iPhone Friday. It really is a small world now.

By jonmulholland | July 11, 2008

Despite the queuing, the O2 customer service problems and some iTunes server issues - I really enjoyed this years ‘iPhone Friday’. Most of all I loved following friends and acquaintances around the world (and making new ones) on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and IM as we all chased after our respective iPhones today.

Today definitely felt ‘bigger’ than than the UK only release back in Novemer last year. It was a wierd kind of global event - uniting hard core Apple fan boys with normobs who just wanted to get their hands on this years must have gadget. Well for those of us daft enough to stand in line for it anyway!

You hear this phrase all the time, but using the web to swap stories with others in iPhone ques around the globe today really made me realize just how small the world has become. I love it. I love that technology (both the pursuit of purchasing and the capability it provides) has done this.

Now I’m off to download and install stuff from App Store. If you managed to get your hands on an iPhone today - enjoy!

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Google Profiles - is this new?

By jonmulholland | June 19, 2008

I know that Google Profiles (linked to Google Reader and Google Shared Stuff) have been around for a little while now, but I’ve just noticed this trick. If you go to http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me it brings you to a full page version of your profile - see below.

The full profile page doesn’t seem to display any more information, but it does allow you to add and edit existing profile information from it. There’s now no need to enter your Google Profile via Reader or ‘Shared Stuff’ if you want to change your details.

Not sure whether or not this is new or not, but it certainly is a more direct way to edit your Google Profile details. Now if we just knew what Google planned to do with all these profile features…
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A bit of Funky Business…

By jonmulholland | June 15, 2008

I didn’t want the week to close out without saying a few words about an incredible presentation I saw on Thursday by Swedish economist and business author Kjell Nordstrom.

One of the best things abut working at Vodafone is the quality guest speakers we get at our company events.  Kjell’s presentation at our people managers conference this week was a real highlight for me - so much so that I actually bought a copy of his book through Amazon whilst he was halfway through his presentation.  When I told him this afterwards he seemed genuinley pleased.

Co-author of “Funky Business” and “Karaoke Capitalism“, Kjell gave a whirlwind tour through some of the key ideas from both books that had most of us on the edge of our seats.  His originality, passion and sheer enthusiasm - for his subject, and for the future, was genuinely inspiring.  Like most of the best economic ideas, his conclusions are based on acute social observations that seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

He discussed how social and technological change has provided unprecedented freedom - the freedom to know, go, do and be pretty much anything we choose - and that these freedoms are a key challenge that enterprises have to learn to enjoy if they are to successfully manage their people, and ultimately be successful.

The feminisation of economic activity, social ’singledom‘, the breakdown of nation states for ‘the world of cities’ and American dominance over innovation - were all given the ‘Funky Business’ treatment.  Most insightful to me, was his belief that successful businesses need to either become ‘Fit’ (ready to create continual temporary monopolies by adapting quickly to market conditions) or ‘Sexy’ (use the power of emotion and attraction to attract custom).

Aside from ordering both books I’ve found a couple of other related bits and pieces online.  The website accompanying Funky Business has more details on Kjell and co-author Jonas Ridderstrale.  If you register with the Funky Tribe community site an MP3 version of the first chapter of Funky Business is available to download for free.  Amazon also have made available a short slide presentation read by Kjell introducing some highligts from Funky Business.  I really encourage you to check them out.

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iPhone 3G; ‘Second Coming’ or ‘Morning Glory’?

By jonmulholland | June 9, 2008

So then…were you surprised by any of that? The 3G, the GPS, AppStore and slightly thinner form factor available in white and black? I must confess I was a little bit - not really by any of the new 3G iPhone features announced earlier, but more by some of the things we didn’t hear from Steve today…

I was genuinely convinced we would also see a smaller, cheaper, feature stripped iPhone nano joining the new 3G device today. I refreshed Gizmodo’s live blog again and again as we got towards the end of what was a pretty long key note. I was waiting for Steve to drop his famous ‘one more thing’, but it didn’t happen. I still do believe we’ll see a nano model before the year is out - possibly as part of the pre-Christmas iPod refresh that Apple seem to do now in the Autumn - the business case for it is just to strong to ignore.

Second big surprise for me was the lack of an upgrade to the camera (2MP) and RAM (8GB or 16GB) found on the current version of the iPhone. James is not wrong with his initial “meh” assessment! The problem for those of us who watch this industry just a little too obsessively with a passion (geekmobs?) is that we follow the rumors closely enough to have known roughly what was coming today. Anything falling short of these expectations is going to be blasted. Expect an awful lot of criticism in the next few days as the Jobsian ‘reality distortion field’ powers down. Nokia, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Sony-Ericsson marketing departments and fanboys will rightly go after these chinks in the armour - and as I said last week all of these now have genuine iPhone competitor devices with better cameras to point to.

This isn’t going to matter though - mainly because of the third thing I was surprised we didn’t hear today - pricing for the UK and rest of the world. We’re going to have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out, but if the rumours are true, and the new 3G iPhone costs the equivalent of $200 or even less for new contracts in the UK and elsewhere then it’s going to go absolutely supernova! Seriously, it will sell like nothing this industry has seen before.

For all it’s perceived or actual shortcomings the iPhone has always been a desirable piece of phone. If the iPhone has proved anything over the past year, it’s that genuine usability triumphs over feature set. Every person I’ve put my iPhone in the hands of has wanted to get one. Every. Single. Person. My wife wants one, my father in law wants one, my best mate wants one. The thing that’s stopping all of them so far is the price. I’m willing to bet that not many people have been put off from buying an iPhone in the past year because of the lack of 3G - the 2MP camera (the current version of which is not bad by the way) will also not have much of a negative impact. Steve in fact claimed during the key note that “The number one reason people didn’t buy iPhones is because they just can’t afford it (56%)”. Now that Apple have found another revenue stream they can use to cross-subsidise the price of the device (is it 30% of each sale through the AppStore that will go straight to Apple?) they can finally add price competitiveness to the iPhone offering. In my opinion this will make it near unstopable - how quickly did the iPhone sell out in the UK when O2 knocked prices down to GBP170?

So it’s still not perfect, may dissapoint hardcore mobile geeks and will get some fair criticism over the next few weeks. Difficult second album is the right analogy, but will it be ‘Second Coming’ or ‘Morning Glory’? We’ll start to get some idea when we see the prices for the rest of the world tomorrow morning…

This post also featured on SMS Text News.

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iPhone 2. The difficult second album…

By jonmulholland | May 31, 2008

I think there are remote Amazonian tribes, isolated from western civilization deep in the jungle, who have heard that the 3G iPhone is coming on June 9th.

I’m not sure that speculation is any longer the right term for it; pretty realistic looking predicitons have been circulating the web for months now. 3G, HSDPA, GPS, AppStore - I’m sure you’ve heard the list. I remember speculation back before MacWorld 2007, the rumours were flying then to be sure but none that I can remember came close to the final spec or even the look and feel of the device. When Steve Jobs finally whipped the first iPhone out on stage it was to genuine awe. Do you remember that wow factor? Do you remember scouring Flickr and the web that night trying to track down as many ‘real’ pictures of the device as possible?

No?  Just me then…

I guess the point I’m trying to get to is that it’s getting harder and harder for the 2nd generation iPhone to launch with the same buzz. 3G…’meh!’ Better camera…’and?’ Download applications…’so what else is new?’ It’s going to be harder to impress this time. Added to this competition in the device market is hotting up - Blackberry, Nokia, LG, Google Android each have devices ariving or on the scene already that are real iPhone competitors. And all of these are ready to compete with the presumed future specification of the 2nd generation iPhone, not the current version.

Has the iPhone had it’s moment?  Will the event next week be an anticlimax? I don’t think so. I think Apple will use a few of the tricks learnt in building the iPods market dominance to also unveil a real surprise. I’m betting Steve’s famous ’one more thing’ next week will be the announcement of an iPhone mini / nano / air - a smaller, sexier ‘fashion accessory’ device that will take the iPhone truly towards mass market adoption.

Skeptical? I was explaining my train of thought on this to a friend the other day…

Apple launch the 1st generation iPod. Whilst the specs aren’t that impressive by themselves Apple’s design approach and innovation in bringing these pieces together creates an interesting (if overpriced for what it is) product. The user interface in particular is pretty revolutionary.  Early adopting geeks like me buy it, but it doesn’t immediatley take off in every market. Sound familiar? This is where we’ve been for the past year with the iPhone. The mobile industry is alerted, but not quite sure to what extent or how they should compete, and starts to build devices that mimic the specs and functionality.

A couple of years later Apple launch the iPod mini. Specification wise it appears to be a step backwards - it even has a smaller hard drive, but it looks cute and crucially it comes in pink. People like my wife start to buy it. Incremental changes are made to the user interface as the Click Wheel is introduced. It may be inferior technically to most other offerings in the market (including Apples now 2nd and 3rd Generation iPod’s) but the iPod Mini is now cheap enough to become a fashion accessory, mass adoption starts quietly. A repeat of this is what I’m expecting from the key note next week. Lots of players in the mobile industry will misread the move and start to think that Apple has lost the plot, but a cheaper smaller device with a spec that doesn’t push the boundaries could really spark mass market appeal.

Fast forward one more year, and Apple launch the iPod nano. It’s a really bold move - replacing the now best selling mini only one year into its product life and it wrong foots most of the competition who are now scrambling to bring out small hard drive iPod mini competitors (remember the Creative Zen Micro?). The nano introduces significant innovation into the market place (flash memory, dramatically reduced form factor, colour screen). The iPod line as a whole is now well on the way into mass adoption, and has reached a price point sweetspot.  Won over by the design, and at a price which is now more reasonable the iPod line starts to cement long term dominance of the market place.  This is what I think will happen next year, by which time Apple will have caused a major shift in the handset market place.

It really wouldn’t be difficult for Apple’s engineers to take the hardware feature set of last years 1st Generation iPhone and put it into a smaller, sexier reduced form factor case. For sure the specification of such a device wouldn’t be impressive - but isn’t this the exact same trick played with the iPod Mini, and more recently the MacBook Air?

Only 9 days to go to find out..

This post also featured on SMS Text News.

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From SXSW, IBM no longer sells boxes by Hugh MacLeod

By jonmulholland | March 9, 2008

From Guardian Online - blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/03/sxsw_hugh_mac… Original picture taken by Jemima Kiss.

A Hugh MacLeod improved Business Card, but is it art? For more check out Hugh’s blog and be sure to follow him on Twitter.

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Think Jaiku is loosing to Twitter? Wait till Android Devices Start Shipping.

By jonmulholland | January 11, 2008

Twitter may be the current leading micro blogging service, but an obvious move by Google can turn that around overnight…

What Jaiku’s fans lack in numbers to Twitter, they certainly make up for in passion.  A post by Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström apologising for the apparent lack of activity since the Google purchase, and follow up criticism from Ars Technica and ReadWriteWeb have sparked a micro debate!

A lot of these concerns are being driven by what happened to Dodgeball following their purchase by Google in May 2005. For those unfamiliar, Dodgeball was a promising early mobile based social network that alerted groups of friends to each others locations via SMS notifications. The service showed promise but Google never found a clear direction for developing it, and the founders famously quit Google last year.

ReadWriteWeb report this week that Jaiku is loosing the user numbers game to Twitter.  Jaiku traffic fell by 30% last month, widening the gap between the two services:

ReadWriteWeb.com

These figures don’t look good, but this is a long game, and a clever move by Google could allow Jaiku to catchup to Twitter almost overnight.

What if Google where to build Jaiku into Android as the standard phone Address Book?  As soon as Android devices started to ship, Jaiku (whatever form it takes in the future) would gain hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of users rapidly.  This isn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds.  As I’ve posted before, Jaiku was originally conceived as a location and status aware address book; many Nokia users who have the Jaiku S60 client application installed already use the service in this way.

A Jaiku Android address book would be a real game changer in micro blogging, and best of all it would almost seamlessly integrate into daily life.  I realise this would not be without difficulties.  The service would need to scaled to support a rapid uptake of users, and Google would no doubt have to be very careful in building in privacy safeguards and assurances.  But the opportunity is there - Jaiku could easily catch up to Twitter this way, in fact the two services would then not necessarily have to compete.  If Jaiku were so heavily integrated into my mobile it would become my micro blogging service of choice by default.  I could then see myself, and other heavy Twitter users, reverse posting Jaiku updates to Twitter to share with others.

It’s great to see such passion and sense of ownership from Jaiku early adopters driving this debate. Also good to see that Jyri and the others are clearly listening to the ideas their users are having. Take a look through the articles Jyri has tagged on del.icio.us recently and you can see he’s personally watching the debate and the ideas Jaiku fans are discussing.  As I’ve said before I firmly believe that Jaiku will play a big part in Google’s next phase - as part of this it can still catch Twitter.

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Are Apple and O2 changing the subscription model?

By jonmulholland | November 21, 2007

Apple may have changed the mobile phone subscription model, without anyone yet realising…

Here’s an interesting question, how do you think O2 will manage iPhone customer upgrades as future versions of Apple’s wonder-device are released?

Speculation is rife that a 2nd generation iPhone, presumably with 3G HSDPA amongst its enhancements, is on the way for next Spring. Apple will almost certainly have released a newer iPhone model before this time next year. What will happen to customers in the UK (and Germany and France for that matter), who at that point would have had their devices for less than 6 months? Will launch of the new device be delayed in these countries for the sake of this first wave of iPhone customers?

I’m betting that O2 will let customers - no make that encourage customers to - upgrade to the new device well before the end of their existing contracts. Think about it for a minute, what reason would 02 have for wanting to prevent any customer who’s just bought the first generation iPhone from upgrading to a newer model?

Usually networks prevent handset upgrades during contract term because the cost of the device is subsidised in line rental over the lifetime of that contract. This is not the case with the iPhone, as all of the handset cost has been paid upfront by the customer at point of sale. If a customer wants to upgrade from the current iPhone to a newer version less than 18 months later, where is the downside for O2? In fact, why not happily upgrade customers to a newer iPhone (taking another small percentage of the hardware sale in the process) and use that opportunity to reset and extend their existing 18 month contract?

In doing so Apple and O2 create a new contract renewal / upgrade path model, one that guarantees a ‘recurring lock in’ of iPhone customers and revenue. O2 keep extending contracts and Apple sell yet more iPhones. Smart eh?

From the outset Apple have been open about wanting to change the mobile phone purchasing experience; device registrations are done at home and sales advisors are pretty much removed from tariff selection. I’m willing to bet that changing the device upgrade path is also part of that strategy - I just don’t think that the other networks have realised this yet.

This post was also featured on SMS Text News.

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What Google has planned for Jaiku?

By jonmulholland | November 19, 2007

Google’s acquisition of Jaiku back in October seems a long time ago now - such is the pace of the technology industry I guess. Subsequent OpenSocial and Android announcements have stolen much of the limelight since, but I keep coming back to the Jaiku purchase. I have a feeling that Jaiku is a bigger piece of Google’s new jigsaw than we’ve so far realised.

If Google simply needed a micro-blogging capability, why go for Jaiku and not Twitter? Twitter after all is the market leader in this growing sector, with an established and enthusiastic user base. Jaiku is certainly popular (especially in Europe) - but not close to Twitter when it comes down to size, popularity and ‘zeitgeist’.

There have been quite a few comments to the effect that Jaiku provided Google with a cheaper alternative to Twitter. Whilst what Google paid for Jaiku is certainly less than they would have paid for Twitter, I’m not convinced this is the reason.

We know Google have money to spend. If the purchase of a pure micro-blogging service was strategically important to Google then I’m pretty sure they would have found the money needed to buy the current leading service. Anyway it probably would have been cheaper still for Google to engineer some kind of status messaging feature directly into Google Talk and/or Gmail if that’s all they were after.

Why Jaiku then? I think the answer lies in mobility, specifically location and mobile integration.

Let’s look at location first. Jaiku is I think unique in combining micro-blogging AND user location awareness. For the uninitiated, when posting status updates Jaiku has the ability to capture and share the location information (neighbourhood, city, country) of the poster in real time. So in addition to a message post Jaiku can provide real time location awareness of users. Hmmm that’s interesting…

And how does Jaiku do this? An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a ’status aware address book’, and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability ( - General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc).

So in addition to a message post AND location awareness you also have deep mobile integration sufficient to identify the status of a user as well. That makes things really interesting, and its this combination that I think is the clever part. Consider this thought:

Post + Location + Status = Value

If you’re a user of Jaiku, or Twitter for that matter, look back through some of your posts and you’ll see that you’ve built an outline profile of your life. Reading through my Twitter and Jaiku pages it’s reasonable easy to deduce that I’m a Mac geek, a fan of American TV dramas, enjoy listening to Radiohead, suffer from occasional migraines, like Indian food etc etc. Now consider what value is added by a service that knows where you are and also whether it’s appropriate to contact you (through your mobile phone) as you post updates.

Jaiku potentially gives Google the Holy Grail - time relevant, location based targeting of information, personalised to a very high degree. Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability. Imagine walking down the high street and having your mobile phone pop up with a Google notification telling you that Heroes DVD box sets were 20% off at HMV today, or that a new Indian restaurant had just opened in that part of town. Some may find that scary, and reminiscent of scenes from the film Minority Report, obviously as a technology ‘enthusiast’ I’m thrilled at the possibilities it opens up.

It seems obvious that Jaiku is destined to become an integral part of the the Android platform over the next year. No doubt Google will want the Jaiku engineering teams expertise in building the features outlined above into the Android offering. This is why I think Google went for Jaiku, and this is why I think Jaiku has a big role to play in the next phase of Google’s advertising platform.

If this isn’t what Google has planned for Jaiku, they should certainly think about it.

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Personal Computing will be mobile - what Microsoft did to the PC, Google plans for the Smart Phone

By jonmulholland | November 5, 2007

The internet is predictably buzzing tonight with news of Google’s Android mobile phone platform.Loads of good commentary about, most of it already shared via Robert Scoble in his infamous link blog. I particularly liked Michael Gartenburg’s take on the announcement (’this will prove to be far more disruptive to the mobile industry than if Google had simply announced a handset’).

I think I agree, although the really smart part is that the Android strategy strategy capitalises on where the mobile phone industry is heading anyway.  In doing so, Google kind of repeat Microsoft’s move back when the Personal Computer market was about to explode all those years ago.

Sure the mobile phone market is already huge, and in some mature markets handset sales growth has slowed recently.  But something interesting is happening at the moment.  The distinction between non-smart and smart phones is disappearing rapidly.  A second phase in the market is emerging as the ubiquitous ‘dumb phone’ takes on smart phone features and evolves.  The mobile phone is becoming the new personal computing platform - the GPS, HSDPA, Email, High Res camera functionality of today’s Nokia N95 and other high end phones will be commonplace in a year’s time.  As these feature sets evolve typical usage of devices is gradually ‘deepening’.  Two years ago mobile internet was for geeks only, now it is reaching the tipping point into mass adoption.

The mobile phone will more and more be the device we use to store our data and interact with pretty much everything we value.  Google has realised this, and is therefore rightly not looking to just capture the geek and enthusiast market as it could have done by launching an uber-connected device of it’s own manufacture today.  Google is aiming for everyday users like my wife, who want a cool looking device that is friendly to use.  Giving the everyday majority of users simple and useful mobile access to Google services is the aim here. It’s far better to let Samsung, Motorola, LG etc to do what they do best (continue to evolve the feature set of devices with mass consumer appeal), whilst Google captures the operating system ecosystem for this new era in personal computing.  Google is almost pulling the same trick as Microsoft did all those years ago - very smart!

There are differences to be sure - the fact that Google won’t be charging OS licensing fees is the biggest.  This is merely a condition imposed by this marketplace.  The zero fee is needed to gain initial entry, but does anyone seriously doubt that there isn’t a sound business case behind this strategy?

Microsoft used to aim for a PC running Windows on every desktop. Google is anticipating a smart phone in every pocket and is aiming to be loaded on to as many devices as possible.  Personal computing will be mobile, and Google wants a big a slice of this.

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