PavingWays

I am speaking at this year’s Xtech conference, on the 17th of May in Paris, France.

The Xtech, Europe’s premier web technology conference, will take place 15 - 18 May 2007. The speakers include some famous people and I am looking forward to meeting some people and friends I met during other conferences before, especially Håkon, Mike and Jeremy.

My presentation will be about “AJAX on mobile devices - making mobile web apps ubiquitous“.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

See you there, Rocco

As of February 1st there have been massive price drops amongst some of Germany’s pay-as-you-go / prepaid offers such as blau.de, Symio and Aldi talk. Aldi talk even offers UMTS / 3G SIM cards, so users can profit from the new cheap rates while using fast connections. All these discount MVNOs are using the network and infrastructure of E-Plus. Apparently E-Plus has dramatically lowered the reseller tariffs for data traffic.

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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!

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Today we received an interesting newsletter from 1&1 Internet AG, a German ISP. 1&1 now offers a Pocket Web Flat for 9.99 EUR per month (powered by Vodafone). There are no time or volume limitations and no additional basic fee, the offer is valid until 30 September 2006.

The service comes with a mobile handset that lacks the ability to make regular phonecalls, except if you are using a bluetooth headset (and pay from 0.29 EUR/Minute) and can therefore be best described as a PDA with phone abilities. However it supports push E-Mail and sports a webbrowser which is “optimized for the mobile internet”. It also has a calendar and a contact manager installed. There are no further information available about the platform or the software, so we will probably have to buy one of these to get more info.

Probably this whole offer is Vodafone’s way to get real-life data about people using the mobile internet and to figure out if they could offer a mobile flatrate within their own data plans. At the moment what you get from Vodafone for 9.95 a month is 30MB and that’s not a lot and quite a difference to a real flatrate or other offers - BASE offers a mobile flatrate for 25.00 EUR / month, but only if you are a BASE customer which makes another 25.00 EUR / month for  the voice service (also flat).

So let’s hope the test works well and we’ll see the mobile flatrate available as regular data plans soon.
For more information see http://pocketweb.1und1.de

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.

Source:
http://www.mobileburn.com

According to Telephia MapQuest Mobile (21.9 %) was the top revenue-generating downloadable mobile application in the first quarter of 2006. In second position came The Weather Channel (5.7 %) and in third the Verizon Superpages 2.0 (5.3 %). Two music applications, Music Choice and Sirius Music, rounded out the top five with revenue shares of 5 % and 4.8 %.

“Local maps/directions and up-to-date weather are well-suited to delivery via mobile phones because they are information needs characterized by immediacy, location-specificity, and time- sensitivity,” said Kanishka Agarwal, Vice President of New Products, Telephia. “Downloadable mobile applications present a significant opportunity for higher ARPU [Average Revenue Per User], with more than 3.3 million mobile consumers downloading these applications during the first quarter of the year.”

(Data does not include revenue for mobile TV and mobile game applications which is reported separately)

Another interesting fact is, that maps/directions applications drive repeat purchase revenue, while entertainment applications claim highest revenue share for first-time purchases:

Maps/Directions and Weather applications are leading in repeat purchases. In contrary, nearly 30 % of first-time purchase revenues were driven by the Entertainment category, with streaming music mobile applications, Music Choice and Sirius Music, securing the highest new purchase revenue share at nearly 9 % and 8 %.

Sources:
http://www.cellular-news.com
http://www.telephia.com