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.