Now that our two big Anywhere reports are published (phew!), I’m returning to a topic near and dear to my heart: the mobile Anywhere web. I wrote a piece in the spring titled, Building the Anywhere Web where I created a scorecard to evaluate mobile Web sites. Now, as you can see from the image on this post, I have that scorecard built into a web-based tool that I’m going to use to evaluate mobile web sites and compile those scores into a report whose working title is, Best of the Anywhere Web. The only remaining question is, “Which mobile web sites should we score?”

So my appeal to Yankee Group blog readers is this: If you use a mobile web site regularly and think it is one of the best mobile web sites you know, please leave a comment with the URL so I can add it to our evaluation list. I can’t promise we’ll score all of them, but I’ll do my best to score most. You have nothing to lose but bad mobile web sites.

As I spent much of Boston’s rain soaked weekend inside recuperating from a terrible cold I was able to catch up on some television. After finishing my DVRed content I was forced back to endure the commercial laden landscape of live television. Naturally, most of the content was indistinguishable from the rest but one stood out, the “next phase” of post Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft commercials.

To be honest I wasn’t a fan of the Seinfeld commercials. I appreciated their quirkiness but I felt they failed to connect with the average viewer. One critique I read that rang most true was “If Microsoft is just now connecting with real users, how can their existing software meet the needs of the everyman?” A great point. Even Microsoft recognized this and decided to revamp, which seemed a good sign, but the new commercials fell even flatter.

Beginning with a “PC” from the Apple commercials, the narrator informs the viewer that he is a stereotype of a PC user but as we learn - many other people are PCs too. And this is where the whole campaign concept goes off track.

The problem is - Microsoft isn’t losing consumers to Apple because PC users are being pigeonholed as an unflattering stereotype. Consumers are smarter than that. Microsoft is ceding ground to Apple because Apple focuses exclusively on digital entertainment and Anywhereness, two increasingly important attributes for users.

According to Yankee Group’s Anywhere Segmentation - Actualized Anywheres, the early adopters that influence the mqarket are the prime constituents to be attracted to Apple’s ecosystem. They then pass this newfound behavior on to the masses behind them, which will yield further gains for Apple over the course of years.

The problem for Microsoft isn’t an inability to provide these services, but a failure to stitch together the components into a compelling  message. It’s nary to find an Apple product without an i in front of it, Microsoft has disparate product lines: Live, Xbox, Zune, Windows, Office, Home Server, etc. which fail to translate into an ecosystem.

This isn’t to say that Microsoft is positioned to become the next great digital lifestyle company - more acquisitions will be needed for that to happen. In addition, Microsoft must better leverage the productivity piece as a lifestyle solution, not just an entertainment solution. Not just entertainment or productivity but both.

One failure of Microsoft is different user interfaces and experiences on all its devices while its competitors continue to consolidate experiences to make transitioning from one device to another easier. Microsoft must follow suit.

For Microsoft to effectively compete in the Anywhere world they must find a way to better tie together its product lines, consolidate experiences, and message the ecosystem to the user. Perhaps choosing the Xbox moniker for all its entertainment products would help Microsoft accomplish this. The Xbox Music Player, the Xbox Game Console, the Xbox photo editing quite. OK, maybe Xbox doesn’t work but the concept is an important one. Then use the brand to find hooks into the productivity piece to create a perception seperation between work and play while building a knowledge base that Microsoft can meet all a users needs.

Apple has done an amazing job of creating an ecosystem, and Google is gaining steam as well. Now Microsoft must do the same. Tie together the pieces to help elucidate the image of a Microsoft world. Focus on the choice consumers get by bragging about the hundreds of form factors available. Talk about openness of the platform. Share how all the pieces fit together. But don’t focus on who uses the device. People already know that.

Evolution was a blow to the T. Rex, the dodo and the quagga. It won’t be less painful for traditional telcos.

If new interconnect models play out, nothing less than extinction is the fate of those who can’t or won’t evolve.

Take the GSM Association’s proposed IP Exchange model (IPX). IPX was designed to address technical and commercial needs in all-IP, media rich communications environments.

The specific aim is to secure and monetize multimedia interactions across mobile and fixed networks. Key concepts include a system of cascading payments in the supply chain, transactional transparency, measured QOS and tough service level agreements.

It’s vastly different from the traditional voice model of floating minutes, arbitrage, transit and settlement. In fact, it kills it stone dead.

Does IPX represent creationism - an intelligent design imposed on the market - or a manifestation of natural selection - an inevitable evolutionary step?

Read the rest of this entry »

Think of the last boom cycle of the telecom industry. If you’re visually inclined, what you’ll recall most forcefully is the so-called ‘hockey stick’ curve.

This iconic image of stupendous market growth justified grandiose investments in fiber optic cables and equipment to feed the need for speed.

Yet when the bandwidth barons were revealed - like the emperor in the children’s fairytale - to have proverbially no clothes on, many people did indeed lose their shirts.

But guess what - the hockey stick is back (see below). And many will soon go naked in the streets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lost in the hubbub of Apple’s revamped iPod line-up last week was the announcement of new Zunes. While some of the features offer differentiation the most interesting aspect of the announcement was the inclusion of free WiFi at McDonalds.

In an age where more devices are coming equipped with WiFi there is finally a recognition that consumers want easy access to the internet when they are beyond the home. Without providing the means to fully utilize WiFi, manufacturers leave their devices crippled. I fully expect that other manufacturers will begin or continue to develop partnerships with WiFi hotspot providers to provide free connectivity for their devices.

Just like all other things connectivity we are still at the beginning. Apple and AT&T have teased us with free iPhone/iPod Touch WiFi at Starbucks and other AT&T hotspots for months and now Microsoft is joining the fray. Partnerships make sense because they bring foot traffic to a location, provide additional features to the consumer, and enhance the value of a device. The industry must be wary of exclusive partnerships for free service emerging as they would stifle the truly Anywhere nature the world is headed toward.

In the future devices will not be competing on who has WiFi and who doesn’t, instead they will compete on who provides the best experience and which offers the most free WiFi to its users. Becoming an Actualized Anywhere is becoming easier and easier.

Digital media adapters have failed for so many reasons; bad user interfaces, lack of access to free content, convoluted file format support, difficult set-up, and more. Covering this space for the last few years I have seen broken promise after broken promise by companies that assure consumers their solution will erase past sins. Yesterday, for the first time I finally saw a product that I believe will usher in the age of digital content on the TV; The Sling Catcher.

Many of you have probably heard about the Sling Catcher for the last few years as Sling Media has touted the product but failed to deliver. The delays appear worth it as Sling has created a solution that will offer the most robust digital media adapter (although I am very remiss to put it into that category) solution on the market this holiday season. In short, the Sling Catcher will allow users to watch all manner of digital content both personal and professional on their TV.

Sling accomplished this by using a number of different avenues to access content:

1. Sneaker Net. Users can move content from their PC to a Sling Catcher by downloading content to the HDD then physically moving it to the Catcher. While I initially thought this was a detriment, the speed in which content will transfer to a hard drive via USB instead of via WiFi, the ability to bring content beyond the home, and the likely need for the inevitable storage upgrade make excluding a HDD palatable, if not sensible. Additionally, Sling will have a solution that will inform users if content they are transferring is incompatible with the Catcher (it seems the only reason it won’t is because of those dastardly DRM restrictions).

2. Projector. This is the killer application. Unlike other devices, projector opens up streamed broadband content in a way unlike ever before. Users can stream content from ANY VIDEO SITE to the TV. Simply put, Projector is an application on the PC which allows you to pick the content you want to stream and then displays it on your TV. Finally all the content from ABC.com, Hulu.com, and even Sling.com can be watched is freed.

 3. Sling Box. If you have a Slingbox you can use the Catcher to connect to the box and play content on another TV. This could be simply extending the viewing experience in the home or taking your home entertainment with you on the road. This adds value to the Catcher and the Slingbox. I can see soft bundles on endcaps in Best Buy already.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Sling’s offering is the tacit understanding that not one solution is appropriate for everyone. Apple’s decision to marry iTunes with Apple TV is its saving grace but also its greatest flaw. Instead of one solution, Sling opts for multiple options but at its core recognizes that there is ample free content that consumers want to connect to.

Sling is a curious company in the age of Anywhere. They are one of the few that are actually enabling the three screen strategy with content users find personally satisfying - because it’s their own.  With a Slingbox and Catcher user will be able to access their content on their PC from anywhere, on their handset from anywhere, and on any TV from anywhere. All you need is a network and a device. These services are appleaing to service providers hoping to upsell broadband service tiers (higher upload speeds help), wireless carriers hoping to sell more data plans, handset manufacturers hoping to sell more expensive multimedia handsets, and content owners hoping for more consumer touch points. Everyone wins in this scenario.

As a CE company Sling is clearly on the forefront of delivering the Anywhere vision, and it hasn’t even fully integrated its web portal. Yet. Ultimately the biggest boon may be for Echostar which can embed Sling’s technology into their set-top boxes. This will prove a major  differentiator between itself and market leader Cisco and Motorola.

In a consolidated industry where differentiation is difficult the ability to offer something different than entrenched competitors is key. Service providers clamoring for service differentiation may consider new partners to more easily enable their subscribers to actually be Anywhere. On any screen. Courtesy of Sling.

Air is cheaper than copper or fiber. The economics of wireless technologies will bring the Anywhere Network to parts of the world that would never have gotten it otherwise.  

Yankee Group believes that in the next five years, remaining telecommunications greenfields–parts of the world hardly touched with conventional telephony–will shrink as low-cost wireless broadband changes the game. Take India, for example; its Anywhere Index today is less than 1%. But by 2012, we expect that to rise to 3%, and Anywhere Network revenues (from the provision of broadband for consumers and enterprises) in the Asian region overall to surpass $100B, more than a tenth of the global spend that year. Those funds represent tantalizing near-term opportunities for network builders and operators who come with the right solutions.

But which solution? The battles over which techologies will be part of that expansion are far from over. Intel has been marshalling resources and energy to support the expansion of WiMAX in India, while the Indian government proceeds with upcoming spectrum auctions that could tilt away from WiMAX or other technologies depending in part on the pricing guidelines they set.

Air may be cheaper than cabling, but two network infrastructures of any flavor aren’t cheaper than one. Vanu Bose, CEO of the eponymous Vanu, Inc., is leading a team offering markets like India a different solution, in the form of software-defined radios (SDRs). For markets without an existing wireless infrastructure, the concept is to sidestep fairly political discussions about which 3G or 4G technology is best, instead deploying a technology-neutral wireless infrastructure that can handle several different networking technologies simultaneously. That means that one network could simultaneously support GSM, CDMA, WiMAX, etc.

Reminds me of ‘Babel fish’, the handy icthy-interpreters in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. I talked with Vanu a few months ago about how it would work in India in particular. He said, ”The value proposition there for rural build-outs is challenging. ARPUs [average revenue per user] are headed down to $5. Will they go to $1? How do you build a network that can make money? The answer is using off-the-shelf hardware, with everything else moved to software. You share one infrastructure, with one set of general-purpose base stations owned and managed by a single entity but running as many as three virtual base stations at once.”

Today in India, Vanu Inc. already works with Tata Communications. Last week, in tight markets for funding, Vanu scored a coup: $32M in new investment. Somehow, India’s citizens will get Anywhere.

P.S.: Come join the debate on where and when 4G technologies unfold — we’d love to see you at WiMAX World USA,  Sept. 30-Oct 2, 2008, in Chicago.

Thanks to Russell Buckley at MobHappy for throwing it down and addressing the central question of ad-supported (free) mobile services. In this case, Russell talks about SMS advertising in his post Will Peer-to-Peer SMS Advertising be Huge?

Sticking to the high points:

In other words, the sms would need to be reduced in price - or even offered free. Let’s assume that an sms currently costs about US 10 cents to send - and I appreciate that this is a huge generalisation, but it’ll do as a round figure. In that case, to replace that revenue, the operator would have to charge $100 in advertising, for every 1,000 they send out.

Russell’s logic is sound. And we keep running into these same issues, and we must continue to ask ourselves: how much would the advertising have to cost?

I find myself talking to clients  about replacement value of advertising and new, incremental advertising revenues. These sound like simple concepts, but as Russell points out with a slightly different example, there are quite a few people who look at a trial campaign with a 25% click-through rate, take the ad revenues and plan on keeping 60% of every incoming dollar. From there, a simple trial becomes a $50 billion market opportunity.

Which is why we ground ourselves with a dose of reality that says that marketers have choices…which they do. Another aspect of sanity comes from sizing the total global advertising market — at somewhere north of $650 billion.

These are important points of comparison for defining new Anywhere Network revenue opportunities in a growing and revolutionary market.

Thanks, Russell

Yesterday, I thought a lot about the concept of willingness to pay. You see, that’s something that’s top of mind when you’re lying in a puddle of water trying to beat the clock and get an automobile back together before dark so that it’s ready to drive to work the next day. I believe that was the point where I asked my wife how much she was willing to pay a mechanic to replace the ball joint in the front suspension of her car. Clearly, the answer was substantially more than several weeks before when she asked me to perform the task…on the weekend…with a limited amount of time and variable weather conditions.

In college, I took a course in urban economics — in which we reviewed a study that surveyed comparable wage rates for different types fo commuting. At the time, people expected to receive compensation of 2.5 times their actual wage rate in order to stand at a bus stop in the rain. I remember the bus stop, because it meant that a person who earned $10 an hour valued their commuting time at $25 an hour when waiting in the rain at the bus stop. I think the study was done in California, because I’d put the bus premium on commuting in a blizzard, not the rain. There’s something about horizontal sleet that really puts a damper on things.

I’ve recently inherited responsibility for Yankee’s coverage of mobile marketing, and there’s something about willingness to pay that keeps coming up with that. As I impatiently use my mobile devices, I wonder how much I’ll value my time when I start to receive marketing messages on these devices. It’s already clear that I’ll value my mobile time differently than that time I spend consuming media on other platforms such as television and the web.

This will have drastic impacts on the amount of advertising I’ll be willing to receive…and how much I’ll value those marketing messages. Chances are good that this will be inversely proportional to the amounts marketers will be willing to pay.

Is all the mystery in the world gone? Santa is not real. The toothfairy is mere farce. And the Wizard of Jobs has lost his magic touch. Or, at least his ability to keep secrets. Today, Apple announced (this is not a full or exhaustive list) a new Nano, Touch, iTunes, software (2.1 for Touch and iPhone), and demoed Spore for the hundreth time.

There were two troubling events I noticed when Steve failed to say those three magic words everyone longs to hear “One more thing.”

1. Apple cannot keep its new products a secret. Anyone reading the Apple/Tech blogs over the last week knew about iTunes 8, the Genius feature, the new Nano form factor, the 2.1 software, and the new iPod Touch. How has Apple left the keys to the vault lying on the kitchen counter? While many of these details were only heard days before, much of Apple’s mystique is tied to its ability to surprise. Apple has made a business of getting free press before, during, and after its events by keeping secrets. The weeks long build-up, the hype followed by the big reveal. It has all worked so well. If people get bored of Apple, the shine on the company will diminish and with hungry competitors desperate to gobble up marketshare could finally put a chink in the armor.

2. Evolution, not revolution. Perhaps Apple is waiting for the rights to The Beatles so they can play Revolution before dropping game changing technology. Truthfully though we demand an embarassment of riches. Apple released the iPod 3G just months ago and we immediately want such revolution in the iPod lineup. But alas, Apple has instead tweaked some form factors, increased storage, and lowered prices. Yes, the Genius feature will be interesting but Apple doesn’t make the bulk of its revenue buying songs. It makes revenue by selling hardware and I’m not convinced they did enough to offset a slowing market. HD television shows are important, yes but they are the next logical step in the offering. How about TV rentals? How about that subscription music service (I’m not saying it’s a good idea but it certainly would break the monotony)? Better integration with Apple TV? HD displays on the iPod?

Ultimately, Apple accomplished what they set out to do - appease their fans. Consumers will continue to buy iPods and Apple will continue to dominate the category. Perhaps their lack of revolution is the result of lackluster competition. Few are pushing them to innovate. Even Microsoft’s Zune announcement  this morning was just keeping pace with the iPod - not outpacing it.

The iPod is no longer a standalone device it’s a component of a connected lifestyle. The iPod, the iMac, the iPhone, and Apple TV all need to work together to offer a unique experience that have people buying more Apple products. Remote, the iPhone application is a good example of this. Apple needs more of those experiences if they want to dominate the connected home - hopefully their next event will offer such revolution.

One more thing - Apple’s decision to incorporate Nike+ in the Touch was an excellent idea. I always felt that was an underutilized promotion and hope its integration is the beginning of more applications for the technology and additional partnerships that offer unique use cases.