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:
Read the rest of this entry »

Over a fun breakfast last week, I chatted with John Bruggeman, CMO of Cadence, the electronic design automation firm. Just back from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I was talking about the battles in the mobile revolution.

John says there are three significant battles still underway in that sector that have do-or-die stakes for the businesses in the actual battle: the mobile operating system (Nokia, Google, and Microsoft — the latter making another run at it with a rethought Windows Mobile), the mobile device platform (the usual handset suspects, Apple, and possibly some daring consumer electronics players), and the prevailing semiconductor architecture — which he sees as boiled down to a question of whether high-performance Intel processors make inroads against the widely used low-power ARM architecture.

Who’ll win that third battle, I asked. The ARM platform has a massive lead in the mobile space, its core IP going into the processor for virtually every handset sold in the world. “Intel is smart, has loads of cash, and knows this is a long-term game,” said John. “Over the next 5 years, they will co-exist. Beyond that, these two worlds — low-power handsets and high-performance portable computing — bleed together. The devices following that time period won’t be about fast web page refreshes; they’ll be about transactions, making fast hits on cloud-based data. When that happens, our mobile devices will want both low power and performance.” Given the time parameters involved, he doesn’t count out Intel’s push to take its desktop/laptop dominance into the smaller more diffused computing domain.

From that topic we wandered over to one that’s a new favorite of mine: that 2010 is the year that mobility as a business issue rises to the boardroom. My logic goes like this:

1. The commercialization of the Internet first hit businesses as an external, largely superficial change, in which they essentially stapled websites to their existing operations.
2. But the subsequent maturation of Internet computing compelled those same businesses to pull the net throughout their activities, affecting supply chains, marketing and sales, manufacturing, and virtually every other function in the company.
3. The mobile revolution has begun similarly. Most major enterprises at this stage have now begun to create mobile experiences for their customers (although, as Carl Howe’s reports on mobile web experiences establish, at widely varying levels of quality)
4. The diffusion of the impact of mobility will be no different than that of the Internet. Thus, corporate board members should begin considering how strategically their enterprises’ leadership is thinking about mobility. How else will governance insure that the business is pushing the leverage of connectivity into every nook and cranny of its operations?

Today's version of a mobility officer

John bought it — and he took the thinking a couple of steps further: ”The first automation of business in the 20th century happened with the advent of mainframe computing. The central information systems function arose then. The re-automation of business, driven by desktop computing, pushed IT further out into the business and, organizationally, led to the rise of the CIO. What you’re talking about — the rise of mobility as a strategic issue for businesses — will mean that we’ll see the rise of a Chief Mobility Officer.”

Fascinating idea, and one Yankee Group will pursue in a research report over the next few months with Josh Holbrook taking the lead. But beware: John followed his prediction of the emergence a new type of corporate CMO with this one: “Sadly, many businesses who take this step will put a networking guy in the job. What they’ll need will be an imaginative business person, someone who’s able to look at all the activities of the business and re-think them completely.”

I spent half of the first day of Mobile World Congress attending and moderating for an Alcatel Lucent IMS customer showcase event was attended by the normal IMS cheerleaders – France Telecom/Orange, NTT Docomo, Telefonica, Belgacom, SFR and a new face with Verizon Wireless [VZW].  Alcatel Lucent says IMS is the pots and pans you need in the next generation network kitchen.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Opening day of CES added another 9 miles to our pedometer, bringing our total walking mileage to the event to 26.7 miles. We can’t claim to have seen everything; in fact, given the fact we were booked in back to back meetings the entire time we were here, we were lucky if we saw even 0.1% of all that CES offered (you can see some of the many photos we took enroute to those meetings here). Still, of the things we did see, I’d award my personal “Best of CES” Awards to the following:

• Best demonstration of 3D: Sony Electronics for their live 3D broadcast of Taylor Swift. Those of us in the audience could watch her live performance in the real world and compare it with the 3D broadcast to see how lifelike it was. The pyrotechnic confetti really made the 3D pop; expect that to become a 3D cliche any time a broadcaster wants to get 3D watchers to ooh and ah.
• Best demonstration of marketing muscle: Sony Electronics for their live 3D broadcast of Taylor Swift. They flew her in to sing one song on her way to the People’s Choice Awards. Yikes.
• Most jaw-dropping technology: Sony Electronics showing their remastered videos of Jimi Hendrix in 3D. The Woodstock video was shot in 1967, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t have 3D video cameras then. Truth be told, we were lucky to have video cameras period.
• Most ambitious celebrity endorsement: Polaroid signed Lady Gaga to become their brand ambassador. ‘Nuf said.
• Best 3D picture: Panasonic’s theater demonstration. The 2008 3D Olympic coverage presented in high-definition 3D on a 152-inch plasma sent chills down my spine. It was the best illustration that good 3D will not be things coming at you, but the effect of looking through a window at what appears to be the Olympics in your own yard.
• Most lusted-after product: Panasonic’s 152-inch 4K plasma TV. Everyone who looked at it wanted it to watch the SuperBowl or World Cup on. We’ll ignore the fact that no sources exist for 4K content (that’s 4 times the resolution of 1080p high-definition).
• Best eReader: Skiff. Dmitriy Molchanov will make his own call on this, but Skiff’s bendable steel-film E Ink reader impressed me far more than I expected. Because it is the only connected reader that was conceived and backed by publishers, it is one of the few that has a clear and understandable business model behind it for that constiutency. The only problem: we have no idea when we’ll be able to get one or what price it will cost. And Apple still might eat it’s lunch with its rumored tablet.
• Best startup you may have heard of: carMD.com. CarMD’s gizmo connects to your car Data Link Connector (every car made since 1996 has one). Once there, it provides you with any diagnostic errors detected by your car’s processors. But that’s just the start: those codes are then used to tap into a database compiled by mechanics over the past 10 years of what problems cause those diagnostic codes, estimates what parts will be needed to fix it, and what a car repair shop will probably charge you to fix it. The company is small, but they’ve just started running infomercials for the device. And the return on investment is a no-brainer; one saved trip to the dealer will easily pay for the device itself.

With that, I leave the crowds to the last three days of CES as I now return to Boston and snow. Have a great show!

That’s French for “After now, the deluge”. And that’s about how I feel about today’s CES opening in just 2.5 hours. It’s going to be a very busy day.

But before the networks melt (or at least glow bright red with heat) from 120,000 people blogging away, I thought I’d recap a few highlights of the last 18 hours deserve some note. Instead of running down the facts of each announcement, I’ll let links to New York Times articles do that for me; I’ll just add my reasons why the events are significant. Specifically:

• Vendors are pushing 3D as the next high-definition. Every flat panel vendor here is hoping that 3D televisions will be the next must-have upgrade. I must admit that I’ve been impressed by the demos here; I saw Sony’s 3D technology with Taylor Swift performing last night, and it was one of the best broadcasts I’ve seen with passive glasses. All that said, with the inconvenience of 3D glass and most flat panels only one to three years old in the U.S., I don’t think most consumers will even consider replacing them for another 3 to 10 years, dooming the trend until the latter half of our new decade. I’ll be touring Panasonic’s booth this morning (it’s the size of a football field), and may have to say about this tonight.
• TVs are adding connected apps in a big way. Both Panasonic and Sony are boasting Skype conferencing on their connected TVs, and that’s far from the last app they’ll be adding. Whether built-in or add-on connected TV apps are the wave of the future, there’s no question in my mind that connected TVs will be a bigger trend than 3D in the short term, and it may be true later in the decade as well. Vince Vittore’s report published just yesterday is a timely analysis of this trend.
• Consumers may be pushing companies to become more vertically integrated. Apple’s been able to win over consumers over the last decade because it can orchestrate hardware, software, and media to create a single unique consumer experience. Microsoft’s one success story in the last decade has been XBox, which is similarly vertically integrated. Sony’s recent successes have been with Playstation Network melded to its PS3 and PSP gaming systems. Despite the appeal of open partner, these vertically integrating offerings are winning consumers and creating profits. The very fact that Google had to create its own Android phone to drive adoption suggests that we may be seeing the open pendulum swing back toward soup-to-nuts offerings.
• Cars are moving to glass cockpits. Despite the dangers of distracted driving, car companies are madly rushing to put Internet connected screens in car dashboards. I don’t actually believe that Anywhere connectivity is the juice that makes this trend take off, but rather the replacement of traditional car instruments with electronic icons, maps, and controls. By the end of this decade, analog guages in cars like we do in airplanes today: amusing antiques.
• Tablets just aren’t here yet. Despite the excitement over Apple’s rumored iTablet and Steve Balmer’s announcement of an HP tablet last night, the reality is that these connected devices are still a dream rather than reality. The litmus test? Try to buy one. It will take more than CES to get this trend moving, but it will probably take Steve Jobs bringing tablets down from his mountain later this month to make it reality instead of vapor, and even then, no one’s going to be using those tablets in any volume until at least Q2.

After the financial services sector, the industry that’s shown the greatest capacity to innovate with technology has been the gaming sector. (I will pass on what may seem like a glaring opportunity to editorialize.)

A story in today’s NYT profiles smart-phone style wireless gaming devices being introduced in Nevada casinos to allow more frequent betting on sporting events.

Besides the devices themselves, which fascinate me as I look for new wireless items in our lives, the most interesting aspect of the story may be the impact that portability of wirelessly-supported gambling has on sports betting. Which is the enabling of what the gaming firms call ‘in-line’ gambling — betting on the outcome of events within a sporting event, such as a football kickoff.

Once we can do things Anywhere, the likelihood of doing them will rise. Same for shopping, media consumption, and more. To enterprises interested in the Anywhere Consumer, Anywhere devices are More of Everything devices.

Farewell to the Noughties, a decade sandwiched between two crises: The dotcom bust and the current – but sputtering – downturn.  In that time, Europe accomplished much: The Euro was adopted, DSL went mainstream and telcos went NGN.

Not least, consumers woke up to the pleasures of mobile content, although it’s questionable whether MNOs will ever see a fair return for their expensive 3G licenses. Roaming charge crackdowns and market saturation haven’t helped financials either.

Time again to put a nebudchadnezzar on ice? There’s plenty under the tree for 2010:

1. Ethernet will be everywhere. Ethernet is in the LAN, it’s in the WAN, it’s transforming mobile backhaul economics, and it’s converging the datacenter. Fiber remains best, but clever vendors (see Hatteras, Actelis) are delivering copper-bonded Ethernet in the first mile. And new Ethernet exchanges (see CENX and Equinix) aim to speed order to cash with their interconnect services. Want a unifying communications fabric? Well duh!

2. The CDN bubble will burst. Telco CDNs can offer compelling features, but how many service providers can the market sustain, even if video traffic is exploding? Many partnerships are already in place: Tata Communications with BitGravity, Verizon with Velocix, Deutsche Telekom with EdgeCast and Global Crossing with Limelight Networks and EdgeCast. If you’re not in the game now, you’ll need deep pockets to buy in.

3. The cloud’s hot air will expand. Resilient, liquid (and probably Ethernet-based) connectivity is going to save the outage-prone cloud. To invest in cloud services enterprises require robust network as well as applications-specific SLAs, as well as network redundancy, say Yankee Group enterprise surveys. Offering on-demand VPN connectivity to cloud services (on a wholesale or retail basis) could help defuse concerns about their security and resilience.

4. Equipment vendors will want to be your new best friend. The ratio of CAPEX to revenue currently stands at 12.6 percent among European operators, according to Yankee Group analysis. It’s not going to recover much. That’s why European equipment vendors like Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks are on a charm offensive with managed services propositions and aims to transform telco business models. Listen to their pitch. And talk to Huawei:  With a new SDP partner program and growing software division, it’s got more in its arsenal than cheap kit.

5. Smart wholesale will become sexier than dumb wholesale. Get big, get niche or get out. Embrace revenue-sharing models with non-traditional partners. And work mobile angles: International remittances, GRX to IPX interconnect, content transcoding, white-label mobile UC and M2M are among many rich avenues of investigation.

Best wishes for the New Year – and decade – look forward to continuing the conversation!

Google’s acquisition of mobile Internet advertising network Admob for $750 million just signals that it intends to reprise its desktop Internet strategy on the mobile Internet. Google already had an aggressive strategy to develop and deploy mobile Internet services such as search, news, and mobile Web reformatting. After all, Google is already the dominant mobile Web search destination among consumers and its news service tied Yahoo in our 2009 Best of the Anywhere Web evaluation of news sites. What Admob adds is the ability to monetize that development with what is probably the largest mobile Internet advertising network today.

I liken this development to that of building a new city. Google is providing free roads and power for a new mobile Internet metropolis. How does Google make money from that? Google/AdMob just happens to own most of the billboard space in that city.

All I can say to this acquisition is that Google still seems to be a couple steps ahead of everyone else in its Internet strategy. Google just acquired some of the best advertising real estate on the mobile Internet. Everyone else is now looking for something in the neighborhood—but not nearly as good.

Hundreds of nerds converged at the San Francisco Blackberry Developer Conference today to listen and learn about new capabilities within Blackberry’s App World. Given the audience, I’ve never felt cooler than I do right now. OK – I’m just kidding about the nerds, but developer jokes are too easy to pass-up. Based on RIM’s announcements I would say the main thrust of the conference is monetization. I have also come away impressed with RIM’c commitment to growing App World.

Monetization:

The four announcements made by co-CEO Jim Balsillie were around the following topics:

1. Ad APIs: RIM aggregated a variety of add platforms so developers can simply insert adds into your application using a new SDK
2. Payment service APIs: A new payment service SDK makes it quick and easy to enable click to purchase capabilities through virtually any platform (e.g. Paypal, credit card, carrier billing).
3. Cell site geo-location APIs: RIM added cell tower triangulation APIs to offer easy access to always on location services.
4. Push APIs: for alerts and content on widgets: Can push alerts. Efficiency for network and battery life

The first two of their four main announcements were directly targeted at helping developers do something novel in the mobile app world – make money. However, even the geo-location offers big revenue opportunities. In fact, Yahoo Mobile demonstrated a widget based location aware search app that seemed to marry Yelp’s crowd sourcing capability, with Yahoo mobile search and Blackberry’s new geo-location engine. I know similar capabilities are offered on the iPhone, but I thought the always on capability was a pretty cool added feature. The net-net, this is a developer conference for grown-ups. Show me the money!

Commitment to App World Growth:

This issue may have been less interesting the many of the developers in the audience but it impressed me. RIM talked about its newly announced App World developer training that will take place around the globe in the native language of the country. For those young aspiring developers RIM talked about their its academic developer program that trains college aged kids how to develop for App World. Lastly, all the training material that already resides in App World was moved to YouTube so anyone doing a general web search can find the training materials they need.

All and all the news is a very well balanced mix of improved developer toolkits, initiatives to help continue fueling growth and tactical App World improvements that ease the logistics of development (e.g. persistent log-in for developers, leaving the simulator running while updating applications). The net net is it seems RIM is listening to its developer community and the developers are pleased.