Category Archives: Mobile

Mobile

Breaking Barriers

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I opened a box of Cracker Jacks and the toy prize was a cell phone. Not a smart phone, but a commoditized flip phone that handled voice conversations, kept a contact list and something that resembles a calendar.  A cell phone so fancy that two decades ago we would have taken a human life to obtain one, but today is so feature free that we might give it to a child so some day he can tell his kids how hard he had it. Markets change constantly, but often products change faster than the markets that support them.  Take the cellular carrier market … please.  Given that the domestic customer base is saturated, carriers are in a constant struggle to keep customers locked into their networks and find new streams of revenue.  Yet they must also help finance your newer and more sophisticated cell phones in order to bring you … Continue reading →

Android Drive

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I love it when people don’t get it — it means the market is ready to shift. This week the geeks at Google released a gizmo that lets average people create Android apps via a brain-dead-simple user interface.  The reaction from the technical community involved hysterical laughter, deriding the tool and the alleged limitation of the applications it could craft.  Uniformly they snickered noting that while Apple’s App Store is loaded with professionally honed software downloads, Google was encouraging point-and-meow apps.  They used the news to lambaste Google’s Nexus One handset, which had a short life before cellular carriers started selling their own Android handies. The technical community doesn’t get it, which means the market is about to shift. Nexus One and the Android App Inventor served similar purposes, namely market seeding.  Android was a relatively new entrant into the handset OS market, and going up against Apple, Microsoft, RIMM, … Continue reading →

HP Handsets

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Just keep reminding yourself that Compaq was an odd deal too. Today Hewlett Packard palmed Palm for whopping $1.2B, or about 1/10th of HP’s petty cash.  This was newsworthy for many reasons including the fact that Palm’s struggling handset line will now join HP’s struggling handset line (bet you forgot that HP makes cell phones — so did the rest of the market).  In a world where RIM owns the corporate market, Apple owns the consumer market, Microsoft hasn’t helped HP’s market, and Google/Android are changing the rules of the market, this marriage seems slightly more absurd than half of Hollywood hook-ups. The deal is not without upside.  First, the market for mobile is not yet saturated.  Especially on the low end, there is plenty of green field. As unlocked handsets become more prevalent and popular, HP can use its retail savvy to shove cell phones into public ears.  I … Continue reading →

Locked-in

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Lock-in as a marketing strategy is alive, well, and unfortunately growing. For dot-communists and those raised in the era of Linux, vendor lock-in is the art of keeping customers captive. By making people commit to a technology, and thus raising the pain of switching away from said technology, vendors cause customers to linger even when they do not want to. I know CIOs who for decades have blustered against Cognos and being locked into stiff annual license fees for PowerHouse, Cognos’ ancient 4GL. Yet they pay the fee every year knowing that rewriting thousands of lines of PowerHouse code is pretty pricy too. Another variation of vendor lock-in is commonly called upgrade robbery. I encountered such a scam this week when I noticed my ancient (circa 2003) smartphone buttons started to stick. In order to upgrade to a newer smartphone, AT&T insists that I buy $720 worth of wireless data … Continue reading →

Mobile Mayhem

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Silicon Strategies client DeviceAnywhere has the good sense not only to employ us, but to take the pulse of their own industry on a regular basis. Knowing that trends change over time helps companies know how best to serve their customers – to anticipate their needs DeviceAnywhere surveys examine what technologies mobile applications developers design for, how DeviceAnywhere services are used and most interestingly what kinds of mobile applications are being written. This last bit says everything about how the mobile application market has shifted and what consumers really want. They want the Internet in their pocket. The Internet is a success because it is Darwinian in nature. Every mutant content provider self-formed out of the digital muck, rapidly mated in orgiastic enthusiasm, and new species of content and application are perpetually being delivered. Go forth and iterate. The reason a Darwinian Internet creates is popular is that every possible … Continue reading →

White Space Gold Rush

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The FCC has created the next big technology gold rush, literally out of thin air. Chip and mobile technology mavens are the first folks who will strike the new mother load, but others will follow. In between existing television channels are buffers collectively called “white space”. The FCC established these buffers in the Bad Old Daysâ„¢ because back then television broadcast equipment was less than precise. A broadcast signal could drift a little up or down the frequency spectrum causing recliner-bound fathers to order their children to adjust dials, knobs and rabbit ears (if you do not know what “rabbit ears” were, then you are too young to be reading this). Basically white space buffers kept channel 2 from clobbering channel 3. But with television broadcasts going digital this February and the unused white space spectrum being valuable, the FCC has opened it up for “unlicensed” use. Unlicensed spectrum devices … Continue reading →

Google Grab

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Advertising is only part of Google’s gain with mobile phones. Much has been made about Google’s mobile advertising potential in deploying Android, their free Linux-based mobile operating system. Google will indeed make a(nother) boatload money through advertisements on cell phones. But this is only part of the Google strategy. The other components should worry competitors more. Let’s stipulate a few things in order for the market dynamics to be clear: Mobile devices are the prophesized unified communications portal (servers be damned). Due to constant availability, mobile devices will become the first option for most people for discovery and use of information. Unifying the end user experience while roaming and at the desk creates commitment by the customer/user. Therein lay the competitive threat from the G-Phone. For years now Google has created end user services (search, maps, photo galleries, office apps, more). The services are generally cost free for the users. … Continue reading →