Google announced Gingerbread phone Nexus S with NFC

After burning the fingers with nexus in terms of nexus direct to consumer distribution strategy, Google wants to re-try the same with the help of Samsung this time. Hopefully they wont repeat the first day customer care disaster. Apart from distribution, Google try to hint the operators about operator independent strategy with the introduction of SIP- based voice-calling support. This might have worked when the dream of blanketed wifi from Google became reality by now. The more interesting thing Google wants to try is the payments space and take the geeky credit for introducing the NFC handset before Apple. The key take away, Nexus is a platform to test the waters with developers community rather than targeting the real customers.

Quad core on your smart phone?

Do we really need a Quad core on our smart phones and tablets? May be yes. With the next generation networks like LTE, we can see more computing intense applications and services specially the high end game and videos which can't survive on today's single core processors. Mobile virtualization can solves some of this computing hunger by emulating multi-cores and effectively sharing resources. But the chip manufacturers want to move ahead with a physical hardware solution rather than a software approach. The key take away is smart phones and tablets are the next gen PCs with more computing power.

Apple will become leader in mobile payments by 2014

Apple will emerge as the leader in mobile payments by 2014. There is a possibility of acquiring one or more mobile payments companies like Zong in next 6 to 12 months. iTunes can become common platform for both physical and digital goods. Apple will take a lead on U.S carrier’s mobile payments initiative named ISIS.


Fig: Significant events in mobile payments landscape

With the series of patents on person to person payments, NFC chip behind the screen etc
make clear that Apple has a mobile payments strategy. With $50 bln in cash, apple is well positioned to acquire new startups in the space and hit the ground running.

On the other hand, three of the four national US telcos are to combine their mobile wallets to boost m-payments and ensure they control the trend. Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA have formally announced their joint venture, Isis. The three carriers are working with financial institutions Barclays and Discover Financial Services. This alliance is trying to eliminate the card networks like visa and master card from the equation. They announced that this initiative might take at least 18 months, which is long lead-time.

The following table compares top3 initiatives:



Some stats on mobile payments market:

- One in every six mobile subscribers worldwide will own a device enabled with Near Field Communications (NFC) capabilities by 2014 according to Juniper Research.

- Juniper anticipates high growth in both North America and Western Europe over the next five years, adding global gross transaction value will exceed $110 billion by 2014.
- Boku raised $10 million in a recent round of funding to buy startups Mobillcash and Paymo in a transaction that was announced in June 2010.

- The number of mobile payment users worldwide will exceed 108.6 million in 2010, a 54.5 percent increase from 2009, when there were 70.2 million users, according to Gartner, Inc. Mobile payment users will represent 2.1 percent of all mobile users in 2010.

Mobile Payment Users by Region (Thousands)
Region 2009 2010
Western Europe 4,519 7,127
North America 1,905 3,502
Asia/Pacific 41,865 62,828
EMEA 16,823 27,091
Latin America 5,131 8,010
Total 70,242 108,558

Some recommendations for Telcos:

- It is recommended to proliferate the European market with NFC enabled handsets, so that the user has choice of picking a non-apple device. The adoption for telcos takes longer time than apple due to fragmented devices and OEMS.

- Finding an alternative business model other than a share in transactional revenue is very important. For ex: mining the user purchase history and suggesting alternative/relative products based on users location.

- Increase the carrier billing relationships beyond digital goods to small services purchase like train/movie tickets

911 system getting a makeover

The long served public safety system deserves a makeover. Texting in emergency situations may look dumb at first glance, but there are situations (one can't speak during hostage situations) where people can take advantage of the technology. The first responders always try to seek as much information as possible, Can Gen Y provide this info via the Text platform? May be. In my opinion the traditional voice calling still be the major first responder platform upgraded with add-ons like texting, live video sharing, sensor based emergency detection (vehicle collisions). With respective funding, the governments always pass the cost to the public via the operators. The people never opposed emergency taxes tag along with their monthly phone bill, no wonder the landlines so far are surviving based on 911 features. Hopefully gen Y can help defines the new system.

iPhone user spend more on credit card and give less to operator

PageOnce inc, compared credit card bills to the phone the user using. Comparing credit card bills to the phone the user using may not give direct correlation, but it is an interesting and unique observation. The results are obvious that the iphone users are big spenders with an average monthly bill of $6872 followed by blackberry, android and windows mobile. It seems there is 35% difference spending between windows mobile user and iphone user. But when it comes to people spending on monthly phone bill, People with windows mobile phone spent on an average $205 compared to $164 by an iphone user. The report does not show breakdown of phone bill, but it is evident that all you can eat plan may be the reason for lower phone bill. The fact that the purchases from iTunes are not considered in the monthly bill may be causing the difference here. It is also clear that apple is grabbing mobile services business from premium customers through their iTunes.

Android handsets out sell Apple IPhone nearly 2 to 1 in 3Q

The Smartphone growth is skyrocketing in US with iPhone4 being the top model consumers purchased in this quarter. But the overall market favored Android with 44% of market share. Apple's iOS devices sales in steady, RIM lost most of the market share to Android. The new release of Blackberry torch did not do much help to RIM. The next battle among these players would be the tablet market. Apple is in forefront with their iPads capturing 95% of market share and Both RIM and Android based tablets sales may increase this during the holiday season. Juniper Research projected the number of annual shipments for tablet devices to reach 81 million by 2015, which leaves a room for market of 75M devices by 2015. On the other hand, Windows Phone 7 who is late in the game got good reviews from industry. They may not dent the US market in 2011 but we cannot underestimate software giant like Microsoft.

Sprint's New Mobile Wallet Application

This also leaves questions like why sprint does that? What is in it for them? Right now there is no direct revenue for them apart from building some customer loyalty. But in future, Sprint may expect revenues for provisioning a card in the digital wallet and some kind of cross selling offers inside the wallet and probably very small percentage from the vendors. There is also speculation that sprint may mine the purchase history to enrich the profiles of the user and probably use them for marketing purposes. if we observe at high level the operator is bending little bit to fit in the payments ecosystem, instead of fighting for a pie in a transactional revenue, finding other models to makeup the revenue.We have to see if digital wallet bring equilibrium among the payments value chain.

WebOS 2.0 with Pre2 announced

WebOS 2.0 is major upgrade since it was announced one and half years ago. Some notable features in the new OS would be the support for adobe flash player 10.1, They clubbed the concept of stacks which is the list of open apps and the multitasking. Just Type is another feature, which allows user to type before opening the apps and based on the context, use the typed text to perform certain tasks in the app. As every OS is layering a unified social experience, Web OS integrated with synergy platform to provide unified email and social experiences. With respective to Pre2, the major disappointment would be 3.1-inch screen which is way smaller is consumers eye when compared to other android phones with 4 inch screens. Pre2 may not be HP's flagship device, but HP plans to use WebO.S 2.0 in their upcoming devices. H.P also plans to integrate their existing cloud based services on to the new devices. Let hope H.P brings a decent competitor in 2011.

Seven percent of cell phone users make video calls

Video calling is getting traction again with the latest high performance gadgets like iphone4 with face time and android evo 4G devices. 7 percent of user using video calling may not be the bigger number at this point due to lack of end to end experiences. There are other multitude of issues like the variations in device capabilities between caller and calling devices. Apple with face time tried to control the end-to-end experience by limiting to iphone4 devices. They plan to open source the face time so other devices can implement the same. Sprint is boasting video as killer application with its 4G network. We may see little increase in video calling adoption over next few years.

Some stats from phonedog:


* As with online video calls, higher-income households had more experience with video calling. Around 10% of users with a household income of over $75,000 a year had experience with mobile phone video calls, as opposed to 4% of users with a household income of under $30,000 a year.
* Likewise, younger users are more likely to have used mobile phone video calling; 9% and 8% of respondents age 18 to 29 and 30 to 39 had experience with mobile phone video calls, as compared with 4% and 3% for older age groups.
* The male-female split was about the same. Roughly 8% of males responded that they had experience with video calls on mobile devices, compared to 6% of female users

GetJar gives away free games

GetJar, who claims to be the second largest app store in the world with their app store available in 200 countries supporting various handsets. They do have some hard time in competing with on-device stores especially in U.S market. Offering premium content for free to acquire the customers is not a new technique but it has never done in the apps world. They plan to give away 5 games from glu mobile supporting android, blackberry and java phones. It is interesting that they have choose game category to offer premium content which also make sense. The getjar appstore might be few clicks away from the on-device appstore placed in premium real estate but it good to observe the conversion rate.

RIM - New Tablet and New OS

This Christmas will be a tablet Christmas with various screen sizes ranging from 5 to 10 inches from many OEMS. RIM is under immense pressure to come up with new devices and create a developer eco-system. Their existing efforts with black berry appworld were not that fruitful. They recently purchased another OS called QNX, who is a leader in embedded RTOS. In consumers mind its not just a device anymore, It is about usability, it is about the apps, it is about the whole experience. It will be challenging for RIM jump start the developer ecosystem. The OEM's lock-in consumer to buy tablet from same manufacturer as their phone , so that they can share the apps. This is especially true for iOS devices, which makes new entrants with tablet only offering more difficult. I don’t believe that these new devices reducing the market share of iPad devices in near future, but it will make apple to offer new features such as camera and reduce the prices. In the operator perspective, yet another data plan would be hard from consumer standpoint, so we need to find some niche services that we can offer on these new segment of devices.

Wal-Mart offering their own branded wireless plans

The Wal-Mart branded offering will be based on the no.4 network operator T-Mobile. The network itself has limited coverage compared to others. I believe, they are currently struggling to raise capitol to upgrade their networks 4G. From wal-mart side, they do have greater retail presence and branded for cheaper products. The proposed voice plan is not cheaper to the rival MetroPCS offering of $40 unlimited calls, text and web. They currently expanding to more markets and upgrading their networks to LTE. Similar to wal-Mart, the electronics retailer BestBuy partnered with clearwire to offer similar service with more emphasis on data plans rather than voice. Overall, the wal-Mart plan encouraging non-data users to try and later buy data, which make sense for the segment, they are targeting. Another biggest problem from the consumer standpoint would be the initial investment on the handset. Wal-mart can show little retail muscle to get the handset prices down compared to the MetroPCS.

Apple relaxed rules

You might heard the news that apple is now allowing third party frameworks on their idevices. Adobe might be pretty exited about this news. After series of back and forth arguments about flash on devices, Apple realized the impact of adobe developer community embracing other platforms mainly android. With huge market adoption of android devices across the world, apple wants to defend their position. The other community of 3rd party ad engines may welcome the news. Previously apple wants to exclusively benefit from iAds program, but now it opened to other 3rd party engines. Overall, the mobile applications industry ranging from developers, cross platform tools, analytics companies etc might extend their support to idevices. I believe apple realized the fact and acted quickly than estimated.

LightSquared to Challenge Clearwire

I just watched LightSquared CEO Mr. Sanjeev Ahuja, talking in bloomberg TV. The network they are building has unique value proposition of quicker and broader coverage by linking the 4G network to satellite, and this is never done before. Unlike clearwire, the only left over player in Wimax, lightSquared going with LTE. When we compare both the companies, the average consumer see reduced prices when many networks competing. Mr.Sanjeev brought another point that, lightsquared is "wholesale only" operator compared to clearwire. Even though Sprint is a partner, the clearwire's 4G mi-fi devices are competing with sprints mifi devices, which is not a good sign. There was another question on the interview about the devices embedding the 4G chipsets or OEMs need to build separate devices. But may be it is cheaper to build LTE chipsets than wimax due to huge market adoption(of course satellite is the twist here, i am not sure about the whole network architecture, at this point).The LightSquared launch was quicker than i expected.I wish they could go to IPO during next year.

iSpot - clear wire offering for iDevices

Clearwire surprised many idevice enthusiasts with iSpot. They saw the opportunity of growing iDevice ranging from ipod to iPads and trying to dent the AT&T existing mobile brand band plans. The device is configured to filter based on MAC address which allows it to ID the Apple mobile devices only and unfortunately it wont work for other non idevices. Can it replace the phone with broadband data like iPhone? no, i think it is very early for that. They recently also announced Rover- pre paid broadband service without contracts and plans for $5 a day to $50 unlimited/month targeting youth segment. At this point, clear service is not available in all markets, but they promise up to 6Mbps download and 1 mbps uploads speeds.

FITC - San Francisco - Adobe Key note

I got the opportunity to attend the FITC event held at UCSF during this week. Here are notes from key note speaker - Kevin Lynch - CTO, Adobe and Mark Andreas - Adobe fellow

- He started with history of flash player from initial version to flash 10. The 10.1 release seems to be a major miles stone for them due the full flash support on mobile devices.Being in the audience, Flash community seems pretty exited about this.

- He tried make a point to the developers that flash is not going away by giving example like there were many flash killers during the journey from AJAX,HTML5,silverlight..etc But it all faded away due to the consistent experience delivered by flash.

- Adobe manage to work with partners to give over the air updates of flash players to the mobile devices, which was considered as a big challenge initially.

-The Flash 10.1 is currently available on 7-8 devices on android platform from HTC and Motorola. The latest droid2 box includes a special promotion "Can play flas" with flash logo.

- The road map of flash player includes tablets, televisions and other multiple farm factors.

- Mike Andreas talked about the major performance improvements they made to make it available on handsets including memory management, hardware acceleration, reducing the power consumption ..etc. He demonstrated the non-optimized regular yahoo flash site vs sony pictures optimized site.

- He talked about Flex 4.0, but it is not currently optimized for moble and it is on their road map.

- Air 2.0: They made some decent performance and mobility improvements in Air 2.0 Air2.0 can also act as server for their peer to peer multicast support. They demonstrated simple asteroid multi player game where the air 2.0 acting as a server and all the devices connects to the air2 running on desktop.

-Air 2.5 for mobile devices is currently available as beta, can be downloaded from adobe.com/go/airbetasignup

-Kevin talked about the device central functionality in cs5, where the developer can emulate the flash content on the device. He demonstrated simple board game with action script code blocks.

-On device debugging is currently not available but expected to come.

- Adobe's priority is to get flash on the devices first then the air.

With Droid 2, Adobe Flash Stakes its Claim

The old days of flash lite are gone , which never satisfied the thirst of accessing any page on mobile phone. The full flash versions appeared recently at least on Android OS. HTC EVO is the first phone with full flash capabilities. The Droid2, is pre-installed with flash running on Android Froyo. For Adobe, this is the time to take off some of the allegations made by Apple, that there is no device running the full flash. Droid2 might be a milestone for Adobe's future, if flash on droid2 is successful in giving good performance as well as battery life. with Flash,the Android tablets may look better than today ipad. All the casual game developers seems to be happy about adobe's progress.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T may lead a venture to replace credit cards

I do agree that a mobile payment is the next logical step for the consumers. The never expected carrier partnership on mobile payments is revolutionary and game changing. The right business model is what lacking all these days to work with financial network like Visa and Master card. The details are not known at this point about the banks participating in this initiative. The carriers most like to use the existing transaction clearing networks like Discover, rather than building their own. Convincing the retailer to spend sub $200 on new terminal would be another challenge. It all depends on mass adaptation. It took more than a decade to Visa and Master card to convince the retailers and consumer. But the moment may be right because the retailer are currently disappointed with transaction fee set by Visa and Master card which they have been fighting for years. Visa is very active in the space, they recently announced a partnership with Texas based start-up called Device Fidelity, to NFC enable the existing iPhone though a case. Overall, this is very positive step, which may provoke the other operators across the world to build their own payment networks or at least to get into co-operative agreements with Visa Master card.

Sprint to Turn iPod Touch Into 3G Mobile Hotspot?

The Peel from Sprint, is a great example of what future accessory business looks like. There are various kinds of accessories, which morph in into the shape device and provide additional value added service. We have envisioned a similar concept where the user can add a case to iphone, and the case holds various sensors ranging from health to environment. Batteries packs are the most common and successful accessories at least on iphone segment, which eventually expand their scope to new range. The Hot-spot solution look interesting but should i kill my exiting DSL and have this an alternative or as add-on to my DSL. The later is an expensive proposition, which may work in enterprise segment but not for the regular consumers at this point.

Flash Evangelist Builds Video Chat App for Android

It’s interesting that, Apple's highly boasted, massively advertized Facetime app coming to androids with Air 2.5 build. The open source clearly winner in this case of time to market. I am pleased to know that Air does have peer-to-peer multi cast technology (which is repurposed in this case). Adobe has been hinting at big plans for P2P ever since it bought a small P2P startup called amicima in early 2007. It made some of amicima’s technology available to developers about a year ago, but restricted it to small-scale use cases like P2P video conferencing or multiplayer games based on a few Flash players directly connected to each other via P2P. Hopefully the developers’ embrace the technology to build some 4G use cases.

Apple to Give Away iPhone Case

Giving away the protective case is very simple for remedy for growing negative popularity of iphone4 devices. Steve jobs tried to lighten the issue, as it is the case with any smart phone. The consumer reports review made apple to look backand wants set the message straight. Personally, i think its an innovative design, which provides structural support and suppose to increase the signal strength due to its wide area. There was a rumor that, Apple did not have good expertise on antenna design and they hired few recently. Its good that they are offering full refund and get out of the contracts if the consumers are not happy with it. they may change the next batch of units(after sept 30th) to include some kind of protective coating to reduce the shortage of antennas. Overall, this might be very disappointing for thier aggressive global distribution strategy.

HP’s Android Tablet Tabled

HP's rumored tablet went though many decision obstacles from day one. The initial proposed the Windows7 based design got delayed due to platform release from Microsoft, which made HP to think of the android. I believe HP might have produced couple of reference designs on android. But later the Palm acquisition made HP to re-purpose the tablet with palm's web OS. The iPAD release might provoke smaller OEMS to build the tablets but not the bigger ones like HP and Dell. We don't know if HP is waiting for some hardware differentiation or more improvements to their Web OS.

Even Without iPhone, Verizon Is Gaining on AT&T

AT&T initial strategy of iphone exclusivity for 5 years worked well for both AT&T and Apple to influence other GSM operators across the world. Once the exclusivity ends, AT&T has to find new ways to keep their customers from switiching. The AT&T's subscriber based should have been 30% more than verizon in last 4 years but they are almost same. I can think of two reasons 1) The AT&T did not address the growing demand of data networks, which let many customers unhappy. There are high chances of customers migrating to other networks once the contract ends. 2) Google's android helped Verzion in competing with iPhone. Verzion with storng marketing campaigns managed to increase their subscriber base without the magic device. According to Comscore, Verizon has managed to steadily increase its share of the Smartphone market, to 26 percent in May, from 20 percent in late 2008. In the same period, AT&T’s market share slipped to 40 percent, from around 45 percent. Apart from devices, the apps and the appstores played major role when customer choosing the devices offered by network, which gave positive fetch to verizon with their Droid. Tier2 carriers and MVNO's offered cheaper plans but the magic devices saved the tier1 operators. At least in metro's AT&T is loosing its ground to Verzion because of the poor network.

Motorola Unveils Latest Flagship Device Droid X

Droid X is positioned to be an iPhone killer with strong marketing campaign from Verizon. It is nothing-short compare to the new iPhone4 with the exception of front view camera and face time calling. A kin of droid x, the HTC EVO got great reviews when it launched on sprint 4G network. Droid x is very similar in hardware and feature set. Motorola improved their motoblur interface and Google adds their new froyo update to this device when released. For CDMA carriers like Verizon and sprint, the android provided decently competing products with iphone. Ironically, the network infrastructure evolution is not in sync with fast growing device evolution due to lack of attractive business models to justify.

Best Buy Partners With Sprint To Offer Data Plans

Best Buy has identified mobile as one of the burgeoning areas of consumer electronics to tap into. It created standalone mobile-phone kiosks in its stores to offer better customer service. This looks like to virtual MVNO relation with a twist of retail distribution chain. Currently they are targeting only laptops, which might be easier to execute than a complicated mobile ecosystem. While it will run over Sprint’s network, it will reportedly be limited to its 3G network, and not tap into the carrier’s faster 4G network. The plans seem to be expensive potentially targeting enterprise segment, but other per usage plans may work well in consumer segment.

AT&T offers businesses a smartphone credit-card payment service

Mobile payments reached $68 billion globally in 2009 and should exceed $600 billion by 2014, according to Generator Research. Mobile payments made using credit cards over Smartphone’s account for just a small percentage of that total market. The browser based AprivaPay is very convenient solution for SMB's with few field workers. Another start-up from twitter co-founder named Square has similar offering targeting SMB's with cheaper and simpler services but it currently works with iPhone only. Lets hope AT&T's marketing muscle helps Apriva go forward.

Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software

Drag n drop web page creation tools with pre-defined templates are so yesterday. AppInventor takes the same paradigm to mobile applications development. The Google application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code — shown as graphic images and representing different Smartphone capabilities— and put them together, similar to snapping together Lego blocks. Even though it is targeted towards people without coding skills, normal developers can use it to write very sample apps to basic prototypes. Apple can you do the same?

Microsoft Pays Mobile App Developers to Help It Catch Apple

Paying money to beat the competition is not new to Microsoft. They did the same with Bing where they pay the consumers if they buy goods and services from partner sites. It will be different ball game when it comes to dealing with developers. The developer’s priority in choosing and prioritizing the right platform is mainly dependent on platform market share. It might not be easy to turn the tables. Microsoft can handle few handful developers this way but it will very hard to manage and influence the big community. The other strategies like increased rev share and more analytics tools may help in some cases. Surprisingly Intel is doing the same for their notebook market place as a last resort.

Hello and Welcome

Hello:

Welcome to my new blogging site(Ruletheair.blogspot.com), thanks to blogger. After 3 years of blogging, in my personal site hosted @home, i finally decided to switch. I will soon move my old posts to this new site.(and it is little complicated:)) Thanks for your understanding. I will inform all and i will make sure this process is as smooth as possible. Thanks you all for supporting me with you comments all these years.