Are Plugins (and Flash) Going Away?

Given my previous 2.5+ years working in the browser space with Skyfire, a lot of folks ask me two questions:

1. Is Flash going away (on its own or because of HTML5)?
2. Do web plugins go away with HTML5?

I wanted to quickly answer both of these. First, Flash is definitely not going away in the near-term. Although some (maybe all) casual web gaming can be developed in HTML5 and web video can be built with HTML5, Flash still has an ecosystem of DRM (digital rights management) tools, required by major web video publishers and supporting reporting and advertising frameworks. With the top premium video publishers, given the importance of DRM, if Flash went away, it wouldn’t be replaced by HTML5 but rather some new plugin that enables DRM. HTML5 is inherently open and thus would not work for high-end premium content.

As to the question of whether plugins go away. In an ideal world, you’d want everything to be standardized and based on W3C specifications; the obvious advantage is that your webpage could then run on any W3C compliant browser. Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening. Plugins have existed because they are the innovation delta between what developers want to do and what HTML spec enables you to do. As an example, Adobe is now talking about the use of Flash to develop 3D applications, it is unlikely that this will become part of HTML spec anytime in the next 5 years. As long as their continued innovation in the front-end, plugins will continue to exist.

Understanding the Emerging Market

I recently gave a talk on some emerging market trends and themes and I figured it’d be good to share them here. With all the focus on 3G data caps and smartphone penetration, we still forget that regions like Brazil (beyond emerging market) still only have 4% data penetration and some parts of Africa (eg Nigeria) have near-4G networks but much of the rural population is still lacking a phone.

The Microprenuer

Many of you have probably heard this story but the government in Uganda wanted to enable two things: 1. Provide mobile phones and thus voice and data access to rural villagers and 2. Create more female entrepreneurs since culturally females were home wives and not enabled to work. To do this, the government in conjunction with Grameen Phone and MTN did something very clever, they recruited females from various rural villages and gave them a mobile phone, known as the VillagePhone. The females instantly became the sole owner of a mobile phone (Village Phone Operators) meaning others at the village would pay her some small fee to use her mobile phone. In one move, villagers were able to call friends and family (or the doctor!) and get limited information in real-time (imagine what it would be like without internet access) and additionally, females were now a working class, a microprenuer. The story of the phone tethered to a single pole in the middle of the village with a line to use it is not a joke – it is real!

USSD (binary SMS) and Voice Services

A search box on your home screen seems like a no-brainer and it’s definitely one of those features you don’t realize how much you appreciate until it is on your home screen. I rely on this search box all day to get information on various things whether it be local services, events and so forth. Anyways, in rural markets, unfortunately data access is often not available and thus you have to rely on alternate forms of transport. Voice is often thought of as a 1:1 communication service but can also be used as a way to broadcast information. Companies like Lexy allow content producers to broadcast channels over voice in the US and projects like the Spoken Web Project take the same concept but apply it to basic information for the third world. For example, I would call a phone number and hear an automated operator tell me the major news around me, the sports scores, the weather and so forth.

Alternatively, how do you offer a information access through an application without being able to send data. It sounds like a trick question but the answer is to use SMS for transport. USSD is effectively a fancy term for binary SMS. When you press #MIN on your mobile phone in the US, you are sending a binary SMS message from your phone to the network; the network then responds with an SMS message that appears as a popup dialog on your phone with the number of minutes available for your plan. Well imagine if you could create a simple J2ME application with a rich UI that uses SMS for transport – great idea and this is what a number of startups are doing for various emerging market operators. See solutions like Shorthand Mobile, MobileXL, Spectrum Mobile and Eyeline.mobi. The UIs feel like portals with access to various text based content. Until data access become available, this is a great interim approach and a great way for these companies to establish their brands with these users.

Mobile Payment

Not sure about you, but I completely rely on plastic (credit/debit cards) and often carry little or no cash. I only take cash out of the ATMs (cash machines) for basically the few times when I can’t pay by card in my average day usually when I know I’m going to San Francisco (and need to pay for parking :). Paying by card generally makes sense since I get an automatic log of the transaction from which I can categorize, archive and reference as a receipt. In any case, the one assumption here is I do have a bank account and I do trust my bank. Well, what do you do when you don’t have access to a local bank or a bank that you can trust.

This problem is encountered by millions of folks in rural populations everyday – welcome M-Pesa that has initially been deployed in Kenya in partnership with Safaricom and Vodafone. Effectively, a rural villager can use their mobile phone account (SIM) as a way to pay other villagers by sending money from one mobile phone account to another. This has been incredibly successful because in many cases the villager trusts their mobile phone operator more than the national banking institutions and are willing to deposit real money into their mobile account via the mobile network operator agents (of which their are an abundance of in rural regions).

In some ways, this makes absolute sense and in advanced markets such as Japan, we are beginning to see banking institutions partner with network operators to allow subscribers to make non-digital purchases via their mobile phone. That being said, even in advanced markets, we still don’t have elegant P2P (person-to-person) payment solutions although many startups are attacking this problem (eg Paypal being the incumbent). I guess once your mobile phone becomes the plastic, do the operators eventually move down-stream and become the banks? Scary thought…

Family Browsing

Having worked on browsers for the past 2.5 years, I’m always amazed at how much browsing usage comes from emerging markets. South Africa is often a top 10 browsing country in terms of usage as reported by Admob which is insane considering their population. Anyways, given the cost of data in some rural villages, it’s too expensive for every family member to have internet access and/or maybe the family has to share one phone so how do you browse the internet as if you had a PC and a larger screen. Well, duh, you get the mobile phone with a built-in projector! Samsung Galaxy Beam is one example but there are several other lower cost devices entering the market. Imagine taking it a step further and connecting your projector-enabled mobile phone to a Bluetooth keyboard or maybe a Bluetooth Zeemote. Now, you effectively have a home PC but using your mobile phone, not a netbook but a mobilebook – very cool!

Above are some example of some of the amazing innovation that is happening in the emerging markets – looking forward to seeing what is developed next!

Sharing Overload?

I probably am not the case study for over-sharing data but there is no denying that there is a broader trend of sharing personal data. This is how I use the following services:

I use Facebook for photos, personal thoughts, birthdays and friends/fam events. I don’t tend to post too many photos myself and I’ve been kind of light on posting personal thoughts, mostly because I haven’t spent the time to organize my social circles (eg family, friends, acquaintances).

I use Picassa for more professional photo albums, often captured with a digital camera as opposed to my phone. I still use Flickr a bit as well and those photos are always public and tend to be more real-time.

I use Twitter for random and professional thoughts, often with a mobile bias since most of my followers are mobile geek-heads.

I haven’t really used FourSquare yet, mostly because I’m scared I’ll be addicted to mayorship but obviously, it’d be used to publish my location to friends; I did try Google Latitude for a short bit but it being mapped to my Gmail contacts was overload!

I have registered for Blippy but I haven’t yet given them my Amazon and Bank Account etc details; I’m holding out to make sure it’s secure but there is no doubt that the data they are collecting is absolutely interesting. I have found myself scanning some friends who use the service and being fascinated by their purchases.

I have used a mix of services to share what I’m listening to, including Playlist.com and others. I’m definitely more top 100 and so I’m probably not an exciting musical person to follow.

I’ve started using a mix of services to blog what I’m eating, fascinating data from many angles including tracking my lifestyle and showing the world how much I eat-out (meaning unhealthy)!

I guess I should also include LinkedIn, although I don’t update it as frequently, I’ve thought about using it to start sharing what I’m reading, in terms of books etc and my favorite blogs which I’m often pinged about.

I suppose, I should also include my own blog where I share other misc thoughts that can’t be characterized in 140 character snippets.

All of this represents my identity and if aggregated, probably an advertisers gold-mine – I’m sure they can extrapolate an incredible behavioral profile, some pieces like what I buy and where I eat being a lot more monetizable than others.

My question is how does this evolve? Do I end up sharing more and eventually use services like Zeo to share when I sleep? Who becomes the ultimate aggregator of all of this data and how is all this data shared? There is an argument for being open with the data but in some way the data is also your IP? And how many of these services will require user-initiated publishing/sharing as opposed to implicit sharing (eg location constantly being broadcasted). All of this in someways contributes to an ADDish lifestyle because of the constant pinging with different social graphs.

Thoughts? I guess the counter argument is that I live in the Bay Area :)

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.

The Mobile Reserve

A little late with this posting but a couple weeks ago, I took a vacation to Alaska. I went to the back-country in Denali which is interestingly known as a game reserve. Most national parks are preserved for their beauty but Denali is preserved for it’s wildlife (not that it’s not beautiful but ask me offline what I ran in to, ha!). In any case, I realized it was still one of the few places where you could be out of cellular coverage for hundreds of square miles – completely disconnected.

While taking the bus into the park, one of the other passengers was joking how his cellular coverage seems to extend further and further past the entrance of the park. Well, imagine a world 25-50 years from now, where to get out of coverage, you have to go to a “Mobile Reserve” where there are no cell towers installed and/or jammers are installed to intentionally kill coverage especially since solar base stations are starting to take-off. Being totally off the grid may become a thing of the past.