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The Annual Not-so Serious 2013 Predictions…

by Jeff Yee on December 20, 2012 in Mobile Web with No comments

The elections are over, the turkey’s been eaten and there are now presents under the tree.  That means it’s time for the annual blog where we have fun predicting how 2013 will turn out.  The key word being “fun”, as this is designed for entertainment purposes only.  Although for the second year in a row, one of our predictions was nearly true.  RIM did acknowledge that the co-CEO arrangement wasn’t working, but no, they didn’t bring Bill Gates out of retirement and then proceed to license Windows.

2012 was a year filled with exciting news about new devices, patent wars and claims from every carrier that they had the fastest network.  Hmm… now that I think of it, that sounds like 2011 too.  But heading into 2013, assuming we can all avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, the Mayan-predicted end-of-the-world, and consumers actually spend money in 2013…we have a lot to look forward to.

Therefore, here’s a poke at some of the wild things that could possibly come true in 2013.  From our family to yours, Happy Holidays!

Top Five 2013 Predictions for the Wireless Industry

#5) iPhone Max – What’s a tablet and what’s a phone?  The lines are blurred in 2013.  Tablets are getting smaller and phones are getting bigger.  Apple tries to keep pace with the 6.3” Samsung Note in 2013, intending to beat them by introducing a new 7” iPhone.  But Tim Cook wants to keep the Apple supply chain simple.  The new iPhone is essentially the size of the iPad Mini but with voice capabilities.  Apple Marketing has the answer.  Develop one product.  On one side of the device, there’s a “call” button with an iPhone Max logo.  Flip the device over for the touch screen and the iPad Mini logo appears.  One device; two brands.  Marketing genius.

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MWC 2012: Enterprise Mobility – The New Frontier for Network Operators

by Jeff Yee on February 28, 2012 in Mobile Web with 1 Comment

Live from the floor on Mobile World Congress 2012…

We’re well into the swing of things at this year’s Mobile World Congress. But with all the flashy announcements and stunts – from 41MP phones launched to “ice cream sandwiches” being given away at Google’s playground – it’s easy to forget that the focus should really be on the operators. After all, it is the operators that make up the core of the GSMA and have the power to drive real change in the industry. But recently they have been pulled into a bit of a tailspin, caused by a lack of growth in voice revenues and an inability to leverage their position on top of the mobile data value chain.

But there are rumblings of change. Yesterday, one of the biggest talking points at MWC was the launch of the GSMA’s initiative “Joyn,” a rich communications service that offers consumers IM, video calling and the ability to share documents and photos simultaneously with voice calls.  The aim of Joyn is to consolidate the multitude of communication apps and put them back under the control of the mobile network operators. This links to conversations we’ve been having with operators around how many are looking at machine-to-machine (M2M) data like this to drive new revenue growth. But the potential is much bigger: the real potential for operators is setting them up as players in the enterprise mobility space, providing their corporate customers with the production of M2M applications, as well as B2C and B2E apps.

A few operators have already ventured in this direction – we’re currently working with AT&T in the U.S., KT in Asia, and Swisscom in Europe, for example. On the whole though, operators have feared to tread in this space – which is surprising if you look at the latest industry stats. We recently conducted a study with Vanson Bourne which showed that on average CIOs and business unit leaders are planning to invest $926,000 (or £590,000) in employee and consumer-facing mobility projects in the next 12-18 months. That’s more than double the amount enterprises currently have invested in mobile projects ($422k/£269k). Not only this, but Global Industry Analysts Inc. recently predicted the worldwide enterprise mobility market would be worth $173.9 billion by 2017.

You can’t argue with numbers like that. And with the corporate relationships that operators hold, network operators that enable mobility for their enterprise customers through the provision of apps, web-apps, mobile websites and storefronts will not only  be able to open up a highly lucrative new revenue stream, but they will also boost revenues associated with the volume of M2M data traffic.

That’s the new frontier for operators. But despite this, many operators have been unwilling to make a play for the share of the enterprise mobility space, mostly due to the deep bank of investment and resource required. However, some operators are starting to see a new solution to the issue, forming wholesale partnerships with enterprise mobility vendors, and white-labelling those vendors’ solutions for their own corporate customers. For this to work, that partner must be able to provide them with a full end-to-end solution, including the ability to build, integrate, publish, manage and analyze, while providing cross platform device support. And above all, these solutions must meet the strict enterprise SLAs and mobile asset management requirements, have full cloud hosting capabilities and integrate with back and systems.

That’s where the opportunity lies. Those are the kind of conversations we are having here in Barcelona this year. And it is those network operators which take advantage of the opportunity in the short term who will reap the biggest gains in the long term.

 

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2012 – Predictions for the New Year

by Jeff Yee on December 19, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

Happy Holidays from Antenna Software!

It’s that time of year again, when the leaves have fallen, the air gets crisp and television ads are dominated with toys that every kid will want in their home.  It’s the holidays!  And it’s also the end of the year and a time to reflect on all of the great things that have happened in 2011 and to predict the wonderful things that will come in 2012. This year we’re doing the predictions thing a little bit differently.  We’re going to get thoughts from several different Mobile Masters bloggers and let you vote on whose predictions you think ring the most true, or who just made you laugh out loud.

And I’m the lucky man who gets to go first!

I’ll start by saying, we’re fortunate to be a part of a very exciting wireless industry.  Mobile experienced tremendous growth this past year and we expect even more next year.  Strangely, one of our predictions from last year’s blog-o-tainment was nearly correct.  As predicted, Motorola spun off two units, the mobility arm was purchased, and the RAZR returned to life.  Moto, are you serious?  We were joking when we said we wanted to see the RAZR brought back from the dead.

With no intention of actually repeating last year’s prediction success, here’s a glimpse of some of the possibilities for 2012.  From our family to yours, Happy Holidays!

Top Five 2012 Predictions for the Wireless Industry

#5) iCook – Apple does a major overhaul of iTunes and its focus on content.  The top applications in the store are no longer titles such as “Angry Birds”, “Tetris” and “Bejeweled”.  Under the old Apple, the Jobs mentality was to create an ecosystem of content, employing others to build content for the popular iPhone.  Now, with a Cook at the helm, the application focus does a tremendous shift.  The new popular titles in the store are: “iBaking”, “Grilling Shish-Ka-Pods” and “Cook-ing with Apples”.  Sorry Apple… you did that one to yourself when you hired a CEO with the last name of Cook to manage a company named after a fruit.

#4) DeviceOS – After Steve Ballmer finally recognizes that the majority of his employees at Microsoft are using iPhones, he concedes defeat.  At one of his infamous pep rallies at an employee meeting, he screams the new motto, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” Microsoft approaches Apple and seals a deal to license iOS, under the condition that they rebrand it.  Of course, the typical Microsoft touch is put on the operating system to ensure backwards compatibility with old phone and PC hardware, spending billions of dollars to effectively support the one guy in Halifax, Nova Scotia who wants to run iOS on a 1987 IBM PS/2.  Microsoft’s marketing team changes the “i” in iOS to “D”, for Device.  No one realizes the new acronym until after it ships – DOS.  Oh no!  DOS is back and it runs on a 1987 IBM PC!

#3) China T-Mobile – AT&T’s failed merger with T-Mobile leaves Deutsche Telekom with $4 billion in cash and spectrum, but it lacks a strategy for the future.  After a board meeting in Germany, Deutsche Telekom has the answer.  $4B per year in failed mergers!  The world’s largest carrier, China Mobile, is eager to expand beyond China into the United States.  So, Deutsche Telekom sells off T-Mobile to China Mobile, with another $4B in fees if the merger fails.  Then, secret lobbyists for Deutsche Telekom work their contacts in Congress to veto the transaction, spreading fears of Chinese spying via U.S. telecom networks.  The plan nearly succeeds before China threatens to dump their massive U.S. bond holdings onto the market, sparking widespread inflation fears.  Congress surrenders and allows the transaction to proceed.  China T-Mobile is formed.

#2 – The Gates of RIM – Blackberry’s smartphone market share continues to decline.  RIM acknowledges that its co-CEO arrangement of Balsillie and Lazaridis is not working.  The problem?  They need more CEOs to handle the load.  Two is not enough.  So they add a third CEO, bringing Bill Gates out of retirement.  Gates has spent most of his time on his charitable foundation, but after looking at RIM, he concludes that it fits his charitable requirements – thousands of Canadians are at risk of starvation if RIM collapses.  Gates, now at the helm with two other CEOs, concludes that licensing iOS from Apple is the best direction for RIM.  The problem is that Ballmer has beaten him to Apple and has already licensed iOS.  Gates has to settle for acquiring the Windows Phone assets from Microsoft, who is no longer using it.  Bill Gates is once again in charge of Windows.

#1 – Newt 5 – Newt Gingrich is losing his momentum in the race for the U.S. presidency in 2012.  November is quickly approaching, but his ratings in the polls have taken a hit.  He decides to switch his political platform to HTML 5, believing that it will solve all the world’s problems.  “Newt, how will you fix the economy?” “HTML 5,” is his answer.  “Newt, how will you combat global warming?”  “HMTL5” is his answer, once again.  The Newt 5 strategy fails.  While the strategy might have worked in 2011, HTML5 is so yesteryear of an answer by 2012.  To the dismay of the W3C, all vendors in the mobile industry have already begun work on the new answer to solve the world’s issues – HTML6.  All vendors except one.  The lone exception is Kony Solutions, who is still trying to figure out HTML5.


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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 6

by Jeff Yee on October 17, 2011 in Mobile Web with 2 Comments

This six-part blog series retraces the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode. Part 4 discusses the growth of the mobile Internet in the early 2000s . And Part 5 brought us the phenomenon of Apple and its influence on the industry.

THE STATE OF THE MOBILE INTERNET TODAY

Determining the state of the mobile Internet as it exists today is a difficult task. The challenge is – which day? In a dynamically changing industry, technological advances are a common occurrence every day. The answer to the question is different depending on the day. This is the challenge with developing for the mobile Internet. With change being constant, where should developers focus their time and attention? Which technologies are worth the investment – the ones that will have a future?

In this six-part blog series, we reviewed the early stages of the mobile Internet and noted the introduction of the iPhone as the inflection point, based on wireless carrier data traffic. A look at the Evolution of Mobile Web-Related Markup Languages, found on Wikipedia, describes in visual format the challenge that developers have faced. The chart, found below, describes the many languages that were created to solve the mobile Web problem, sometimes branching off from a predecessor with improvements.  Some of these languages are still in use today; others have been dropped by the vendors that once promoted them.

The chart on Wikipedia has been updated through 2007, coincidentally the year the iPhone was introduced. Unfortunately, it’s out of date and missing the latest HTML5 movement. So let’s take a stab at completing this chart for Wikipedia. Will it look like the following, where the world finds its harmony and lives happily ever after?

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 5

by Jeff Yee on October 10, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode. Part 4 discusses the growth of the mobile Internet in the early 2000s .

APPLE SPARKS THE LONG-AWAITED MOBILE INTERNET

In June 2007, everything changed. Overnight, the world woke up to a new phone that was radically different than its predecessors. It was the Apple iPhone, which will be remembered as the device that finally lived up to the mobile-Internet hype. But it could have been very different. In 2006, AT&T was working on a secret project with Apple, dubbed “Project Fruit.” The project, done in typical Apple secrecy where few people were aware of the project within both companies, was for Apple to become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MNVO. In the middle of the decade, MVNOs were the rage. Although Virgin looked like a successful MVNO, many other notable brands, such as Disney and ESPN, were having a difficult time with their MVNO offerings.  ESPN was shut down that year.  Apple took notice of the MVNO failures and changed its plans. It would not become a virtual operator, piggybacking on someone else’s network, but instead, it would focus on selling devices. Can you imagine how different it would be if Apple was an MVNO? By 2007, Apple stuck to its core business and put its focus on the launch of the iPhone in the U.S., with an exclusive deal with its first carrier, AT&T.

Until the launch of the iPhone, critics stated that the mobile Internet needed faster networks and cheaper data plans to succeed. They claimed that the mobile Internet wouldn’t go mainstream until this happened. Apple’s iPhone proved them wrong. The first iPhone launched using AT&T’s EDGE network (a 2.5G technology), despite the fact that AT&T had already deployed a 3G network. And the phone required a $30 per month unlimited data plan, when other phones on AT&T were only $20 per month for unlimited data (the price of the plan actually increased, not decreased). Therefore, it wasn’t the speed of the network or the price points that had been the problem for slower-than-hoped-for mobile Internet growth before the iPhone, it was that the market lacked a device that had the experience that users expected when they surfed the mobile Internet.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 4

by Jeff Yee on October 3, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode.

WAP’S INITIAL HYPE AND GROWTH IN THE EARLY 2000s

While data services were exploding in Japan in the early 2000s, the Western world seemed to declare each year, at various conferences, that, “This will be the year for the mobile Internet.” But despite some success, these prophecies were largely wrong until the latter part of the decade. The decade started with a dot-com bust that took down many of the Internet companies that were declaring wireless to be the new frontier for the Web. And when the dust settled after the bust, the remaining companies that stayed loyal to their beliefs in the mobile version of the World Wide Web, had to wait patiently, for years, until the adoption rate finally lived up to expectation. Mobile Internet adoption did grow during the first part of the decade, but it seemed to always be short of expectations in North America and Europe. 

The successful mobile start-ups during this time were not getting rich on the mobile Internet. They, instead, focused their time and energy on the money-makers at that time: SMS services and digital downloads such as ringtones.

Why did the mobile Internet fail to live up to expectations in the Western world in the early part of the decade? And why was i-mode so successful during this same period?  Around the same time that AT&T launched PocketNet in 1997, the WAP Forum (now Open Mobile Alliance) was formed.  WAP, or the Wireless Application Protocol, was started in June 1997 by founding members Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Openwave, formerly Unwired Planet which is the browser AT&T was using for its first PocketNet phone. The WAP Forum was busy creating specifications for the protocol and markup language that would bridge the differences between a mobile network (GSM, TDMA at the time) and the Internet. As a result, carriers utilizing products from these vendors began a shift to WAP and WML (Wireless Markup Language) by the early 2000s. Even early-leader AT&T shifted from the HDML markup language used for PocketNet to WML by 2002. Meanwhile, i-mode was benefiting from a different choice in technologies; a technology that more closely resembled HTML development for the PC.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 3

by Jeff Yee on September 26, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touched on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone.

I-MODE – THE EARLY LEADER IN MOBILE DATA SERVICES

After the launch of AT&T’s initial PocketNet service, NTT DOCOMO sent a team to the United States to learn more about the offering as it attempted to build its own data phone. NTT DOCOMO,the largest wireless carrier in Japan, built a strong relationship with AT&T at that time, and would eventually become an investor in AT&T Wireless with a 16 percent stake in the company.

In February 1999, NTT DOCOMO launched i-mode, Japan’s first mobile Internet service. Unlike AT&T’s initial offering, i-mode was an overnight success. It reached 10 million users by 2000, and 40 million users by 2003. It became the envy of wireless carriers around the world and the talk of the content community. But why was i-mode successful when PocketNet failed? What was the difference between the two?

The American answer was to point to differences in the Japanese culture – the Japanese are early adopters of electronics, or dense cities in Japan meant more commuting via public transportation and thus more susceptible to data services (it’s impolite to talk on the train), or average landline costs in Japan for Internet connections, such as DSL, were much higher than the U.S., thus the mobile phone was the first connection to the World Wide Web for many Japanese. While many of these reasons have some validity, there was a better explanation that was being ignored by the rest of the world at the time.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 2

by Jeff Yee on September 19, 2011 in Mobile Web with 1 Comment

This six-part blog series will retrace the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touched on the history of the PC Internet.

AT&T POCKETNET– THE FIRST MOBILE INTERNET PHONE

By 1997, the Internet was booming. It was also the year that AT&T Wireless unveiled the world’s first mobile Internet phone. Developed by Pacific Communications Sciences Inc., the phone was branded PocketNet, and it looked like a standard mobile phone at the time, but with one major difference – it included a 19.2 Kbps modem running on AT&T’s new Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network. Two additional phones using the PocketNet service followed: the Mitsubishi Mobile Access (MA120) and the Samsung Duett.

Despite being the first to market with Internet-capable phones, AT&T’s initial phones were not a tremendous success. (Reports suggest that slightly more than 20,000 analog PocketNet phones were sold.) There were many factors that contributed to the relatively slow adoption of the first Internet phone. The PocketNet phone had a three-line, 60-character LCD screen that limited readable text without significant scrolling. This limited its use and appeal, as it was not compatible with most Web sites that were being developed in 1997.

But more importantly, the first PocketNet phone used the analog AMPS network for voice calling at a time when users were demanding digital voice features. The phone had made an interesting leap in technology to support a data connection, but it missed the popular transition at the time to move to the digital voice network (AT&T’s digital TDMA network). Moreover, users selected a channel and network, which meant that a voice call could not be received while a user was in data mode.

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Mobile Web: History of the Mobile Internet, Part 1

by Jeff Yee on September 12, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

The power of the mobile device is quite simply amazing. Today’s miniature computer, which is what we now hold in our hands, is not fixed to a geographical location. It travels with you wherever you are – it is mobile. And with today’s technology, it is more than a communication device. Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. Radical changes in the past decade have brought us to this point. We need to stop calling our utility tool a phone, but instead, we need to call it a device.

This six-part blog series will explore the last decade of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. By understanding its history, we’ll be able to answer why consumers and developers are faced with an overwhelming number of technology choices. But to understand mobile, we’ll need to start with the history of the Internet itself, or what I’ll dub the “PC Internet.”

British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1994. (Courtesy of CERN)

HISTORY OF THE PC INTERNET

Although the mobile Internet may sound like a separate network, it is in fact the same Internet that blossomed with PC computers in the 1990s. Although there isn’t a differentiation in actual network, the Internet viewed through the desktop computer is sometimes referred to in the wireless industry as the PC Internet, to separate it from applications and services that have been optimized for mobile devices, or the mobile Internet. Since the mobile Internet shares the same network as the PC Internet, and now the same protocols and languages (although this was not always the case), it is helpful to start with the history of the PC Internet when considering how the Web grew to support mobile devices.

The World Wide Web was first developed in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee built the protocols for communication between a client and server at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.  At that time, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, which is an important point to make. The network itself, the Internet, was already in place. In fact, the Internet has roots back to the U.S. government’s ARPANET, the first packet switching network. But in 1989, this network, for the most part, connected government and educational facilities, and each node often had differing systems that made it difficult to share information.

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Mobile Web: Survey Illustrates That Mobile Performance Matters

by Jeff Yee on July 29, 2011 in Mobile Web with No comments

Equation Research recently came out with a report analyzing user expectations for the mobile Web.  Their graphic is a well-illustrated visual of the issues that a mobile Web site owner faces when developing a site. In short, poor performance results in users dropping and less likely to return or recommend a site.

Courtesy of Equation Research and Compuware Corp.

While the conclusion may not be surprising, it’s the survey numbers that are worth noting. Interestingly, nearly three-quarters of mobile phone users expect Web sites to load as quickly on their phones as they have on their desktops. When it doesn’t meet expectations – they drop.  And 74 percent will only wait five seconds for the page to load.

How does the problem get resolved? It’s true that network congestion and factors outside a developer’s control can be an issue, but there’s a lot within control to be a major influence on the user experience. It’s time to stop putting the blame on wireless carriers for having poor coverage or an old network. It’s pointless as the carrier in turn puts blame on their governments for not releasing enough spectrum or to YouTube for hogging an amazing 22 percent of the pipe.

From the Equation Research numbers themselves, we know that 77 percent of the top companies’ mobile sites take more than five seconds to load. With everything else being equal (network coverage, etc.), this means that 23 percent of the sites are able to beat the mark and performance. So what are these sites doing right? Optimization and compression. Too many sites rely on the mobile browser to do the work. It’s the lazy approach. Pages are not optimized for the size of the device, often defaulting to the desktop version of the site and relying on the browser to use best fit or zoom technology to provide a decent user experience. Another common issue is the lack of media compression, or even worse, CSS or JavaScript that is not used in the markup. In a wireless environment, bandwidth is critical and needs to be considered carefully when crafting the mobile site. These problems can be solved individually by developers – although it’s a painful process – or with platforms that address device optimization and compression for wireless networks.

Performance is often neglected during development and design, with most of the attention going to UI and feature capabilities in the mobile device. Yet these numbers from Equation Research tell a different story – build a poorly performing site and you may not have many users, regardless of your features. The good news is that it’s not necessarily a trade-off between speed and function. With the right architectural approach, a high-performing, feature-rich mobile site is certainly possible. Even on an older wireless network;even in poor coverage areas. It’s time to stop blaming the network. Seventy-seven percent of the top companies with 5+ second response times need to start redesigning their mobile sites!

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