Raj Singh’s Mobile Life

Top 6 Reasons Why Nokia Doesn’t Have a Capacitive Touch Screen

Disclaimer: I have a lot of friends at Nokia; this is meant to be friendly and I do look forward to your awesome phones this year!

6. Double-tap for zoom is great but come on guys, we’re still working on integrating login across Ovi. Pinch and zoom, that’s complex software!

5. We are focused on the variants between N90 and N900. N1000?! That means we have to change our manufacturing process, errr!

4. Apple-spat! Patents on multi-touch? Ha, we’re saving pennies aka margin on every device, you wait and see!

3. As any prudent company, it’s our fidicuary responsibility to provide a stylus to all of our enterprise customers.

2. If you were smart, you’d see that in the recent handset reports that we dominate in emerging countries. We don’t need capacitive to differentiate! We’re GOD in Africa and India!

1. You do understand we live in Finland. This is not the Bay Area, gloves don’t work with capacitive!

Looking forward to seeing that capacitive Nokia :)

Mobile Trends 2020

So I was fortunate enough to participate in Rudy De Waele’s mobile 2020 predictions collaborative. Thanks Rudy for assembling a great group of mobile visionaries, thought leaders and entrepreneurs. Check it out below:

Mobile Taking a Cue From the Travel Industry

Just finished a week at CES – I’m exhausted! On Wed, I attended the ATT Developer Event. One of the first announcements of the day besides BREW which I found amusing was that ATT was now working with Orange and America Movil. The specifics were not clear but basically if you submit an app in the ATT app store, you could seamlessly submit it to Orange and America Movil (and vice-versa). In addition, the dev programs and other tools etc would be merged – it was the beginning of a tighter partnership. As I was listening to this announcement, I was thinking Travel Reward Programs – not that this is the first instance of a set of operators working together but the way it sounded, I wouldn’t be surprised if your ATT or Orange etc subscription entitles you to receive special cross-operator benefits – this is definitely coming.

Later that the day, we had our next instance of the classic “timeshare presentation”. We sat through a presentation and we got a free phone – this seems to be the trend at many of the recent developer events I have attended. It’s only a matter of time before they’ll not less us watch the presentation because of some screening (ie when real timeshares don’t let you participate because your wife isn’t with you, ha!).

Next comes an Orbitz like model for voice and data :) Not just discounted minutes when it’s off-peak (some operators already do that) but pricing that is determined in real-time, an operator as a service (SAAS) – now that would be amazing.

CTIA Party Analysis

Happy NYE everyone!

Not sure if this is interesting or not but I was able to pull this together pretty quickly. I looked at my CTIA schedules for the past few years and graphed some data around the parties that I was invited to – I was curious to see if there were any trend lines and/or anything that may have pointed to the recession. FYI, CTIA attendance last year was down approximately 20% but the number of exhibitors held strong.

This first graph shows the total number of parties I was invited to – nothing too exciting there. I also graphed the number of parties that were actual parties as opposed to events organized by press, organizations etc – I figured this may more accurately represent party budgets at each of these events. The party count has remained fairly constant…

This second graph shows who is throwing the parties. The infrastructure category includes aggregators which almost always seem to throw parties (makes sense). I bundled mobile advertising into marketing, I was expecting that group to continue to grow but interesting to see it went to dead zero in the Fall of 09 (or they didn’t want to invite me :) – possibly because of the ad recession, they became much more exclusive with their invites. Content companies continue to hold strong although the mix has definitely changed (not represented in the graph). Less ringtone companies and more software companies. It also seems press / org events have grown – that doesn’t surprise me since these are cheaper to host and are probably mostly gatherings.

This last graph is very telling and shows how most companies have only thrown one CTIA party. I would imagine this is because it was their launch party and/or they couldn’t justify the ROI on throwing any additional parties. Only 2 have thrown 6 parties in the past 4 years which is almost every CTIA event.

Anyways, this is very unscientific and only represents parties that I was invited to at CTIA – please comment if you see any other interesting trends from these graphs.

Geo-Monopolies?

These past few Qs has seen some significant pain coming to some OEMs such as Nokia and SonyEricsson. Don’t get me wrong, I have friends at both of these OEMs and I think they both produce amazing devices but I’m wondering if there is an another reason for their pain.

Yesterday, I went to the T-Mobile store to look at some device packaging. I specifically wanted to see the images on the boxes. In 2005, when I last did this exercise, you’d often see details such as megapixels, video support, screen size and 3G written on a box. This time, it wasn’t a single detail about the device but actually the logos of each web service that worked (ie Facebook, Youtube, Pandora, Google, Twitter etc). I’ve knew this trend was coming and it is something I’ve been evangelizing for the last couple years – it’s about the services the device supports and not the device specs (or at least not as much).

What’s interesting though, is if you are start to look at each of these logos, you realize they are all US Web 2.0 companies. A monopoly by normal definition is usually when a company has an over-riding control of a specific vertical such that they can dictate the terms for the rest of the ecosystem (ie owning the entire operating system space, ha!). Horizontal monopolies are less common these days but I’m wondering if the US has a geo-monopoly on Web 2.0? Is that even possible and obviously not in the traditional sense.

Given that the next generation devices from TVs to vehicles to phones and other electronics are going to be differentiated by the services they include (ie access to Twitter and Facebook, or being able to search via Google or watch video via YouTube) – this points to an interesting problem. If you are an OEM and you do not have significant marketshare in the US, how do you convince the Web 2.0 folks in the US to build to your platform first (this is under the presumption that most Web 2.0 startups / companies will build for their home territory first). Sure, they may be able to pay these Web 2.0 companies to build for them or incentivize the top 10 guys but how do you convince the long-tail which easily represents 70-80%+ of all the apps / services and usage.

What’s even more painful is that the pain has a downward spiraling effect – ie, Nokia has to convince these Web 2.0 developers to build killer services to sell more phones but if the first doesn’t happen (or to the extent necessary), the 2nd issue becomes an even larger problem. I guess you see the same effect with the brains of Silicon Valley – there is no brain drain IMO, if anything, I see more and more very talented people choosing to live here.

Taking this a step further, you could being to look at Web 2.0 as a resource. Resource control spread by geo is well understood (ie gold and oil are great examples). Can Web 2.0 be considered a necessary resource like gold or oil?

Interesting thought experiment, I would love to get your feedback.

Measuring AT&Ts Network

I’ve been meaning to this post for a while – it’s inspried by a similar analysis of Vodafone coverage in Germany via WirelessMoves. Note, I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to carrier infrastructure especially since I’ve spent my whole career on the software side of the mobile biz :)

Anyways, I recently read that it’s estimated that ATT has approximately 50K cell sites in the US. I’m not sure what’s the split between GSM and UMTS base-stations but from a subscriber standpoint, I have read that approximately 30% of US subscribers are 3G subscribers meaning they have a 3G handset and are connected over 3G. In any case, let’s do some simple math assuming all 80M ATT subscribers were connected over the 50K cell sites. This means each cell site is serving 80M / 50K = 1600 customers. Base stations are usually split into three sectors meaning each sector covers 1600 / 3 = 533 customers. Now, the average ATT subscriber uses 760 voice minutes each month so now multiply 766 min * 533 customers and you have 408,278 voice minutes per sector. Now obviously, most of the calls are within a certain set of hours each day, I will assume 16 so you then have 408,278 minutes / 30 days / 16 hours = 850 minutes per sector per hour. A sector is typically equipped with 2-3 transcievers which can each server between 6 and 8 voice calls meaning the potential maximum would be 60 minutes * 3 transceivers * 8 voice calls = 1440 minutes per sector per hour – I have no idea if that is reasonable or not :)

Lots of assumptions here and I’d love to get some more accurate data. It’d be interesting to look at data consumption per sector and see if we are really under-capacity. Obviously, it’s not as simple as 50K cell sites since there is quite a bit of tower leasing meaning only partial capacity as well as a significant number of subscribers being prepaid and/or part of an ATT MVNO (ie Tracfone estimated at 14M prepaid subscribers). We also assuming an even distribution across the country which definitely doesn’t hold, you’d expect a higher density within urban centers.

In any case, interesting as it is – let me know if you have better data.

Mobile Cloud Computing

Just did a guest post for Textopoly (great mobile mktg shop) – check it out here.

Mobile Beyond & NARIP

Just did a Podcast i-view for Brian @ Mobile Beyond on Skyfire and mobile cloud computing. FYI, Brian has some interesting content on his blog so definitely check it out.

BTW, NARIP asked me to link to this – I did a simple write-up on how to distribute music via mobile.

Mobile 2.0 Advertising Notes

Yes, I’m way late with this post. I recently moderated a panel on mobile advertising at the wonderful Mobile 2.0 conference – some interesting tidbits:

Where should I focus my mobile ad spend?
As expected, the panel answered “…test, test, test…”. With all the different combinations of ad networks and ad units etc, the easiest approach to see what is working is to test – $5K still continues to be the average “good” test budget.

Has the mobile web advertising market gotten more efficient?
In some ways, this was sort of a trick question. In an efficient market, you have less variance (ie mediation engines tend to focus more on ad unit types and placement on the page as opposed to the benefits of culling from multiple ad networks). Efficiency also means that CPMs have normalized meaning that the 50 cent eCPMs we see now in mobile may not ever get back to $1+ (or at least until the network is large enough that it can take advantage of a new parameter such as granular location). Obviously during recessionary times, a greater piece of the ad spend is in direct-response (ie performance-based) as opposed to brand advertising, so this doesn’t help either. So yes, the panelists did agree that the market was getting more efficient.

Is ad mediation necessary?
Not surprisingly, all of the panelists agreed that we need mediation but it ultimately comes down to testing. Mediation is a funny thing and in many ways reminds me of the SMS aggregator business. Yes, there are services like AdMarvel and TapJoy that are direct-to-consumer facing mobile ad mediation services but it’s not like every other mobile ad network isn’t pulling ads from other partners as well – they are just not exposing it as a D2C service. It’s like in the old days of SMS before everyone had “direct-connects” – you send an SMS to Verizon through MX Telecom and they then send it through their competitor, Verisign – funny how that works.

Does the mobile ad spend have a ceiling as a percentage of the total ad budget?
It was not in the panelists best interest to say yes but everyone agreed that there is a ceiling for digital and then a ceiling for mobile within digital. More interesting was the panelists agreement that mobile is now just a piece of selling digital as opposed to necessarily being called-out in the media buy. This is a remarkable state since this implies that the industry has matured and mobile has moved out of the traditional “innovation ad spend”!

Is there an iPhone bias when selling to the brands?
Mixed answers here – some agreed that when selling mobile, it implied iPhone. Others said, it wasn’t called-out by device. Regardless, a chunk of the mobile advertising industry has morphed into in-application advertising, essentially PPD (pay per download). The beauty of this, is that for the first time, the advertiser can calculate a real ROI (ie I buy an ad and does it result in a purchase of my app in the app store – this is much akin to the biggest ecommerce advertisers on the web measuring purchase conversion).

IAB Mobile and MMA convergence?
We hope so :) We definitely need fewer ad units to target – some brands are definitely already beginning to complain about how much they have to spend on creative.

Are we ready for behavioral advertising in mobile?
Unanimous consensus was no and not for a long time – the network is barely able to target on granular location, it’s going to take a long time before we have ad servers that can ingest behavioral data as well as networks that can consistently fill against this data.

Is PPC (pay per call) picking-up?
ATT Interactive (with Yellow Pages and Ingenio ownership) obviously said yes, but agreed that it’s still a long ways out. Solving the hyper-local problem is difficult, there is a reason, I get a Pizza Hut ad as opposed to the mom-and-pop shop. On a separate note, probably another blog topic, I’ve heard that PPC performance is varying significantly by carrier – not certain yet, but it seems bad coverage means worse performing PPC!

Is lead-gen on the horizon?
Everyone was in absolute agreement here – mobile Offerpal was on it’s way! Onthe contrary, video ad units was definitely not in the horizon. There were some tests in the past but there is just not enough interest for mobile video ads yet, mostly because the experience isn’t there yet.

Will the top 10 advertisers on the PC become the top 10 advertisers on mobile?
Not much response from the panel here, after some thought, some of them said yes. This answer validates a few assumptions. One, that mobile and PC ad networks are converging (ad units will of course remain different). Two, that the mobile will become as effective of a transaction platform as is the PC (ie credit card payments for Amazon products on mobile would have to be seamless). Three, the browsing behavior on mobile would ultimately converge with the PC – with better browsers, we are starting to see that kind of convergence where for example, Skyfire’s top 100 visited sites closely mimics the Alexa 100.

Will platform providers, specifically Android, introduce their own advertising APIs for in-application? How do you compete?
The panel absolutely agreed that this was coming and as expected, they said it’s about testing with as many partners as you can and seeing what performs for you the best. Interestingly, there is definitely a trend of carriers and/or OEMs introducing or partnering with ad networks and analytics companies (ie T-Mobile US has partnered with Flurry for analytics and 3 ad networks for mobile; Motorola has partnered with Amobee) – interesting to see how this all plays out.

Those were the interesting tidbits, feel free to ping me offline if you want more. BTW, the panel was composed of Ali Diab at Admob, Michael Rubin at ATT Interactive, Ragner Kruse at Smaato, Paul Cheng at Velti and David Katz at Yahoo.

Carnival of the Mobilists #193

Volker on Mobile is this week’s host of Carnival of the Mobilists. Some juicy bits in there, definitely check it out.

FYI, if you are not familiar with Carnival of the Mobilists – it’s a network of bloggers who write about mobile and take turns each week hosting the best posts. It’s a great way to drive traffic but also a great to get a quick summary of the week.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on power-metering my life w/ one of my favorite apps, Nokia Energy Profiler – more on that soon.