Some more interesting news announced at the Mobile Word Congress:
Google’s new strategy “Mobile First”
Google’s new strategy: “Mobile First” The company now focuses more on smartphones than on desktops. That means giving mobile top priority and launching new products first on mobile platforms before creating PC versions.
60,000 Android phone a day
Google’s Android launched a year ago and is now available on 26 different devices in 48 countries. 60.000 Android devices running this operating systems are now being sold on a daily basis … meaning about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21 million per year. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter and 25 million in 2009. Seems like Android is gaining ground, hopefully internal fragmentation will be taken care of (if that’s possible).
Last year in October I wrote in a blog post about smart phone applications coming to cars. Today I read an article about Deutsche Telekom and tyre maker Continental joining this market as well.
They plan to put apps into all vehicles via an Android-based on-board computer. The prototype called AutoLinQ will be demonstrated at this year’s Cebit show. Inspired by the iPhone drivers can search for apps, download music, pick up news, check emails and answer them by using voice recording technology. The promise is: all without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road!
Deutsche Telekom said in a statement that the core functions of AutoLinQ include an online address book linked to the navigation system. Drivers can type in journey destinations on the computer at home or work before getting in the car, or via their mobile phone when out and about. As the vehicle is connected to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network, drivers can call up information that tells them where the car is parked, or check whether the sunroof is open and close it remotely using their phone.
After mobile phones and cars we now will be able to access our mobile apps on TV - This really is exciting news:
At CES 2010 in Las Vegas Samsung announced the upcoming availability of of free and paid apps in Samsung’s Apps store, including apps for Televisions, Blu-Ray Players, Home Theater and Mobile Phones. The download service for TVs will be available in July 2010.
I found two interesting videos from Samsung’s press conferences:
At the IAA in Frankfurt (Frankfurt Motor Show) in September 2009 BMW, Nokia and Parrot SA unveiled plans for bringing smart phone applications to cars.
“For software developers, this opens a whole new domain to sell their apps. For car makers, apps provide new ways to deliver infotainment and telematics services to customers. For motorists, apps allow them to enjoy their infotainment systems to the fullest, while paying only for the applications they want, thus saving them money. With apps so critical to the automotive market, companies are pushing approaches that benefit their specific goals. While the solutions shown at IAA were only concepts, they clearly reflect what will soon be on the market.” said Kevin Hamlin, analyst for automotive electronics at iSuppli Corp.
Sounds good? Yes. Where’s the catch? Doing it right!
I have been invited by the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair for a panel discussion about digital and mobile solutions in the field of cooking and publishing.
For the first time, the Frankfurt Book Fair is offering over 400 qm exclusively to the world of food, wine and all things epicurean. The Gourmet Gallery (in Hall 5.0), one of the highlights at the book fair, features a show kitchen for live demonstrations by prominent chefs as well as talks, discussions, interviews etc. about everything cooking- and gourmet-related.
The topic of the panel discussion that I am participating in is “Cooking digital, digital Cooking: digital innovations and initiatives“. It is a B2B talk where we want to discuss examples for new ways for cookery books, trends, innovations and business models for chefs or publishing representatives. We will also talk about electronic culinary schools and getting recipes on your mobile.
Insights from the huge amount of mobile application stores and the emerging mobile widgets market will be things I can contribute, and findings from our research on these topics will come in handy, so I hope. In case you haven’t seen our wiki yet, it’s the place where we collect all available information about app stores and widget engines - our main area of business meanwhile.
It’s my first time at the Frankfurt Book Fair and I am really looking forward to this interesting panel. Many thanks to Heike Scholz@MobileZeitgeist for getting me in touch!
On July, 31, RIM has officially launched their app store Blackberry App World 1.1 now also in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands with enhanced features, such as:
sorting options (newest, name, price, vendor, popularity and relevance),
filtering top 25 free and paid apps,
additional categories and sub-categories and
SD card archivingfor downloaded and purchased apps (customers can now reinstall deleted apps from their memory card). (more…)
Yesterday, I came across a very interesting article about the mobile applications market and its future outlook.
“Apps will be as big if not bigger than the internet,” said Ilja Laurs, founder and chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent mobile application store. “They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers.”
But he also warned developers for rushing into this market blindly: “The reality is that this space is only so big and only able to support so many people. Unfortunately the overhype that goes with [Apple's] App Store is what has driven so many to rush to develop for the market. It is fashionable to do apps and every media outlet tells you apps are cool. But the economics are a different story. The ratio of those developers who will fail is about 90%; they will simply not make a return on their investment or make a good enough living at this”. (more…)
On Tuesday the Nokia Developer Summit started. The conference was opened by Rob Taylor, Head of Forum Nokia. At the beginning he showed us a demo of a coming service (powered by qik) where consumers will be able to share videos live from their mobile devices.
The topic of this conference was mainly Nokia’s Ovi Store, which will launch this month. 500 people were at the event, mainly developers from all over the world, but also bloggers, press, analysts, students etc.
Recently, Opera released its new “State of the Mobile Web 2009″ report and revealed that they had one of their largest monthly increases ever in January 2009. Opera Mini now has more than 20 million users. Those users viewed approximately 7.6 billion pages in January. Page views and data transfers increased 18% month-over-month. That means, not only more people are using the mobile web, but they also use it more often.
The mobile Web usage is booming in developing countries. Among the top 35 countries using the browser, Armenia, Nigeria and Egypt showed the most growth between January 2008 and January 2009 in terms of unique users. The most significant growth (2800%) was in Armenia (a country with 3 million residents). On average Armenians surfed 669 pages per user in January and that is far more than it is in other countries.
“Looking back on a full year of mobile Web growth, it is easy to see why mobile devices will become the primary device for Web usage in most of the world,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO, in a statement. “Developing countries may lead the way due to the sheer prevalence of mobile devices versus PCs, but the solid growth rates in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, show the entire world is moving in this direction.”
During February 16-19, Barcelona again has become the “capital” for the whole mobile industry with the Mobile World Congress taking place. Despite the global economic crisis and declining mobile phone sales (for the first time ever since 2001), the mobile industry expects global growth due to new devices and services. This optimistic outlook is also proven by the sales figures of smart phones. In 2008 almost 160 million smart phones were sold worldwide. This year as much as 190 million smart phones could be sold.
A survey by analyst Nielsen and Tellabs, based on more than 50,000 mobile users in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the US, shows that there will be an dramatic increase in the use of mobile data services (such as mobile internet, email, photo uploading and MMS) over the next two years with a significant ramp up in the next 12 months. 71 per cent of consumers anticipate the daily usage of services such as mobile internet and more than half of the approximately 200 million mobile data users in those countries expect to increase use in the next two years.
According to the study, about 49% of US respondents said they were planning to surf the mobile web more in the next year, compared to 34% of those in Europe. Preferences of US and Europe users differ (see the following picture below). In Europe, Italy tends to be the leading adopter across all services, while Germany shows comparatively low adoption rates.
Recently, Opera released its interesting and insightful “State of the Mobile Web” report. In this report, Opera analyzed the traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.
Opera Mini: the world’s most popular mobile browser
Since its worldwide launch in 2006, Opera Mini has become the world’s most popular mobile web browser with millions of users and billions of page views:
Social Networking Services drive mobile web usage worldwide
Interestingly, almost 40% of all visited web pages with Opera Mini were social networking services. In the US, South Africa and Indonesia even more than 60% of the user were visiting these services with their mobile devices. That shows social networking services are very popular worldwide.
Top 10 Sites in the US, India, South Africa, UK and Germany
Wizzl, a Dutch company, is preparing to launch its all-in-one virtual phone. Users (”Wizzlers”) can talk, chat, have direct access to live TV, Internet radio and web games. Or as written on their website:
“Wizzl has developed free communication software which will allow its users (’Wizzlers’) to make free voice and video calls over the internet, and calls to local and international phones and mobiles from only 1.5 Eurocents per minute. And it doesn’t stop there; with Wizzl’s all-in-one virtual phone, Wizzlers will have direct access to live TV, internet radio stations and the most popular web games around. Personal photographs, music and videos will also be at users’ fingertips.”
The official (worldwide) launch will be at GamePlay, the largest game event of the Benelux, between 23 and 25 Nov. 2007.
You can test their (Windows) software on your desktop PC here: http://www.wizzl.com/intl/en/download. First-time downloaders get up to 10 minutes of free calling time to landlines and mobile phones across the world. Wizzler-to-Wizzler voice and video calls are completely free of charge. “The current beta version works on desktops and laptops only. In the very near future, Wizzl will also be available for mobile phones.”
I read an interesting article on us.blognation.com about mywaves, a mobile video service. mywaves was founded at the end of 2006, is led by a team that includes veterans from Yahoo, Napster, Danger, PayPal and TiVo and is financially backed by Menlo Ventures.The Sunnyvale, California based company revealed some quite impressive numbers. mywaves reported 1.25 million visitors per month. Honestly, I didn’t know that there is already such a big market for mobile video out there. According to their press release they got an average of 4 visits per month per individual. These visits lasted an average of 20 minutes.
How does it work?
First you have to sign-up for the service. Then you can discover, choose and personalize your on-the-go entertainment on their website that will be automatically delivered and updated to your mobile phone. mywaves also sends text messages alerting you about content updates in their channels. The service is free and works globally across all 3G, EDGE, BREW and EV-DO carriers as well as most video-capable mobile phones.
Marketing
In May 2007 they announced their partnership with Admob to enable click-to-video advertisements for AdMob advertisers.In July 2007 mywaves announced that Alltel Wireless will be the first North American carrier who launches mywaves service allowing Alltel customer to watch videos from their phone for 3.99 USD per month. Customers can easily download the application from their phone via the Alltel Axcess Shop and customize the content.
The latest research from Telephia shows that around 4 % of U.K. mobile users have uploaded content created on their mobile phones to social networking sites, video and picture sharing sites, blogs and personal web pages.
Still, uploading content from mobile phones is not yet mainstream, probably because of the still expensive data plans for using the mobile web. But Telephia says it is already ranking close to watching mobile video in popularity. An interesting fact is also that users are finding ways to send their content even to sites that do not yet offer a facility to upload direct from mobile phones. That shows the strong demand mobile and should be integrated into social networking services.
In recent years online social networks have experienced huge growth. Typically sites like Facebook.com or MySpace.com have been a place for the younger demographic in society to express personal interests and information. The report “Social Networking: Finding Friends Online“ from InStat describes these networks as “virtual social structures consisting of individuals that are connected through various social familiarities, geographies, business connections, or common interests”. In short: social networking sites are a great place for self promotion.
But with tragedies like the tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 it began to show that online social networking sites have become more important than just promoting yourself. They became a public place to mourn the loss.
On April 16, 2007 Nokia announced their S60 platform would support widgets in subsequent releases. This means, using their WebKit based browser under the hood, newer phones (S60 3rd ed. with Feature Pack 2) will have support for those small applications, mostly serving not more than a single purpose (e.g. show the weather or an RSS feed) that are well known on the desktop since a couple of years now.
In preparation to my talk at this year’s XTech conference I want to point out some important things related to this announcement. I think widgets on (mobile) devices are a major step in the right direction and I feel the mobile web can finally get the boost it so desperately was waiting for since a couple of years now. “The Ubiquitous Web” is this year’s XTech topic - I feel the mobile web will become ubiquitous pretty soon…This article can be seen as a primer to my talk at XTech: Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous.
Today Steve Jobs unveiled the long-anticipated iPhone to the public. We gotta say this thing is amazing! Featuring a new input method called “Multi-touch”, which allows you to use several fingers at once to input “gestures”, the phone also features Wi-Fi (and EDGE) along with a version of Apple’s web browser Safari - this is possible, because the phone’s operating system is MAC OS X!
On Friday, November 17th, we were at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, which is a nice and impressive complex of buildings. We were at building one, the Microsoft conference center (pic below). The event started pretty early with an extensive breakfast buffet and the usual networking.
What was different though was the crowd of attendees: more formal and not as “geeky” as what we had experienced in former events. It was also harder to get in touch with other people than before, probably because everybody seemed to be really keen on talking to the VCs and the representatives from the other big companies (cf. title).
What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?
What is important to consumers, both for mobile and voice services?
What implications can be drawn from usage differences between segments, geographies or even between the distinct customer bases of operators and device manufacturers?
These questions were examined in the 2005 A.T.Kearney Mobinet study, which is an assessment of global consumer trends in mobile usage. By interviewing mobile users in 21 countries the company researched the degree to which consumers are adopting mobile data services.
Mobile phones - only for making phone calls?
Nearly 60% of the customers expect to use their mobile phone to make the majority of their calls over the next year. Only 4% of consumers expect to use VoIP for the majority of their calls next year. Alarmingly a significant number of consumers are not convinced that their mobile operator should offer anything more than basic voice service. The majority (80%) of the 65-year olds (or older) reject data services compared to 25% of the under 24-year olds. Probably one reason for this is, that older people are more afraid of new technologies/services.
Another important aspect is the price. 70% of mobile phone users see the price as the primary factor in choosing operator.
What is the current level of usage and consumer interest for data services?
Because the penetration of data-enabled, multimedia phones has increased to 53%, more consumers across all age groups are adopting mobile data services. Most of them (56%) use it (more…)
Today I read an interesting post on http://www.mobileburn.com. China Mobile has outranked Vodafone as the world’s largest mobile phone operator. It is really surprising, because Vodafone serves the worldwide market and China Mobile only the Chinese market. Latest figures indicate that China Mobile serves 200 million customers - Vodafone “only” 186.8 million.
This just shows us how big the Chinese market is and how many opportunities it offers. Analysts are predicting that China Mobile will expand their business overseas in the next few years.
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