Ed Comment: This is significant -- Bitwallet is the joint venture established by DoCoMo, Sony and more than 35 banks, travel agencies, technology companies, etc. Bitwallet now has a banking license in Japan and serves as the e-money cash issuer and payment settlement operator. This investment from Intel VC -- one of the first from an outside pure-VC-capital-growth-seeking partner into the JV -- means that someone outside Japan also sees the huge potential in Felica/IC cash payments that DoCoMo and KDDI also see. [Wireless Watch Japan]
5:41:55 PM    comment   

WMP

400k

Real

400k

QT

500k

DCMX is a logical progression from the carrier's popular 'o-seifu keitai' IC-chip handsets that can store value onboard for small, daily purchases, and the launch announcement confirms DoCoMo's strategic course aiming squarely at making the network-connected phone the payment method of choice for millions of Japanese. Maybe one day something this useful will be offered by carriers elsewhere? Subscribers log in for full video (including hands-on test-drive), plus Q&A session .mp3 and our additional comments. [Wireless Watch Japan]
5:32:27 PM    comment   

I got a new Samsung ZX10 from Cingular the other day to try out the re-rollout of their American UMTS 3G services. Remember, I was one of the first people to use AT&T Wireless's 3G service a couple years ago before they got bought by Cingular. It's amusing to remember the boat-anchor I was using back then: the Motorola A845... the thing was the size of a shoe! The ZX10 is a much nicer phone, small and totally indistinguishable from other GPRS handsets. It's a real bummer my N70 doesn't work on the frequencies here in the U.S. actually, but until the government gets around to auctioning off the 2.1Ghz spectrum (if then), us GSM folk are stuck on an alternative system and have to have separate phones. The worst part is that even though AT&T was one of the first 3G networks, since then UMTS has actually been been surpassed by the CDMA carriers' EV-DO networks! Argh! But hopefully we'll see some HSDPA phones pretty soon as well (Cingular has already announced the ZX20 which uses HSDPA, for example) and finally after years of waiting, be living that true 3G dream. :-)

Anyways, I was reading my news just now and saw that Orb has re-launched their TiVo integration as a DVREverywhere.com. It used to be just a plug in, but now it seems more official. I haven't had much luck with TiVo Desktop or Orb Streaming on my new Media Center PC I bought in January, but I decided to re-download the services and see if there have been any improvements. The UIs are essentially the same, but someone fixed something somewhere, because now everything works like a charm in terms of being able to copy over TiVo videos to my PC, and then stream them over the internet.

Of course, the first thing I wanted to see was whether the vids would play on the Samsung phone. I really had my doubts - I'm not sure what type of encoding it supported, but I couldn't imagine that I'd be lucky enough for it to work "out of the box" so to speak, but guess what! It does! My personal video to my phone over 3G networks! W00t!!! It starts up immediately, looks great and even allows fast forwarding and reverse. That is out-of-control cool. Really, who needs Location Free TV or a Slingbox if you have a TiVo sitting there already? And all those $5 a month video plans? Forget it. This is awesome stuff.

All this talk of mobile video at 3GSM and CTIA started really making me wonder if it was just a bunch of marketing hoo-ha, but being able to watch my recorded programs like How Things Work streaming flawlessly to my handset? That beats 5-minute Sopranos snippets hands down, any day of the week.

Now if I could just get the frigin' address book on the handset to sync with something, I'd be psyched... ;-) My kingdom for a 3G phone in the U.S. that supports Yahoo! Go Mobile!

-Russ

5:32:00 PM    comment   

You know when I ran across the new mini site and advertising campaign for the Nokia 6101 last night, I just about choked in disbelief. You may not believe this, but Nokia's new big selling point is, "Buttons for Humans." The site animation shows how big and friendly the buttons on the phone are, how it flips ever so easily closed when you're done with it, politely and conveniently, almost smiling at you with unbounded user friendliness. My god, after seeing the ads, it would be unthinkable for a phone to be designed in any other way...

*Ahem*

Hey, I'm all for Nokia's solid entry into the flip-phone market, and I really like the new clean designs and basic colors, and I'm definitely 100% behind them embracing big usable buttons as well... But, but, but, wow! These guys have got some real cajones no? The most heinous crimes ever commited against the physical human interface we call a mobile phone keypad were perpetrated by none other than Nokia itself! The fact that they've turned around and gone 180 degrees in the other direction is wonderful, but to then market this stuff as if they weren't the main ones responsible for small, oddly shaped, insanely unusable keypads in the first place takes some real nerve, don't you think? MAN!

Okay, sure - the past is the past and Nokia has paid their dues for past design missteps... But as an owner of more than several wonky handsets sold by these guys over the past few years, I'm reticent to let them off the hook that easily. So lest we forget those oh-too-recent travesties of usability, I collected some images of the worst offenders above. Sure, the 3650's round keypad wasn't actually that bad, but the people who designed - and then approved - the 7610 keypad need to be brought out to a Finnish lake in mid winter, dumped in buck-naked, then pulled into a small, insanely hot room with other sweaty naked Finns and hit repeatedly with bundles of birch twigs until they're delirious. (Yes, I know, it'd be an extreme punishment, but that's how I feel.)

"Buttons for Humans!" From Nokia! Can you believe that?!? Next it'll be something like, "Easy to remember product names, not numbers... of course!" (Oh, how I wish...).

:-)

-Russ

[RussellBeattie.com]
5:31:28 PM    comment   

I have to say, I've fondled a few new phones lately that were just really exciting and the sole reason is because of the bright new QVGA screens they all sported. (QVGA stands for Quarter VGA, or 240x320 resolution, in case you're not hip with the lingo). I'm telling you, it makes a *huge* difference. Now that I can see the pipeline of handsets filling up with QVGA screens, I can really say without a doubt that they are going to make fundamental improvements in mobile usability and thus higher usage. It seems like there wouldn't be much difference between, say a standard 176x220 screen that many phones have today, but it's night and day. Not just because of better eye-candy, though there's lots of pros in just that alone, but because there's just so much more information you can fit on the screen, so much more subtlety you can add to graphics and widgets, and generally just a total increase in the instant satisfaction you feel when you're using the handset. People see a QVGA screen they just say "wow".

Want an example? The new iPod with video. That's a QVGA screen, and it's caused a complete industry wide landrush into portable video as a result. But the brighter, nicer screens I've seen on handsets just make the iPod look dull by comparision. Just brilliant. Now, physically, the QVGA screen could be any size. The QVGA-sized example squares above could be tiny or huge depending on your monitor... there's no way to really show you exactly the size they'd be on the phone (that I know of). Generally, the phones I've seen lately have pretty big screens (fat pixels), though I've seen others that were the same resolution but tiny as today's screens. I don't think that size is as good, but it does have the effect of enhancing the resolution (tiny pixels) and really makes the screens pop. To me though, screens that your Mom can read without her glasses is a good thing. The screens still aren't the size of Compaq PDAs or anything - just reasonable sized mobile canvases on which to draw your information.

Play around with it yourself to see. Create a web page with a div that has hard-coded height and width, and then make the font 8 or 10 point (about the size of a phone's font) and see how much text you can put inside that rectangle. It's a surprising amount of info, actually. And there's enough room to add in navigation and GUI elements to a page, without making it feel cramped as well.

And again, the iPod has shown that there's an appetite for mobile video in that resolution too - the guys at Modeo are geniuses for using that same screen size and resolution (down to the millimeter) as the basis for their mobile video phone. And like I said when I first talked about that device, I think the wide screen format might be great for browsing the mobile web as well. We'll have to wait and see (as it also depends on the ability of the handset's web browser), but it seems like a real no-brainer to me. No matter what, I think QVGA could have as big an impact on the mobile market as color screens and cameras did just a couple years ago, and that's pretty great.

-Russ

[RussellBeattie.com]
5:24:37 PM    comment   

Heh. No sooner than I write about how QVGA is going to make a huge change in the marketplace, I read this morning that Vodafone Japan (soon to be Softbank/Yahoo!) has just launched the Sharp VGA phone - the 904SH - we read about during 3GSM. This is pretty interesting, as for some reason I had it in my mind that launch would be a bit farther out. The fact that it's available now changes some things in my mind. I mean, hey - just because a cool new phone in Japan was launched (with other bene's like GPS and a 3.2 megapixel camera) hardly means that it'll show up in your local phone store in Kansas tomorrow, but it *does* mean that the clock has started ticking, and the lag between the advanced Asian mobile markets (Japan, Korea) and the West is arguably getting shorter.

I think that I'm still confident in predicting that QVGA will be the sweet spot for mobile displays in the mid-range for the next few years, but a phone with a VGA-resolution screen does bring up the same questions in my mind about resolution vs. physical screen size. There's definitely an optimal physical size out there, I'm just not sure what it is. It's not the size of a PDA - it's just too big to lug around. It *may* be the size of O2's XDA II mini pda phone - which is basically a fat mobile, with most of the face covered by the screen. It's bigger than most of today's mobile displays, that's for sure...

Side note - this of course is the advantage of Flip phones and why I've finally come around to realizing they are more practical than candy bars. Not only do flips protect the keys from accidental dialing, protect the screen from scrapes (being in the same pocket or bag as your keys generally) and curve around your face in a more natural way so you don't have to cup your hand to be heard, but flip phones also allow the screens and keypads to be much bigger, taking up the entire section they're on. Though I got into mobiles in Europe where the candy bar still rules, and was pretty biased that way for a while (quicker access to screen, no need to deal with flipping the phone open, etc.) the benefits of the flip form factor are pretty obvious now I think.

But here's the big question in my mind: How much of mobile phone user interfaces have been affected by screen resolution, and how much have they been the result of their physical size and the fact that they're usually operated with one hand (or just your thumb generally). VGA displays on a phone doesn't change some fundamental constraints of the device: You can't just slap a Windows 95-style UI onto a 2 inch screen and hand it off to a consumer - they'd go crazy or blind (probably both). Then again, current mobile UIs are completely inefficient for displays with so many pixels to play with.

My best guess about a solution to this problem in the future is "Zooming UIs." We're already seeing this in the new Nokia S60 Browser (the one based on KHTML/WebKit). It can browse normal pages by allowing the user to zoom in and out of the page, and enables them to go back and forth by seeing thumbnail screenshots of previous pages as well. I think this UI paradigm will need to be applied to the entire interface. This is pretty interesting if you think about it, because it means that designers will really have to adopt a way of thinking that is way beyond just minimum resolutions and layouts that "flow" - they'll have to embrace a UI that has constantly changing sizes. If you put that Log In button in the corner of your screen with 8pt type, and the users happens to be zoomed all the way out for whatever reason - they'll never see it, for example.

Of course, "constantly changing" and "permanently flexible" does not exactly equate to "consumer friendly" does it? This is exactly what I'm trying to convey - there's going to be some interesting opportunities in the future in this area. The simplest thing for device makers to do will be to slap the same UI on the screen with better resolution - but it'll be the companies that really grok the opportunities that higher resolution provides that will get a competitive advantage.

-Russ

[RussellBeattie.com]
5:20:36 PM    comment   

eMarketer has some spanky graphs from the Ipsos report that came out this week about the worldwide growth of the Mobile Internet and another one from A.T.Kearney last October. It's nice to see this stuff finally got some traction in the blogosphere... it's important data after all, though nothing too surprising if you've been following the trends for a while.

The numbers on a macro level are pretty easy to see: There's roughly 1B internet users on PCs, and there's 2B mobile phone users, of whom Ipsos is saying that 28% - or 560M people - are using the mobile internet. Now, the growth of PC users is expected to remain pretty flat, but mobile subscriber numbers are expected to grow to 3B over the next 18 months to 2 years (depending on who's waving their hands excitedly). So if you take Ipsos numbers at face value, even if that percentage of mobile internet users stays flat, the massive growth of the mobile market as a whole is going to push the mobile internet users beyond the PC users within the next year or so. Even if you took the worst case scenario - PC growth booms, mobile growth softens etc., before the end of the decade, we'll at least have parity.

So you can see that it's really not a matter of if the mobile phone will become the dominant internet platform any more, but when. And that when isn't expressed in "somedays" either, I bet if you wanted to sit down with the numbers you could probably pick out the exact day. I'm thinking it'll probably be around October 3rd, 2007 (at 8:34 a.m).

:-)

-Russ

[RussellBeattie.com]
4:31:38 PM    comment   

The analyst firm that put out the silly report that the Apple iPhone was “imminent” and would launch on the Helio MVNO in the US is back with their full report on “Apple in Wireless”, and their press release really makes it sound like it’s worth the £1300 pounds they want for it.

Where to begin? How about with this paragraph:

However, Apple will embrace mobile more fully and pose a greater threat to the mobile phone industry itself - as an MVNO challenging carriers and a cellphone brand challenging handset makers. Upcoming US MVNO Helio presents a good entry strategy for Apple’s iPhone, an own-brand Apple mobile phone that is likely to be launched by the company. Indeed, the release of which is both logical and inevitable, argues visiongain.

So Apple is going to become an MVNO… by launching its phone on the network of another MVNO? As I said before, the Helio connection is a joke. One big reason — Helio’s devices feature its own UI that’s consistent across its portfolio. Would Apple, with its expertise in UI, accept that? It’s doubtful, given that the analyst behind the report calls the iPod UI “Apple’s greatest gift to the computing masses”.

I also like the two statements “visiongain estimates total shipments of over 40 million iPods” and “In 2006, visiongain expects over 40% of all cars sold in the US in 2006 to offer iPod connectivity”. It makes it sound like they’ve done some real research, rather than just find a round up of Apple’s quarterly earnings conference call, where the company helpfully disclosed both of those figures.

One final gem: “It also discusses the possibility of the iPod getting VoIP functionality and what the implications would be.” Yeow. Really, though, if the the iPhone is such a certainty and is “imminent”, why bother putting VoIP in the iPod? Seems pretty counter-intuitive. Or even more so than having VoIP in an iPod at all.

My original offer still stands — if you were thinking of dropping the $2300 or so on this report, get in touch with me first and I’ll compile all the net speculation and photoshopped images for you at a weekend sale price of $1000, and it will be about as accurate as this report.

Seriously, is this what passes for analysis these days?

4:21:04 PM    comment   

Om and Niall PodSessions‘ latest session is up. We are discussing video’s big move to the move. I decided to talk about all the stuff - streaming versus downloads and other such things in this podsession. I was going to blog it, but got busy with other stuff. You can keep up with all my online video coverage here.

ABC recently announced streams of its popular shows will be available online for free. Fox will offer its programming online as well, including web-only episodes of popular shows such as Family Guy. Smaller players such as Rocketboom deliver content created especially for online viewing and syndicated through partnerships with companies such as TiVo.

Filling in the middle is the iTunes video store and its single purchase and subscription offerings. Are large content producers merely experimenting with online distribution or is this a trend that is here to stay? What’s driving viewer numbers from all over the production spectrum from two guys on their couch to two news anchors behind a desk? Can online video distribution be profitable for large publishers?

This and more on in the latest podsession, which is 20 minutes long, a 9 MB download. Get it in iTunes or subscribe to our feed.

3:57:26 PM    comment   

eBay is very very worried about Google and is trying to work with either Yahoo or MSN (or both) to try and blunt Google, reports The Wall Street Journal. It is a big article about the age old saying: enemy of my enemy is a friend. The really juicy bit is about the consulting giant McKinsey & Co’s conclusions about Google.

Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Co. McKinsey concluded that Google wouldn’t use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study. EBay’s dependence on Google increased as it shifted ad dollars to online ads from traditional media throughout 2004.

I think McKinsey reports should come with a statutory warning. Why? These are the same people who told AT&T back in the day, that mobile phones will be a niche market. And if that was not enough, I have two words for you: Jeffrey Skilling. (Of course, there is The Witch Doctors a fascinating book if there is about McKinsey blunders.)

So what are your thoughts on eBay & New Friends versus Google. Any thoughts? It could be part of a big strategic report

3:50:19 PM    comment   

Combining hardware with human bodies gains even more traction with these solar-powered retinal implants that spray a neurotransmitter substance onto retinal cells, restoring sight to the blind. There are no batteries required, either, because the whole thing is solar powered.

The tiny 1.5mm chip flexes in response to low intensity light, stimulating nerves that send visual info on to the brain. The actuator has now been built by engineer Laxman Saggere of the University of Illinois at Chicago; no word on when we'll see this technology implemented in the real world.

Solar-powered implant could restore vision [NewScientist, via treehugger]

10:45:52 AM    comment