Graph of Car Locator Sales
Eddie Kim, author of the Android Car Locator app, just announced today that his app has reached a new milestone of $13,000 a month in revenue. Now that may be chicken feed next to what top performing iPhone apps do (the record-breaking PopCap game Plants versus Zombies for iPhone, for example, just went from zero to $1 million in revenue in 9 days). However, Eddie makes a more important point farther down his post:
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Windows Phone 7 Series home screen
Microsoft announced its new take on its Windows Mobile OS today at Mobile World Congress, christened Windows Phone 7 Series (I’ll abbreviate it WP7S for convenience; see a demo here, Microsoft Silverlight required). Despite my enjoyment of my present Phone, I’m really pleased and excited to see this.
The rumors of a Motorola dismemberment plan have sprung anew with a Wednesday article in the WSJ. Everyone, get your axes ready – either to grind or to hack off your favorite piece of the Moto beast. The latest round of speculation points to the possibility of Motorola combining their handset and set top box divisions to build a new integrated future. Of course, speculation also exists pointing to the potential spin-off of these units. Who are all these unnamed speculators anyway? Whether it is to sell them off or create competitive advantage, the merger of the two units raises some interesting prospects.
If Motorola can come up with a workable structure to blend its mobile device unit with its set top box unit, then that new combined group would hold tremendous promise to integrate consumers’ digital media in an exciting way. That combination would certainly attract the interests of companies like Huawei, Asus and others looking to gain more prominent market positioning in the mobile and CE industries. Of course, if Motorola could do that easily, it wouldn’t be looking to dismantle itself and sell off the valuable morsels to the highest bidder. So while I think the combination of the two units is a fine notion at a high level, the fact remains that Motorola has failed to integrate its two most important business groups in any significant way and will have to undergo major cultural and organizational changes to realize that vision. Back in early 2007, I met with then CMO of Motorola, Casey Keller, at a trade show to discuss media integration and device interaction between mobile handsets and set top boxes. Keller shared the view that Motorola held the strongest potential hand in the business to do that, but was facing an anemic mobile device pipeline (how many ways can you sell a RAZR, after all?) and new levels of challenge on the set top box side as well. So, vision took a back seat to triage and the more important task of stopping the bleeding, but execution proved to be elusive. From YE 2006 to YE 2009, Motorola’s annual device sales dropped by approximately 65%.
Three years later, the Motorola device group is showing solid signs of rebirth with its recent line-up of smartphones architected around the Android platform. The new expanding portfolio leverages Motorola’s greatest recent advance: the highly customized Motoblur experience that presents users with all their social networking and primary apps in a single view. If this concept catches fire, it provides an interesting potential roadmap for Motorola to upgrade its set top box experience to include similar capabilities for social networking but, perhaps more importantly, media sharing among a consumer’s multiple devices. With its massive share of the North American set top box market, Motorola holds a unique hand of assets and partners. Cable companies have been desperate to extend their relevance beyond the TV and laptop and a set top box that easily interacts with mobile and CE devices, integrating digital media could be just the trick.
But the window of opportunity for this integrated approach is limited, so, Motorola, god speed. As Jeff Goldblum famously said in Jurassic Park, “Life, uh, finds a way.” In the consumer media world “life” is the idea of acquiring, enjoying and moving media on any device you want, whenever and anywhere you want. Consumers are already experimenting with this in many forms. Whether it is the game station, laptop, media gateway, transcoders, mobile apps, etc, consumers have a huge selection of ways to get media from A to B, but few are terribly satisfying from either a user interface or device compatibility basis. This leaves Motorola with some wiggle room to merge the set top box business and mobile device unit to generate a new integrated vision of consumer media. The vision will need to be both technical and cultural to bridge the gaps between the two business units, which share nothing beyond a company brand. But with proper execution, such an approach could save set top boxes and the Motorola brand from being another set of fossils on the anywhere evolutionary path.
Today’s announcement by Google that it is exploring deploying an experimental 1 Gbps fiber to the home service in a small number of communities sounds like crazy talk (see Benoit Felten’s analysis for his view on this announcement). Could Google really believe that it could run an fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service akin to Verizon’s FiOS as a side business? However as I reflected on the announcement and my recent reading of Ken Auletta’s book, Googled, I find myself thinking that this is anything but a side business. I think that this project is Google executing on a key element of its BHAG.
Star Walk iPhone app on iPad
Based on all the details Wednesday, I’ve written an iPad analysis report that clients should be able to dive into later today. The bottom line: no matter how much you may think Apple ran its hype machine this week, the iPad will be a force to be reckoned with. Why? Because Apple has a unique vision for Anywhere devices and the marketing muscle to back it up. If you have comments or disagreements after reading it, please send them.
Meanwhile, a number of questions and objections to the iPad have popped up online, and given that I’m one of only about 500 people who has used an iPad for a half-hour or so, I thought I’d repond to them here. So without further ado:
Isn’t iPad just a big iPod touch?
I’ll be publishing a detailed analysis for clients about the Apple iPad and its effect on connected devices (i.e., it’s a big deal) in the next day or so. I have also posted photos that I took of the press, VIPs, and tablets we saw today for those who are interested.
However, I also had some takeaways from the event that fell somewhere between the immediacy of my tweets and the detailed analysis mentioned above. As I look toward the iPad shipping in late March/early April, I see some changes coming. Specifically:
"Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it." -- the Wall Street Journal
Here are my quick reactions to today’s Apple Special Event; expect some more thoughtful analysis in a few hours. But the highlights of the last few hours were:
Will it catch on? Based on a few minutes of hands-on playing with one, absolutely. The iPad bears the same relationship to a netbook that the original Mac did to DOS PCs: it’s a complete rethinking of the reading and media consuming experience. Apple’s full-color, full motion device makes not only netbooks, but any product with an E Ink display look tired and dated. And if you’re a publisher who lives and dies by what your content looks like, you want to be talking to Apple now; any other digital distribution is going to look very last decade.
Stay tuned for more details and a deeper analysis for clients over the next day or two.
Now that CES is a week behind us and I’ve had some time to put my thoughts together and recover from the dreaded CES flu, I’ll be writing a few blog posts on three big CE products/trends that garnered considerable attention during the show:
I’ll start with a short post on connected cars, as this is really the first year where they received standout coverage: Over 380 in-vehicle technology exhibitors graced CES’ floors this year, Ford CEO Alan Mulally delivered a keynote, and a CEA press release issued before the show claimed that sales of in-vehicle technology topped $9.3 billion in 2009. Yes, you heard correctly, $9.3 billion.
A number of players will profit when more technology finds its way into our cars. Some statistics presented during the show highlight just how much network operators, automotive companies and legislators stand to win. Take a look:
Given the diverse set of players in this emerging market, Yankee Group is including a number of questions on connected cars in its updated Consumer Survey. As data begins to come in, expect to see a publication on the subject in the near future.
I got a rude awakening early this morning: the ice and snowstorm that blew through Massachusetts last night knocked out our power. That meant we had no lights, no heat, and no running water (darn those electric well pumps!).
But, like in Emerging Anywhere countries, even though we didn’t have power, we did have Internet access via our mobile phones. And that strange disparity—the ability to call people and access information from the rest of the world when we didn’t have basic infrastructure services—provided personal emphasis to stories I’d recently read in the news over the weekend.
The earthquake which struck Haiti on Tuesday has wrought an unimaginable human toll. As the devastation is made plain on our TV screens — and in our browsers — our charitable instincts are awakened and long for an outlet.
Text HAITI to 90999 and a donation of $10 will be given to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts in #Haiti.
So tweeted @mGive on Tuesday evening, and so began a sea change in digital fund raising.
Quick and easy: Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10
In the three days since, more than one million such text messages have been sent, bringing in over $10 million to help Haiti’s earthquake victims. Haitian musician Wyclef Jean’s YELE/501501 campaign had collected over $1 million in $5 donations by Thursday. Similar SMS campaigns are underway by International Medical Corps, International Rescue, the Salvation Army, and the William J. Clinton foundation, but it is the “HAITI/90999″ campaign which caught the attention of the Obama administration and was promoted on the White House blog on Wednesday.
