system to include local as well as national channels. The audience was skeptical. One questioner wondered aloud whether any customers would actually pay for such a thing.

Well, guess what? Mobile TV is going to be big. In fact, it's already happening here in the US. A company called MobiTV is sending TV programming to mobile phones over cellular data networks. This isn't nearly as good as the full-scale mobile broadcasting they have in Korea, and it's only available on a few phones from a few carriers. Nonetheless, customers seem to be responding. There are already 500,000 subscribers to MobiTV's service here in the US.

Let's see now. 500,000 subscribers at $10/month means a $60 million annual revenue run-rate. That's not chump change. And it's nothing compared to the numbers we'll see once real digital mobile broadcasting hits these shores. Qualcomm is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the infrastructure for mobile TV, and other companis are as well.

While the telcos' IPTV platforms get all the attention from regulators and the business press, I suspect true alternatives to conventional television like digital mobile broadcasting and the Internet-based platforms that companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Brightcove are building will have more of an impact sooner on transforming the TV industry.

12:32:33 PM    comment   

DailyWireless.org does a great job of collecting the mobile and wireless numbers on their site. It’s incredible, actually, I’m incapable of absorbing the sheer amount of links and stats they post daily, mostly having to do with wireless infrastructure. Definitely check it out if you want to drink from a firehose of wireless information.

I’ve been meaning to point out some numbers that have flown by in the past few days. The first is the breakdown of mobile subscribers by year end 2005 by country. Those are pretty useful to have around. I didn’t realize the U.S. was going to break 200 million subs by the end of the year. Pretty cool.

The thing that really blew my mind was the predicted growth of WiMax and WiBro by the end of the decade, compared with cellular growth: Where 3G cellular services is going top 750 million users by 2010, and total numbers of mobile users will be near 3 billion, WiMax will only reach just over 12 million, and WiBro just over 8 million.

Wow. There’s so much hype involved with WiMax and WiBro, I just assumed - as many people do I think - that the numbers would be higher. It doesn’t look like it. And though WiFi hotspots will continue to grow and play a role in consumer devices for sure, I think as anyone who’s played with UMTS or EVDO can tell you, doing basic surfing, emailing or IMing over 3G is really great and takes away a lot of the impetus to mess with local WiFi connections. Dell has even announced integrated 3G in their latest Laptops. Look for this trend to continue and WiFi become less important for mobile connectivity going forward.

-Russ

12:19:03 PM    comment   

Click here for the 60-page Trai's report (PDF) on the performance of telecom services. [ContentSutra]
11:55:30 AM    comment