One message I've consistently been hearing from Nokia over the last two years has been that all of the different Ovi services will somehow combine together to make something wonderful that would "delight users" (their words). Nokia never gave any concrete examples, and I was starting to think that this was simply vaporware - but now that all the services are together and under the same Ovi banner, there is some magic starting to happen. The Nokia Gig Finder application genuinely impressed me at this year's Nokia World. The premise is simple - but then aren't all the best ideas? The Gig Finder app looks at the music you have on your phone, checks your location, and then suggests up-coming gigs for you. You can buy tickets directly, message your friends about it, save the gig on your calendar, get directions to the gig and listen to some more music from the artist to get you in the mood for the gig as well!. Music, Maps, Billing, Messaging, Social Networking and the phone's Calendar all coming together - which sounds like it should be far too complex for the user but in fact the app is remarkably simple and intuitive. All of the technical stuff is hidden and it is the complex integration of services at the back-end and the single sign-in (which has taken Nokia over a year to achieve across its Ovi suite) which makes this sort of stuff possible. An interesting, innovative, compelling, useful app which is greater than the sum of its parts - and with a developer community numbering over 3 million, I'm hoping to see more innovation like this emerging out of the Nokia ecosystem. As Thomas Edison said, "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". After the years of talk, they needed something to prove there can be an end product. I'm sure there has been plenty of perspiration behind the scenes at Nokia as they rolled out and integrated these services, at last that 1% inspiration is starting to show. Related reports: Nokia Opens Up To Innovation - David MacQueen

 

 

 

The inevitable movement to tiered pricing which started with Verizon Wireless acknowledging its plans to do so for LTE and has been accelerated with the much anticipated data plan announcement by AT&T this week.  So, what next?

• Will we see significant priced based competition for mobile data among the top US operators?
• Will we see significant movement in share of adds for AT&T as iPhone wannabees are tempted by a plan of only $15?
• What impact will lower data plans for smartphones have on AT&T’s Quick Messaging Devices and Verizon Wireless equivalent?
• How long before we see family data plans and shared usage across multiple devices?

The move by AT&T is a smart play to extend the smartphone momentum as the low hanging fruit of Apple aficionados, multimedia techies and style seekers willing to pay top dollar has been significantly penetrated.

There is no doubt that the iPhone remains the coolest device on the marketplace and the end to end user experience remains easily the best in class. So, reducing the TCO to attract the next 20% of customers to a paid data plans while educating customers about data usage levels and managing the traffic risk is very smart business in my opinion.

The lower price points will help AT&T maintain its current leading share of smartphone users and may be attractive to casual social networkers

• Although the 50 photos allowance is not exactly generous! For casual messenger, and social network status checking and moderate email the new DataPlus plan is quite attractive overall and will likely attract a portion of customers who would otherwise opt for a Quick Messaging Device from AT&T or a competitive offering from Verizon Wireless.

I do expect to see some modest price competition among the big operators

• with T-Mobile most likely to drive prices lower given their need for scale and to protect their predominantly youth centric customer base. but also expect an increasingly strong Verizon Wireless handset line up to compete strongly.

The impact on Quick Messaging Devices is in my opinion likely to be modest

• as a traditional qwerty remains overwhelmingly the input of choice for heavy messengers in the US although there is definitely room for lowering the $10 mandatory data plan on featurephones

Family data plans and data plans which allow access across multiple devices are in the pipeline

• but will probably not make an appearance until 2012+ as part of LTE offerings.

From a device vendor perspective, the move to lower priced iPhone plans is likely to put further pressure on vendors like LG who have yet to make a credible offer in this space as well as RIM who will find more competition in the consumer space.

The lower pricing on data plans will be music to the ears of ambitious new entrants like Huawei, ZTE who plan to bring mass market priced devices to the US & Europe. The lower TCO of smartphones as a result of downward pressure on service prices boost their addressable market.

Spiderman (née Peter Parker) and Harry Obsorne. Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus. Apple and Google. Each of these great friendships inevitably turned into a rivalry. The battle for the consumer’s mobile soul became more complicated on January 20th as rumors abounded that further acrimony between Apple and Google, the former bunkmates, has led Apple to consider Microsoft’s Bing as the iPhone’s default search engine. Take a moment to let that sink in. Apple partnering with its rival Microsoft – certainly with noses tightly clenched - to challenge the enemy du jour, Google. The mobile market certainly makes for strange bedfellows. Beyond just posturing, the possibility of Bing coming to the iPhone shows Apple is serious about its divorce from Google but it could just be an interim step for greater Apple control of its platforms. 1. Google Services. A number of iPhone users – unwilling to pay the annual fee for MobileMe use Google services, particularly Google Sync to keep e-mail, contacts, and calendars always up to date from iPhone to cloud to computer. If Apple is serious about limiting Google’s footprint they should make MobileMe free and hasten the conversion of Google users to MobileMe users. Failure to do so, combined with the possibility of greater disconnection from Google services could convince some Google users to adopt Android. But a free MobileMe not only prevents this, it gets users further invested in the Apple ecosystem. 2. Apple Control. Maps. Search. The processor. Streaming music. Apple still partners with a number of companies for its device and service, but it has also been on an acquisition binge. Could this be the beginning of greater control for Apple to ensure a wholly differentiated experience? Acquisitions of PA Semi, Lala, PlaceBase, and Quattro certainly indicate it more Apple control could be the future. Could an Apple search engine even be on the horizon? 3. The Tablet and other platforms. All service/OS providers want greater control over the user experience. Google is releasing an entire OS, Chrome, to extend its control to more platforms. Apple will not want to cede valuable property on iPhone, iPod Touch, or the iPad/iTablet/iSlate/iTenInchOLEDTouchscreenMacBookTouchPro. Looking at the broader picture – offering improved embedded services such as Maps while also allowing users to download other best of breed applications will ensure an improved, but differentiated experience. It seems therefore that partnering with Bing could be an interim step, another defensive move to relinquish any lingering grip Google has on the ‘out of the box’ Apple platform and eventually lead to a more wholly Apple experience and an improvement to the Apple ecosystem. But if Apple doubles down with its own services it must remember an important lesson Spiderman was once taught before he could defeat Harry Osborne’s Green Goblin – with great power comes great responsibility. -Josh Martin

In many ways, convergence between online and mobile is already here. For some types of content, convergence with mobile was something that just happened. Take music; as soon as phones became music players, “convergence” was already in place. Strategy Analytics’ consumer research shows 83% of Western Europeans and Americans have used their phone as a music player, with 37% using the devices as their regular portable music player (although only 6% have actually purchased music on their phone, but that’s a different story… see Can Nokia Challenge Apple's Digital Music Dominance).  For media companies and internet brands, it’s no longer about whether or not they should have a mobile presence, but rather what form that mobile presence takes. An optimized web page? An app in the App Store? A deal with an operator? These are all options, sure, but for me it’s a shame that most of the discussion around convergence is simply about making the same content available on the mobile device. Rather than focus on convergence, which is clearly the direction media markets are heading (if they haven’t already arrived, as in the case of music), I’d like to look instead at what I see as step 2 – divergence. By divergence, what do I mean? I’m talking about the unique factors of mobile; what is it that makes the mobile environment different, and how can that be used to provide a better user experience - and thus, ultimately, greater revenues? Yes, there is a smaller screen size, lower processing power, and of course a mobile experience has to be designed around these limiting factors, but there are also some strongly positive characteristics about mobile usage which can actually be used to improve the experience. One of the first things that people might expect me to talk about here is the idea of targeted advertising. However, I’m not going to go down that route – aside from the fact that you’ve almost certainly heard it all before, targeted advertising is not something that enhances the user experience. It’s simply a tool to attempt to generate slightly higher advertising revenues. I’m not talking about the content either – made for mobile content has rarely been popular, and it seems that what consumers want is traditional content. So what am I talking about? It’s the experience, not the content, which has to be “made for mobile”. An example of a media type where mobile actually adds something new is social networking. The constantly updating nature of social networks along with the “always on, always with you” nature of the mobile phone is a match made in heaven. Strategy Analytics conducted a survey of MySpace users, and found that more users accessed MySpace Mobile daily than the main MySpace.com website. With such high levels of mobile usage, it seems remarkable that the most popular social networks (MySpace and facebook) have yet to monetize this traffic. Usage patterns were quite different – sessions were shorter and tended to be limited to status updates and comments (see Mobile Social Networking - Strategies for Success ). Mobile isn’t exactly converging with online, it’s diverging – mobile will become the main use case for social networks, and the usage will be different from how it has been in the online world. To make the most of this opportunity, social networks need to think about how mobile is different, not just simply try and replicate the desktop experience on mobile. Context is another way in which mobile is very different from online. If I’m accessing a website from my desktop, I am at my desk. If I’m accessing a website from my mobile, I could be anywhere, and the place I am at matters. Taking a simple example, if I’m in town and I’m searching for a movie, I almost certainly want cinema listings close to where I am located. I’m unlikely to want to go to the movie’s own website, or the IMDB page (typically these will be the top 2 search results). Location clearly matters, and this is why both Nokia and Google have been investing so heavily in maps products. Google has a huge head-start online, as not only are Google Maps available through Google's own web properties, they are available on many other websites. This has given Google a 44% share of the local search market (comScore, July 2008). In terms of handsets, Nokia has something of a lead as it pre-installs Ovi Maps on Nokia smartphones. In just 3 years, Nokia went from being non-existent in this market to being the world’s largest manufacturer of GPS devices. The location capabilities of phones add divergence from the fixed, online world – optimizing search results for my location is one way to really enhance the user experience, but it has the potential to add all sorts of richness to other media (see Nokia Strides Forward in Online Location and Navigation and Crowd Sourcing Model to Disrupt Premium Mobile Navigation Market) Take social networking, where as I discussed earlier, mobile is already driving usage. Nokia announced a deal with facebook, and facebook users with Ovi Maps on their device can now post their location. Users can tag photographs uploaded from phones with GPS coordinates. There’s really quite a number of ways in which the mobile experience can actually add something new and I really believe that these early examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Now that people can access the same content online and on mobile (and the iPhone has proven that) we already have convergence. What is going to be exciting to watch, and where we’ll see the really exciting innovation, is actually the divergence of mobile. - David MacQueen, Director, Wireless Media Strategies